Why Clever People Should Lift
[Not a joke]
You can’t outsmart the weight.
Clever people like to solve problems in clever ways.
They savor the thrill of finding a brilliant trick that saves hours of effort.
They live for that moment of clarity when a neuron fires in just the right way to connect a logical gap heretofore unconnected.
I love that shit too. It gets me fired up.
Every time.
But for all the excitement that instant of cleverness spurs - a pure focus on cleverness glosses over the gritty reality that embedded in most hard problems.
The reality is that the solution to a hard problem often requires:
1 part Clever
9 parts Putting in the Work.
And know what’s even more frustrating?
A lot of times that 1 part Clever is the direct result of the 9 parts Putting in the Work on the LAST problem.
Grace Hopper didn’t invent the first compiler on a lark. She first spent thousands of hours of understanding machines and the people that leverage them to solve the world’s hardest computational problems.
Vitalik Buterin didn’t just casually create the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It took years of false starts and hacks and developer iterations to become the useful thing we have today (and it’s still up for debate if it’s going alright!).
Jeff Bezos didn’t build the most sophisticated and comprehensive logistics network in the history of the world overnight. It took over a decade of Bezos telling shareholders that if they weren’t in it for the long haul, they should sell the stock before that progress truly became apparent.
The 9 parts Putting in the Work isn’t for the faint of heart.
Lifting reminds me of that every day.
You can tweak and pre-optimize your workout plan and diet and macros and rest cycles and supplements and preloads and reloads and deloads all you want.
But you can’t hide from the fact that nothing happens until you start going and getting after it.
As an aspiring clever person, I regularly need this brick of reality to smack me upside the head.
So maybe it’d be helpful for you to figure out something productive in your life that you can’t outsmart (it doesn’t have to be the lifting weights).
And start putting in the work.
I hope this added value to your day.
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