Choosing Resistance

After finally getting checked out at the clinic, I was informed I had frozen shoulder (hurray for middle age 🥹) and I’ve been prescribed daily light physical arm exercises. After a couple of weeks of doing these exercises I can feel my shoulder freeing up. I really ought to have got it checked months earlier than I did. But every morning I still feel resistance to actually starting the exercises, even though I can feel the benefits every day from doing them. This is in addition to my regular exercises of push-ups, sit-ups and squats.

It’s the thought of doing these exercises every morning that brings pause. My schedule is free. I have all the time in the world to do them. I know that after I’ve done them I’ll feel good, and that the less-than-five minutes of not-exactly-difficult discomfort will give me a whole day of benefit. And yet I experience resistance. There is still that moment where I know exactly what I should do, have absolutely nothing stopping me from doing it, and nevertheless don’t particularly want to start.

This even extends into eating. Right now I am trying to lose weight by means of daily calorie control. Despite ensuring I eat my breakfast oats and lunchtime vegetables, every single time I step outside in Tokyo I am bombarded with restaurants and options I know I love. It takes effort to resist the urge to step inside and order my favourite yakiniku or katsu. And despite having been on this diet for almost a month now, the temptation is still there. Apparently my brain has not yet received the memo that we are a vegetable person now.

And I know all too well the consequences of not being strong in these little moments. No exercise means a stiffer shoulder and the day doesn’t feel quite as light as it did yesterday. Too many visits to restaurants and the scales rather unsympathetically show the results of my efforts. The strange thing is that the resistance often lasts for only a tiny fraction of the time that I enjoy the benefits of having pushed through it.

The mini miracle of actually doing something

Certainly the Tuesday app and MRC × C structure help with the up-front planning of what to do at any given moment in service of larger goals, but the moment of selecting a task and then actually executing it can sometimes seem like a mini miracle! Getting into a routine of doing that first push-up certainly helps. Once I’ve done one, I might as well do the other 19, and then I might as well move on to the sit-ups and squats. The difficult part is often not doing the thing at all. It’s crossing that tiny gap between thinking about doing it and actually starting.

It’s very clear that despite living FIRE for years, there is still the necessity to be able to push into resistance for a task I know I should do and make sure it gets done. Perhaps this should have been obvious, but I think somewhere along the way I had implicitly connected freedom with the removal of resistance. After all, an enormous part of the appeal of FIRE is exactly that. If I don’t need to work for money, I don’t need to force myself through a commute, meetings, deadlines and tasks somebody else has decided I should do. I can remove an enormous amount of unwanted resistance from my life.

The 80/20 principle pushes me in much the same direction. Why expend 100% of the effort when 20% gets me 80% of the result? Why push myself endlessly for marginal improvements when I already have enough? This applies particularly well to FIRE itself. Why continue pushing myself in a job I don’t want to do in order to accumulate ever more money when I can retire with what I already have and be happy with that?

What does David Goggins say?

A while back I read up on David Goggins, his biography and his philosophy of continually pushing for more. To see what can be achieved. To see who you really are. At first glance, it seemed completely antithetical to my own 20/80 approach of only ever doing enough to get enough. Goggins deliberately seeks out discomfort and then keeps going long after almost anyone else would have stopped. My philosophy has generally been that if I can achieve the result I want without all that suffering, I’ll very happily take that option!

After using AI to thrash out the points head-to-head in a virtual podcast between myself and Goggins — and not really making any concessions on either side — I let it sit for a few days.

And then it hit me.

There is an invaluable aspect of Goggins’ philosophy that not only works with my line of thinking, but may actually be necessary for it. In those moments of resistance before I do my push-ups, this is exactly the moment that the Goggins drive needs to kick in. Not for three days of running through a desert or some superhuman physical challenge. I just need enough of it to get myself onto the floor and do the first push-up. In doing so, I get a little more practiced at encountering resistance, pushing through it and discovering once again that the resistance itself was temporary.

Not all resistance is the same

The mistake, I think, is assuming that all resistance is the same. There is plenty of resistance in life that is pointless, or at least not worth the reward on the other side. FIRE has allowed me to remove a huge amount of that. The 80/20 principle allows me to identify other areas where the additional effort simply isn’t worth the additional return. I have absolutely no desire to reintroduce unnecessary difficulty into my life merely so that I can demonstrate my ability to endure it.

