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Why I Want My Kids to Grow Up Puking
By: Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at
Usain Bolt is one of the world's top athletes and dubbed the "fastest man ever". I just watched a video of him in action. Wow!
I wasn't aware that Jamaica had such advanced laboratories where the best and brightest could build such a machine. His body in motion is a brilliant piece of engineering, with all the wiring, traction control systems, internal pounding engine, and outer streamlined shell working simultaneously to produce colossal, explosive firepower. It's beautiful to watch!
Since I'm skeptical of Jamaica's laboratories I think we can safely put this remarkable athlete's power and skill down to other factors.
Raw talent, desire, diet, winning the physical genetic lottery ticket,...
What else, I wonder?
Puking.
Yes, puking. I wonder how many times Usain has puked in his efforts to push the limits, to be stronger, better, faster? I've met plenty of talented people who have won the genetic lottery, so to speak, and some of them are nowhere, really. I've often thought to myself what a shame that was. Without drive and determination talent just goes to waste.
Here is Usain throwing up after a strenuous workout. What I'd love to know is whether he always believed he could be the world's best, or did he gradually become aware of it... Did he surprise himself along the way?
Over the weekend I ran up a small mountain with my son. It takes about 45 minutes top to bottom, and it's mostly stairs. I've come close to vomiting on it a few times myself when doing personal training runs. My son's a good athlete and usually extremely competitive so when we finished I asked him how he felt.
"Fine."
"Do you think you can do it again?"
The problem was he knew he could do it. We've done it before.
"Of course Dad"
"Right away, right now?"
The doubt was there. The ego didn't want to admit it but the doubt was there.
"Yeeeah, sure. Of course I could if I wanted to."
I knew he didn't actually believe it. The word IF is a killer. IF and SHOULD are two words that, together with Ebola, need to be eliminated. We don't need any of them. People "should" all over themselves. I should do this and I should do that. It's defeatist language.
At times I find myself using it and I cringe. I have to tell myself to shut up and grow some balls. You either do something or you don't. If you don't intend to do it then don't waste the breath talking about it.
Pushing oneself lets you know where your boundaries currently are. Do you really know where your personal boundaries are? Have you tested them?
Clearly when you're puking you've already stopped exercising. There is a boundary right there. BUT, and this is the important part, when you exceed what you thought you could do, suddenly the world looks entirely different. It shows you that you're actually better, stronger than you thought: "Hey, if I can do that, then what else can I do that I have been secretly telling myself I can't do?"
Why is this important to me?
It's important to me because I've experienced my own set of barriers in my life and I continue to experience more. I've spent my life pushing boundaries and I want my kids to do the same thing. That's how we grow and become better. Quite frankly aside from sex it's what makes us tick.
Accomplishing simple tasks doesn't inspire us or anyone. Accomplishing large, seemingly insurmountable tasks does inspire us. It creates pressure and pressure, if managed correctly, is a powerful force for the good. Managed poorly it causes all sorts of problems.
Here's a fact.
Angels invest in people more often than they invest in ideas. Those people are typically the type of people who will be prepared to "puke" for their business because it's going to get tough, really tough. Some time ago we interviewed the CEO of one of our portfolio companies. I'd like to share some of that with you because I think it highlights my point.
When you bootstrap, the enterprise is inherently personal. Full stop. My co-founder and business partner Tim and I made a conscious decision to continue trying to build a business. We had crossed our self-drawn lines in the sand several times and kept reaching deeper into our reserves – something we told ourselves we’d never do – because we had faith in the product, business and our team. Every positive meeting, every positive instance of feedback was exhilarating. Every negative meeting and every set-back was crushing. Luckily, we were able to attract a team of incredibly talented and committed individuals who not only talked the talk but walked the walk and shared the hardship of no money because they also believed. Without that, we would have stopped long ago.
Now, if you've conditioned yourself to be pushing hard and are now used to getting scrappy, you've got a much better chance of success than if you've always taken the easy road. That's not what Usain Bolt does and that's not what winners do. Winners push, winners puke.
You probably want to know what happened with my son. The truth is I feel terrible. I let him off. I'm not always a good Dad. I should have encouraged him to run and if he puked - all the better. We should have done that mountain again.
A habit of pushing himself instilled early on will be invaluable to him. There is a saying, "Thoughts create action, action create habits, habits create character and character creates future."
Next time I'll help him prove to himself he can do more than he thinks he can. Next time I hope to be a better Dad. He doesn't know it but next time it's probably going to be math problems.
