Do the Verb to Earn the Adjective to Become the Noun

Why we tend to not do the things we need to do to become the people we say we want to be.

Read Time: ~ 10 minutes

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Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.

- Ronnie Coleman, 8-time Mr. Olympia Champion

Mr. Coleman here did in fact lift some “heavy-ass weights”

Who do you want to be/ how do you want to be described?

I’m now 28 years old and have realized something. There is still a long list of things I think I want to achieve and a similarly long list of people I say I want to become. An incomplete list includes financially independent, self-employed, fit (no chronic health problems and generally good physical condition), someone with great teeth (there isn’t a great word for that but it’s still true), a paid writer, etc…

What is true about all of these things (and the rest of the list that I left out for brevity) is that this list is far from unachievable and I already know at least one person who has accomplished each item. Maybe not one person who has done them all but I know someone who has done or is that person for every item on that list.

Barring something out of left field, I should be able to accomplish all of these with the remaining years I have left. But it has taken me sitting down and thinking through all of these potential paths I could take to realize how much effort it will actually entail getting through them all. Which prompts the question, “Upon what timeline am I evaluating success?”

I think this is true for many of us. We each have a list of the types of people that we want to become but have yet to take the actions required to get there. If you want to be someone who is in incredible shape, you have to exercise and eat clean. If you want to make a lot of money you have to become someone who works hard or picks a high-paying career, or more than likely, both. Each of these end goals is only realized through concentrated effort directed towards achieving the stated goal. But if you don’t do the verb you can never be the noun.

Youth is a deceptive state of mind. The youthful feel like they have their whole life in front of them while taking for granted their current energy levels and desire to take action to make their dreams come true. It convinces us that we have all the time in the world and as a result, makes it much harder to prioritize getting to work on any one thing.

As I reflect on myself today, I realize that subconsciously there are a lot of things I yearn for that I haven’t even begun to put in the effort to achieve. Intellectually, I know that if I want something to be true I have to go put in the work to make it so. While young, I am old enough to understand what effort is required of me to be described with the adjectives that I listed but for many of them, I’ve yet to start doing the things that would make these wishes reality.

So why, if I understand this, do I still feel some amount of envy for those of my peers who have achieved these goals through legible effort? I know what it takes, I just need to do it.

I think we all have some level of envy for people who have already achieved something that we hope ourselves to one day accomplish. Whether that envy is a helpful motivator depends on the person. But what I want to explore for myself is why do I have these desires to be the noun without the desire to do the verb? What does that say about me, about us, and how can we internalize our real goals and allow ourselves to let go of the goals that we have no true intention of pursuing?

To put the question in simpler terms: why do I have this long list of “people” I want to be when I seem to be unwilling to do the work to become that person?

The answer appears to arrive in two parts.

I.

The first is that we tend to underestimate how much effort it takes to achieve these lofty ambitions of ours. We see the people who have achieved them and want to be just like them but we fail to see all of the hard work that they put in when no one was watching to get there.

This happens in the fitness world all of the time. I work out at Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach California which is known as the “Mecca of Bodybuilding.” This means that on a regular basis I see ultra-fit men and women who appear to be carved from marble. These specimens have achieved peak human condition and myself and others can’t help but ogle at what is truly an incredible achievement in the physical world. When I see a guy I’ve never met with a perfect physique I can’t help but sometimes think, “Damn I wish I could look like that.” But do I really? My surface-level reaction fails to take into consideration how much time and effort these people sink into their physical fitness. To get to that level of fitness you have to live an incredibly regimented lifestyle. You have to spend hours in the gym, eat a specific diet, and pass up a lot of the late-night social activities that I love so you can sleep and recover for your workout the next day. Am I really willing to skip out on my weekly burger so I can have a rippling eight-pack and 6% body fat? No, I most certainly am not. So why the envy? Why does it even cross my mind to think that is what I want?

