S2 Be Better 4 · Series: Becoming Future Proof

Hey legends, welcome back to the Virtus Performance Podcast. Now we're gonna do a quick little episode for the Be Better series today. I wanna have a bit of a chat about becoming future-proof and the idea of becoming future-proof is that you build up your resilience and your adaptability to a level where you become anti-fragile and yourself as a physical organism and your mental capacity gets to a point where it can respond to anything the external environment throws at you. It's a common, I guess, theme or idea in strength and conditioning that you become a more resilient, more robust individual.

But I guess my chat for this week is a little bit more around life and how we make choices and how those choices affect our ability to be more resilient and be more robust and be more adaptable to the environment around us. So here we go. We can't predict the future, but we can create it. Sleep in, stay in bed, miss your sessions, eat processed foods, don't move much, watch TV, disregard your routine, don't drink water, skip meals, disconnect with your community, sit on your phone, ignore how you're feeling and quit when things get hard. I know you know this, but this is terrible advice.

On the flip side, get up early, out of bed, complete your sessions, eat fresh foods, move well and move often, read and write, optimize your routine, keep your fluids up, eat regularly, connect with your community, use your phone sparingly, create self-awareness and cultivate habits which build your resilience with every decision you make. Yeah, that sounds a bit better. You can choose your future, but contrary to popular belief, it's not one or two big decisions that shapes our future. We make thousands of conscious choices each day, and I did a little bit of a look into how many and the number that seems most commonly cited is 35,000.

So we have 35,000 conscious choices that we make each day. Obviously, most of them are very minute, but I guess that's the point of this chat. With each one of those decisions, taking you slightly closer or slightly further away from the person you wanna become. Now, this is probably one of the most powerful decisions thought experiments that I've had, or that I've had, that I've learned about over the last six to 12 months. So every little decision you make, what you have for breakfast, the time you go to bed, what book you read, how long

you sit on Instagram, all these kind of things, they all affect the future version of you, and everyone is either taking you slightly closer or slightly further away. And we can look at the same system of adaptation in training. Every session we do, every decision we make around the sessions, food, nutrition, sleep, stress, all that kind of stuff, it affects us massively. Someone who does very good work in this field is James Clear. So if you guys haven't read "Atomic Habits," I would very, very much suggest it, recommend it. Jump on his website, it's also incredible.

All right, let's keep going. "Hard Decisions, Easy Life, Easy Decisions, Hard Life." Now that's by a guy named Jersey Gregorek. I think that's one of the most fundamental ideas around making difficult decisions is it makes everything else easier. If you make easy decisions, it makes everything else harder. It's a simple weight of numbers. With so many decisions, you know you'll make some poor ones, we know that. But you'll choose, or when you choose the easy way rather than the right way, but that's okay, it'll happen. As long as your choices are weighted favorably towards the right ones, you'll be able to continue to grow, to forge ahead.

If we do hard things often, we make the right decisions. You win some, you lose some. Just make sure that you win more than you lose. And herein lies the secret, or a secret, to success. I didn't say it would be easy, but I know it most certainly will be worth it. Again, it's simple, but don't mistake simplicity for ease. The person you are right now is a combination of your past decisions and future you will be an accumulation of the decisions you make now. The choice is yours, choose wisely. And now a little quote to finish off from old mate Charles Bukowski, which ties in really nicely to everything I've just said.

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it. So if you need a reminder, that was it, go do good things. That's me out, be amazing.