Doing Reps

I recently read two books that changed my thinking, A LOT.  The first book was “Start” by Jon Acuff and the second book was titled “LinchPin” by Seth Godin. Two very different, but similar in some ways, awesome reads.  Yes, I realize that the previous sentence doesn’t make sense.

In the book Start.  Jon talks about how we all must do Reps.  Reps is an abbreviation for Repetition, meaning repeating something over and over.  In the workout world we all say we did X amount of Reps of a certain exercise or lift to properly workout the muscle that we are wanting to work on.

Just like a muscle that we want to work, our brain, our trade, a skill, a hobby, etc. we must just do Reps to become really good at it.  I consider my blog that I write, as a Rep.  I have poor grammar, and really poor sentence structure, but I am just doing Reps.  I think I am getting better at it :).  You tell me.  My mentor Jim Rohn says it like this, you must be disciplined when the numbers are small (my blog followers are small, but growing :)) because if you don’t form the habit of discipline when the numbers are small, you won’t have the habit when the numbers are large.

So Jon says he started out giving talks to AA meetings.  AA groups are always looking for people to come in and speak.  So he considered that practice as putting in Reps.  He became really good at public speaking and delivering a message, because he put in a lot of reps.  Golfers put in a lot of Reps. You think they just hit those shots because they were born with that skill.  A good example is our current President Barack Obama.  He started out putting in Reps when he was a community organizer (what is this again?:)), so why do you think he is known as one of the best orators and speech givers in the world.  He put a lot of Reps in when he was on the streets organizing I am sure, whatever that is.

As I mentioned earlier Seth Godin in his book, says it like this.  JUST SHIP.  Meaning Don’t over analyze everything, JUST SHIP.  If you wait for everything to be perfect you will never ship, so just get in a habit of shipping.  He also said it like this “Everything in Life is a Draft”.  I said wow, when I read this.  There is so much truth to this

A lot of us get in our own way and think we have to have everything perfect before we take the next steps.  Just Ship.  Don’t be reckless, I am sure you won’t, but Just Ship.  Maybe you want to start a business, maybe you want to lose weight, maybe you want to go back to school, maybe you want to start a blog, maybe you want to “you name it”.  Just start. You have all of the skills you will ever need and guess what will happen when you start.  It will be clunky, you will encounter problems, you will get tired after 5 mins of working out, all of these things, but just start.

The first time I ran an 8 min mile, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.  Now I can pace 8 min miles, for 13.1 miles. You know why, because I just Shipped, meaning I started. Every time I hit the publish button on these blogs, I say I should have said this different or “what if”, “what if”, now I am just going to hit the publish button and “Just Ship”, I know it is a just a draft.

If you read something in this blog today, that got you thinking about your business, your skills, your world, please share with me, I love to hear the stories, plus, since everything we do in life is a draft maybe we can work together and edit the draft.

Brian Willett