Ken Fite

There’s a theory in weightlifting that training to failure is necessary for seeing results.

Training to failure is where you run so hard that you can’t take another step, or you work a specific muscle in good form repeatedly to the point where you couldn’t do one more rep even if you wanted to. This is the point where the muscle fibers break down. They rip apart and tear at a microscopic level. Within 24 hours, your body will start to hurt while it repairs itself.

You’ll know you worked out right if you feel like your legs are made of jello and you walk funny. Or if you worked your arms so hard that you can’t lift them to wash your own hair without swinging them back and fourth in the shower to get some momentum. And if you forgot to grab some shampoo first, good luck starting all over. Working out to failure is a lot more fun than it sounds.

But that’s when an amazing thing happens. If you worked out in good form, if you worked your muscles to the point of failure, and if you fed your body plenty of protein, your muscles will grow. You’ll get leaner. You’ll walk by the mirror and will notice the change. You may start wearing v-necks. If you repeat this process, and stay committed, you can completely transform your body.

This can only happen if you work out to failure. Muscles don’t grow bigger and get leaner if they’re just worked a little. If you drop and do five push-ups, I can guarantee you won’t see any results.

How many reps does it take to reach failure? It depends on the person and their level of fitness. But the key is that it’s only during extreme pressure where we have the potential for growth.

I had a hard week. You probably did, too. Things seem to get more complicated every day. At times, I felt like I was being stretched to the limit. Even to the point of failure. But what I’m realizing is this: it’s in our failures where we have the opportunity to grow into a better version of ourselves.

Just like our muscles that will never grow unless they reach their breaking point through repeated training, you and I can’t grow if we’re never stretched to our limit, either. We like to play it safe. We like to avoid reaching the breaking point. It’s scary because we don’t know how we’ll get through it.

But it’s not something to fear. It’s something to expect. We’re in training to become better people.

When we recognize that we’re close to our breaking point, push through to the other side.

That’s where we’ll find our breakthrough.

My six-year-old’s last soccer game was on Saturday. The entire season had – at least for me – led up to this game. My friend’s son was on the opposing team, and they’re quite good. They always had over 12 players show up each week. Plenty of kids to rotate in and out whenever they’d get tired. Our team was lucky if five showed up. But we were the underdog that kept on winning.

As my friend and I stood watching my son’s team kick his son’s team’s butt, we started talking about how much better the boys were getting. He made the comment, “If only I had more time, I would have practiced with him.” I agreed and felt the same way. “If only we had more time.”

We didn’t say much more after that. Those last few words hung in the air. And in my mind.

For some reason, I was taken back to a conversation that I had ten years earlier.

An acquaintance had met my wife and me for what we thought was going to be a dinner to catch up but ended up being a sales pitch for trying to get us to join a multi-level marketing business.

I was not interested. We were not interested. We wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. We explained as nicely as we could – multiple times – that we didn’t have enough time.

As uncomfortable and awkward as that dinner meeting was, I’ll never forget what he said next, as he tried to convince us to join his business. He said, “We all have the same amount of time. There’s 168 hours in a week. But it’s up to us to decide how we’re going to spend them.”

It’s true.

Our kids won’t be little forever. My son might not want to even play soccer next year. And there’s no guarantee that the people we love will be here tomorrow, either. We all know this deep down. We tell ourselves that we’ll spend time doing things that matter tomorrow. But like the sign in the coffee shop that says Free coffee tomorrow, tomorrow never really comes, now does it?

So how do we find more time? It’s simple. We make time.

It’s an answer that invites eye-rolls but it’s the only answer there is.

It’s like the rock, pebble, and sand experiment that my eighth grade science teacher showed us.

• The sand represents social media, phone calls, emails, and busywork that feels good in the moment but keeps us from devoting time to what really matters.
• The pebbles represent the things in our lives that have little consequence if we don’t do them right now… things that need to get done but can wait if we would just walk away.
• The rocks represent the most important things in our lives. Spending time with loved ones. Saying Yes when your six-year-old asks you to play or practice soccer with them.
• The jar represents our limited time. We can’t get a bigger jar that holds more than 168 hours a week. The only thing we can control is what we put in the jar and when we put them in.

If you pour the sand in the jar, then add the pebbles, you’ll never get the big rocks in. There’s just not enough room when we put the unimportant things in first. The sand gets packed at the bottom. We may get a few pebbles in, but the rocks won’t fit. There’s just not enough room for everything.

