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Atomic Habits Author James Clear Says These Two Rules Will Help You Achieve Big Things

Lessons from running three marathons in one year

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I had a surreal moment last weekend.

I watched my friend Jonathan finish his 2nd marathon. Well, I watched it on a race tracker app.

It was a surreal moment because we started running only two years ago, and it didn’t start well. I remember our first long run with Fleet Feet. We tried to run eight miles, and we quit after four because, well, running is hard.

Now we’re running marathons.

Here’s something even crazier: Collectively, although not always together, we’ve run five marathons in 12 months.

The question is, how did we start at zero and become actual marathon runners?

How do you start anything from zero and achieve what you set out to achieve?

You could write books about this subject, and people do. But the author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, summed it up perfectly in a recent blog post. Here’s all it read:

“Two of my rules for life:

1. The person who has the most fun wins.

2. The climb is the fun part.”

Allow me to elaborate on what I think he means.

1.) The person who has the most fun wins.

Some childhood lessons stick to you like tree sap.

I recall my dad talking about a local high school football star named Dane Sazenbacher. Dane grew up down the street from me in South Toledo and went to high school where my dad was the athletic director. He later played wide receiver at Ohio State and then in the NFL for the Chicago Bears. I idolized this guy.

My dad would often say, “I see him in the weight room, and he always seems to have more fun than everyone else. It looks like he enjoys the work.”

It was a lesson about growth mindset.

Yeah, it hurts getting better at things. Sometimes, it feels like you’re in a torture machine day in and day out. You might get in the machine for weeks and come out feeling like the same piece of shit who got in the damn thing.

But that, my dear readers, is the human experience. No one is immune to the disease of inexperience.

So you may as well have fun with it.

What’s fun about running? What’s fun about being in the weight room? What’s fun about waking up at 4:30 am to write? What’s fun about mile 20 of a marathon?

I don’t know, man. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

For me, I learn something about myself when I do hard things. What I’m made of. Who I am. What I need to work on.

I become more curious when there’s a little pain involved.

I can’t help but smile at that.

2.) The climb is the fun part.

Jonathan and I finished our first marathon last year in Philadelphia.

It was cold. We shared plenty of hugs after the race. We drank beers and ate gigantic Philly cheesesteaks. I’ll remember that day fondly.

But the climb to get there was the fun part.

Like the time after our first 18-mile run with Fleet Feet. I laid on the ground in exhaustion, and an experienced runner looked down at me and said, “It looks like you got your cherry popped.”

Or the time a teenager we trained with ate an entire Little Caesars Pizza before a run and proceeded to throw up the Za after the workout.

The climb to success is just that — a climb. One step, one reach after the other. You take each in stride: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

That’s the ultimate form of existing in the present.

And that’s really the definition of fun wouldn’t you say? Existing in the present.

Mindset
Goals
Personal Development
Inspiration
Running
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