You Already Know What You Need to Do

There is a version of me that skips the squat rack when I do not feel like it.

That version rolls over, checks his phone, talks himself into a rest day he did not earn, and moves on.

And I get it.

After a long week on the road, flights and hotel beds and eating whatever is available, the last thing I want to do is walk into a gym and get under a bar. My body is tired. My brain is already negotiating.

But I go anyway.

Not because I am some machine.
Not because discipline is easy for me.

I go because I have learned something that took me a long time to actually believe.

The hard thing is not the obstacle. The hard thing is the point.

What Tulane Taught Me

When I was at Tulane, nobody handed me anything.

I earned a roster spot on a Division I football team as a legally blind long snapper.

There were practices I showed up to not knowing how I was going to get through them. There were moments where the honest answer was I do not know if I can do this.

But every single time I did it anyway, something shifted.

Not just in my confidence.

In who I was becoming.

The rep I did not want to do built me more than the ten before it that felt easy.

The Things We Avoid Get Heavier

That is true in the gym.

It is also true everywhere else.

The conversation you keep putting off with someone on your team. The phone call you have been avoiding. The thing you know you need to say but have been rewriting in your head for three weeks.

That stuff does not go away.

It just gets heavier the longer you carry it.

I say this to every audience I speak to:

The goal you have is on the other side of the action you do not want to take.

And most of the time, when you finally rip off the Band-Aid, it was never as bad as the story you had been telling yourself about it.

The anticipation is almost always worse than the thing itself.

The squat you dread takes four minutes.
The conversation you have been avoiding takes ten.

But you will spend days, sometimes weeks, letting both of them live rent free in your head instead of just doing them and moving on.

Hard Things Are the Way

Hard things are not in the way.

They are the way.

And the life you are building, the version of yourself you are trying to become, it is sitting right on the other side of the thing you do not want to do today.

Go do it.

Aaron