I still remember when my teacher showed us how to fit everything in. He put the big rocks in the jar first. Then he added in the pebbles, which found their way through some of the openings left by the big rocks to fill the void. Finally, he poured in the sand that filled up all of the remaining space left by the rocks and the pebbles. It all fit, even the big rocks. It’s all the same crap – but it all fit. As a thirteen-year-old middle schooler seeing this for the first time, it blew my mind.

There’s never enough time to get everything done. But there’s always enough time to get the most important things done.

When it comes to choosing between working a little bit longer or doing something meaningful, close the laptop and walk away without hesitation. There will be plenty of work to do, no matter how much gets done right now. It will still be there. But the things that really matter might not.

The truth is, there was always enough time for my friend and me to practice soccer with our boys. We didn’t need more time. We had the time. We just chose to spend it elsewhere.

And that’s a tough thing to admit.

Yesterday, I published my latest book, Remember to Remember: Improve Your Recall, Memorize Anything, and Never Forget a Name (the Kindle book is FREE today, by the way!). This is the best book I’ve ever written. I say that about every book I write, because it’s true. I continue to learn the craft of writing and I see myself improving.

My first book took a month to edit because I had so many mistakes to fix. If my editor had been Mrs. White, my high school English teacher, I would have taken ten lashings with a metal ruler. It needed a lot of work. But my new book only took a week to edit. It’s a great feeling to see progress, but one area that I still struggle with when writing is wasting a lot of time trying to make it perfect. It’s called perfectionism and if not kept in check, it can be a fast track to unhappiness.

At times, I’m an extreme perfectionist, 100% focused on any task I decide to concentrate on. Whenever I work on something, I want it to be perfect before I call it done. It’s something I’ve struggled with, even before I started writing.

After college, I took a job in Corporate America. I remember complaining to a coworker about how long it was taking me to finish assignments. What he said next has always stuck with me.

He said, “Ken – are you wasting time trying to be perfect?” I really didn’t know what he meant by that. Of course I was trying to be perfect – I didn’t want to turn in work that I wasn’t proud of. That’s when he explained to me the concept of being good enough. Not in a sloppy kind of way… more like, was I spending time making unnecessary edits before turning in the work that I completed?

I think a better way of putting this is that published is better than perfect.

Author Tim Ferriss calls this the minimum effective dose.

The minimum effective dose is the smallest dose that is needed to produce a desired outcome for any goal we want to accomplish. It’s drawing a line in the sand to know when you’re done.

The thing about the minimum effective dose is that anything beyond what is required is wasteful. Water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. You can’t make it more boiled by adding more heat.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go the extra mile. We absolutely should do more than is required, and more than is expected, where it makes sense. But how often is that really necessary?

The struggle is that there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done. And we can fall into the trap of spending more time on things than is necessary or even required if we’re not careful.

My new book is 93 pages long. That’s 30 more pages than my first book. This is the kind of thinking and the perfectionism trap I fall into when I try to outdo myself when writing another book.

My next book has to be longer than the last one. It has to get read by more people. It has to get better and more reviews by readers than the last one.

It’s nonsense.

It took five months to write this book. Two of those months were wasted trying to make it perfect. That’s two months I could have been writing the next book. It’s two months I’ll never get back.

The manuscript for the best book ever written is sitting in someone’s drawer right now. Never to see the light of day. Never to make a difference. Never to change a life. Don’t let that be you.

There’s more dragons to slay. There’s new battles to fight. Whatever project you’re working on, finish it. Get it done. It’s not perfect, but publish it anyway and set out on the next adventure.

I was driving home when out of nowhere, the sun disappeared and it started to rain. It was rush hour and I was still half an hour away from home. I had a bad feeling that things would get ugly.

What happened next shook me to the core.

I had already driven up the on-ramp and was stuck in the middle lane of a major highway with no exit in sight when the skies opened up and it rained harder than I had seen it rain in a long time.

I panicked.

I thought about trying to slowly change lanes and maybe pull over on the shoulder and turn my hazards on to wait the storm out but I knew that would be dangerous. I couldn’t see the shoulder.

To the left and to the right of me was a blur. I knew there were other cars there but I couldn’t see them anymore. The rain was coming down so hard that they became invisible to me.

All I could see was ten feet of the road in front of me. I knew I was in a lane. I knew I was a safe distance from the car in front of me, I could see the brake lights up ahead. But that’s all I knew.

