A high school kid came to me recently and told me about really wanting to get into a particular animation class next year. The problem was he had to be proficient at a math class to be allowed to take the animation class, because the animation process takes a certain proficiency at math. He never told me if he was able to get into the animation class or not. While we were chatting I gave an example of the journey to the animation class.
I told him imagine a mountain, the animation class is at the top of the mountain and you’re currently at the bottom. You’ve got to climb “Math Mountain” to make it to the animation class. You’ve got lots of support (teachers, parents, extra time at school etc.) and specific gear (calculators, books, computers) to help you make it to the top. So the only thing that’s keeping you from getting to the top is you proverbially putting one foot in front of the other and moving up.
This story could definitely take a hard personal responsibility tone, but that’s not where I’d like to take it.
My thought is we all something we want, ‘the top of the mountain’. Before we can start to take personal responsibility for forward movement, we first need to realize where we are.
I used to want to squat 400 pounds. A 400 pound squat was the top of my mountain, I learned lots about squat technique, I studied different loading patterns, meso, macro and micro cycles. Which racks were best to work with etc. What I didn’t do was take a good look at where my current squat capacity was. I was a decent squatter in the low to mid 300 pound range. But I tried to skip a whole section of getting to the top of the mountain and ended up with an injury that still plagues me today.
Had I been okay with where I was at, and moved progressively forward I would’ve hit that 400 pound squat without getting hurt.
I think that we all have some sort mountain that we’d like to be at the top of (goal we’d like to achieve). I encourage you to take stock of where you’re currently at, you might be at the bottom and need to start moving up, you might be half way up, but now the responsibility part comes in...start moving up, don’t try to skip to the top.
If you’re ready to start moving up your mountain check out our 7 Day Kickstart Program