Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. – Zen Kōan
Joshua Medcalf’s Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall in Love with the Process of Becoming Great is necessary reading for athletes, coaches, trainers, and everyone else with big goals.
Medcalf’s book is laid out like a fable, with the protagonist John embarking on the training to become a samurai.
Along the way, he learns a pile of lessons, including overcoming discouragement, focusing on the present, developing true mental toughness, and more.
Each chapter contains its own lesson, with our hero coming around on things like wanting the result before the process, accepting the dirtiness of the grind, and understanding that big moments of success are built with a collection of little wins.
The reader is walked through each chapter and lesson, with Medcalf providing examples in the sporting and business world.
The book is one of my favorite mental toughness books for athletes, and is required reading for anyone who wants to learn to truly appreciate the journey and process of achieving excellence.
Below are some of the key lessons and quotes that I took from Chop Wood Carry Water, along with my own thoughts and ideas.
Where to Buy — Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall in Love with the Process of Becoming Great
1. Fuel yourself with encouragement.
No matter how badly you want something, there will be times where your confidence crumbles like a stale cookie.
Improvement has stalled. You have a terrible game. You lose to an inferior opponent.
Feeling discouraged in the aftermath of this kind of stuff is okay. But holding onto it, allowing the discouragement to take root and become a belief is when things get troublesome.
Feeling discouraged at times is part of the process.
- “I’m no good at this, I will never achieve my goals.”
- “I will never beat my main competitor, so why bother trying.”
- “I can’t do this workout.”
How do you combat these swings into being a Negative Nelly? Fuel your heart with encouragement. And this is done with the people you surround yourself with, the content you ingest each day through your phone, the self-talk you use, and the things you visualize.
Think of these things like a rip current. You don’t see it from the surface, and you don’t always feel its pull right away, but it isn’t long until you are pulled out and don’t know how you got there.
- “Fuel your heart with encouragement… if you put the wrong fuel into your gas tank, it is very easy to get discouraged and break down as you go through the journey of life.”
2. Stop protecting your ego.
How often have you pulled short on giving your all because you feared the repercussions of failure? How many times have you half-ass chased a goal that was within your grasp and matched your skills and talents, only to pull up short?
It’s not because you can’t do it.
It’s because you are focused on protecting your ego from the risk of failure. Your ego lies to you, convincing you that you won’t be able to handle failing, that you will look stupid, that people will judge and laugh.
So what do you do?
Pull up short and protect your ego.
- “Most people settle for average and what comes easy. They never give their very, very best and exhaust themselves in order to protect their ego. They enjoy being able to say, ‘I didn’t even really try,’ or ‘I didn’t really care.’ Because if they really did give their best, and still failed, that would be too much for their ego to handle.”
3. “The grass is greener where you water it.”
In today’s age, comparisons are almost impossible to avoid. You walk into the gym, what do you do?
Rank and grade other lifters. How much someone is lifting. Their technique and form. How jacked (or not) they are.
We immediately, and often very subconsciously, measure ourselves up against the people we see.
But comparisons, while helpful in letting us know where we stand in the scheme of things, are unhelpful when it distracts us from our process. Energy and focus spent on others is less energy and focus spent on ourselves.
Comparisons also cause unnecessary pressure and anxiety. Think about how many times you’ve scrolled through someone’s perfectly curated life on social media. They look so happy, so motivated, and so successful that it can only leave us feeling “less than.”
- “Comparison is incredibly short-sighted, and if we focus only on the successes of others, we do it at our own expense.”
- “The grass is greener where you water it.”
4. Do the work.
There is no shortage of athletes and gymgoers and aspiring gymgoers who talk about the big things they could accomplish with their health and athletic skills.
Talking a big game is the easy part. Having a big goal doesn’t require any determination or grit.
It’s the showing up and doing it each day that is the hard part.
- “Everyone wants to be great, until it’s time to do what greatness requires.”
- “Greatness is far from sexy, it is dirty, hard work, usually required to be done in the dark, when no one is watching, while your dreams are so far off they feel like fairytales.”
- “Greatness isn’t for the chosen few. Greatness is for the few who choose.”
5. Excellence is lonely.
Few have the patience to pursue excellence on a daily basis. Which leaves you with plenty of clear water when you stick to it.
- “You don’t find any traffic after going the extra mile, and there’s a very good reason for that: most people won’t do what it takes to get there. But if you choose to do what others won’t, eventually you will get to do what others can’t.”
- “People who get average results persist until things get uncomfortable, then they quit. People who get good results persist until things get painful, then they quit. People who get world class results have trained themselves to become comfortable when it is painful and uncomfortable.”
- “You can’t cheat the grind… It knows how hard you have worked, and it won’t give you anything you have not earned.”
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