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The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation (Part II)
Matt Karamazov
October 22, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 27 minutes
“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”
“If you have everything under control, you’re not moving fast enough.”
“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.”
“You can put in the work, or get put in your place.”
“Let’s not forget that not so long ago, our forebears had to chase, fight, and kill just to survive. They expected hardship. They were willing to face the worst. They embraced the fact that the universe, in all its apparent tranquility, is a carefully balanced chaos of forces that we barely understand.
We, on the other hand, have it easy. And that makes it easy to go soft, lose perspective, and be lulled into idleness. Working out is something of an inoculation against this. It's a tribute to the primacy of effort.”
“Nothing fails as spectacularly as half measures.”
“In order to have the best life possible, you must know what the best decisions are and have the courage to make them.”
“While the concrete rewards of making good decisions may be delayed and uncertain, the emotional ones are always instantaneous and assured. By focusing on the latter, we can gain considerable power over our behavior.
We can consider how it will feel to smoke or drink less or stick to our diet and exercise routine instead of how it will benefit our physiology; how it will feel to see our savings rise or debts fall, instead of how it will impact our net worth or financial resilience; how it will feel to spend less time on social media or watching TV, instead of how it will free up time for other valuable activities.”
“I decided that I would keep going until I died. And then it got a whole lot easier. Am I dead yet? No? Then I can keep going.”
“For whatever reason, intention seems to be a force multiplier of sorts, and work done with resolve seems to outpace work done with a wavering mind.”
“Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing people don’t get.”
“If you’re going to compete against me, you better be willing to give up your life, because I’m giving up mine.”
“The peak of the mountain is important only because it justifies climbing, which is the real goal of the enterprise.”
“In many competitions, you don’t have to be the best to win. You just have to be harder to destroy.”
“You have to give something to get something.”
“We can only be as great as our circumstances demand.”
“Be less concerned with what you have than what you are.”
“The more you suffer voluntarily, the less you’ll suffer involuntarily.”
“Where you are now is a result of who you were, but where you go from here and ultimately end up depends solely on who you decide to be from this moment forward.”
Doing well in school has very little to do with how successful you become. In this new economy, the biggest factor in your success will not be abstract, academic learning but whether you develop the real-life success skills evinced by the people on these pages, and how early you do.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly. Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture.”
“You are a reflection of the 20 or 30 people that give you the best advice.”
“The wealthiest people are not the ones who are hoarding the most value – they’re the ones who have the most value flowing in and out of their lives.”
Read the Full Breakdown: The Education of Millionaires, by Michael Ellsberg
This is, pound-for-pound, one of the wisest, most genuinely and authentically helpful books ever written, and it's just full of simple, profound mental models and sage advice to help guide your decisions and move you toward where you want to be in life.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
"When life or a plan feels ultimately unsatisfying, I find it's because I've forgotten to find the intersection of all three: what makes me happy, what's smart, and what's useful to others."
“We do so many things for the attention, to feel important or praised. But what if you had so much attention and so much praise that you couldn’t possibly want any more? What would you do then? What would you stop doing?”
“Empty time has the potential to be filled with great things. Time filled with little things has little potential.”
Read the Full Breakdown: Hell Yeah or No, by Derek Sivers
Every little action you take toward your Future Self enhances your level of commitment and knowing. Every little action toward your Future Self is the evidence of your faith. Every little action toward your Future Self is you more fully being your Future Self now.
Sample Quotes from the Book:
“The first and most fundamental threat to your Future Self is not having hope in your future. Without hope, the present loses meaning. Without hope, you don't have clear goals or a sense of purpose for your life. Without hope, there is no way. Without hope, you decay."
“You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat your future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you will give up trying to master it."
“Anything that isn’t taking you toward your Future Self is a lesser goal."
Read the Full Breakdown: Be Your Future Self Now, by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
No one's ideas are beyond questioning. In this section, I argue the case for the opposition and raise some points you might wish to evaluate for yourself while reading this book.
#1: Should You Announce Your Goals?
There are two different schools of thought when it comes to whether or not you should announce your goals to the world before you achieve them, or whether you should keep them to yourself until after they've been achieved.
Mike Matthews' view is that talking about your goals before you've achieved them diminishes your motivation to achieve them by giving you a premature sense of accomplishment that substitutes itself for the real thing.
To your brain, strangely enough, talking about your goals can give you the same kind of dopamine hits that you'd get from actually making progress toward them. This then causes you to basically do nothing, because if you've already triggered those feel-good brain chemicals without actually doing any of the work, why do any of the work?
