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I am in so much physical pain right now.
Throbbing, aching, burning physical pain. Pain that I choose to put myself through and will choose to do again. Next time, I’ll put myself through even more of it. And yes, it will hurt that much more.
But I absolutely, positively love it.
I sit here writing this only moments after returning from the gym, after forcibly making a conscience choice to get on the treadmill, crank it up to 7.0 MPH at an incline of 1.0, run at that pace for 10 minutes straight, and then crank it up to 8 MPH every other minute for the next 25 minutes straight.
My thighs are burning. My calves are throbbing. My ankles are aching.
What does this have to do with personal finance, or anything else for that matter here at Financial Highway? Everything.
You see, I was going to sit down at some point tonight and write about how working out and staying fit can lead to a more happy, positive outlook on all aspects of life, ranging from family to career to money.
Now however, what I was planning on writing just seems far too removed and impersonal.
What I’m going to write about instead is this: Passion. You’ve got to have a burning, throbbing, seething passion for what you want to accomplish.
There are many things I want to accomplish in my life. One of them you’re all already aware of, and that’s to break free from this cycle of daily existence and accomplish a feat so miraculous few ever get to experience it: total financial freedom. Another one of my goals is to achieve the highest level of physical fitness that I can. Until tonight I thought they were two separate things. They’re only separate on the surface.
Each and every time I began one of those 8 MPH minutes, I was forced to dig something up from inside myself that pushed me through. I didn’t WANT to run that fast at first, it was painful, it made me sweat, and my chest and lungs burned. But the more I pushed myself through sheer strength of will, the easier it became, and I found that I had much, much more to drudge up from the depths of my being than I ever thought I did.
20 seconds into these 8 MPH minutes, I found myself feeling elated, found myself thinking that I can indeed do this, and that realization alone drove me on. 30 seconds in I began to think I could not only do this, but any other thing I decided to do, like earn a crap-load of cash off of Financial Highway. I pictured what that Google Adsense check would look like, I imagined the look on my friend’s and parent’s faces when I showed them proof that someone was actually paying me to write what came purely from my own mind, what was solely my creation.
This drove me on for 20 more solid seconds, until the home stretch arrived, the last 10 seconds. This got tough, this began to hurt… this was where I either sank or swam. All of the thoughts that ran through my head the previous 50 seconds were just cheap talk… it was easy to think like that when, compared to these last 10 seconds, I had merely been taking a stroll on that treadmill.
And then it was over.
I turned the treadmill down to 7.0 MPH, which felt like a stroll through the park, and began the recovery period of 2 minutes, until I once again summoned up the motivation, the passion to bust out another 8.0 MPH minute.
And here I am writing this, only moments after that run, putting the passion and the drive I had drudged up from god knows where inside of me and applying it to this blog.
That’s what your goals require. That’s what your goals deserve.
