Are you putting in the hours?

In this era of instant-easy-everything and whatever-hacking, we’re inundated by the 6 minute abs version of everything. But under the innocent guise of wanting to work smarter and not harder, we often start looking for shortcuts instead of doing the work required.

Something that cycle 2 taught me is that you need to make sure you are doing the right thing (working smart), but also you need to put the hours in (working hard).

I am all about efficiency, but the reality is that if the results aren’t coming, at some point you do need to ask yourself if you are simply not putting in the hours required to get them.

As the online manifesting community will tell you, ‘it’s supposed to be effort-less, but not effort-none’.

All of this became abundantly clear to me when I was reflecting on all of the great results from my training. Because of course I'm getting bloody results when I am dropping 14-20 hours a week on it! How could I not?

So when I asked myself: ‘why am I not getting this amount of traction with [insert thing I have been completely neglecting]?'

My brain responded with ‘Well, are you putting in 14-20 hours a week on it?!’

No. I haven't even been putting in 1 hour a week on it, so no wonder I have made zero progress.

After the penny dropped, I amended my weekly workout tracker and added two extra rows to it - one for each thing I have been neglecting.

Two principles are at work here:

1. Put in the hours

2. Track/measure/monitor/pay attention to what you want to improve

Is there something in your life or work that you’d like to improve your outcomes in?

Are you honestly putting in the hours every week?

And are you tracking them?

✌🏻

Here’s a clip of Federer (love him) saying essentially the same thing with different words from 7:10-8:14 (the whole speech is great).