Similarly, we don’t learn about life through theories, we learn about life through living. You will never become a better runner if all you did was to read books about running. But if you were to simply start running, it’s likely you’ll become a better runner over time simply through practice.

Theories can be understood from the comforts of the couch, action actually requires us to get our ass off the couch.

Informational knowledge + Experiential knowledge = New reality.

That said, doing without thinking would be mindless and we are not here to be drones. Vice versa, thinking without doing is a form of self-indulgence and we wouldn’t make any meaningful impact.

Doing Doing Doing = Mindless, low growth and low impact (meh..) Thinking Thinking Thinking = Thoughtful, low growth and low impact (neigh) Thinking + Doing + Reflecting = Thoughtful, high growth and high impact (Yeay!)

But where do we start? First we focus on the next smallest concrete steps and one of the most effective first actions you can take is to make a commitment, preferably one that’s public or involves someone else. I’ve found that making a commitment will often drive me to take action rather than the other way around.

It’s not unlike how we develop passion. Passion, mostly, doesn’t simply erupt spontaneously. More often than not, we become more passionate at an activity when we get better at it.

Look at me, I thought about triathlons for years but nothing happened until I followed through with a simple act of signing up. Signing up for the race made me swim, bike, run, and write. Not thinking about it, not reading about it, not wishing about it. And to think all it really took was me making a simple act of commitment.

Takeaway: We need to cultivate a default bias towards action, because everything else in the process serves as a multiplier of the effect of taking action. From trying out new things, you gain a whole new layer of contextual knowledge, which you can then combine with the theoretical knowledge to build an informed perspective and approach towards the activity at hand.

The idea may come across as banal, but I assure you that its profundity is anything but, for it’s in the process where the discoveries are made, not at the finishing line.

5. Practicing correctly is more important than simply practicing.

With the race looming in 4 weeks, I was getting nowhere with my swim training. I was ludicrously slow and my discomfort in the water was not subsiding. I realized that if I wanted to be ready in time for the race, I had to develop a deliberate training plan.

I knew I had to work on two areas: mental and physical training. The mental training I could work on it myself. But the physical part I needed external feedback. Since I already have a base level of fitness, I deduced that my technique must be wrong. I was super slow and visualizing I was Michael Phelps or a bottle-nosed dolphin didn’t quite cut it. I needed an expert to point out my mistakes.

Coach, am I doing this right?

Enter deliberate practice

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the “10,000-Hour Rule” when he claimed that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. That was based on a study by Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of Psychology at Florida State University, a pioneer in researching deliberate practice and what it means.

In essence, deliberate practice is a highly structured and highly engaged activity with the specific goal of improving performance. It is: intentional, aimed at improving performance, designed for your current skill level, combined with immediate feedback and repetition.

“Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.“ — K. Anders Ericsson

I fully subscribe to the idea that the development of genuine expertise requires struggle and sacrifice, honest and often painful self-assessment. So in a way, this was the perfect opportunity to test it. On a small scale.

Here’s how I broke it down.

My key weaknesses

I was afraid of the open water / lakes, and that made me extremely uncomfortable and tensed when in the water. I was a slow swimmer despite my athleticism.

My hypotheses

Familiarity begets comfort. I would be more comfortable in the open water if I did more open water swims and familiarize myself with being in the water. I was slow because my technique was lousy. If had a coach to point out the mistakes in my technique, I could work on correcting them to become a better swimmer.

Over the course of a month I logged about 10 swim sessions (3 in a lake and 7 in the pool) and I went to 2 swim classes.

The payoff arrived quickly. I was improving with each session. I realized that the longer I swam, the more relaxed I became. Somewhere around the 15th lap, my mind and body would ease into the repetitive motion and an effortless focus state would arrive. Not unlike the feeling I get when I run over 15 km.

Going to the swim classes helped me tremendously. Once the coach pointed out my mistakes, I began doing isolated drills on them by myself to work on my technique. I was kicking with my calves and not my legs, that’s why I was going so slow. I was only breathing on one side, which made me drift. Which in turn added to my stress level as I was constantly worried if I was going in the right direction.

I must admit even I was amazed but how quickly I managed to reprogram and improve my technique through deliberate practice.

Takeaway: Practice weakens unfamiliarity but deliberate practice strengthens abilities.

6. Inspiration is relative, and it’s all around us.

In any new endeavors we begin — professional or personal — it’s common to look up to the top performers as role models. And one of the things that was hard to miss on race day was when the pros started to roll in with their anti-gravity spacecraft bikes and blackhole aerodynamics optimized helmets.

When they zoomed past me so effortlessly during the race while I was pedalling like hell, I remember thinking to myself:

Man, I wish I was as fast as them.

I wish I had their level of fitness.

I wish I had their expensive, fast bikes.

