Growth

Things I learned from weight lifting: Pt 2

July 18, 2026

You need little rewards.

There’s a spreadsheet I follow at each gym session that tells me what I lifted last time and I what I want to lift this time.

It worked fine and then I discovered you can change the colours of the boxes…

So now every time I lift slightly more than last week or increase my reps, I get to change the colour of the box GREEN!

Now when I go into the spreadsheet at the gym, I see green boxes dotted all over the place.

This little visual reward seems to give me the boost I need in those moments.

You need little rewards.

You choose what you are by what you do

July 16, 2026

Our acting teacher, Jon, sends us a daily task. Something small we do as an actor, no more than five to fifteen minutes. Behind it is a simple idea: we are what we repeatedly do. You’re always an actor, and you can signal that to your brain just by doing the task.

What I love about these tasks is that they’re not product-based. We’re not trying to make anything. We’re just edging closer to our craft, building up reference material to draw on later.

That matters because as actors, we’re usually only ever working toward an end product: the audition, the rehearsal, the thing that needs to get done. We rarely get to just play, or sketch. Jon’s tasks are the opposite of that. They broaden our capabilities slightly, sure, but more importantly, they broaden our reference base.

Today’s task was to observe a person in the world through an actor’s lens, and try to figure out what drives them. How are they moving physically? What lens are they seeing the world through? How do they move in relation to the people around them? Then feel into what it would be like to begin playing them: how would you move your body to become this person?

I’m never actually going to play this person. But that’s not really the point. It feeds a longer body of work, a longer collection of references, that might inform something down the line… or might just broaden my reference base as an actor.

0 to 1

July 12, 2026

You don’t need ‘perfect’ or even ‘complete’.

You just need zero to one.

Zero to one is opening the gate.

It’s getting out of analysis paralysis and getting into the game.

Trying to be perfect, getting it finished or figure it all out before you start won’t get you nearly as far as zero to one.

Change the time horizon

July 10, 2026

Sometimes it can feel like something isn’t working.

That might be a method problem, but it might also be because of time line you’ve attached to it.

We’d do well not to mistake a faulty method with a lack of patience.

What you’re doing might actually be working, but you just haven’t waited long enough to see.

Add a few more months on before you measure progress and then you could change the method.

How you think about it

June 25, 2026

We all know what we need to do to get what we want, more or less.

The trouble isn’t the recipe, it’s the implimentation.

Our focus then shouldn’t be on finding more recipes, but how to get ourselves to use that ones we have.

The trick is how you think about the thing you need to do.

You want to get fit, you know you need to get more daily steps in, but when you think about walking you think about dying trying to get up a steep hill.

If you can take the thing you want to do and think about it in a way that makes you excited to do it, that’s when life starts getting interesting.

Books are insane value

June 24, 2026

Think of all of the time an author puts into writing a book.

And think about the years of practice, research and revisions they’ve gone through to know what they know.

And think about how specific book topics often are.

A book holds the detailed instructions of how to get a specific result. You get to adopt the beliefs, experiences and recipes of the greatest minds in any field you want.

By opening a book you open a potential world where you too can do what the writer has a done.

All of this for 20 bucks.

But of course every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So yes the book is cheap, but it doesn’t give you the result on a silver platter.

It gives you everything you need, but it’s up to you to implement that.

A shelf of books could be collectively worth a few hundred dollars.

But the potential that lies in those same pages is in the millions or perhaps it’s even priceless.

Books are a bargain, but only if you take action on them.

If you don’t, well you’re ripping yourself off.

The easiest version is better than the perfect version

June 20, 2026

Have you ever tried tracking your food on a tracking app? If you can get past groans from your friends and family, there are a few other things that might get in the way…

One of those things is wanting to be perfect at it.

This happened to me. Having worked out the macros I needed to be consuming daily, I started my first day measuring every single thing I ate and it took AGES.

So long in fact that every time I tared my food scale I fantaised about giving up completely.

The problem wasn’t the food weighing, it was that I was trying to do the olympic version of it!

I went from NEVER weighing my food to weighing the oil I was about to cook my veges in.

Yeah, I know I’m groaning WITH you!

So instead of giving up, I thought :”Look, I’ll just try my best”

What did my best look like? Well, if I weighed ANY food whatsoever in a day, I won.

Strangely, by lowering my ‘standard’ I had actually raised it. I’ve heard it said that perfection is the lowest standard because perfection is impossible. So you’ve set a standard you know you can’t achieve so therefore you have NO standard!

So I figured my new standard was doable.

And it totally was. I felt zero pressure to weigh the oil (and the fumes it gave off)

I was just weighing the best I could in the time I had.

I was doing my best. You could say it was the easiest version. And if the 80/20 rule is to be believed you could say I was yielding most of the results from this level of efforts too.

The best part? I gradually became more exact in my measurements as time went on- but I did not START there. Where I am now with that particular habit stands on the shoulders of a simpler version of the habit.

Get momentum first, then worry about the details.

So if you’re trying something new, ignore the groaners and do the easiest version for now.

Once momentum gets going, you can weigh the fumes, the condensation and the breath you expel saying the name of the dish you’re cooking.

How do you sensitise yourself?

June 19, 2026

The world has so much stimulus flying at us in all directions.

We tune a lot of it out.

I’m thinking a lot about how to resensitise ourselves to the world.

What do you focus on? What do you put in your body on a regular basis? How do you move your body?

All of these things have an effect on my capacity to feel and be moved by the world around me.

A feather can be moved by a baby’s breath.

A rock cannot.

Simple vs. Easy

June 14, 2026

Things that are simple mightn’t be easy.

If it’s worth it, it probably isn’t easy.

But it may well be simple.

Difficult doesn’t have to mean something is unpleasant either.

Something tricky can be fun.

Something simple can be hard to execute.

And things that are worth doing can be difficult and enjoyable.

Short term verses long term planning

June 11, 2026

I had a fancy habit tracker that synced across my computer and my phone.

It had little emojis to represent each habit and a smart piece of code that showed me my progress with across the month.

It didn’t stick.

This week, I stuck half a refill page to the wall and listed my habits for the week. Beside each one was a space for each day of the week. As I did each habit I could colour in the square marking it done.

The refill page is nearly completely full- meaning I’ve done a week of near perfect habits.

I don’t think the secret is lower tech. I think it’s time horizon.

The first incarnation of my habit tracker I tried to create the ‘master document’, the be-all-and-end-all of habit lists. “These are the ones I’ll do for the WHOLE YEAR!”

The refill version is just this week.

The takeaway, I think is to shorten our time horizons. What are you doing just this week? And how can you track it?

Yes, we have to know what it’s in service of, the big goal.

But what makes it actually work is when we can simply do whats right in front of us.

JUSTIN ROGERS

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