For the record, I don't think Mike's wrong. There's also plenty of research to support his conclusions. I do still tend to take an alternative approach, however, and there's merit in my way as well. There's also plenty of research backing up my approach, so take from that what you will. Science is hard.
But in my view, sharing your goals publicly introduces social pressure to back up your words with meaningful actions, whereas if you kept your goals to yourself, you could just quietly quit and no one else would ever be able to tell. You'd have no external accountability, which can be tremendously helpful when it comes to achieving meaningful goals.
If nobody else knows about your goals, how can they help you and support you? How can they provide motivation and assistance to help you keep going? Who are you doing this for?
One of my favorite bodybuilders, Tom Platz, says that he loves putting himself in uncomfortable situations - places where he has to figure it out, where he has to make it. That kind of positive pressure can stimulate effective action as well.
At the end of the day, though, it's really up to you which approach most resonates with you. There's plenty wrong with my and Tom's approach, not least the potential for social embarrassment if we quit and everyone knows that we quit. But just keep both viewpoints in mind and come to your own adult decision. Mike and I would both agree on that.
#2: Too Many Quotes and References?
This isn't my own criticism of the book, but a few people have said they don't like the book because Mike draws too heavily on other thinkers and their ideas, rather than his own. I don't think that's particularly fair, and I actually love that he quotes people like Solzhenitsyn, Emerson, and all the rest. But here we are.
I've even heard one person say that if you follow "countless others," you'll hear lots of the same advice. Well, my response to that is, why don't you just read this book instead of "countless others"?! Or read all of them!
Repetition is fantastic when it comes to learning, and is it really possible to hear a life-changing idea too many times? I suppose you could, but I don't think you're in danger of doing that by reading The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life. That's also how you get the absolute most out of any book that you decide to read:
You ask great questions the whole time - as though the book was on trial for its life.
Here in this section are a few questions that can help guide and stimulate your thinking, but try to come up with your own additional questions, especially if you decide to read this book the whole way through...
#1: "First, what's right with your body? What are you okay with? What can you enjoy, admire, and even celebrate?"
#2: "Next, reflect on what things might be like if your body didn't possess these positive qualities. What if they were taken away? How would this impact your life?"
#3: "When it comes to fitness, or virtually any positive quality that you'd like to emulate, express, and embody, who do you admire? What do you admire most about that person? How do they live, act, speak, and behave that makes them so impressive? Can you adopt those same behaviors and mannerisms in your own life?"
#4: "What do you want right now? Comfort? To take the night off from the gym? To spare yourself the embarrassment of other people at the gym knowing that you're a beginner? Now, what do you want most? To be healthy and fit? To feel fantastic in your own body? To feel alive? Are you willing to give up at least some of what you want now in order to move closer to what you want most?"
#5: "What are you willing to sacrifice in order to get what you want most? How much pain, discomfort, and uncertainty are you willing to take?"
#6: "What's the price of the success you seek? Are you willing to pay it?"
#7: "What are the various types of resistance - fear, desire for comfort, etc. - you face when trying to follow through on your fitness plan? How can you plan ahead of time to make these roadblocks and desires irrelevant?"
#8: "What kind of implementation intentions (Key Idea #5) can you set up that will help you achieve your fitness goals? What kind of physical activity will you commit yourself to? Where will you work out? For how long? With whom? What do you need to plan for ahead of time to make sure that all this happens as it's supposed to?"
#9: "Who can you enlist as support to help you sustain your new commitment to health and fitness? Can you keep each other accountable on a daily basis? Can you make each other stronger than either one of you could be on your own? Can 1+1=3?"
#10: “What ideal are you moving toward? What's the clear vision you have for this strong, fit, capable, courageous human being you're becoming? Who do you want to be?"
"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."
So you've finished reading. What do you do now?
Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!
Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.
Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...
#1: Drill Down to Your Deepest WHY
Often, what we think are the reasons we have for doing or wanting something aren't the real reasons. Or, at least, they're not the deepest, most visceral reasons why we're motivated to start a new fitness habit or buy some particular thing, etc. There's some other reason, perhaps just a little bit below consciousness awareness, why we actually want what we want.
I may be making it sound more mysterious than it actually is, but an effective exercise to help you access those reasons is to keep asking "why" questions until you get to the very bottom of it.
So, what's your "why" for fitness? Why do you want to get in shape, get healthy, etc." Why do you keep showing up?
At first, you might say something like, "Because I want to look better."
But then, if you ask "why" again, you might say, "Because then they'll take me more seriously at work."
