Overcoming the Paradox of Serious Training

Here's a trick to feel amazingly capable and confident: periodically look back at stuff you originally found challenging months ago.

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The funny thing about serious skill-building is that you never stop feeling humbled by your training.

The strongest people are the ones who continually lift weights heavy enough to make them feel weak.

What a paradox!

But here’s a trick to feel amazingly capable and confident: periodically look back at stuff you originally found challenging months a couple months ago, a year ago, multiple years ago…

Compare the capabilities of your present self to your past self. That should make the growth obvious.

There should be things you used to be really confused about (or maybe even confidently wrong about) that are way more clear now.

Or things that used to take a lot of effort to accomplish, that would be way easier now. (That coding project took me a full week back then? I could do that in an hour now.)

After you add a bunch of weight to your lift over several months of training, if you pick up the original weight again, it feels light as a feather.

Also – maybe this is less wholesome – but once you reach a high enough level of skill you can periodically compare yourself to other people who are clearly less skilled. Not saying things to make them feel bad, or even thinking poorly of them, just noticing evidence that your percentile has changed on the bell curve.

But of course you can’t spend too long in this state, you just dip in to get your confidence up again and then snap out of it and get back to lifting those metaphorical weights that are heavy enough to make you feel weak again.

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