Overcoming The Urge To Give Up: How To Push Through When Your Health Journey Seems Daunting

We get excited about a new project and then we lose motivation as time goes by, it suddenly gets less exciting. We do this in 10 different projects and then we wonder why we haven’t achieved anything meaningful yet. We wonder why we haven’t lost weight, built muscle, been regular at the gym, started a new project, and finished that book we started reading last month.

We’ve all been victims of this in our lives. We are thinking about starting something new. We built up this amazing vision of ourselves and what we COULD achieve. We get excited. We start… and then one day that motivation goes away and we stop showing up.

Why is that? I don’t have an exact answer, but what has worked for me is to replace motivation with DISCIPLINE. Bear with me. I know people don’t like to talk about discipline, but I truly think it is a virtue and it can be the answer to this problem

Motivation And Discipline

Motivation will go away eventually, no one is motivated 100% of the time. We will not get to the end of the road depending on motivation. Here is an idea I just came up with – Motivation focuses on the end of the road. When you do things because of motivation you are focusing on the vision you have of what you could achieve.

On the other hand, discipline focuses on the journey, on showing up. Putting one foot in front of the other. Discipline says – I don’t know if I’ll get to the end, but I’ll try one more day, I’ll show up ONE MORE TIME.

That is how you finish what you start. By showing up every day. By postponing quitting to the next day. It’s hard, but isn’t that what makes it worth pursuing? If it was easy anybody could do it and it would take all the value away from it. You look up at people who do things that are hard.

This is the mindset I try to use when starting something new. If you aren’t learning new skills, developing new habits, or killing bad ones, you are staying still. Living the same old way you’ve been living for the past 5 years. Why would you do that?

Why would you choose stagnation instead of growth?

The Dignity of choice

Jim Rohn said it best –

“Humans are the only life form that doesn’t strive for its maximum.

How long will a tree grow? As tall as it possibly can. Humans, on the other hand, were given the dignity of choice.”

Jim Rohn is a big mentor of mine, even though he is not around anymore I still listen to his audio and his lectures. I find this idea absolutely amazing. We were given the option of choice, and for that reason, we have to CHOOSE if we want to continue growing and HOW MUCH we want to grow. We cap that growth by choosing to STOP at any point we want. If you want to know more about Jim Rohn and his work check his website here.

The funny thing is that we don’t decide to literally and conscientiously stop growing. Instead, we lose focus, start adopting bad habits, and stop putting in the work, and thus we stop growing.

Do you know how far you can go? Do you have any idea of what the best version of yourself looks like?

We aren’t stuck to the current version of ourselves, we can decide to change at any point we want. We can start eating properly – a healthy disease-prevention diet. We can start exercising and developing a strong, fit, healthy body. IT WON’T BE EASY. You might be motivated at the start and think that motivation will guide you, but it won’t. Motivation is a snake. It leaves you when you most need it. Relying on motivation will take you nowhere, all the people who have failed to achieve what they want were motivated at the start and COLLAPSED when motivation left them. The people you see who got what you want, on the other hand, were driven by discipline. THEY KEPT SHOWING UP AFTER MOTIVATION LEFT THEM.

Choose Your Mindset

We often focus on achieving a goal we have but we don’t think about how it will be ONCE WE HAVE IT. We think the game is over and we will not need to put in any more work. However, we mustn’t think “All this discipline was worth it, I have been eating a healthy diet for 1 year, now I can let go of discipline and finally relax.” That’s a big mistake. BIG MISTAKE.

Discipline is something you CARRY WITH YOU FOR LIFE. Discipline is a LIFELONG CHOICE. Once you got a healthy diet, you have to KEEP IT GOING. Otherwise, what was the point? To follow a healthy diet for 2 months and then go back to bad eating habits? Take this example, imagine someone worked hard to get in great shape. Now that they have the body they’ve always wanted is the game over? No way! IT HAS JUST STARTED. Getting the body you want is the easy part. The hard part is MAINTAINING IT FOR A LONG PERIOD OF TIME.

the idea of infinite games vs finite games.

Most things in life are infinite games. That means the point of the game is to keep playing. It doesn’t matter that you GOT in great shape, what matters is that you KEEP that shape. It doesn’t matter that you finally got in a relationship, what matters is that you are still happily together 30 years down the line.

I’ve just recently heard about this idea from Alex Hormozi, and it completely changed the way I think about my life now. I realized that in most cases I’m not working towards the thing itself, I am working just for the sake of the game. I’M FOCUSED ON THE JOURNEY, NOT THE DESTINATION. I’m happy with my body, I’ve worked very hard to build it this way, and now the goal is to keep it this way. I’ve developed a good diet, and now the goal is to keep at it for the rest of my life. I’ve started the habit of reading books, now I the hard part is to read every day for the rest of my life.

There’re all sorts of DISTRACTIONS that will try to get you to slip and fall back onto old habits. But do you realize how much harder it is to maintain something than it is to get it? Getting in great shape takes you probably 2 years of hard work depending on your current state, but maintaining it you have to do it for the rest of your life. It will be 30 years of staying on track, STAYING FOCUSED.

wrap up

I will keep working on developing this mindset of discipline over motivation and finite vs infinite games in my own life. As you have probably seen on the website, I am currently building my nutrition consulting business, which is a great opportunity to put all of this to practice. I’ll aim to keep writing blogs, to keep posting on social media, and to build this business from the ground up.

I hope you have something you are looking forward to and you have a goal worth pursuing. My general advice is – FOCUS ON YOUR HEALTH FIRST, get your diet and your exercise routine in check, everything else will change after you work on those two things. If you want to read about how I started learning about nutrition click here to read another blog post.

Thank you for reading this far, I am grateful for your attention and I hope I’ve provided some value to you.

Best wishes,

Martim