The Nerdist Way_ How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) - Chris Hardwick [63]
MAKE REGULAR DEPOSITS
Technically, this concept is applicable to any endeavor in which you have long-term commitments. I learned it from Trainer Tom as it applies to fitness, so I put it in this section because I am the king of this book. Quite simply, it’s a metaphor for consistency. There are many times I absolutely do NOT feel like going in to exercise. Apartment Dojo is forty minutes from my house. I’ve been driving there for six years. Some days, I wake up and every cell in my body does its best to add weight to my organs to keep me pinned in bed. I go anyway. I have never canceled on Tom because I didn’t feel like going. I know that if I ignore my brain and get my body to put on workout clothes and get in the car, I’ll be fine once I’m there and getting blood to flow through my veins. And I always am, and I really DO leave feeling better.
As I have said, I struggled with a back injury since I was eighteen, so there were times when all we did was stretch. “It doesn’t matter,” Tom would say, “you showed up.” A few workouts would go by and then I would have a stellar one. The kind where I didn’t feel wrecked, I had tons of energy, and I experienced breakthrough moments. Tom would always point out that it was the sum total of all of the workouts that had gotten me to that moment. The crappy ones, he reasoned, were ESSENTIAL for getting to the good ones. He would also say that pushing through the tough workouts was when you learned the most about yourself. “Name one workout from last year!” he said to me once. “I . . . don’t . . . schwaaa??” “EXACTLY!” (Tom gets charmingly excited while making a good point.) “It’s not any one thing that changed your life. It’s CONSISTENCY. You got to this place by showing up regularly, no matter how you felt!” If you can develop the ability to get through stuff that you don’t feel like doing and come out of it stronger, how could that NOT bleed over into the rest of your life? How could you not become a force of Nature?
Think of your body as a bank account and today you open that account with zero dollars. Every time you do something positive for yourself from this day forward, whether it be exercising or eating healthier, you are making a deposit. Over time, those deposits begin to accumulate into quite a pile of goodness. The reason this is important is because there will ABSOLUTELY be times that you aren’t able to do those things. You get sick, there’s a work deadline, you’re traveling, it’s the holidays, whatever. The regular deposits that you make when you can give you a cushion for those times when life sucks you down into its undertow. As I complainbrag often, I travel a lot. Traveling DARES you to eat well. Like, double-dog dares you. It is VERY tricky to not eat like shit when you’re grabbing quick food on the road or in airports. And the Midwest and the South—while I love them—by and large have not embraced the whole “Don’t eat the worst stuff you can imagine” thing yet. I ordered an Asian chicken salad from the “lite menu” in Kansas once and got a salad with fried chicken, wonton strips, and globs of ranch dressing—you know, the way the Asians eat it. Caucs will put ranch dressing on anything and everything: meat, vegetables, other ranch dressing. They don’t care. Ranch dressing contains the molecule that gives white people their pasty, reflective sheen.
Because I know there will be many moments in my life when I can’t eat the way