The Only Habit I’d Fight a Troll For
Sauna, cold plunge, meditation, acupuncture, marathons, somatic breathwork, box breathing, resonant breathing, beeswax candles in the ears, 12 hours of walking, Spartan races, 24-hour fasts, 3-day fasts, intermittent fasts, face tapping, fascia release, therapy, and everything else.
We didn’t start the fire, and based on that woefully incomplete list of ways to quell it, we haven’t stopped trying to put it out, either.
I’m a sucker for trying nearly any type of personal development trend at least once. Some have stuck and some haven’t. For example, I’m not a runner. Actually, one of my favorite bits after having cancer is blaming it for things I don’t want to do. “Sorry, I had cancer.”
But I’m never saying no to an opportunity to sauna.
I Wasn’t Always Like This
This is a new development for me. Until a few years ago, I really only tried one personal-development-adjacent thing. On a summer day in 2016, I stood about fifty feet away from a giant, curved wall. It looked like a black wave as high as my roof. Maybe higher. I’m short, so everything looks tall to me, but other people seemed to agree. Despite the height, I’d seen tons of people summit one of these things on American Ninja Warrior, and I had just watched at least a dozen more do it in real life. So I knew it was possible.
Before the race started, I asked someone how to conquer this obstacle. Of everything I expected to encounter on the trail, this one seemed the hardest. They told me to run as fast as possible or as long as possible, then jump at the last moment. After a deep breath, I took off. My mud-stained shoes threw dirt behind me as the top of the wall got taller and taller. Undeterred, I pumped my arms and chugged my legs as much as I could. When I felt my momentum coming to an end, I jumped and stretched my hands as high above my head as I could.
They didn’t come close to the lip of the wall. But they managed to grasp the outstretched arm of one of the more athletic racers, who successfully made it up. Great! But when my upward momentum died, latched wrists or not, I started falling. Not great! When I did, I felt a crack in my shoulder and a jolt of pain. I let go of his hand and slid to the bottom of the wall, looking up at an obstacle I could not overcome that day.
Retreating back to my friends who hadn’t gone yet, I tried to lift my arm. It wouldn’t go higher than 90 degrees. My buddy, who played rugby in college and watched all of this happen, said, “hold on one second,” and slammed my shoulder back into place with a crunch. It felt better. Not perfect, but better.
I finished the race, skipping the obstacles requiring me to hang or climb. The finish line offered some personal satisfaction, but certainly no physical relief. It took a few months before I felt completely back to my old self. The incident didn’t deter me from trying again the next year, determined to avenge my shortcoming. I did, but I didn’t give it a third go. Not my thing, and that’s OK.
…Then Shit Got Crazy.
What a difference a cancer diagnosis and trip to rehab will make. When things got crazy in my life, I found myself searching out and experimenting just about every personal development trend on the list at the top (plus a few others). And they’re fine. They’re good. I’m glad people embrace them. I want to live in a world where people want to develop mindfulness and create meaning in their lives.
If a magical, evil troll poofed himself into existence and forced me to keep one at the expense of all others, I’d be sad, but I wouldn’t hesitate. No habit has delivered more insights into my health, my relationships, myself, and my meaning in this world more than writing.
It’s also the hardest.
A week or so ago, a friend and I both had wives out of town. We combined forces and took the gaggle of kids to a nearby park. The kids barely looked at the playground. No way the cavatappi-shaped slide could compete with the flowing river across the street. We’ve had an unusually warm winter, and that afternoon got to nearly 90°. The giant boulders lining the banks of the rivers held groups of local college kids who took the opportunity to start their tans early. Some read, others ate Cheetos, they all wore cool sunglasses. We saw kayakers, dog walkers, hippies, and kids (our own and others) basking in the sun.
But the water comes straight from the mountain snow, which isn’t 90 degrees. More like 38, maybe 42.
I love a good cold plunge, so I kicked my flip-flops off and volunteered to stand guard as the kids leapt from the bank onto a boulder sitting a foot or two in the river. The other dad said he was impressed by my ability to stand in the cold water. His eyes opened wider when I laid down to let the snow melt flow over my whole body.
*Not me in that picture…..but basically.
If that seemed hard, I thought, try unpacking personal trials, tribulations, and trauma for 70,000 words. No regerts and all of that, but I do wonder if I could’ve skipped those crazy few years if I had built a writing practice earlier in my life.
So Why Don’t More People Do It?
This week I spoke with a business prospect for about an hour. She asked why people pay me to write for them. First you have all of the surface-level reasons: they don’t have time, need to focus on running their business, and don’t tend to be good at it. But really, it’s because it’s hard. That’s why.
81% of people want to write a book. 3% finish a first draft. 1% of those who finish the draft publish the work.
Why such a high attrition rate?
Again, some reasons come easily, and I’m only talking about the 81% who claim they want to write a book. They have a hard time calculating the ROI of investing in it, they don’t have the time, they don’t think they have anything interesting to say, etc.
But I think of those as excuses and not reasons. I see people start and get overwhelmed by the difficulty they find in the self-reflection it forces upon the author, even in business books. It’s a curved wall so high they never think they’ll get to the top, and they worry about what they may break if they try.
The ROI
Writing requires a certain type of physicality, but I don’t think it’s the main thing holding people back. Sure, it’s not always easy to sit and clack on the keyboard for hours when the world has plenty of other things to offer. But people also run (for fun!) Some of them do it for more than 26 miles. It’s more of a mental hurdle, to choose to sit in the seat and clack on a keyboard when you could scroll funny 20-second clips on the internet. Every routine, from flossing to exercising, requires mental determination. There’s a benefit to discipline and routine, and writing’s no different.
Sitting with yourself, your thoughts, your intellect, and ultimately your identity scares people off. This is where writing, to me, starts to differentiate itself. Nearly every person I talk to who writes about their lives on a regular basis, for public consumption or privately, has cried in front of a keyboard. That’s hard, it’s scary, and it keeps people in their heads.
Real talk, crying in front of a keyboard isn’t fun, but the changes it makes in my mind, my emotions, and even my body make it worthwhile. Dr. James Pennebaker showed people with a writing routine boost their immune system at the level of their blood. His studies have been replicated thousands of times and show the same results. The act of turning your thoughts into language helps you understand them better because it forces you to slow them down. You end up with lower blood pressure, reduced stress hormones, better relationships, and so much more.
It allows me to make connections in my mind where I didn’t have them before. For example, on our drive up the mountain to participate in the second obstacle course race (my last one), my wife and I spent the drive trying to memorize the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” That hadn’t occurred to me when I came up with the opening for this piece (or blog, or whatever we call these things). Creation not only results in whatever it is we make, but it gives us a way to better understand our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions.
So it’s hard, and it may not always deliver an ROI in the bank account, but it fills buckets no amount of therapy, saunas, cold plunges, kettlebells, yoga, or anything else can. I have found it’s truly a special act, which is why I’m giving it all up to keep writing…that is, if an evil troll ever shows up to take everything else away.
P.S. My audiobook, No Silver Bullets, is now live on audible. Get it here.
OR You could read it the good, old fashioned way. Order here.
I relate to this very much. My episode was a non-cancerous brain tumor, but it left me feeling very similarly. I love what writing gives me.