- Chris
"Commitment is a big part of what I am and what I believe. How committed are you to winning? How committed are you to being a good friend? To being trustworthy? To being successful? How committed are you to being a good father, a good teammate, a good role model? There's that moment every morning when you look in the mirror: Are you committed, or are you not?" - LeBron James
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You are what you eat, drink, breathe, think, say and do.
You know I wonder. The only guy I knew that threw up after crossfit workouts wasn't in especially good shape but was naturally blazing fast. Perhaps sprinters' genetics predisposes them to puking. Or maybe it isn't even genetics but his nervous system being able to push his body more to the point of puking.
Ultimately, pushing yourself to win just to win seems empty and pointless to me. If you don't love sprinting why in the hell would you put yourself through misery you don't like just to win? Basically being an actor playing the part someone else wants you to play. Fuck that.
Some committed runners also have trouble with diaria.
Recently science has appeared to have demonstrated that self-discipline can be exercised and developed just like a muscle but it has also indicated that a person’s overall capacity for self-discipline is determined by “the genetic lottery” to a far greater extent than previously thought. Sad, but probably true.
Of course all kids should be taught the importance of self-discipline and encouraged to develop such habits as much as possible but generally pushy sports parents are a twisted and abusive lot. If I hear one more parent brag about how is 12 year old is "going pro" next year I may puke myself.
There are only, for instance, a handfull of people on the planet who have an optical nerve bundle thick enough to resolve the trajectory of a 90mph baseball and no amount of practice or self-discipline is going to change that.
Chris might want to take this in: http://hbowatch.com/hbo-sports-documentary-state-of-play-trophy-kids/
At some point I learned not to push anyone but myself, especially my kids.
For me, I am operating best as a parent, manager, and horse trainer when I simply make the right things easy and wrong things hard.
That being said, I do love running up hills, with my wife and kids or by myself, on foot and on a horse.
That is the truth. Only the mediocre think they can tyrannize their children into excellence. Real excellence, athletic or otherwise, comes from consistent accumulation of small advantages. You eat right, you rest right, you practice constantly. Once in a while you might push too hard but that's a tiny part of the experience. Yet that's what the naive focus on in their cargo-cult pursuit of greatness.
Model the behavior you want your kids to learn and enjoy it, or it's not sustainable. And if you have to puke, do it in the bushes. Nobody likes a show off.
@hh - You nailed it. One must be very careful as a parent in how and how hard we push our kids. My sixth grade teacher's son hung himself from a tree in the woods behind their house because his father just pushed, pushed, pushed and the kid thought his dad thought he was a failure. It was just horrible to see the pain that family, a good family, went through, and I never forgot that when I became a parent. You CAN push kids too hard. I like how you put it - make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. Very sound advice.
Along with "pushing too hard," I think parents need to watch out for defining "sucess" too narrowly. It's easy to put the freak athlete on a pedestal, along with famous scientists, engineers, lawyers, doctors, business people, political or religious leaders, or even musicians, artists, and actors, etc.
For me anyway - working hard at what I love is a joy. Working hard just to satisfy someone else's conception is a lot tougher and I question its value other than as a means to an end. Regardless, my passions in life do not involve fame and I don't accept that success is a zero sum game where I have to snatch victory from every other competitor to acheive a fulfilling and worthwhile life.
I partied till I puked and I was on top of my game back then.
first thing that came to my mind
Having some experience also in pushing the envelope, I learned along the way that there are certain inherited traits that are critical to performance, not just a, "Just Do IT!!", attitude.
Bolt is endowed with certain natural gifts that he has exploited to the fullest. So is the guy above with the degrees in 3.5 yrs.
It is foolish to think that puking alone is what is required to excel or hurdle barriers higher than you ever have. I am certain that there are musicians, actors, and others who have puked their guts out with attempting to hurdle impossible heights. And are just as poorly off as they were without trying too hard.
Sure there are people with talent, brains, looks, bodies, and other natural gifts that have gone nowhere near their limits, let alone exceeded them. In my experience they are few, with nearly all the ones I know from grade school on, having done very very well, I would say extraordinarily well, but that's not the case when a winning genetic Powerblall lottery ticket is held at birth.
By all means just do it, but remember what Harry Calahan and Robert Browning said,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrFV5r8cs0
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?The reach is only a fraction away from the grasp, not a foot.
[sound of respirator]
A man's got to know his limitations.
[sound of respirator]
Even if they're not human.
[sound of respirator]
There is no one be all end all recipe and it is interesting this is one of the rare instances where I agree with ALL the comments.
Pushing has its place but so does relaxed in the flow thinking. And certainly not taking the ruling class bait does also.
