At the beginning of the year, I made the classic New Year’s resolution to “Get in Shape”. And as everyone who’s made that resolution knows, keeping with a new workout program for the first few weeks is easy. The hard part comes in sticking with it month after month as the enthusiasm fades and the year drags on.

But miraculously I’ve stayed with the same program three months into the year and I’m still (mostly) looking forward to the workouts every Mon, Wed, and Fri morning. Not to mention, I’m probably in better shape then I’ve ever been (sorry I don’t have any before and after pics for you).

The secret is a program called CrossFit.

What is it?

So what is CrossFit? Wikipedia (as usual) gives the best definition:

CrossFit has been “variously portrayed as a fitness company, a grassroots health movement, a nascent sport, a fad, a publishing business and sometimes, disparagingly, a cult.” Classes at affiliated gyms typically include a warm-up, a skill development segment, and a high-intensity workout that lasts around ten to twenty minutes. Affiliates create a new workout each day called the “Workout of the Day” or “WOD”. Affiliates often use scoring and ranking systems to transform workouts into sport. Some affiliates offer additional classes which are not centered around a WOD, such as Olympic weightlifting classes.

By the way, I love the fact, that detractors call it “a cult”. It definitely is a workout program that people get really into. That said, I would like to highlight a couple of the positive aspects that drew me in:

• Full Body Movements: I like the fact that it’s not just doing 20 curls or isolating one specific muscle. It’s all about doing full, natural body movements like squats and pull-ups. It just feels more natural to me, and it builds functional strength rather than beach muscles.
• Used By Military & Police: There’s something special about the fact that the men and women serving our country use this workout to get in shape. You get the feeling that you are training with them. The crossfit site highlights this by showing pictures and dedicating daily workouts to fallen soldiers.
• Online: Each day the crossfit website posts the daily workout (more details about that below) and hundreds of people comment on what they thought of it and their time to complete it. If you have questions on how to do the workout, you can watch videos on the site of other people doing it.

They also keep the barriers to starting very low. You do not need a lot of equipment and the site even gives you tips for creating a garage gym or working out when traveling.

For many months, I worked out in my garage following the online site to participate in the slated workout each day. This was pretty good, but to truly take it to the next level I joined a local crossfit affiliate which gave me access to additional equiment and skilled trainers.

At first, I was reluctant to shell out the cash, but I find my workouts are even better when completed at the gym because the trainers push me harder than I would on my own.

Why Does it Work?

So why does it work so well? I think it boils down to the following key aspects of Crossfit:

• WOD: Every day there is a Workout of the Day (WOD) which helps keep it fresh. It’s not like Wed is bench day for the 200th time. Instead they keep it interesting by making workouts like fight gone bad.
• Whiteboard: All workouts are timed and each day your scrores are written on the whiteboard. This has a couple of effects. First off, to paraphrase Drucker, you get better at what you measure. Something about writing your time down makes you want to improve it. There are also some key benchmark workouts (like Fran) that you will do every few months to mark your progress. Having a time, gives you something to beat.
• Diet: No workout program can be successful without a diet component and CrossFit is no exception. They are full bore into the Paleo diet which consists of the following simple philosophy: “Don’t eat anything that you can’t grow or kill”. In other words, your meals consist of avoiding processed foods, most carbs (because you can’t grow or kill bread), and sticking to Meats and Veggies.
• Community: When you are getting up at 5:45 AM to workout, it helps to know that you will be meeting others at the gym to do the same workout. And that if you skip out, they will give you a hard time.

So the only remaining question is could it work for you?

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

-Vince Lombardi

That’s the question I’ve been asking myself with the new year upon us. The beginning of a new year is a great time for renewal and laying out your plan of where you’d like to go.

In the same way that a ship’s captain lays out the travel plan to avoid storms and reach the final destination, it’s important for you to chart a course so you can control where you want to go rather than letting the wind blow you where it will.

For myself, I’m on the verge of finishing my major goal from last year. In a few short days, I will be running my first marathon. So as I cross that off my list, I’m looking forward to sitting down with my compass to chart my course for the new year. This will mean laying out my annual goals.

As I lay out these annual goals, I’ll try to keep to the following principles:

• Keep them Limited: One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from Leo at zen habits is that you can’t do everything. If you limit the number of goals you’re focusing on, you’ll feel less stressed and make more progress.
• Keep them SMART: This is an acronym for how you should create your goals. They should be: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.
• Keep them Role-Based: Stephen Covey introduced me to this idea and it was useful to bring some balance into my life. He recommends that you define different roles for your life (eg – Father, Business Owner, and Athlete) and set goals for each role.