While this specific example may not be relevant to you, I’m sure that you can think of a person who has one trait that you admire and wish you could adopt. On the surface, you may even wish that you could be like them/ look like them/ work the same job as them. And that is natural. Us humans tend to compare ourselves to one another reflexively because we are social creatures and it’s a part of our programming. But if you really unpack what price those people paid to achieve that thing that you are admiring, you have to come to terms with two things. One, that yes, you could absolutely have what they have, which may scare you. Two, that to have it you are going to have to make those same sacrifices that they made. When I think through my envy on this level, I find that it mostly slips away. If I truly consider the work that the people sunk into whatever it is that I’m envious of, I find myself no longer wanting to trade places. I realize concretely that if I really want what they have, I can have it. But it is going to come at the expense of something else that I currently spend my time doing. This is fine, because at least now I have an honest view of what it would take to achieve it, and this lets me know that yes I can have it if I’m only willing to pay the price.

This is healthy, I think. Shallow envy is a superficial emotion that is largely unproductive. What thinking through your goals at the level of what effort they would require to achieve allows us to do is to trim down our list of desired identities and “nouns” to a shorter, more authentic list and then start tackling them one by one.

II.

The second reason why we don’t seem to achieve all of our desired identities and goals is that we rarely correctly calculate the time it will take to complete them. There is a short quote that I love that summarizes why so many New Year’s resolutions fail and why so many of us have a fully loaded “Someday Shelf”.

People overestimate how much they can do in one year but underestimate how much they can do in ten.

On New Year’s Day, millions of people commit to a long list of items they want to achieve in the next 12 months but so few people actually get to December 31st with a neatly set of goals met. The main reason this is the case, and the core truth of the quote above, is that we all are too optimistic about what think we can handle at one time and thus spread ourselves too thin to achieve anything meaningful. Then, when we are pacing behind or don’t seem like we’ll be able to do it we quit and then call the whole thing off.

I think setting a variety of effortful goals all at once sets us up for failure. It’s too much for us to progress on everything because our expectations are too high. Setting one ambitious goal for a year is hard enough. If you set five and define that as “Success” then you’re only setting yourself up for failure.

Take any standard New Year’s Resolution List:

• Lose 15 pounds

• Earn a 20% raise

• Learn to speak Spanish fluently

• Learn how to play the piano well enough so I can play “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton

Any one of those things would be a fantastic achievement in a year. But put them all together and now you are spending every free moment grinding away lest you feel guilty that you won’t meet your goals. It’s going to be hard to see consistent progress in every area and this lack of progress will decrease motivation and with it, your chances of success.

What if instead of slotting those all into one four-season period you instead committed to all of those items but set your timeframe for five years? Maybe you focus on your career in the first year while you try to eat healthier with the aim of losing some weight. Once you’ve received that raise, you start to focus your free time on Spanish. Once you feel like you’ve got a good handle on the language, you begin to take piano classes. And so on. And in five short years, you are jamming out to La Bamba on an electronic keyboard with endless energy while sitting on a throne of cash.

When you have one concrete target to aim at success feels a lot more achievable because any extra time that you have can be allotted to one task. You won’t feel like you are procrastinating the rest of your list because that is your list. This allows you to make progress, and enjoy the feeling of making progress, which makes you more likely to continue making progress, and thus gives you a much greater chance of success. This makes you happy and satisfied and makes you more eager to take on new challenges. Thus, the virtuous cycle is created.

So back to those identities we were talking about earlier. We all are seeking some level of instant gratification but to achieve anything worth anything takes time and focus. If you are trying to juggle many things at once and have a short time horizon upon which to evaluate success you are much more likely to fail, and one failure will decrease motivation which will then make it harder to achieve all of that other stuff.

Stated another way, if you want to become a noun in any one area, focus on that first. Focus on it hard. Do all the verbs, and make it your top priority. You’d be surprised at far how you can get. Once you feel comfortable with whatever level of success you’ve achieved, you can then move on to the next thing. While five or ten years feels like an eternity to our stupid monkey brains, it goes by in the blink of an eye.

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Pulling these two ideas together, if you have a firm understanding of what it takes to become the person you want to be, have a realistic timeline for when you want to achieve it, and can focus when it is required you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how many adjectives you can add to your collective description. It takes work and the ability to ignore the shiny new thing, but if you stay on track you can change a lot in a relatively short (on the scale of human life) timeframe.

In five short years, you can add a whole new list of adjectives that are associated with you as a person and nouns that people use to identify you. The only one holding you back is you (he said to himself as he reviews his list of stuff to do this year).