No one wants to work hard for anything anymore. It’s true. Take a look around at our modern culture. Instant satisfaction is everywhere from fast food to movies on demand. We literally have to wait for nothing. And, while the convenience is great and quite useful for the most part, it has also has had a deleterious effect on our lives that is sometimes overlooked or unseen. It has eroded our patience and destroyed our work ethic – at least when it comes to the really hard stuff like physical development and skill acquisition. Why? Because these things are not and cannot be had instantaneously. They require consistent practice and drive. I mean, c’mon they now have pills to take that burn fat while you sleep? Are you kidding me? How lazy can we be? By the way though, if you get your diet correct and even skip a meal once in a while, you will burn fat while you sleep without the damn pills, but that’s another blog post….
As you may have noticed, martial arts training and conditioning to develop the proper levels of fitness, mechanics, technique, attributes, and that all elusive sense of flow can be difficult, repetitious, and sometimes downright boring, to be honest. So how do we keep going in our daily training? How do we push ourselves through the plateaus and dry spots with enough intensity and consistency to break through to our own personal greatness? (See what some of the historical martial greats had to say about it in this article here.) My advice is to embrace the suck – yeah, the suck. Learn to love it. Crave it. Become friends with it. So when it hits, you not only can push through it, but actually embrace it.
Dostoyevsky said to “love your suffering.”
The Chinese martial artists call it, “eating bitter.”
We here at Warrior Fitness call it “embracing the suck!”
Does this make you weird? Well, yes, but only in some circles. But for the most part it earns you respect. Why? Because most people can’t do it. Being able to embrace the suck and keep going distinguishes you. It differentiates you from the pack. It makes you a leader. If you want to be a leader, there’s only one way to do it – lead from the front. That’s the only way to inspire people – by your own example. What example do you set for your students, your family, your friends, your kids?
Learning to embrace the suck allows you to, as the great method acting coach Stanislavsky once wrote, “make the difficult habitual: what is habitual will become easy, and what is easy will become agreeable.” So even embracing the suck is a process which allows us to continue to train with greater intensity and focus, and thus push through even greater levels of suck.
However, the best part about embracing the suck is when the suck ends and you come out on the other side. You’ve fought the good fight, pushed through the barrier, and overcome the adversity once again. You’re a stronger person for it. You know it. I know it. So go out and live it!
