I Can't

or, buck up, buttercup

I am a Certified Personal Trainer, Strength and Conditioning Coach, and a licensed Nutritionist in California. Being anything official in California is a dubious distinction, I admit, but it did require that I jump through quite a few hoops. Though not as often anymore, I used to be consulted often about exercise regimens and nutritional plans. It always fascinated me that people would come to me, ask for my time (free of charge), receive the benefits of my experience, and then ignore the advice.  They would altogether refuse to follow up.

Eating nothing but meat and salt, and drinking nothing but water and the occasional snort of bourbon, in Jordan Peterson's words, "sucks." It simply isn't exhilarating from a gustatory standpoint. But the consequences of wandering off that discipline are far worse for him and for many who have battled cancer, autoimmune difficulties, diabetes, or any health issue that requires heavy pharmaceutical intervention. As I have mentioned before, for me, arthritis ceases to be an issue, as does almost everything associated with inflammation. Everything I still deal with is due mainly to stress, and no diet can completely mitigate your stressors.

I hear people all the time say, "I can't." It never fails to irritate me. You can, you simply won't. You lack the discipline to do the one thing you can do to improve your life. Worse, your life would be so much better that you can't even imagine it, but you lack the force of will to improve. This seems to be a consistent theme today: an alarming lack of vision and even less gumption.

Clearly, discipline is superior to motivation. You cannot accomplish anything significant if you rely on motivation. This shouldn't even be a point of contention, yet it is with stunning regularity. As I often say, do the hard work in a soft world; if you need me to motivate you, you will not reach your goal. It has to come from within and is a function of discipline.

Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power and other best-selling books, noted that we can become incredibly lazy without a sense of necessity. How often is there a sense of necessity in America? Even now, as an attitude of scarcity is forced upon us, there is little urgency of necessity or need. I get asked all the time in corporate consulting how businesses should motivate employees - you can't, but you can undoubtedly demotivate them. Require the best of them, accept nothing less, and shepherd them to more extraordinary achievements.

Identity is the union of faith and responsibility. Growth is the creation of a scaffolding of the proximal to the infinite; elementary things that everyday reality consists of build upon each other to define the infinite, the divine. The scale of vision expands with maturation until it encompasses philosophical concepts. It embodies the idea that, when one is in grammar school, the size of one's world is only as big as the world they are exposed to; as one ages, the scope expands, as does one's understanding of it. Of course, awareness does not develop at the same rate as a consciousness of what one is trying to understand. We think we've got this segment of our lives licked, but we've only begun to grasp what we actually face. Not only do we lack the discipline (which is a choice) to deal with our situation, but we lack the perspective (which often is not a choice, yet the application of discipline would alter our perception if applied for even a moment) to understand what is happening.

To say "I can't" is sometimes a failure of both discipline and perspective; both are failures over which we have some control. I can't tell you how many businesses lay the blame for their failures on the altar of excuses such as "We've tried that, and it didn't work" or "We're just different." Sorry, cupcake, but your business is no snowflake. There is a reason that institutional discipline scaffolding like the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) is so popular -- many in business have forgotten which disciplines are required and need to be reminded. And, like most people in most situations, they need to be told how to apply the requisite discipline, even to the extent of being shown what it looks like.

When applying the scaffolding to the level of the eternal, I can't tell you how many times I have been told, "I can't believe in a God that would allow this to happen." How laughable is that? Worse, it's wantonly irresponsible, narcissistic even. All you are telling me is that you refuse to believe in anything that requires anything of you. You want the freedom to choose your way, but you can't believe in a Higher Power that would allow consequences for those choices. I want my cake and to eat it too. How American. How selfish. Same thing. Damn the evidence (of which there is an overwhelming abundance), I am my own god. The funny thing is, it takes all of half a second to see how this applies to the highest levels of the scaffolding, to business, and even down to the day to day lowest levels of the hierarchy of needs.

