Category: persistence

Grand Canyon Rim 2 Rim – Look Only 20 Feet Ahead

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to do the Grand Canyon Rim to Rim Hike.

It’s the second time I’ve done this hike, and both times it’s been a doozy.

It’s a 24 mile hike that we completed in one day, with a 6am start time and, for me, a ~3:30pm finish. It starts with a 5,000 ft vertical drop in the first 6 miles, followed by a 2,400 foot ascent for the next 9 miles (plus the optional two mile side route to an amazing waterfall), and then, with 19 miles in your legs, a 4,000 foot vertical ascent over the last 5 miles.

That might be why this is the sign you have to pass on your way down the canyon.

Knowing what I had signed up for, I spent the second half of this summer training for this hike, starting with 3-mile runs and ending with 10-milers by late August. And even so, it was really, really hard. As much as I wanted to appreciate the experience—which I did—the last 5 miles are a mental and physical test. It was hard to stay focused and keep the faith.

This route is particularly tricky because it is an upside-down hike: the hardest part coming at the end messes with both your mind and your body.

And it occurred to me that the upside-down hike isn’t so dissimilar from most projects or from building a company. The truth is that the really exciting fun part is often right at the beginning—the downhill where you can see the views, where everything seems possible, where the initial going is easy.

But, for nearly everyone, the hard part lays ahead. It might come in the first few months; it might come a few years down the road. We all have a dip that we need to get through, a hard part that comes long after the initial enthusiasm and excitement has passed.

What did I learn on this hike about pushing my way through the hard part and getting out of the Grand Canyon?

The one behavior that really tripped me up was picking my head up to look too far up the path ahead.

This might seem counterintuitive, but looking too far up the path set off a cycle of doubt. I was so tired, my legs were so shot, and I had so much further to go. Looking up a few hundred vertical feet or, worse, a few thousand—whether spotting a hiker looking to the next ridge—was discouraging. Whereas focusing on my feet, or looking 10-20 feet ahead, worked great.

“I can take this next step, and the next one, and a few after that.” My job was to keep going, without narrative or judgement around how long I thought I could keep it up.

If you find yourself in a hard patch, focus on the now, on that next step, on the work that’s in front of you that you know you can do.

Asking the question “how much longer can I keep this up?” leads to a whole bunch of answers that are inaccurate and that take the wind out of your sails.

Whereas one step at a time can take you a long, long way.

 

Going Through the Motions

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

If all you do, each and every day, is go through the motions, then something’s not quite right.

But going through the motions also gets a bad rap.

Each time I start a run, or stand at the side of the pool before swimming laps, or contemplate an at-home yoga or meditation practice, the only way I’m able to start is by going through the motions.

Just start running, slowly.

Just jump into that too-cold water and go.

Just stand, or sit, and breathe a few times.

Before starting, I have lots of ideas about what my experience will be. It turns out that these ideas are terrible predictors of what ends up happening. It’s the act of going through those motions that creates my experience – at times powerful, energizing, or transformative, at times just as plodding and heavy as I feared it would be.

The consistent choice, day after day, to start even if we don’t feel like it, to willingly and deliberately go through the motions, is the embodiment of our persistence. We persist when we ignore the voice that says, “Not this time, not right now, not yet. Today I really can’t.”

It turns out that the story about how terrible it’s going to be doesn’t represent any sort of profound truth. Nor is it a story that’s going to help you to reach your goals.

Some days

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Some days you get a lot of praise for work well done.

It can feel like this praise isn’t deserved, or that it is for things that came easily to you, or that it is not worth all the fuss. Often this means that you won’t allow yourself to fully hear the gratitude and appreciation that someone expresses.

Other days you toil and sweat and put your heart and soul into a thing and nothing comes back. Or, worse, it’s exactly your best work that engenders criticism or nit-picking or downright resistance.

The thing to remember is this: gift-giving is circular. Your best ideas, your art, your emotional labor, your love, these things never come back to you in a binary way. Imagine instead that the positive words you’re hearing took a long, circuitous route to get to you. They are the winding, imperfect product of you putting bravest, truest self out into the world.

What we need from you is your continued courage, grit and determination.

And what we encourage is that you allow yourself to be sustained by the positive words that do come back your way, because the people sharing these words are, secretly, messengers for many.

Reps

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Way (way) back when, when I was a high school wrestler, I used to lift weights. This was old school stuff. I spent most of my training time off-season at the local Y surrounded by barbells, dumbbells, and big metal plates, not the wooshing white, ergonomically advanced machines of today.

In my senior year of high school, the guy I trained with, who could bench press well over 300 pounds, changed our routine. Every other day, instead of a regular weight-lifting session, we’d do a pushup workout. In each set, you’d do as many pushups as you could, until your muscles failed. The trick was, instead of counting normally (1-2-3-4-5-6) you’d count in a pyramid:

1

1-2

1-2-3

1-2-3-4

And so on

The only other rule was that if you gave up before finishing a number you had to redo that number (meaning, if you were trying to get to 15 but you stopped at 10, when your next set started you had to repeat number 15).

The entire workout was to go up to 20 and back, and try to do it in as few sets as possible.

For those of you doing the math, you’ll quickly see that all we were doing was 400 pushups. So why all the rigmarole, and why, week in and week out, would we keep on doing the pyramid instead of counting our way up to 50, 60, or (on a good day) 70 pushups per set?

It’s because even that counting trick was powerful. Each milestone felt achievable. The structure made it hard to how big the whole was. Doing 400 pushups? Wow, that’s a lot. But just doing a first set counting from 1 to 10? That doesn’t seem that bad, now does it (even though it is 55 pushups)?

The work we are all doing requires walking long, hard roads. Long as in years, maybe decades. And hard because we’re taking on the gnarly, unsolved problems in the world.

Part of the way we do that is through deep exploration of and connection to purpose. We must turn on a light inside of us, through a deep investigation of our own “why,” and we must keep that flame burning by revisiting that why time and again.

But we can’t be revisiting all the time, and certainly not every day.

Because most days what the world needs from us is work, not reflection. And what our work needs from us is that we show up, that we see where we need to go today, that we do that work with skill, focus, energy, and with full and hopeful conviction, so that we move the ball forward a bit.

That next achievable, daily milestone is a very valuable thing. It takes the cross-hairs off of the big gigantic goal, moving it to our peripheral vision – still in sight, but not quite clear enough to overwhelm. We can set the milestones so we have to stretch some, because getting to pushup 15 when you feel like you can only do 10, is possible.

Over time, the daily work of doing a little more than we thought possible adds up to weeks, months and years of amazing, surprising progress. It’s always been that the act of showing up today, workman-like, and moving forward as much as we can is actually a great way to do big, important and great things over time.