Do it. Do it poorly. Do it wrong. But Do it

There is this really funny thing that happens when someone does their first triathlon.

They take their time to make sure they are well prepared. They relentlessly practise their swimming, their cycling and running to the degree where they are MORE than competent at each.

Yet something quite unexpected happens.

Their recorded time is often DOUBLE what they expected.

The equation in their head during preparation was,

Swim + Cycle + run = triathlon

The reality, any hardened triathlete will tell you, is VERY different.

There are a million different ingredients that are hard to list even if you have experienced them.

Tasks so small as to seem irrelevant. Like putting socks on with wet feet or trainers on to once wet now sweaty swollen feet to start the run.

Or 50 other things that cannot be known without having done it can all seem to take forever, particularly as you are swept along with the “competition” installing an urgency to maintain your position.

As much as we wish it were different our brain cannot learn (and create new action) through information gathering.

Their is no way to master a game without skin in it.

We learn through a process called neuro association. This is the process of connecting the dots in our own mind in our own story.

What this means is that we can see the sum

21 + 27 = 48

Yet still not know it

We can ask someone else the question, what is

21 + 27

And they can provide us with the answer (48) and we can STILL not KNOW the answer two weeks later.

The only way we can know the answer is to have connected the dots in our mind.

It is for this reason that diets, prescribed workouts, books proposing brilliant systems and strategies from which to approach life seldom become a part of our lives despite their compelling and convincing argument.

Even advise is seldom useful because our brain MUST go through this dot connection process.

And dots can only be connected in one way, by reviewing our own lived experience.

We must Live, Review, Repeat (Not discounting that there is a bunch of lived behind you just waiting to be integrated.)

Even when we hear someone else’s story and it resonates this resonance is a product of our connecting dots in our own mind in our own story.

So Do it. Do it poorly. Do it wrong even. But Do it

Then connected the dots, gather the data and do it better next time. Live. Review. Repeat.