The cost of a thing

You will never be younger or have more opportunity in front of you than right now.

Ten or twenty years from now, you will look back on yourself at this age and give anything to be back here. To have this amount of youth, energy, and open road ahead of you. This is true whether you’re 20 or 50.

“The cost of a thing,” wrote Thoreau, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Look around your minute-to-minute activities today, and on any normal day.

The cost of every minute that rolls by is fixed, irretrievable, with no promise of many more. So, what are you getting in exchange?

Those lost minutes scrolling the digital slot machine on your phone, opening your refrigerator for the fifth time to see if anything’s changed inside, or checking email instead of focusing on what you really need to do - are they worth the price?

Total up those lost minutes, the moments when you tell yourself you’re killing time without acknowledging that it’s really the other way around; that time kills you. What else could you purchase instead?

Like a slowly compounding investment account, those minutes could accumulate into something that matters to you, and that will feel worth it when you look back on it all. Things that buy you freedom and options, that help you find yourself in situations that others will call good luck because they can’t fathom the groundwork that produced them.

An average American spends between 4.5 and 5.5 hours on their phone each day, reads at the level of a 7th grader, and feels that they don’t have enough time to do the things that really matter to them. These things are not unrelated.

Imagine if you compounded several hours of time per day over several years. What second language could you speak? What level of fitness would you have? Where would your career be? What would your relationships look like with that amount of time dedicated to being fully present with those you care the most about?

Five years from now, will those things be a reality for you? You will answer that question with how you spend the spare coins of your life.

Attention is the currency of change

Attention is the currency of change.

You have a limited amount to utilize for different tasks, and how you deploy it determines how effectively you learn, adapt, and perform.

From moment to moment, your brain balances attention between what’s happening in the environment and what’s happening internally. The constant bombardment from your senses (things like sight, smell, hearing, touch, proprioception) is so immense that your brain can only make sense of a small fraction of it.

At the same time, higher cortical processes continuously interpret this input, generating an ongoing stream of thoughts, predictions, and an internal narrative.

This all probably seems obvious, but consider how you think about stressful situations. How often do you find yourself saying that an event was stressful or difficult without considering how well you used your attention to amplify or skillfully navigate the situation?

Our experience feels objective, which is why it’s so easy to fool yourself into believing your experience was the only one possible.

This is a lie. We only really see what we look for.

In other words, how you use the spotlight of your attention changes what you experience, and how you manage your attention allows you to shape the attitudes you use to filter that experience.

By skillfully directing your attention, you can focus on specific internal or external information and adjust its meaning to change your perception of stress. By doing so, you change the components of a skill over time. Without this process, you are a hostage to your environment and the current nature of your brain.

This is why the most fundamental and valuable mental skill will always be how you use attention, and the best way to improve your ability to do that is to practice noticing the nature of your experience with curiosity and openness.

When we train our attention, we’re training the system that shapes every experience we have.

The higher the floor, the higher the ceiling

The higher the floor, the higher the ceiling.

Many of the adaptations required for high performance in a short, intense event like a 2-mile run are developed by doing things other than running 2 miles as fast as you can.

Lower intensity training builds the engine that you’re calling upon when it’s time to push the pedal to the floor. If you skip the engine-building part of that process, you’re hammering the throttle on a fundamentally limited machine.

Aerobic capacity training builds adaptations that max-effort conditioning work does not (or does not do well). These include increased mitochondrial content, enhanced oxidative enzyme capacity, increased cardiac stroke volume, expanded capillary networks, lower sympathetic cost for a given output, and a greater reliance on fat oxidation and glucose sparing at submaximal workloads.

These adaptations raise the floor of performance. They increase the amount of work you can perform before crossing your ventilatory threshold, accumulating metabolites, or degrading movement quality. They also improve recovery between hard efforts by accelerating lactate clearance and autonomic regulation.

This last part, rapid recovery from repeated efforts and fatigue resistance, is a key differentiator in SOF selection. People who train primarily with high-intensity methods are often good at the short, hard stuff on day one. But they don’t have the metabolic and autonomic engine to recover efficiently from one event to another, day after day. By the end of a hard week, they’ve fallen behind and are struggling to hang on, whereas someone with the maturity to put in the time to build a stronger foundation has suffered much less breakdown. They’re still feeling good and performing well.

When we start by building a strong foundation and add intensity later, it gets layered into a system with greater durability and reserve capacity. VO2max work, intervals, and maximal efforts allow us to display capacity, but they don’t build the structures that support repeated stress tolerance.

High-intensity training displays performance. Foundational training determines how much performance is available to express.

Hedonistic treadmill of information consumption

Mistakes and failures hurt.

It might mean we weren’t skilled enough, had the wrong intuition, used the wrong strategy, lost focus and got behind, or any number of other possibilities.

The perfect workout plan fell apart after a few weeks. We didn’t stick to the diet. That TV series was just too hard to avoid binge-watching, and our sleep schedule fell by the wayside.

When this happens, the default, learned response for most of us is to treat the symptom. We seek information that confirms that we just didn’t have the right formula. That we are victims. That our noncompliance or incompetence is because we were missing some vital piece of information.

We hop from topic to topic, putting out fires or riding the hedonistic treadmill of information consumption by squirreling away facts and chasing short-term goals that make us feel competent or like we are pushing ourselves to grow, when in reality, we are just distracting ourselves.

Passively consuming information is, practically speaking, worse than doing nothing, because information without action deceives us into believing we are more capable than we really are, misattributing understanding for knowledge earned through experience.

It can also amplify cognitive dissonance by highlighting the gap between what you know you should do and what you actually do, increasing internal resistance that often leads to more convoluted rationalizations, further reducing your ability to see life clearly.
The truth is that most of us are not very good at consistently doing what we already know. Most of our failures stem from the gap between the information we have and our ability to apply it, not a fundamental lack of understanding.

There is a time and place to seek new and better information, but probably everyone reading this is far removed from information being the limiting factor.

Mistakes and failures are invaluable. Don’t waste them. They are an investment in your future success if you’re able to face and use them to change your behavior.

Stop chasing new solutions to the same problems and focus on doing less, but actually doing it well, and you’ll find yourself making far more progress while feeling much less friction.