By Daniel Gilman
“If you drink twelve cups of green tea each day for just 60 days you will achieve rock hard sculpted abs!”
I can make this promise to you if, like me, you’re a millennial, because you won’t last 60 days. I’ll get to sell a ton of green tea, and you’ll blame yourself for not hitting 60 days and then move onto the next quick fix promise for your abs.
I’ve been going to the gym multiple times a week for a year and half and about two months ago I decided to up my game. I hadn’t seen a ton of results so I started Googling gym questions. Now all of the ads on my Facebook, Instagram, and Gmail are about quick fixes to big muscles and beach bods. I read yesterday that you can literally drink green tea to get a six pack. So I’ll confess to you that I drank a bunch of green tea. I won’t lie to you: I still don’t have a six pack. But I did go to the bathroom a ton and stayed up all night because that much green tea does have a significant amount of caffeine.
The internet is full of bad workout advice, so I appreciate straight talkers who respond like this:
If you are tempted by articles like “GET A SIX PACK IN ONE MONTH OR TWO MONTHS,” then you have something to beware of: there is no shortcut to a perfectly ripped body and six pack abs. There is no way you can get them in a month. If you want to get them on, you have to sweat it off. You might see significant changes in one or two months, but you’ll take a minimum four or six months.
In his brilliant discussion on millennials, Simon Sinek leans forward to offer this powerful insight about our defining impatience: “They’ve grown up in a world of instant gratification. You want to buy something, you go on Amazon and it arrives the next day. You want to watch a movie, log on and watch a movie. You don’t check movie times. You want to watch a TV show, binge. You don’t even have to wait week-to-week-to-week. Many people skip seasons, just so they can binge at the end of the season… Instant gratification. You want to go on a date? You don’t even have to learn how to be socially awkward on that first date. You don’t need to learn how to practice that skill… Swipe right – bang – done! You don’t even need to learn the social coping mechanism.”
This impatience and instant gratification training makes perseverance for developing a change much harder for millennials.
As part of my day job I have the privilege of helping people find freedom from porn. There’s a number of people who I see weekly. It takes tenacious gritty endurance to change one’s habits and behaviours. In the marathon of freedom, the person who finishes still on their feet is the one who got up one more time than they fell down. Don’t get frustrated looking for an incredible pill, the perfect conference, or the magical amount of motivation. Put in the time to complete the course, stay with a mentors, plugged into accountability or whatever your good battle plan is for freedom. Have you relapsed? Keep fighting.
As my friend Jarod said about turning 40 years old: “There’s no shortcut to forty years – you’ve just got to put in the time.” There’s no shortcut to rock solid abs, and there’s no shortcut to freedom from porn. Keep fighting the long, hard, fight. Unlike sculpted abs it’s not about vanity, but about developing true grit strength.