executive function

“I want a lifetime deadlift personal record, so I look at one of the other coaches and tell him I want to try 260. He counters with 255 and I accept, because that’s still 5 pounds more than I’ve ever lifted. I pull, I get stuck at my knees, but I pull through. Grinding through a lift is more rewarding than when they come easy. Not quitting when things get hard is new to me.

I just laugh at the top, and it’s pure joy.”

it has been three months since i started my daily stretch routines! i have been doing them every day with the exception of travel days, which i find quite surprising as i still hate stretching. it is never something i look forward to and there is never really a good time to stretch in the evening; i am always in the middle of a book, a conversation, a piece of code

i’ve been thinking about how, when i fully commit to doing a stretch, i am left with only feelings from the stretch itself - pain and tension and exhaustion and joy and so on - nothing else remains. i’m bored can we move onto the next stretch and this sucks i don’t want to do it again tomorrow are signs that i am not pushing myself hard enough, because how can you experience boredom or think about tomorrow if you are truly putting everything into the present?

with stretching and with everything else i am looking to immerse myself in action so fully that my dislike for the action dissipates. i only make it that far a couple times a week but i hope i’ll eventually be able to do it every day

a few things that have changed since i started: i’ve stopped using a yoga mat and instead do everything on the bare wooden floor, which hurts my knees but i no longer care. i now stretch shirtless to minimize sweat. i used to stretch right before bed and now i do it a few hours earlier, when i am less tired and more motivated. this last point concerns me - is it prudent or is it cheating? if the goal is to get a good stretch session in every day then it makes sense to do it when i’m more likely to be in the mood for it. if the goal is to become the kind of person who can finish unpleasant tasks without flinching then scheduling stretches for when i’m more likely to want to do them is probably not the best way to practice. i care about both of these goals and am not sure where that leaves me

maybe all this is a bit silly? i know that peoples’ moods vary wildly hour-to-hour and day-to-day, i know that pain is not the unit of effort, i know that the best way to get things done is to enjoy doing them, but also - i can’t help but think that there is a lot of value in being able to burn through a pile of uninspiring tasks with the efficiency of a machine. it’s true that everyone has off days, but some pro athletes are extremely consistent across hundreds of consecutive games and some founders maintain a very high level of focus for months on end. i have never been able to understand how

i’ve been thinking about executive function and how i often struggle with it. i spent all week procrastinating and working at a frustratingly slow pace and then yesterday i felt so incredibly uninhibited i threw the kitchen sink at the problem i was working on and made my models 18x better. can you really explain that away as mere fluctuations in mood and conviction? and even if you could, would doing so actually be a good idea, or would you miss out on something else as a result? i am always confused about when to accommodate the worse parts of my nature and when to wrestle with them in the hopes of changing something