I couldn’t see the road all the way home. But I never could, anyway. All I needed to see was the ten feet in front of me. And then the ten feet after that. Eventually, I would make it home safely.

That’s when I realized that I would be okay.

I think about that drive home whenever I find myself, or the people I care about, in a situation that seems hopeless. Too many give up when things get tough instead of fighting for what they want.

Most will never know how close they were to a breakthrough if they had just fought a little harder.

It’s hard to see the whole plan. It’s impossible for us to know how everything is going to turn out. We can’t control things. We can’t control the future. But we can navigate what we see, right now.

Clarity comes with action. When we take a step in faith, the next door will appear. If we wait for everything to be perfect, we’ll never start. And if we quit when things get tough, we’ll never finish.

When we find ourselves driving through the storms of life, with no way to pull over, say a little prayer and keep on driving. Focus on the ten feet in front of you until you make it to the other side.

I never thought I would become a writer.

I wrote my first book Coffee Hacker last June as a bucket list kind of thing… something I thought I would check off the list and then move on to the next goal. What I found was that I loved writing.

Within minutes of publishing that first book, someone bought it. I couldn’t believe it – someone out there was reading the words that I had written, probably with a better cup of coffee in their hand.

I was hooked.

I wrote four more books last year, which meant that I was coming out with a new book about every 5 weeks. It was crazy. I considered growing a writer’s beard and buying a pet cat. I was on a roll.

But when the new year rolled around, I started to become unfocused. I began doing more things that resembled work and spent less time doing the hard work of writing. In short, I just got lazy.

And there was a problem – I had already promised myself that I would write more books this year.

You’ve likely made promises to yourself that you still need to keep, too. Maybe it’s going back to school to finally get a degree. Maybe it’s saying No more often to spend more time with the kids.

We tell ourselves that we’ll accomplish our goals someday but someday can’t be found on a calendar. Someday doesn’t exist. When we tell ourselves Someday, we’re really lying to ourselves.

Would you trust someone who repeatedly lied to you?

Of course not. We karate chop those people in the neck. We unfriend them on Facebook and if they call, we tap on ignore. But what about when we realize that we’ve lied to ourselves?

I’ve done a little reading on self-promises. Philosophers think that there’s no such thing as a self-promise… because the agent (you and me) cannot be the promisor and the promisee at the same time because we can release ourselves from a self-promise at will. In other words, self-promises don’t really count because we can always let ourselves off the hook when things become too hard.

I don’t buy it. I know that when I don’t follow through with reaching the goals I’ve set for myself, it gnaws at me like an uneaten bowl of salsa. It’s always there in the back of my mind as an unresolved commitment that I told myself I would honor but didn’t. And I know from experience that when I start to keep the little promises that I’ve made I begin keeping the bigger ones, too.

A funny thing happens when we start keeping promises to ourselves. We become unstoppable. We start to believe ourselves when we say things like I’m going for a run today.

Yesterday I finished writing my 6th book. It took me five months… much longer than it should have… but I finished it. I can’t wait to tell you when it’s published and ready for the world to read.

And today I started writing my 7th. I promised myself that I would write more books this year and I want to honor that promise. Even when the academics say it shouldn’t matter, it matters to me.

So send in that application to get the degree you’ve always wanted. Cancel that appointment and make plans to have a special date with the kids. Write that book. Keep your promises to yourself.

Someday is today.

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Pinocchio, the animated Disney film about a wooden marionette created by a woodworker named Geppetto. I’m sure you’ve seen it many times over the years, just like me. I was reminded of the film after looking for a classic movie that I could show my kids. In the film, after Geppetto finishes creating Pinocchio, he wishes upon a star that Pinocchio would one day become a real boy.

It’s the next part that I remember most. After Geppetto goes to sleep, the Blue Fairy visits Pinocchio and tells him that if he does three things, if he can prove himself to brave, truthful, and unselfish, his dream – and Gepetto’s wish – will one day come true.

These character traits were essential to experiencing a transformation then as they are now:

1. Be brave.
2. Be truthful.
3. Be unselfish.

Life is full of risks. Every day we waste time worrying about doing the things that scare us instead of taking those things on directly. We can all be braver than we are but we like to play it safe. I’ve written before that there is no growth in the comfort zone and there is no comfort in the growth zone. The real magic happens when we leave our comfort zone. To see the light at the end of the tunnel, we have to walk through the darkness. If we are never afraid, we can never be brave.