But there is another kind of resistance which sits directly between me and something I’ve already decided is worthwhile. The first push-up. My shoulder exercises. Walking past the yakiniku restaurant. Starting a difficult piece of work rather than watching a movie. Learning something I don’t understand. Having a difficult conversation. In those cases, removing the resistance may not even be possible without also removing the thing I want on the other side of it.

Perhaps this is where the two philosophies fit together better than I originally thought. The 80/20 principle asks me whether the effort is worth expending in the first place. Goggins becomes useful after I’ve already answered yes. Once I’ve decided that something is worth doing, the fact that I don’t particularly feel like doing it right now isn’t necessarily a good reason not to.

The resistance muscle

Perhaps, then, I should think of my ability to push into resistance as a resistance muscle. On any given day there is only so much willingness I have to push myself into things I don’t immediately feel like doing. But unlike a fixed budget, a muscle can be exercised. If I repeatedly encounter small moments of resistance and act anyway, perhaps I become better at doing so when the next one arrives.

This gives those first few push-ups another purpose. I’m not only exercising my chest and arms. The moment before the first push-up, when I’d really rather not bother, might be exercising something else. Each time I cross that little gap between I don’t feel like doing this and I’m doing it anyway, I’m practicing the act of not allowing resistance to make the decision for me.

Of course, muscles can also be exhausted. This doesn’t mean I should deliberately fill every day with things I don’t want to do. The 80/20 principle still applies. If resistance isn’t buying me anything worthwhile, I would rather remove it. FIRE itself removed an enormous amount of resistance that I saw no reason to continue enduring. But perhaps removing unnecessary resistance leaves my resistance muscle available for the places where I actually want to use it.

And, just as importantly, perhaps it can become stronger. This is where I can take something from Goggins without needing to become Goggins. I don’t need to seek the most extreme test available to me. Twenty push-ups when I don’t want to do the first one might be quite sufficient training for today. But tomorrow, when I encounter resistance to starting some difficult piece of work, I’ve already practiced the fundamental movement: feel resistance, recognize it, and move into it anyway.

Resistance and MRC × C

This also changes how I think about MRC × C. Mastery almost necessarily requires exercising the resistance muscle; if everything is easy, I’m probably not mastering very much. Relationships sometimes require doing something I’d rather not do at that particular moment. Contribution will surely contain occasions where doing something useful for somebody else is harder than doing something entertaining for myself.

And perhaps Commitment is, amongst other things, what keeps exercising that muscle after the initial enthusiasm for Mastery, Relationships or Contribution has disappeared.

This becomes particularly important when I think about what I want to do next. I’ve spent a lot of time considering how to improve my own happiness, freedom and contentment. But applying my own 80/20 thinking to this raises an obvious question: what if I already have enough? I’m happy. I’m free. My life is good. There are undoubtedly marginal improvements still available, but perhaps endlessly optimizing those things is no longer where the greatest return lies.

If I want to improve my productive capacity, create things, develop mastery and ultimately make a greater contribution to other people, I should probably expect resistance to be part of that. Anything sufficiently difficult to require mastery is unlikely to feel effortless every morning. Anything substantial enough to require commitment is going to contain days when I’d rather do something else. If I’m waiting to find the important project that never produces resistance, I may be waiting for something that doesn’t exist.

Choosing my resistance

That suggests something quite different from the life of ever-increasing comfort that FIRE could theoretically produce. The objective wasn’t to eliminate resistance from my life. It was to eliminate enough unwanted resistance that I could have some say over where I spend my effort.

And maybe that is another form of freedom I hadn’t considered before.

Freedom isn’t necessarily having nothing I don’t want to do. It can also mean having the ability to choose which resistance is worth pushing into, rather than having that resistance chosen for me.

That makes resistance itself something I can occasionally welcome. When I experience that little moment of not wanting to start my exercises, it isn’t necessarily evidence that something has gone wrong with my carefully constructed free life. This is simply what doing something worthwhile sometimes feels like. If I can recognize the moment, push through it and get the thing done, I receive the reward on the other side — and perhaps make the resistance muscle slightly stronger for the next time I need it.

FIRE gave me the opportunity to remove a huge amount of resistance from my life. The 80/20 principle helps me remove even more of the resistance that isn’t worth the effort. But that doesn’t mean the goal should be zero resistance.

Remove resistance intelligently. Choose resistance deliberately. And when I’ve decided something really is worth doing, don’t allow resistance to make the decision for me.

I don’t need to become David Goggins.

But every morning, for that first push-up, I might need just a little bit of him.