Stay soft.

David Goggins is wrong.

Your physical pursuits must bring you joy.

They must feed your soul.

They must be driven first by passion and love.

You will fail if they do not.

We choose how we express and explore effort, how we build a relationship with movement….on foot, under load, competing with your fellow man, chasing aesthetics….there are endless ways to navigate exertion, but the common thread is that it must first bring you happiness before it brings you success. It should be your peace.

Why do you do what you do? It’s such an important question. Far too many get caught up in the hype of the Goggins mentality: Show up, stay hard, do the shit you don’t want to and do it every day until you die…ok David that’s all good and well but I bet your training and your mentality would look different if you had 2 kids, a normal 9-5 and were living paycheck to paycheck. For those who aren’t full time athletes, you must be highly selective with how you spend your limited bandwidth and pour it into actions and activities that bring you peace. You must do hard things that make life feel lighter, happier, softer. Hard for the sake of hard is not the way.

Doing the hard shit is important. Doing the stuff you don’t want to is important. As a pieces to the puzzle, they are important. Not as the picture in its entirety. Hard should not and cannot be the defining charactersistic. Joy must be.

Do the things you WANT to do

Not what you see other people doing

Not what you think others think you should do

Not what you think you should be doing

Do what you WANT to do and fuck the rest.

You can find “hard” within anything you seek. You can find things you don’t want to do within the passions that bring you joy. The THING must be driven by emotion. The components of the thing can test you, mold you, change you. But they must all form a whole that touches you deeper.

My joy is in the mountains and over long miles. It is feeling connected to the earth and to myself, through long form physical exertion. It is in navigating terrain few will see and even less will enter. It is exploring limitations both internally and externally I perceive myself to have.

There are parts of that joy that are hard, that I do not want to do, that challenge me, that make me adapt and grow. But they are just small parts of a greater experience. My passion radiates gratitude and happiness despite the extreme physical toll it takes. My love for the “deep scary water” I enter willingly is something I embrace fully and completely and because of that, the act of doing is easy.

The hard parts of my expression of effort challenge me.

The easy parts of my expression of effort allow for thought.

The parts of my expression I don’t enjoy doing teach me.

Each component comes together to form a whole, which connects me more to my existence.

I am softer in life because of the hardness of my expression.

This allows me to love. Deeper. More thoughtfully. Toward myself, to others and to life.

That is why I express myself this way.

It chose me as much as I chose it.

I used to chase hard for the sake of hard. I explored effort as if I was a martyr, forced to walk the earth in agony and pain, grinding in ways others would not…all for the sake of being miserable. I wanted to be the tough guy who did the tough things, just because. There was no joy, no light, no happiness within the suffering and it was reflective of its impact on my life. It did not make me a better version of myself, it did not make me better to the world around me, it only made me tired.

I am grateful I have found a brighter path. I am thankful to have found a way to connect to myself and the world around me in a meaningful way. It has forever changed me.

I hope you find your version of this.

Onward, Always.