Who said this: "There are two kinds of people in this world; those who work, and those who work out" If you can afford to spend your day running up mountains, your parents did something right. However, if you ACTUALLY spend your day running up mountains....
Puking is for amateurs straining till you bleed out your arse now that's the sign of a winner. But whatever you do never watch a video of a constipated winner trying to push one out. It will scar you for life.
"Next time I'll help him prove to himself he can do more than he thinks he can."
If he sticks around, that is. I had a dad just like you. Push push, all the time push. Dude tried to make me in his own image. Fuck that shit. Had about all I could take by the time I was 15 and bugged out. Never looked back.
Missed your calling Chris. You should have been an army recruiter, or maybe a drill sergeant.
I've gone to soft, old and lazy for pushing that far these days.
But I have had my moments. (Thank you, USMC.)
AA/AS/BS and 90% of Master Degree in 3.5 years, including every undergrad accounting course offered while desperately trying to maintain a family while on foodstamps and welfare and steam cleaning carpets for minimum wage when there was work offered. I don't know if anyone has experienced 24 and 27 unit quarters in college for 3.5 years...but I have. Dean's List, President's List, and ended up with 3.6 gpa (politically required classes beat the grade down).
Now my run is to compress closing fifty companies and produce financials within two days after AR and AP close.
That is very impressive! The USMC had a good effect on my oldest also. Raise a family (3 kids), work full time, buy/fix up a beat-up house, and graduate Purdue with a BS in computer science in 6 years.
Oh yeah? Try painting 4, 3 bedroom units with kitchens and bathrooms, per day, for a month. Not only will you be a masterful painter, you will never want to do it again. I promise...
This one time when I was thirteen, I ran five miles from my place to the trails, ran a 17-mile loop, and ran four and three fourths miles back. Couldn't make it that last quarter mile. My place was close to a 7-11. There were still pay phones then. I called home and dad came to get me and took me to Jamba Juice. Man, a crappy frozen smoothie never tasted better.
Lesson? Sometimes you don't make it home, but you still get a smoothie anyway cuz you busted your ass.
Here's your trophy. Everyone's a winner.
Evwee bawdy a weiner!
Gotta turn your trophy down, Old Phart - I got plenty of those, just for finishing things. Such is the curse of living in the "hooray you finished!" age. What a joke. I ran my first marathon at fourteen. They gave me a medal, for finishing in 3 hours 45 minutes ( I only ran five training runs, that run from the previous post one of them ). The African dude who won it ran the dang thing in less than 2 1/2 hours. Now there's a winner. No, not really - his life probably revolves around running all day long, every day, and I'm sure he wants to stop running one day.
Years later, no one gives me medals for hauling ass and shipping good products, but my shit works and people, including myself, are happy. Much better.
Lesson? I don't know, but there's always a lesson. Don't drink too much - you'll get indigestion. There's a lesson.
Pushing and puking may be the answer for some. For others, just getting out of your chair and taking long leisurely walks may be enough. The trick is consistently getting out of the chair and shutting off all the crap.
Aggressive go-getters are what makes me puke, but on the bright side, more of them burn out than actually succeed because you need more than just aggression to get somewhere. You need intelligence and the ability to learn, which you can't get from running around puking.
My best friend and I dodged high school football for over a month. After roll-call we'd hang back when the sheep went running out to the field, then circle back to the lockers, change into our streets and go hide out in the library and read books. Dumbass coach was too busy with his star athletes to even notice we weren't there...LOL! And when he finally caught on, he was too fucked up at being played for a fool, so we were never reported.
Alpha dogs are easy to outsmart because, besides self-admiration, they only know one thing: Push. As in martial arts, you just sidestep and slam them into the mat. Works every time.
I'm coming up to the end of my time on this jerkwater planet. The man in the mirror says I did alright and thats enough for me.
Pleasant journeys to the next destination. I have a while yet
Oh?
My spaceship isn't due for a while.
The best advice I ever heard was to push, keep pushing, dont stop, push, push push. My midwife was a real inspiration.
Dear,
I puked a few times in my life and that was due to excessive alchool consumpion. I pushed my self plenty but with my build, from my experience without a strong reason like to much sea storm or a stomache infection I would die of exaustion before puking.
Also cannot agree with the IF bad mouthing that would make programming so much more difficult.
Don't let this harsh words demotivate you from being my angel ass.
Your never to be bitch.
This coment gave some bad turn somewhere and should be read as intertainment, me or the author of the article never met and have no affiliation what so ever.
lol's, the best chips. reg. since 2001.