This quote from a recent Dan Kennedy newsletter has been going through my head for about two weeks now:
I was about 16 when I heard a Crown Direct Distributor in Amway named Skip Ross say: “the trainer of a top racehorse developing as a Kentucky Derby contender does not keep him up all hours of the night playing poker, smoking cigars and drinking bourbon, feed him food fetched from McDonald’s, house him in noisy, aggravating or unhealthy environments, have him hang out in the field with dumb, slow horses, and put the cheapest shoes on him when it’s time to race – why would you do such things to you?”
And lo and behold, I’ve been eating a bit better, sleeping more, drinking less booze, and hitting the gym consistently. Maybe that’ll help you too. (Related: did you see the trick I use to floss more regularly?)
I’ll admit, as a vegan who discourages the use of animals for entertainment, it’s a bit weird to be using racehorse analogies in my daily mindset training, but I think it’s because the mental pictures it forms are so abstract that it works so well. If I substituted “Olympic athlete” in there, it’s too close to something I could aspire to (yeah right, but bear with me) so I’d make assumptions about the level they train at, how often they “cheat” on diet and training, and so on.
With a racehorse, I have to form mental pictures of the entire training regimen, which isn’t something I’ve though about before, like, at all, so it’s no great surprise that my vision of what that’s like is pretty much exactly what I’ve just been given, i.e. the stuff that’s in that quote. And to stray from that description would seem ludicrous (it helps that Kennedy races too, so there’s extra implied authority.)
The more I explore the area, the more I’m convinced that the initial stages of changing and forming habits, for me at least, comes down to establishing mental pictures and analogies that I can easily draw upon when I’m inclined to stray from the behaviour I’m trying to adopt. The physical tricks (like my new belt) help a bit too, but the untapped potential in my brain totally fascinates me.
Photo by Paolo Camera
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