But, as important as it is to lay out goals and work toward achieving them, remember that life is a journey and more often than not, it’s the striving for these goals that you should enjoy, not just finishing them.

As I close the book on my marathon training, I look back on my long runs as some of the toughest and yet greatest moments of my life. On my 20 mile run, for example, I pushed myself farther than I thought possible and yet felt fully alive. Even without completing the marathon, I’ve learned a lot about myself just by training for it.

So as you chart your course for 2009 don’t forget to enjoy the journey!

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.
-Seneca

I recently heard about a study where they presented an entire box of chocolates in front of people and told them to eat as many as they wanted. When presented with this choice, the average person ate one piece of chocolate. But when the people were presented with only six chocolates and told to eat as many as they wanted, the average person ate three pieces. What can we learn from this?

First of all it shows that too many choices can overwhelm people. We live in a world of nearly infinite choices. Consider the bookstore (assuming you still shop at the bookstore). You can find multiple books on nearly any niche topic. In fact, because of the amount of books out there, bookstores have begun to create little islands highlighting specific books to help focus your attention. It’s been proven to help boost sales because it limits the choices.

You would think all of this choice would be a good thing, but in fact it causes stress in many people. Let’s say that you want to buy a digital camera and you are one of those people who want to get the best one for your money.

When digital cameras first came out, you did not have a lot of choices. Only a few companies made them and they very expensive. Now that they are everywhere you have to struggle through finding the “best” one. You have to research the different brands and compare matrices of features to get the right one for the right price. Once you find the right one, then you have to pick the best place to buy it from.

All of these choices explain why searching and organization of information is so important in this day and age. With such a large amount of choices we need a system to help us find and sort through them. This is why Google has become one of the hottest companies because it provides such a valuable service.

The same principle of limiting yourself applies when trying to get tasks accomplished. If I have a list of twelve things to do for the day, I find that I’m much less productive than if I only have three.

When I only have three, I will get them done, but if they’re twelve things to do then it’s much harder to even start. The list seems too big and I’m not sure which task to focus on first, and even if I get through five of them I still don’t have a sense of accomplishment at the end because I have seven uncompleted tasks. You are much better to limit yourself to just the three most important tasks for the day.

The same holds true of big goals. I try to set about three big goals to focus on for the year. Much more than that and I find that I’m not able to make steady progress towards them because I’m spread too thin.

To do more, limit yourself.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

-Albert Einstein

There is a large part of me that is a doer. I’m not happy each day until I can cross items off my list and feel like I’ve made progress toward a goal. In many ways this is a good thing. It helps me to be productive with my time and make steady progress toward achieving goals.

In fact, my business is often about implementing IT projects for clients. I pride myself on running a consulting company that “gets things done” rather than one of those lofty consulting companies who charge a small fortune only to generate a list of all the things that are wrong, but can’t actually help fix them.

But because I’m so focused on making daily progress sometimes it’s hard for me to step back and look at the big picture. And the reason why the big picture matters on an individual or corporate level is that it helps establish who you are and where you’re ultimately going. These things can sometimes get lost in the details, but they are vitally important especially when you are looking to get a group of people working toward a common goal.

A friend of mine works for Hilton. He could say that his job is to ensure that the beds get made and the dinner gets served to the various people who travel through the O’Hare Hilton. And that’s nice, but it sure sounds like just a job and would make you wonder “what’s the point”? 

Instead what if he said, quoting Conrad Hilton, that his job  ”has been and continues to be [my] responsibility to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality.”   Wow! What a difference. Now that’s something worth working for!

Setting a vision for a group helps add meaning for the people that take part in achieving that. People are happier and more driven to work hard when they feel like they are working toward a shared goal and something that brings meaning to their life. It sure sounds a lot better than I’m here to make money or for a company to say that the company exists to make money for partners or shareholders.

Having a vision helps to define a corporate culture, and some of the classics of business literature have agreed that this is the best way to ensure that a business succeeds over the long term. For example, “Built to Last” from Jim Collins talks about how those businesses with a bold mission (BHAG – Big Hairy Audacious Goals) and cult-like culture do much better than those that just focus on profits:

Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.

