Two days ago a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to run a fun triathlon competition with him. It was a quarter of the distance of a normal Ironman competition (1 km swimming, 40 km cycling, 10 km running). Immediately I said: “Yes, why not?” since I always wanted to do it, although I had nearly no training what so ever. I knew I could do it, although I also knew that it will be pretty tough without sufficient training, which I clearly didn’t have (and of course it was a little bit dumb). But I decided for it and I did it.
I finished it yesterday in about 3:30 hours feeling prouder than ever about myself. Of course I barely can feel and move my legs today, but it gives you so much more. A lot of people don’t push their borders on how far they think they can go in life. They never reach physical exhaustion and therefore don’t know that, whenever you feel like you can’t go any further, that there is always room for more. You can ALWAYS just go a little bit further. Your body will produce the energy when the demand is there. But the demand has to be generated in your mind, which is why having a strong mind can lead you everywhere in life.
I believe that my attitude of asking “why not” instead of making excuses in any area of my life is the reason I am where I am at right now. It is the opposite of making excuses for everything and telling yourself you cannot do anything of whatever reason. It forces you to find a way to make it happen and therefore tells your brain to efficiently look for solutions. When you focus yourself on why something will not work for you and why something might fail, it tends to do so. It would immediately block you out on every possible solution, because your brain isn’t even looking anymore. There are endless possibilities out there for you to reach your goals, but when you make excuses for yourself, why you think that something is not working for you, you throw them away without even evaluating them. It is almost as if the majority of the people don’t really believe in themselves and therefore just make up excuses so that they do not have to prove them wrong. It would destroy their identity of a person not being able to do it and it is always better to have some kind of identity than none, isn’t it?
Don’t be ridiculous and man up!
