— Editor note: 40+ blogs later, I’m convinced that this is the biggest lesson of this challenge. I didn’t do a great job explaining it. But I sure learned the lesson.—

Just because you’re willing to work hard, doesn’t make you entitled to work hard. Hard work is earned through a lot of “less hard” work.

Very obvious platitude. Wasn’t obvious enough to me.

When I signed up for this race, I knew that I would have to train 8 hours per week and grow that into 15 hours by the time of the race. There wasn’t any part of me that was reluctant to put in that work. I was mentally prepared and motivated to do it. The hard work itself was kind of a reward so I needed no coaxing to engage in it. I quickly realized that my will was much greater than my ability.

I have never worked out more than 6 hours in a week before. Leading up to this, I would do 3 or 4h maximum, and that’s gym work which is very different. I was willing to forego anything that isn’t work or sleep. And then I soon discovered that I was wrong.

I would be laying on the couch steaming with motivation to go out and train, while the body was giving me a stern no.

The nos came in three formats: the mid week slump where I literally couldn’t bring my brain to focus if you gave me a million dollars. The second format was the injury which was a hamstring that just popped like a guitar string for no apparent reason. And then there was the knee and the achilles that kept firing warning shots. The third format which was the most destructive to my training was the sickness. You have to understand, I never get sick. I’m the asshole who goes out of the shower with a wet head and open windows in December. That never used to affect me at all. But for some reason, I would get consistently sick every Saturday after the long run. it happened maybe 6 times, 2 of them were quite serious.

The reason for this bodily refusal came from the large delta between my motivation and my ability. it taught me about the need to earn the ability to work for those long hours. I was never interested in the 4 hour athlete schedule. I wanted the “glory” of the 20h week. At the very least, I wanted 12 hour weeks, you know… To start slow.

It is this very fact that helped me see this pattern in other areas of my existence, namely entrepreneurship and work. Fuck a small free PDF, screw a plugin, apps be damned, I am only interested in building platform, right now, not over 4 years.

The path to greatness is one that I looked down on. I’m not going to toil for years building this trivial stuff like a peasant. It’s not inline with my ability or my ambition. What sports did to me is it helped me see that neither of those matter. You can’t train for 6 hours until your trained for 5 hours long enough. You have to earn 6.

When observing people’s most deplorable character traits, entitlement was always the one that agitated me most. It gets under my skin. I am not an entitled person and I hate to see it in others. You can imagine my surprise when I started learning that I, of all people, one who despises this trait, was indeed harboring a lot of entitlement. I had a more pernicious type.

My notion of entitlement was about he who feels deserving of a certain object or position or status. My entitlement though was different. I think I have always felt entitled to jump all the steps because I was too clever and ambitious and hard working.

It’s true that many stepping stones are not real. I have proven that multiple times. You don’t need to get a university degree to get far in life. You don’t need a teacher to learn most things. There are plenty of examples that reinforced this sense of entitlement in me. If you knew my story, you would expect me to build the sort of entitlement that I had. It’s easy for me to forget that legitimate stepping stones still exist. In fact, they are the norm.

The delusion of the college dorm techproneur is the epitome of this phenomenon. It is only matched by the ego of the couch to Ironman athlete (who isn’t even an athlete). It’s not that stepping stones are necessary. It’s that jumping them isn’t necessarily better and I overestimate how many I can jump and how long I can keep jumping.

For some reason, I still see more glory in the direct approach. Even though heroes all pay their dues, even though we all know that champions are made slowly, I still behave differently. But at least now that I have learned this lesson, I have increased my respect of the process and will attempt to be more deliberate and temperate what to skip if I feel compelled to.