You can keep asking "why" again and again until you come to the deepest possible reason you can come up with for why you actually want to prioritize your health and fitness.
You might come into this thinking that you were doing it for more "superficial" reasons like looking and feeling better, but then discover that for you, it's actually about living longer and experiencing a greater quality of life, one where you're able to keep up with your kids when they're playing in the backyard.
There aren't any "wrong" answers here, but just keep asking "why" at least 3-5 times until you come up with something that can help keep you going when it gets tough. And it will get tough.
#2: The Seven-Day Sacrifice Challenge
Getting better at fitness is all about getting better at sacrificing. We have to sacrifice for what we want; we have to give up at least a little bit of what we want now, so we can have a better chance of getting what we want most.
The good news is that sacrificing is a skill, and we can get better at it with practice.
With that in mind, consider taking on this seven-day challenge:
Day 1: Sacrifice a little bit of your comfort and warmth by taking a 5-minute cold shower in the morning.
Day 2: Sacrifice your sloth by waking up at least 15 minutes earlier.
Day 3: Sacrifice your afternoon brain fog by going without caffeine for a day, especially not within 12 hours of going to sleep.
Day 4: Sacrifice some of the toxic chemicals floating around in your bloodstream by avoiding highly processed food.
Day 5: Sacrifice a few of your addictive neurochemicals by going on a digital detox and limiting your social media consumption for a day.
Day 6: Sacrifice your lethargy by doing an hour of low-to-moderate cardio.
Day 7: Sacrifice your ignorance by reading a book for an hour.
Every time you give up something that feels good in the moment for something that will make you feel good about yourself for a lifetime, it gets easier to do. You're unlearning slavery to your automatic drives and impulses and learning about freedom and achievement.
#3: The Warren Buffett "Two List" Strategy
There's some controversy about whether Warren Buffett ever actually offered this advice or not, but he's since heard that his name was attributed to it and said that it wasn't a bad idea! So here's what you do:
You make a list of the goals, projects, opportunities, etc. that you'd like to pursue, trying to keep it to 25 items. Then you pick the top 5 that most excite you and that you think will make the biggest positive difference to your quality of life, and then you place them on a separate, second list.
Now, take that first list of 20 less meaningful goals and aspirations, put it away in a drawer, and never look at it again.
Next, expand on your top 5 and write out why they're most interesting or meaningful to you out of all of the things you listed. You may have to ask "why" several times, as you did in the first Action Step above.
After that, you're going to write down three of the biggest obstacles that might get in the way of you achieving these goals. What might make them hard to achieve? What might you have to sacrifice?
If, after soberly evaluating all the positives and negatives surrounding each goal, project, priority, etc., you're still fired up about them, great! Review what you've written down every single day of your life from this day forward and never lose sight of these precious goals.
Naturally, you can change or edit them as you see fit, but it's very important that you limit yourself to just a few opportunities, establish why you want to go after them and what they mean to you, and hold onto them with everything you've got.
#4: Create Your Own Action Items
Review each of the goals, projects, and priorities you've identified previously, and write down the next actions you need to take in order to make them real, including what-when-where statements for each of them. Implementation intentions!
Next, write down one potential obstacle that might get in the way of each action item and formulate a plan for overcoming it. Then, find an accountability partner who will help keep you on track and who will help you up when you fall down.
Going forward, at the beginning of each week, specify the next actions you will take within the next seven days to get you closer to your stated goals. Repeat until wildly successful in life.
#5: Develop a Meaningful Fitness Mantra
Never say anything about yourself that you don't want to become true. How we speak to ourselves is incredibly, insanely important, and so what we want to do is learn how to be our own biggest supporter, instead of our own most dangerous enemy.
This happens by strengthening our self-talk and empowering ourselves with how we use our internal voice instead of weakening ourselves. It also helps to have a mantra on hand to refocus ourselves on our greatest reasons for getting moving and keeping the promises we've made to ourselves in the beginning.
It doesn't have to be too complicated or involved; you could even take the deepest "why" you've identified in the first Action Step and make that into your mantra, something you repeat to yourself at those moments - and there will be many - when you want to quit.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”
Mike Matthews is the #1 bestselling fitness author in the world, with over 1.5 million books sold, as well as the founder of the #1 brand of all-natural sports supplements, Legion.
His simple and science-based approach to building muscle, losing fat, and getting healthy has helped tens of thousands of people build their best body ever, and his work has been featured in many popular outlets including Esquire, Men’s Health, Elle, Women’s Health, Muscle & Strength, and more, as well as on FOX and ABC.
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Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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