Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Good morning, everybody. So it's Monday, which means a few things. There's really some of you in three camps. Yeah?
Speaker 1:You've had a good weekend. Your momentum, the bridge. The weekend is bridged. From last week to Monday, Momentum is going. You've had great momentum last week.
Speaker 1:The weekend bridge has broken down or you think it has, meaning today you feel like, oh, I'm starting again. What's the point? And there's another one where last week didn't even go all that great. The weekend is a kind of doesn't go great. It's a Monday, and you're like, here's Monday again.
Speaker 1:I don't feel great. That's typically the three kind of places people are out on Mondays. Now what's important to note about this type of stuff is like the I've mentioned it in previous podcasts, and I went over this research again about the perfectionism versus like good enough excellence. It's just so obvious that perfectionism, it goes against everything you want to achieve in your life. It is not a good thing to do.
Speaker 1:It is not virtuous to say I'm a perfectionist. If anything, you should slap yourself the next time you try and say that you're a perfectionist because as if it's a good thing. Because some people claim I'm a perfectionist. It's not a good thing. There's a bit of you that thinks it is a good thing because you think it gives you high standards.
Speaker 1:It doesn't. It gives you impossibly high standards you never reach, thus reduces your flexibility, creativity, energy so you actually perform worse than if you said, I will try my best. Sometimes my best is a. Sometimes my best is a c. Sometimes my best is a b.
Speaker 1:Right? That's how it works. So with that mindset in place, right now, you've got the chance today to go for a good enough day no matter what happened before this day. Even though what happened before this day leads us to our present feeling, are we free to act in a different way from what's happened in the last few days? No.
Speaker 1:Robert Sapolsky would say no. He would say there's no free will. What happens today is a combination of what happened five minutes ago, what happened an hour ago, what happened twenty four hours ago, what happened forty eight hours ago. And in a in a sense, he's right. If you had a very, very stressful weekend and you had you know, you've been eating not great, you've you've got alcohol, you've been drinking alcohol, you're on hangovers, it's a depressant, your current mood of the brain is gonna be low.
Speaker 1:Thus, the action from a low mood brain is likely to be nonaction in a sense. It's likely to be I'm not gonna do well today. I'm not gonna bother. I'm just gonna eat for comfort. And maybe that's a more likely outcome.
Speaker 1:But if we can see that that, I'm feeling a bit low right now because of the things that's recently happened, you for you to change that, there must be something that happens in the fork in the road where you decide to go down that other path. And that's where your frontal cortex comes in. It helps you or makes you do the the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. If that makes sense. Can you hear?
Speaker 1:It makes you do the harder thing when it's the right thing to do. The harder thing today is to pick yourself back up, put the past behind you, and go for today. Hey. Gay Sepsin. Try your best.
Speaker 1:You did you plan to do a workout? Okay. It doesn't work out. Go for a walk instead. If you've if you've not hit your macros for a while, just track today.
Speaker 1:Track the foods you eat and just track them honestly. Right? Be build a base. Do it today. That is doing the harder thing when it's the right thing to do because the easy thing is to to to moan about things, to lay about, or I can't be bothered.
Speaker 1:Why am I always like that? Feeling sorry for yourself. And feeling sorry for yourself in these matters is not justifiable, really, if you wanna think about the bigger picture of your life. So I think it's important that today that we do decide, and this is called the choice of Hercules in the old ancient wisdom of Athens, where one path is easy. It's staying in bed.
Speaker 1:It's as much food as you want. It's all the comforts you want. It's all the pleasures you want. It's the TV binge shows. It's morning.
Speaker 1:It's all our hey. Go down this path. It's amazing. Trust me. And you're like, oh, it does so nice.
Speaker 1:Then the other path is another person's on the path talking to Hercules, and she's like, listen, buddy. This path is tough. You're gonna be challenged beyond belief. You're gonna be put through your bases. There'll be some days in this path you wanna go back.
Speaker 1:You you have enough. But trust me, follow this path, and you'll become the person you've always meant to be, and it will fulfill you far more than the empty pleasures of the easy path. Right? And that's what the the ancient priests loved this. All my days, they loved this wisdom.
Speaker 1:They loved that. They would talk about all the time Hercules is a hero. You know? Hercules is this choice of Hercules is in their mind constantly, you know, dictating how they look to things day to day. You know, if you wanna change yourself, if you wanna change your behavior and how you will look at things, it starts from work you've done years ago to today.
Speaker 1:It doesn't happen overnight, but it's reminding yourself of it's not things that disturb me. It's my opinion about the thing. So you step on the scales in the morning. You see the weight's gone up because it does go up and down. The weight goes up.
Speaker 1:Straight away, your old conditioning comes in and goes, oh my god. You're a loser. What is going on? What's the point? You're never gonna lose weight.
