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By Root 597 0

I’d like to, I do my best to stay on top of it when my life is a little more regulated at home. This way, I don’t have to feel bad for falling off the wagon when life happens. The same is true for exercise. If you exercise two or three days a week—week in, week out—you will be totally fine if you go through a few weeks or a month when you can’t. Tom reminds me CONSTANTLY: You can’t get into shape in a week, you can’t fall out of shape in a week. When you have a spell where workouts are impossible, you’re never more than two or three workouts away from getting back to where you were. This is GOLDEN information for someone like me, who tends to cata-strophize. “Aw SHIT! I haven’t worked out in three weeks! It’s over! I’m gonna get all doughy and huffy again!” This is untrue. It’s important to know this because when you haven’t worked out for a few weeks your brain will try to talk you out of going back. If you feel like “it’s all over,” you’re less likely to start doing it again. This, as it turns out, is an empty excuse.

Making deposits is all about building credit. When you make the choice to be extra nice to people every day, they are much more forgiving that one day when venom shoots out of you because you were on an all-night flight next to an unhappy baby. (Babies—or “crypods” as I call them—would be SO AWESOME if you could set them on “vibrate.”) This also applies to delivering quality work to the best of your ability on time. Employers will be lenient if you have a misstep here or there, because we are imperfect beings. Make the deposits. Build your credit. If you can just do that for the rest of your life, you will have had a wonderful stint here on Earth.

Effort, big or small, is always rewarded! Deem yourself worthy and embrace that, which you so deserve.

—Trainer Tom

Now that you are on your way to a more physically capable you, give yourself another 50 XP for completing this section!

PART THREE

TIME

THINGS THAT ARE BIGGER THAN YOU

Humans are a religious bunch. We love aligning ourselves with notions and simulacra because we need a path. Any path. We need an ideology to ferry us through life because decision making is a bit easier once we have a prefab belief system in place. This religion is usually, but doesn’t have to be, Christ-y in nature. You can folmulate (a word I just made up: folmulate= follow + emulate) Star Trek, the Jedi, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, math, WoW, Monty Python, Unix philosophy, ’80s teen comedies, cactus worship, NERDISM (see what I did there?) . . . it doesn’t matter. It just has to be a system. Mine is primarily self-improvement. It’s probably because I was such a fuckup in my twenties that I realized I needed to change my life in my thirties so my forties through deathies wouldn’t suck.

This was an easy path to follow because there is no shortage of self-help literature. As a resident of Los Angeles, I spend much of my day ensnared in traffic. Our public transportation system is what experts would call “not awesome,” so I spend a lot of time in my car. Many years of basic cable “celebrity” have afforded me a nice one, so I enjoy being wrapped up in it like a snazzy metal blanket. The main problem is that I am constantly bored of the music I already know I like. My thirst for new music is greater than the available new music that I can drink with my brain.

Then, in 2005, I had a stunning epiphany, which is almost shameful in its simplicity: Instead of mindlessly listening to music in my mobile exoskeleton, I can download self-improvement au-diobooks so I can LEARN while I TRAFFIC. All of this commute time was fertile education soil just waiting to be seeded.

I began downloading—it didn’t matter what—as long as it promised improvement in some way. I knew a lot of it might be sucky and ridiculous, but as long as I was committed to the idea of learning to improve, it was better than trying to harmonize with the same fifteen songs over and over (yeah, I try to harmonize with songs a lot, a practice that I’m sure you can assume is HIGHLY annoying to witness).