The world we live in today has made everything EASY. Literally, everything. think about it. Food? Easy. Entertainment? Easy. Work? Boring, but Easy. Working out? Easy..er.
If you really think about it, everything we are doing in terms of evolution is trying to make tasks EASIER for us. Think about your car for two seconds. How do you unlock the car door? For most of us, it’s with a little clicker thing. For some more of us, it’s just our hand by the handle. No more keys into the keyhole and turn. All I do is press down. How about rolling down the window? Very few of us, if any, have to ROLL down the window now. We lower it by pressing a button. How about throwing it in reverse? Don’t turn around, we’ll just put a camera back there. Way easier.
Although this has made the driving experience incrementally an easier task to navigate, I’m not so sure it’s made us better drivers. We don’t have to “work” as hard to operate a motor vehicle. I don’t think that necessarily makes us BETTER. Now take a look around you. What are some of the other things that are easier to do? Turn on the television, wash clothes, eat on the run, etc. There are some great advancements in life in general, but I would say what is happening is that EASY is spilling over into the things where we only benefit IF we work HARD.
If we try to make everything EASY, can we become an expert at anything? Can we really understand how to REALLY understand if we are trying to find the easiest way to do the task? Some people may not want to understand WHY they are doing anything.
Let’s take… you guessed it… working out. If we take the easiest way out, where you are told what to do and then perform the easiest way through that task, how much do you think you’ll benefit? My guess.. and knowledge is going to tell you that you won’t benefit very much and your ceiling for growth, fat loss, muscle gain, and health improvements is very low. When we have this social philosophy of making everything easier, we understand “hard work” less, and definitely don’t adopt a mindset of putting forth that thing called “effort” into anything we strive to achieve. If you wan’t to get stronger, you become impatient because you don’t understand the process of growth and how it takes time consistency and effort to see the incremental gains, and so you switch to something else.
No offense to the person who posted it, but that workout above, that’s easy. I suppose some people could get in better shape with that workout, but it has a ceiling, right? So, doing just that workout will eventually pan out to little to no results. You need to move on to more complex things. There’s no strength in that workout, and for some people, the stimulus will be too low. That’s easy, but the return is VERY low.
That’s why you see so many people always trying another diet or “plan”. They are unwilling to accept the fact that it may be HARD to do, and are looking for an easier, quicker way. They keep failing with the next easier, quicker way, and move on to yet ANOTHER one. They are unwilling to commit the next YEAR to improving their habits even though they KNOW that is what it’s going to take. We’ve become obsessed with EASY rather than INTELLIGENT.
So, here’s my pitch. Don’t take the shortcut. Look and find out how you have to put EFFORT into something. In general, the rewards for putting in actual effort are much better than the rewards you get from shortcuts or “working smarter”. You’ll get a better understanding of WHEN to “work smarter” when you understand the hard parts.