What’s always struck me about this movie is that just like in real life, if we focus on being brave, truthful, and unselfish, if we focus on following all of the rules all of the time, we will fail.

We are human. We will make mistakes. Focusing on our failures is a great way to stop any forward progress. But if we focus on what we want to become instead of what we’re not, we will arrive.

It’s called the Pinocchio Effect. Pinocchio wanted to become a real boy more than anything, and he knew what he needed to do to get there. But it was still hard for him. There were unsavory characters that he met along the way that encouraged him to lie and do bad things. He skipped school. He met a weirdo cat that deceived him. He befriended a kid that turned into a donkey.

Thank God life isn’t that psychedelic but it can be just as difficult. In the end, after failing time and again, Pinocchio finally focused on the right thing. That’s how it works – we become what we think. He was convinced that he would be a real boy one day. And in the end, when he finally stopped focusing on living up to the rules, when he changed his mindset, that’s what he became.

Stop focusing on what you’re not and start seeing yourself as the person you want to become. From this day forward, tell yourself who you are. With the right focus, amazing things can happen.

Be brave. Be truthful. Be unselfish. But above all, be aware of what you focus your thoughts on.

That’s who you will become.

We’re all afraid of something. We fear things like public speaking, heights, flying, spiders, clowns, and sometimes going to the dentist. And our fears often change as we grow older. My two-year-old is scared of thunder yet is fearless when he wants his M&M yogurt. Trust me, you don’t want to be anywhere near him when he wants his yogurt.

We also fear much more important things in our lives. A promotion at work that we’re thinking about going for. A new opportunity across the country that would mean starting all over.

The big things in our lives that we fear don’t have to be as dramatic as a job change or a move. It can be an important conversation with someone that we don’t feel like we’re prepared to have.

It’s usually at this moment, when we start dreaming about doing something big with our lives, or taking a leap of faith, that Fear asks the question that he loves to ask: Who are you to do that?

Fear’s good at asking that question. I hate that guy. He’s a wrecker of dreams and he loves to tell us when we’re getting close to crossing the line. Even when it’s a dream we’ve had for years.

When I was eight years old, my parents bought me a microphone for Christmas. It wasn’t just any microphone – it was a battery powered wireless microphone that when tuned to the right frequency on the FM dial, I could hear my voice come out of the speakers like I was on the radio. It was the best gift ever. I spent hours playing records and talking in between them, pretending to be a DJ.

It was no surprise when a few years later in high school, I started to think about riding my bike down to my favorite radio station, 101.1 WJRR, to ask for a job. I spent a lot of time working up the courage to go. Fear kept asking me, Who are you to do that? And for a while, I believed him.

I was a nobody. I wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Who takes a guy who parks his bike at the curb to apply for a job seriously?

One day, I decided to go for it. I rode my bike to the radio station and after a quick stop at the 7-Eleven for a pack of Now and Laters, I parked my bike and walked in. The receptionist, whose job responsibilities included keeping riff raff like me away from the Talent, politely told me to go away.

So I did. Fear was right and Fear had won. But I knew that I was supposed to be on the radio and that I was supposed to work at that radio station, so I went back. After a heavy sigh, I was told to go get experience at a smaller station and maybe, if I was lucky, one day I would have a shot.

After high school, I got a job on the air at my college radio station. I went on to DJ at nine other radio stations until one day, many years later, I finally got a call from WJRR who needed a new DJ. After years of Fear whispering in my ear, Who are you to do that? I finally got to show him.

In other words, I gave Fear an uppercut to the chin. It took me a while, but I proved him wrong.

Radio was my passion. At least, it was at the time. Although that dream ended years ago, what I’ve found is that I wasn’t in love with radio, I was in love with broadcasting. Maybe that’s why I write.

What do you fear? What big dreams do you have but aren’t taking any action on because you don’t believe that you’re able to do something about them? It’s time to dream big. It’s time to be brave.

The thing about Fear is that he never goes away for good. Fear has come back for a visit because he knows I have big dreams for my writing. And he’s shown up to make sure that doesn’t happen.

So today, I’m going to take my writing to a new level. I’m going to do the thing that Fear doesn’t think I should do or could do. I won’t tell you what that thing is. That’s between Fear and me.

