Third Period

Nobody quits push-ups. There’s no ceremony and no memo.

I was in the best shape of my life in my late teens and early twenties.
Discipline had nothing to do with it.

I did push-ups every Tuesday for four years of high school, not because I decided to. Every Tuesday afternoon was third-period gym. My gym teacher, like most, wore sweatpants to work every day and was arguably the coolest teacher on staff, no matter what high school you went to (why is that?). Every week, fifty push-ups. I didn’t read a book about it first. There was no internet, so there was no influencer claiming a new hand position would give me unrivaled pectoral definition. I showed up because it was third period, and somewhere in the middle of it all, without noticing, I was in the best shape of my life.

Then high school ended, there were no gym teachers in college, and something strange happened, which is that nothing happened. I never quit.

There was no quitting day. No moment where I stood in front of a mirror and said that’s it for push-ups, I’m done. Nobody quits push-ups. Nobody quits the guitar or the Sunday call to your mom. There’s no ceremony and no memo. I guess today they’d call it quiet quitting. For us Gen-Xers, the thing just stops being the thing you do, and by the time you notice, you can’t find the day it happened.

I’ve been thinking about this because of a word we throw around like we understand it: consistency. I have more equipment for consistency than almost anyone. Half a dozen workout apps on my phone (we all do). A watch that vibrates when it’s time to stand. Five jump ropes I’ve renamed stationary ropes.

Some will tell you the problem is motivation (excuse #1). Bullshit. You don’t need motivation, you need to start and then not stop. Others will tell you the problem is time (excuse #2). Also bullshit. Anyone who says they don’t have time means they’re not making time, and deep down they know it. I could list a dozen more excuses we’d all recognize, but I think the problem lives somewhere else entirely.

I think the problem is that we’re rich.
Not in money. In too many options.

In 1953, a back doctor named Hans Kraus published the results of a fitness test so simple it took ninety seconds to run. Six movements. Sit-ups, leg lifts, a toe touch. He and his climbing partner, a woman named Bonnie Prudden, gave it to thousands of schoolchildren in America and Europe, and the results made national news: 57.9 percent of American kids failed at least one movement. The European kids failed at 8.7 percent.

Read that again. The children of the richest country on earth, the country with the good food and the new playgrounds and the school athletics budgets, were getting outperformed by kids climbing out of postwar rubble. And the diagnosis wasn’t that American children were lazy. It was that they were provided for. Buses instead of walking. Cars instead of bikes (have you been to Holland?). The European kids weren’t more disciplined. They had fewer options.

As my friend Colten would say, they had two feet and a heartbeat.

Their fitness wasn’t a virtue. It was a shortage.

The panic reached the White House. Eisenhower created a council in 1956. Kennedy, before taking office, wrote a Sports Illustrated essay with a title that still stings: “The Soft American.” And then the country did the most American thing imaginable. Faced with proof that abundance was the problem, it responded by adding things. A program. A test. An award. A patch for your jacket. They (I’m Canadian, remember) answered abundance with more abundance. They’ve been doing it ever since. We all have.

A wealth of options creates a deficit of follow-through.

That’s excuse #3, by the way: “I don’t know where to start”. And that one isn’t entirely bullshit. That one is the wealth of options, doing exactly what it does.

Because Third Period gym was the only option, and someone else made time for it, for you. You didn’t choose push-ups over forty other things. There were no other things. No analysis paralysis, no browsing, no picking a program. The consistency came from an institution you attended five days a week: school. And the institution never went away. It just changed what it wanted from you. We are all, every one of us, magnificently consistent about our inbox.

Consistency isn’t something you have.
It’s something your life makes room for.

This is why camp works. Fitness camp, music camp, the retreat, the training montage. We think their power is focus, but focus is just the shadow. A camp doesn’t add intensity to your life. It subtracts your life. For a week or a summer, somebody builds you an artificial poverty: one thing to do and nothing else on offer. And inside that poverty, you become the person you keep failing to become at home. Then you drive back into abundance and wonder why the person didn’t survive the trip.

Atomic Habits runs on the same trick. That book has sold more than 25 million copies to people who, like me, own stationary ropes. The advice everyone remembers: make it small, make it obvious, make it easy. That sounds like addition, and it’s actually subtraction. Shrink the habit until it’s too small for abundance to crowd out. Two push-ups, not fifty. A book that popular isn’t teaching us something new. It’s selling us back the emptiness we used to get for free.

So then what do we do with Kobe Bryant?

Because Kobe is the counterexample everybody reaches for, me included. The 4 a.m. workouts. The extra sessions, while everyone else did the standard two. Chris Bosh tells a story about the 2008 Olympic team’s first breakfast in Las Vegas: Kobe walked in with ice on his knees, trainers in tow, already done for the morning. Everybody else just woke up. His math was simple and merciless: start earlier, add a session, and the daily difference is nothing, but compound it over five years, and no talent on earth can close the gap.

We named it the Mamba mentality and hung it in every locker room and sales office on the continent, and then asked ourselves, quietly, on the drive home: why don’t I do that?

Look closer at what he actually did, though. He didn’t out-discipline abundance. He abolished it. He built a life where one thing won every day, for twenty years, until everything else stopped asking. The scarcity the rest of us rent for a week at camp, he built at home, permanently. That’s not willpower. That’s drive, and drive is just the point where the contest is over before the day starts.

Now describe that life without the jersey on it. A man who can’t rest. Who leaves the house dark. Who builds every hour around one compulsion and a number that resets each morning. Whose family sees the results but never the hours. We have another word for that man.

We call it drive when it pays off. We call it addiction when it doesn’t.

I know people locked in at the gym the way Kobe was locked in at the arena. The personal best is chased daily, logged, and needed. The dopamine is doing exactly what dopamine does. Same loop. We call one a legend and quietly worry about the other, and nobody draws that line in advance. The line gets drawn afterward, by the results, by the rest of us watching. So the question was never how much is too much. The question is what you’re willing to let loose. Kobe answered without flinching. Most of us can’t, and I’ve stopped thinking that’s weakness. It might be the most honest thing about us.

I’d like to tell you I’ve solved this. I haven’t.
You read the part about the stationary ropes.

But the best advice I’ve found is only eight words long: do one thing every day that scares you. The internet hands that line to Eleanor Roosevelt. It actually belongs to a newspaper columnist named Mary Schmich, who wrote it in 1997 in a pretend graduation speech, and we’ve spent almost thirty years passing it around without once checking. Even our best advice is unconsidered. Doesn’t make it wrong. One thing. Every day. Preferably uncomfortable.

The floor is still there.
It’s exactly where you left it.