Ain't Nothin' But a Peanut
Ain't Nothin' But a Peanut
Put weight on, lift, put more weight on, lift again.
In 1998, Ronnie Coleman won his first Mr. Olympia contest.
After that, he won 7 more.
Mr. Olympia is the premier men’s bodybuilding title. Its winners include Coleman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a bunch of guys you wouldn’t recognize but you’d certainly notice.
Coleman, who could squat 800 lbs, deadlift another 800, and bench press the GDP of Peru, is widely considered to be the greatest bodybuilder of all time.
But Ronnie Coleman didn’t have any secrets to success.
For him, it was simple.
“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder,” Coleman would say. “But nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights!”
I quit my job because of a Reddit post.
“I make about $10,000 a month as a copywriter,” it said. “Does anybody have any questions about getting quality clients? Happy to help.”
I read that thread so intensely I had to switch to manual blinking. And the guy wasn’t BSing. He laid it all out. It was a start-to-finish blueprint on how to become a successful freelance copywriter from scratch.
“He did it,” I thought. “I bet I could too.”
So I quit my job and I followed the blueprint.
Here’s a hard truth:
You know what you have to do.
One of the benefits of living in the future is that every blueprint to success is at our fingertips.
Anything you want to do has already been done. Many times. Successfully. By people who will explain exactly how they did it, create a paint-by-numbers guide, and give that guide away for free to anyone with a WiFi connection.
We all know what we want to do, we know what our dreams are, and — like it or not — we know what we have to do to make those dreams happen.
Most people are not held back in life due to uncertainty.
Most people are held back in life due to a lack of willingness to do what it takes to achieve their goals.
Most people give up on their big goals because failure without effort allows you to maintain the fantasy that you could have done it if you wanted to.
Meanwhile, if you try and you fail, you have cold hard proof that you fell short. And most people would rather maintain their pride and settle for mediocrity than risk testing themselves and finding out who they really are.
And the funny thing is, the path to success is often so much easier than we realize.
Because most people aren’t willing to travel it, the competition is sparse. You don’t have to be uncommonly smart or talented or lucky to succeed.
The irony is that most of our glittering goals can be achieved by the dullest method of simply applying consistent pressure with uncommon focus without the promise of reward or recognition for an extended period of time until compound momentum kicks in.
But for most people, that’s too much to ask.
Put more simply:
Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder.
But nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.