Pressure is a double-edged sword. Too much pressure and we get stressed out and become paralyzed with fear, unable to make a move because we don’t know where to even begin. Too little pressure and life has no excitement, nothing to try to accomplish, and we find ourselves with no real goals to reach for, sitting on the couch watching back-to-back episodes of Judge Judy.

Our lives are so busy, stressful, and full of pressure that sometimes we just don’t know how we’re going to make it through the day, let alone how we’re going to save the day – or save ourselves. There’s emails, meetings, projects, issues, and then there’s kids to take care of. It’s overwhelming.

Pressure isn’t always a bad thing. We often view it as something to be avoided and eliminated from our lives entirely, but that’s the wrong way to think about it. Pressure can be used for good.

We can either use pressure as an excuse or as the reason to make a difference. Its a choice. Either path can be taken but each one leads to a very different ending.

Even Superman needed pressure. Without it, he was just Clark Kent. As Bill Phillips has said, Superman was only super when there was pressure. It was required for him to rise to the occasion. Had he always been under pressure, he would have walked around in a cape and spandex all of the time and that would have been a little weird, especially for an office job. It would have also been exhausting. With no pressure, Clark would never be Superman or use his gifts to make a difference. Clark’s outfit was the default, Superman’s was the exception. He knew when to switch.

The reality is that Superman was real and the Clark Kent persona was created to hide in plain sight. How many of us are hiding in plain sight, too busy or too paralyzed with fear to break out?

I first read Phillips’s book Body for Life ten years ago. I had just proposed to Missy and I wanted to get in the best shape of my life. I completed Phillips’s twelve week challenge and got in great shape. Then I got married, had kids, and started using the excuse of being too busy to exercise.

I’m tired of my excuses. I’m tired of telling myself that I’ll get back in shape one day, just not today. I’m tired of saving the day but never saving myself. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

What about you – what have you been avoiding? When will you decide that it’s time to do something about it… that it’s time to take off the Clark Kent glasses and take action on your goals?

You’ll know what your kryptonite is if you ask yourself what you’ve been avoiding. Exercise is mine. So I’ve decided to start a new twelve week challenge. Not someday but today.

It’s the thing that I don’t want to do. And that’s why I know that I have to do it.

A friend of mine asked if my older son and I wanted to join him and his kids at a “Dad and Me” camp this weekend. He told me how much fun the kids would have and all of the different kinds of activities dads can do with their children to connect with each other and with God. I was nice enough and told him I’d think about it, but my real answer, the one I didn’t say out loud, was No.

I thought about it for a few days. I made up some pretty good excuses not to go. It was too short of a notice, if only I had known about it sooner. It was too far away from home. It would cost money.

But if I’m honest with myself, the real reason that I decided in my head to say No was because sometimes I just don’t know how to be a dad.

Sure, I know how to discipline my boys, how to give them piggy-back rides, make them meals, tuck them in at night, and do typical father type stuff. But I don’t know how to do dad stuff.

The last time I went fishing, I was seven years old and I accidentally hooked one of my friends in the head when I released the line too early during a backwards cast, scarring both of us for life. And the last time I went canoeing, I was ten years old at my dad’s company picnic sitting with him inside a canoe at the lake and I had the brilliant idea to stand up, causing both of us to tip over.

I’ll never forget the image of him in shock, sinking slowly, beer in hand. Later, we laughed about it.

Still, as dangerous as it is to invite me to any kind of camp, I’m starting to believe that the way you become a dad is the same way that you become a writer or anything else you want to get better at.

You just do it.

If you want to write, you read books on writing, you learn as much as you can about the craft before you try your hand at it. But at some point, you have to sit down at the blank screen with the blinking cursor and you have to write. You make a lot of mistakes at first. You realize that some days your writing will be amazing and something that you want to share with the world.

Other days, your writing will be so terrible that after writing what you thought was good material, you’ll decide later that it can’t see the light of day and you pray that you don’t have a wreck on the way home so you can trash what you’ve written before anyone finds it.

You start out not really knowing what to write about or how to write it, but you keep showing up and you try your best and eventually, you find your way. I think that’s also how you become a dad.

So today I’m at the Dad and Me camp. I’ll avoid doing any fishing, for the safety of others.

I’m clicking on publish and I’m setting out to enjoy the day as a dad with his boy. And if my son stands up in our canoe and tips us over, I’ll do the same thing my dad did. We’ll laugh about it.