I wish I was more like them and less shitty like me…

How bike pros achieve warp speed ◉o◉

Luckily I managed to backpedal before I fell into a negative envy spiral, having realized that they had probably put in 100 times more effort than I had and they had many more races under their belt, and it would be cruel and delusional to compare myself to them.

The other thing that you’ll notice at public sporting events is the mix of people who show up. From kids to teenagers, young adults to seniors. Fro those who are thin to those who are athletically built, to those who don’t look particularly in shape. People that if you saw on the streets and had to guess what they did for fun on a weekend, you would’ve never landed on triathlon as your first guess. And I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, but against my limited perspective, I was always under the impression that you had to be in top physical shape to do a triathlon.

But these people — I call them the everyday athletes — they are the people I’m most inspired by , because effort is a beautiful thing to see in motion, and it’s personified by the people who are trying the hardest.

Find it. Own it. Use it.

Whether it’s the pro or the everyday athlete, you can draw inspiration from them and use it as strength. When you view everything as a wellspring of energy that you can tap into and turn it into your advantage, you are increasing the amount of resources available to you.

7. You don’t know who you are inspiring.

I clocked my fastest lap time when I was sprinting towards the refreshment stands after crossing the finishing line. As I was jamming down my 4th slice of apple cake I felt a tap on my back. I turned around to find a middle-aged man with a huge smile plastered across his face and a hand outstretched for a handshake. I took his hand instinctively as he thanked me enthusiastically for being his motivation throughout the race.

I was taken by surprise — Me?! He must be joking right?? The entire race I felt as though I was struggling like a newly hatched baby turtle scurrying across the beach to make it into the ocean.

Guys?

It turned out that I was more or less just 20 to 30 metres ahead of him the entire time and he used me as a visual marker to maintain his pace. Of course I did. Others had do the same for me and it made total sense that I was doing the same for others. It just never crossed my mind that I was doing it. If anything, I certainly wasn’t trying.

Here’s the thing: you just might be someone else’s role model without ever knowing it. If you’re lucky, there will be some who will step out and share their appreciation for you. But the majority of people who support your work or effort will never actively step out to tell you. It’s sort of like how only the people with extreme experiences are the ones who leave reviews.

Great, but what can we do with this knowledge?

First, we can use it to maintain a high level of self-decorum and quality in conducting ourselves. At all times. Even when nobody’s around. Because ultimately, we are always looking at ourselves. Secondly, you can do the same by reaching out to those who inspires you and let them know. I know I’ll do the same more often from now on.

8. Ignore the haters and look for people who lift you up.

I was extremely stressed about the swim as the race drew near, but in hindsight, nothing could have prepared me for the real event. Imagine 300 people rushing into the water simultaneously, and everyone is grabbing, pulling, kicking you to get ahead. I’ve heard various accounts of this, but to experience it myself was something else. It was brutal and exhilarating. As far as I could tell in the chaos, it was everyone for themselves. The good news: because of the chaos I had no mental energy left for panicking amidst the chaos because I was laser-focused on trying to stay afloat without getting kicked in the face.

During the later part of the swim, for a good distance there was this guy who kept pulling my leg (not with jokes) which was seriously annoying. it felt intentional, that’s the worst part. There I was, literally trying to stay alive, and he wasn’t making it any easier. I was tempted to stop and scream “Do I look like fucking life support to you?!” But I decided it wouldn’t help my cause to finish the swim faster so I eventually swam further out in the channels away from him.

PRO-TIP: This is not allowed.

Thankfully, people were much more civilized during the bike and run segments (I suspect it was partly because everyone could see everyone else clearly at this point) and the spirit of competition came through as you could see people encouraging others to keep pushing on, or simply sharing a smile or a stoic head nod as you passed by.

It’s not that different in life, is it? There will always be people who will try to pull you down to further their own agenda and there will be people who will lift you up despite their own agenda.

Ultimately, we can’t control what people do, but we can control our responses. Instead of expending our energy to try and fight the “haters,” we can choose to respond by pushing away from those who try to pull us down and instead, pull towards those who lift us up.

This works both ways, and this is what I want you to spend a moment considering:

Are you lifting the people around you up instead of pulling them down?

Are you playing the same role for others that you wish others would for you?

It’s worth a thought.

9. Only we can run our own race but we don’t have to do it completely alone.

Regardless of where you are born, what skin color you have, or what ideologies you subscribe to, one of the universal truths in life that applies to everyone is that no one can live our lives for us but ourselves. Having volition, the will to exercise a conscious choice to build our own lives, is vital. While that is true, it doesn’t mean that we need to do it completely alone.

Could I have done it myself? Probably. I’m sure it would be a whole other enlightening experience in itself, but I’m immensely grateful that I had three buddies who were willing to do it with me. To train together, freak out together, laugh together. To give each other high-fives made the experience 100x better. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything else.