Sunday Story…My Apologies

To each one of you, my readers.

For not holding you more accountable.
For allowing you to “slip”.
For not being more insistent in our pursuit of fitness, health and excellence.
For letting mediocrity creep in.
For allowing excuses to be reasons.
For not calling forth your greatness.
For not seeing all your fears and finding the path to defeating them.
For all the ways I have failed you.

I apologize. I re-commit to doing better, to insisting on you doing better, to creating an environment where excellence isn’t a sometimes thing but an all the time thing.

We are what we do.
Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle

John Mariotti
www.crossfitodyssey.com
www.sundaystories.blogspot.com
775-338-2412

Sunday Story…Good Enough

Isn’t Good Enough, sometimes. Maybe just this once, you shouldn’t settle. Maybe you should sacrifice, lay it all on the line, and do whatever it takes to make the thing happen. What then?

What if you didn’t let the urgent stuff get in the way of the important stuff? What if you focused only on the important? What if you went “all-in” to do only that?

What if you saw the change you wanted to make and you wouldn’t slow down, settle, or stop until the change was in place? What if your work mattered so much that anything less than full effort was akin to thievery? What if we decided there was only one acceptable outcome?

Maybe there are places we shouldn’t allow good enough to be good enough. Maybe there are things so important that anything less than complete and total ownership would be criminal. Maybe you should find something like that and be unstoppable.

What if, indeed?

John Mariotti
www.crossfitodyssey.com
www.sundaystories.blogspot.com
775-338-2412

Sunday Story…Can

Not should.

Just because I can doesn’t mean I should. There are lots of things in the world I Can do. Every day I am presented with a myriad of choices of things I can do. Most of them, not only Can I do but I Should do. There are, however a bunch of them I Can do but absolutely Should NOT do!

How do you know what I should or should not do? What’s the mechanism for making sure I am doing what I Can and Should do?

You might start with the worst-case scenario. I can do X and the worst thing that might happen is Y. Y isn’t too bad, I can live with Y, it isn’t going to affect my day to day life too terribly much and probably isn’t going to happen anyway. On the other hand, if Y happens my life is going to change and not for the better. Easy decision there, right? Don’t do X if though you can!

I call this “doing the math.” When I sit down and figure out all the likely outcomes from any given activity I am in the process of deciding what I Should do. And if the math is in my favor then go ahead…you Can and you Should. If the math indicates the outcome might change your life unfavorably (the likelihood of death for instance), Don’t Do It!!! Doing the math is way cheaper than the alternative.

"Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment"

John Mariotti
www.crossfitodyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com
775-338-2412

Sunday Story…More “P”s

I often wonder about those huge water towers we see all over the landscape. Are they really full of water? Does it ever get used? When? How? Why?

The why is puzzling…I mean we have a pretty good system for water delivery for the most part and it just seems that pumping water up to a tower only to let it feedback down is remarkably inefficient.

On closer inspection, however, the necessary energy expenditure to meet the demand when all of us need water at the same time is waaaay bigger than the expenditure needed to send that water up to the top of the tower. So it is more efficient to do it that way.

Guess what? Planning ahead makes getting the job done consistently and efficiently way easier. Just like practicing your bar muscle-ups is more efficient than trying to figure it out on game day! Just like doing the progressions to get any skill perfected makes more sense than just trying to do the skill.

You can’t learn to drive by hopping into a race car that goes 200mph…you will just learn to crash! We learn to drive in an empty parking lot at 5mph and eventually we figure out how to go 200mph. There’s a bunch of stuff in life like this (most, actually)…proper planning (as well as preparation) also prevents poor performance!

John Mariotti
www.crossfitodyssey.com
www.sunday-stories.blogspot.com
775-338-2412