…Highly visionary companies often use bold missions–what we prefer to call BHAGs (pronounced bee-hags, short for “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”)–as a particularly powerful mechanism to stimulate progress.

-Built to Last, Jim Collins

Take a look at some vision/mission statements from famous companies to get a feel for what I’m talking about:

• Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.
• Google: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
• Amazon.com: seeks to be the world’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.
• Mcdonalds: McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.

I think the key to the vision is to come up with something inspiring, unique but not trite. Some corporations just go off to an executive retreat and throw a bunch of fancy words together without really identifying the unique DNA of their company. In my mind, that is key to the vision.  In other words, define what makes your group special.

All of this has led me to begin developing a vision for my company. Otherwise how can I or my employees really know where we’re going? 

We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision.

-Anonymous

What if I told you that by doing a simple 5-minute test on a child, I could tell you what their likelihood of success in later life will be? Would you believe it and do you know what I’d test?

In the 1970s Walter Mischel of Stanford performed a series of tests on four-year-olds. The main test consisted of putting the child in a room with two plates, a bell and a nice man. One plate has one marshmallow on it and the other has two.  The child is told that the nice man is going to leave the room and come back. If the child can wait until the nice man returns then that child will get the two marshmallows. If the child doesn’t want to wait for the nice man anymore then the child can ring the bell and get one marshmallow.

After fifteen years Mischel follows up with the parents of those children in his initial study, and it’s amazing what can be predicted (as documented in the Happiness Hypothesis):

Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to  ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a  teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as  teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this in the “real” world. People that try for easy success usually don’t achieve it. Easy success in life is a myth. Sometimes people get lucky and stumble into something big without a lot of work, but that is much more the exception than the rule. To paraphrase Edison, success usually looks like dirty overalls because it’s a lot of hard work, and along the way there are many failures. The key is to be persistent. Time and again that is proven as the path to success. You’ve got to be able to wait and wait and not give up too soon.

How different this idea is from the world we live in. Everything is instant gratification. If I want a book, I can have it immediately on my kindle. If I want to watch a TV show, I can have it up immediately on hulu.com. If I want a song, I can have it immediately on iTunes. Delayed gratification is a tough skill to learn in a world of instant gratification, but it has great benefits.

For example, let’s look at how delayed gratification affects some areas of our life:

• Financial: Delayed gratification is probably most obvious in this area. Isn’t that what all Financial Planners preach in a nutshell: Put as much away now for your retirement so that you can actually enjoy it later. Don’t spend it all now or live paycheck to paycheck. If you wait, it will be worth so much more later. They even have a fancy phrase for it — the time value of money
• Marriage: In order to summarize his foundational studies on sex and marriage, Alfred Kinsey stated the most common sign that a marriage will be successful is that both parties have a “willingness for marriage to persist”. Even when times are hard, they don’t just give up because it’s convenient. They are willing to hang on and push through the difficulties. Now there are some marriages that should be given up on because they were based on false premises or there is abuse, but the vast majority give up too early because it’s not as fun as it was in the beginning.
• Business: Most businesses start out under-funded and overworked. They’re typically not thriving for the first five years. Often times, the owner of a new business plans to have a loss for the first few years in the hopes that down the road they will start making a profit. In fact, Walt Disney sold his car to make payroll in the early years. Even if you are not starting a business and are just starting a new job, there is a period in the beginning where everything is bad. You don’t know how their processes work; You don’t know who to talk to about what; Heck, you may not even be able to find your way back to your desk if you get too far away. The people that succeed in business are those that push through the lean and hard times.
• Health: If you haven’t work out for a while and you start a new workout routine, it’s not fun. In fact, it’s painful. But if you can push through the pain long enough, you can get to a point where you actually enjoy it and begin to look forward to the workouts. That’s been my experience with running. If you are training for an athletic goal, you know that you are going to go through a lot of hard practices, maybe for years, before finally reaching that goal.

Bloggers have to deal with delayed gratification. Most people do not start a blog and then immediately have a million readers. They write and write and write for many years often without anyone noticing. Then slowly but surely they begin to build up traffic based on the quality content they’ve been providing.

So it’s clear that being able to delay gratification is important for success in many areas of your life. The only problem is I’m not sure if it can be taught or if people are just born one way or the other. I imagine like most things it’s a combination of both. Even if it’s something that people are born with, everyone can still learn to enjoy the journey rather than getting too fixated on the end goal. Research has shown, that alone will make you happier.

I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.

-Edison