Speaker 1:Right? And then you then that quote pops in your head and goes, it's not things that disturb me. It's my opinion. It's not that that number's gone up or disturbs me. It's my opinion that the number's gone up or is disturbing me because I think that that number should never go up.
Speaker 1:When in fact, that is silly because we know the number goes up and down all the time with the downward trend if you're being honest with your habits and tracking. Right? So then you're like, okay. How many times do have to do that for it to become second nature? I do not know.
Speaker 1:Depends on you. Depends if you celebrate that or not. So these things that are getting popped in your brain, for you that's new to these things, these it'll take it may be in six months time. Blightbulb, Barmigatta. Maybe straight away, maybe some of you have been you've been listening to this podcast for three or four years, three years, or else been around for two or three years, and you're thinking, yeah, well, that's kind my default way with things now.
Speaker 1:You know? So we got it's not things that disturb me. It's my opinion about things. Got a choice of Hercules. I can go down the pleasurable path of easy living, but that's not gonna fulfill me.
Speaker 1:Empty pleasures are not happiness. Pleasure is not happiness. I'm gonna take the hard road. But on Mondays, the hard road is usually harder than any other roads of the week because more often than not, we we go into Monday maybe not in the best shape. Maybe we have weekends that don't really go to plan, and that's fine.
Speaker 1:Life is hard to predict. Things can come in slapier and nowhere. So my only advice today is take the hard path today. Okay? Do the choice of Hercules.
Speaker 1:Remind yourself it's your opinion of things that's the that's the issue, not the thing itself. Now that excludes, I always want to exclude, like, real serious life things there, like death and stuff, because there are some philosophers or people in the world that can see death as the person returning back to source, and they they haven't actually died. It's just that Baldi has died and there's fear of things. Right? And then you got people, well, I just want my my parent or my my friend back, and I don't really care about this philosophical view over there.
Speaker 1:Like, it's a horrible thing to happen. So when it comes to those matters, that's a more that's like a deeper, thing, and it's not something I'm suggesting now. What I'm talking about is the day to day living that we go through when 90% of the stuff that happens to us day to day is irrelevant to the end of our lives. So when we when we go and take the view from above, we zoom out. So things are really impact us now.
Speaker 1:And it was striking to me because I went over an old journal from 2019 over the weekend, and the stuff in that journal, 80 to 90% of what I'm writing about there is irrelevant right now. Look. They might have given a picture. They might have connected a dot or so here and there. But when I think about things, none of them are intruding my mind right now.
Speaker 1:And what I realized as well is journaling isn't really for looking back on, in a sense, or saving. Journaling is for the utility of it today. So if I write down today that this is this and I brain dumped today, that brain dump in a year is gonna be irrelevant because my life would be different and stuff. And I look back and I go, my god. What was that for?
Speaker 1:But on that day that I brain dumped, on that day that I journaled, it helped me that day. Does that make sense? So we need to throw away this kind of, like, thing about, like, we must be doing something new all the time and, like, we need it to be useful over time. No. We don't.
Speaker 1:We need it to help us now. And if it helps us now and it hasn't in a year when we look back at it, it doesn't matter because it's done its job of the today. And that's why the one day at a time philosophy is what helps and what works is because it's not whilst you might be thinking, well, Scott, this one big thing, tracking my macros, going my steps in, every day is the same. Yes. But it is for its benefit of that day in itself.
Speaker 1:Over time, it strings together into this combination. Right? Of course. But getting your steps in and clearing the mind and doing a workout for mental health and eating well serves you in that day mainly. Thus, the byproduct is it adds up and you might lose weight and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But really, it's like, wow. Like, if I were to just ignore the past and the future and look to today and the benefit those things give me today, then obviously I do them. Because wow. What a powerful impact they have on my day, and that's all my life is made up of is the day, day, day, day, day. So don't don't try and hold on to things.
Speaker 1:Don't try and be like, well, is it the same for four or five days? Fine. Is this need to be you know, some days are the thing different, this and that. But if you can focus on, in a sense, repeating things that really help you day to day, don't throw them away because we've been told over time, if something needs to change all the time, you gotta spice things up. Some things don't need to be spiced up.
Speaker 1:Health does not need to be spiced up. Working out maybe to do to move and find something, that's fine. But in general, you're eating doesn't need to be spiced up too much. Your steps, unless you wanna bounce around and, you know, change your scenery all the time, doesn't need to be spiced up. These things bring this calmness and stillness to our days.
Speaker 1:They don't need to be spiced up because the benefit of that over mixing things up is huge, way better, calm mind, still mind, rational action, good action. So enjoy your day. Take on board, Roger said. Choose the tough path today of Hercules himself, and I'll see all you Herculeans tomorrow.