Latest / From Chad / Running #1179

Transcript

Running #1179 · From Chad

• 0:00
  He was smoking 60 cigarettes a day.
• 0:04
  There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
• 0:07
  Chademer 1179 to upgrade your mental game today by telling
• 0:12
  yourself a better story. Because the most important story
• 0:15
  you hear is the story you tell yourself.
• 0:16
  This message is dedicated to Kevin Hudson.
• 0:19
  Here's the upgrade. You think a bad habit has to be
• 0:21
  pulled out, but upgraded? Think he knows a nail is driven
• 0:24
  out by a nail? Here's the story.
• 0:28
  Aruki Murakami is a Japanese writer whose novels have been
• 0:31
  translated into more than 50 languages.
• 0:34
  But in the beginning, he'd just become a novelist, and for
• 0:36
  years, he'd run a jazz bar in Tokyo on his feet all day.
• 0:39
  Hard physical work. It kept him lean without a
• 0:42
  single thought about it. Then he sat down at a desk to
• 0:45
  write. His energy dropped, the weight
• 0:47
  came on, and the smoking got worse because concentration and
• 0:51
  cigarettes had fused into one act 60 a day.
• 0:54
  That's basically one every 15 minutes he was awake.
• 0:57
  No amount of willpower was going to touch that.
• 1:00
  So here's what he did. He quit smoking by never trying
• 1:04
  to quit. He treated it as a logistics
• 1:06
  problem. The job had changed, so the body
• 1:08
  had to change. He took up running.
• 1:12
  The reason he picked it was you don't need a team, you don't
• 1:14
  need equipment, you don't need a special place, shoes and a road.
• 1:18
  Murakami realized of himself that he's a loner and team
• 1:20
  sports never suited him. It helped him keep things
• 1:23
  simple. Reading, writing, running, That
• 1:27
  was his life. Three things you do alone.
• 1:29
  The new habit fit the man. Then the direction matters.
• 1:33
  He didn't say I want to quit smoking, so I'll run.
• 1:37
  He said I want to keep running and smoking is in the way.
• 1:42
  Quitting was, in his words, a natural result, result of
• 1:45
  running every day. The desire to run carried him
• 1:48
  through the withdrawal. He called it a farewell to the
• 1:51
  life he used to lead. All this led him to write a
• 1:54
  personal non fiction book titled What I Talk About When I Talk
• 1:57
  About Running. He didn't drive the old nail
• 2:00
  out. He drove a new one in and the
• 2:03
  old one fell out the other side. Same whole new nail and he built
• 2:09
  his whole day around it. He says the repetition itself
• 2:12
  becomes the important thing. 60 cigarettes a day was a trance.
• 2:16
  He didn't remove the trance, he replaced it with a better one.
• 2:21
  The better story to tell yourself is I'm not quitting
• 2:24
  anything, I'm starting something.
• 2:27
  Stop quitting. Start something.
• 2:30
  The upgrade at the beginning of this message today is an old
• 2:33
  proverb from Erasmus that a nail is driven out by another nail.
• 2:38
  Habit is overcome by habit. You can't pull a bad habit out,
• 2:42
  you can only push it out. Tell me a story of a habit that
• 2:46
  pushed out another one to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
• 2:49
  Send someone a text and ask them, What are you starting?
• 2:54
  You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in
• 2:57
  the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com.
• 3:01
  The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are
• 3:04
  always available at www.fromchad.com.