Do you ask yourself the correct questions?

---

"What do you talk about with your clients?"

I was asked this over dinner recently.

I said, "I ask them questions that help them change.

I ask them questions that help them think critically.

I help them to see the tasks they may not have chosen"  

I tell jokes to make them laugh. 

When was the last time you sat down in a quiet place and asked yourself:

What do I want to do with my life?

How do I want to live?

What makes me happy,  what do I truly enjoy doing?

How do I want to look and feel?

I grew up in a trailer park, in a family that was dysfunctional to put it mildly. For me, these questions came early and often. I knew something was wrong with the way I lived, and I was always looking for ways to make my environment and my experiences better. My go-to section in every library and bookstore has always been self-help.

As I climbed the socioeconomic ladder and started surrounding myself with "successful" people, I noticed something: most people never ask themselves these questions. Most are carrying vague goals and directions that were placed on them from the outside. They ask "What time is my next meeting?" or "What's the market doing today?" — important questions, sure, but not the ones that determine whether a life actually feels well-lived.

Their lives are filled with tasks that lead to objectives.

Good parents raised them on tasks that led them to their parents' objectives:

put your shoes on,

go to soccer,

do your homework,

apply to Dartmouth, Caltech, Princeton, Skidmore.

Once they left their house, they followed the path they were already on.

Projects, emails, bills to pay, 401k to fill, meetings, documents to review.

Even their goals become tasks in disguise: a vacation to "get away," a restaurant to "enjoy," a bigger apartment, a better neighborhood, good schools for the kids.

Tasks are easy to do in a way because they don't force you to think and ask "WHY?"

Most never stop to ask where their life is actually heading, what makes them happy, what their purpose is. And by every external measure, their lives are working..... the house, the title, the number in the account.

I am in no way judging this system as a negative, It produces a society we all live in and enjoy. I am also painting with a broad brush. 

So, if this doesn't apply to you then it doesn't. 

It's easy for me to see this, because I was never really parented that way. My parents never looked at my report card. (think about that for a second)

My tasks were simple and home based. Did I complain as a child? Yes. All the time. I hated being poor. My mom once told me, "Honey, if you aren't happy then I suggest you figure out why and change it". Looking back I realize she was content with the way things were and thats Ok. I however have never accepted my current position. Something deep inside me has always wanted better. Financial mobility, stronger, faster, more time off to myself. I only came to these realizations though through the questions I asked myself. I had to dream for myself and figure out how to make the dream real.

Today the successful people I know, I see them tired in a way sleep doesn't fix.

Strong on paper, soft and depleted in practice.

Quietly unwell.

They built an entire life around achieving, and never built the habit of asking whether the achieving was taking them somewhere they actually wanted to go.

That's the part nobody warns you about with success: it doesn't ask you the hard questions for you. If anything, it buys you more and more ways to avoid them, more distractions, more obligations, more reasons to say "I'll figure out how I want to live once things slow down."

I see it every day, the same way I watch the tomato plants on my balcony move through their stages: seed, sprout, leaf, plant, flower, budding fruit, mature tomato. People move through theirs too: 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. 

The retirement and the 20s have exactly the same problems. Largely because they never stop to ask themselves the correct questions. 

This is part of why I do what I do.

Training someone's body is never really just about the body — it's behavior modification. But to change the behavior, I first have to see the operating system driving it. The right questions have to be asked before the operating system can change. Exercise is one of the few places left in a busy person's week where they're forced to be present, to actually notice how they feel, instead of managing the next task on the list.

Everything that exists around you was once just a thought in someone's mind. A thought becomes an action, and enough repeated action shapes a new reality, but only when it's driven by a desire strong enough to survive the difficulty of getting there.

The degree of change you're after is usually matched by the degree of difficulty required to reach it.

The iPhone is a good example. Before it existed, someone had to be dissatisfied enough with what already existed — flip phones, clunky PDAs, a handful of devices each doing one job — to sit with that dissatisfaction until it became a desire, and stay with that desire through years of failure until it became real. The desire came first. Everything else followed from it.

Your body is no different. The version of you that moves without pain, has energy left at the end of the day, and is still strong at 70 instead of managing decline, that version doesn't happen by accident. It starts the same way the iPhone did: with someone finally asking the right question, and wanting the answer badly enough to do something about it.