In business, this is often manifested as a failure to understand why your people don't get more done but simultaneously not holding them accountable for anything. Some folks have a tendency to coast -- why do most marriages stagnate? Comfort. I mentioned Steven Bartlett's discipline equation in an earlier article, and it's no more prescient than in this right here: everything comes down to discipline, and what matters most is your "why." Why are you doing this thing (or not doing it)? What is the cost of doing it that's keeping you from executing? Are you being driven or dragged -- do you love the thing so much that you must do it to repay those who believed in you, or are you dragged by the loathing of some former trauma? There is a considerable difference, based on your why and the cost or friction of moving forward.

In his book The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter argues that the abundance of comforts we live with in the modern, Western world actually hurts our health and happiness rather than supporting or developing it. The guy has a point, but his idea of discomfort would make Mark Manson laugh, much less David Goggins. Goggins would view Easter's viewpoint as quaint, and then he would go for a leisurely 30-mile run to get the axe with which he would pierce the ice in his farm pond so he could swim in 28-degree water. The truth is, there is always someone and something more challenging than you and your situation. Do we have a comfort crisis? Yes, we do, and no further evidence is required than:

1. Executive's inability to have meetings that start on time and stick to productive conversation.

2. Marriages we allow to turn fallow because we're comfortable or refuse to be uncomfortable in them.

3. The alarming and pathetic state of nutrition in this country.

"The average caloric intake in the USA: 3540 kcal/day. The average daily physical activity: less than 20 minutes. But there are people out there who believe oatmeal, fruits, vegetables, & polyunsaturated fats are what is making us sick." — Layne Norton.

Though I should use this quote to make another point about discipline, this might be one of the most stupendously obtuse things I've ever read about nutrition. Have you ever tried to eat 3500 calories a day without eating anything processed? I have. It's damn hard to do. It is the processing of food, the very fact that decades ago, we chose convenience over nutrition, and the fact that the government lied to us about margarine (a stick of trans-fats) over butter, carbs over fat (hello diabetes), and processed food in general that has made us sick. Consider that eating 3000+ calories at McDonald's is a breeze, but it takes roughly 3 pounds of sirloin to do the same cleanly. Yes, those things (carbs, other sugars, phytotoxins, and seed oils) are making us sick; to say otherwise is disingenuous. And yes, everyone needs to lever their bums off the couch and start moving.

There are many other areas in which our love affair with comfort is causing us grief, but this is enough for now -- you get the point. Instead, it's "I can't."

California Presidential candidate Gavin Newsom raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20/hour, which immediately resulted in the closure of hundreds of restaurants. Middle and lower-class families are eating out less, automation is expensive and slow to develop, and tourism is tanking on the Left Coast. Politicians have never understood downstream effects and unintended consequences, but this is a special slice. What is interesting about this is that the dollar menu is dead out west, and the excuse that it's "cheaper to eat fast food than eating well" no longer holds water. A quarter-pound burger, fries, and drink at McDonald's costs about $15. In contrast, ground beef from Costco is about $5/lb, even in Kalifornistan. A nice ribeye is $12.95/pound -- would you rather have a steak or a sugary adult happy meal?

Even if you ignore cost, a Chik-Fil-A broiled chicken sandwich has 100 ingredients. The Chik-Fil-A fried sandwich has 40 synthetic ingredients. Wonder what Norton wants to say about that?

Taking the scaffolding framework of growing from the proximal to the infinite, Layne Norton's quote is even more obtuse than it initially seems.

"I can't" is a refusal to accept responsibility. Simple as that. Part and parcel of the culture war we find ourselves in is rooted in this refusal -- the identification with the victim mentality. I can't be responsible; I can't take charge…because sugar is added to everything, and seed oils are ubiquitous. No, they aren't. It seems that way if you satisfy yourself with a view of the world limited to yesterday's scaffolding. It is unfortunate that some of those I hear this from are the most critical of a lack of vision in others.

For some, this whole article is simply about food. Is it? Ask yourself this: where does the fight start? If you can't feed yourself, how can you feed others, no matter in what sense you are feeding them?

So, callous your mind, adjust your perspective to include more than what lies before you, reclaim your nutrition, stop eating chemical paste, show some discipline, get serious about improving, and live a better life.

Get after it.