How to build muscle without going to the gym
A couple of things we do not generally regard as muscles:
Coming up with good ideas
Enjoying your own presence
Learning things on a dime
Befriending strangers
Not muscles in the anatomical sense, but metaphorically still muscles.
It takes doing deeply uncomfortable exercises to become good at them.
You are bad, awkward, and clunky at each of these when doing it the first time
There’s good form / bad form just like in the gym for each
But that’s what makes muscles muscles.
And most importantly, sticking with the exercises and improving our form leads to real muscle growth at each. Usually not visible until other people point out your progress in hindsight
Also like working out - getting better at each usually does not make the exercises easier, but allows you to do more in life
Whereas lifting progressively heavy weights allows you to carry progressively heavier objects in the physical world. Working out these extracurricular muscles makes the world playdoh-like and malleable to your favor. Only with bigger muscles you can begin to create the world to your liking
You can more easily switch to your dream job without worrying about your resume.
You can travel where you want when you want.
You can take advantage of opportunities others can’t.
Those other people will call what you have natural talent, but you know you were in their shoes not so long ago.
You just decided to take action.
The secret to starting is to do each of these things poorly before you learn how to do them well. Get rejected, try something and fail. Fail fast and fail often, success is merrily walking from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm (Winston Churchill). You can’t lose until you quit.
Stop looking for the right way to do things and they will soon find you.
You start building these muscles when you stop procrastinating.
For that which we must learn how to do, we learn by doing. -Artistotle
We are the things we do repeatedly. Excellence is not an act, but a habit. -Also Aristotle
Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world -Archimedes
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use - Steve Jobs
The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think - Marc Andreessen
"A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.
People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential." - Sam Altman
Further Reading