A Workout for Geeks
Dec/090
It’s the holiday season, which means those New Years resolutions are coming up fast. For those of you who are considering exercising more this upcoming year, here is a workout specially designed for the geek in you.
The Problem with Traditional Workouts
The number one problem with most workout plans for the life hacker is that they are boring. You go to the gym, lift some weights, run on the treadmill, and go home. Maybe next time you’ll run a little faster or lift a little more weight, but you’re pretty much going to do the same thing over and over. What’s the fun in that?
As a life hacker, you are creative and adventurous in everything you do, including your exercise. You should be constantly challenged both physically and mentally. Traditional workouts push you physically, while your mind remains idle. No wonder you reject them.
How to Hack Your Workout
Remember that hackers discover unconventional methods to push the boundaries of both themselves and their environment. A great tool that I’ve been using in my workouts is the aerobics step platforms. It’s like playing with giant sized legos, where I can build my own workout scenarios to explore.
Here are a couple methods that I already use:
- Hopping the Hurdles: This one is based off a gymnastics exercise I saw and is the one pictured above. I place a series of platforms at different lengths and heights and consecutively jump over them. It’s pretty fun because after the first jump, your feet act as springs, so it’s almost like being on a pogo stick. I kind of feel like Mario as I go through my level.
- The Parkour Track: The second method I use is laying out the long platforms on the floor in an oval shape and usually have one or two high obstacles that I need to either jump or climb over. I run atop the platforms, which means I need to be conscious of where I put my feet, when I speed up to jump, and even the speed taking corners (I’ve fallen over a few times as the platform slid out from going too fast).
The benefit of using these aerobics platforms is that it easily enables you to dynamically adjust the difficulty of the workout, according to your own beliefs about your abilities. It also provides great variability between workouts, so that your body is physically challenged, your cognitive awareness of your environment is enhanced, your creativity is expressed, and you get to have fun while everyone else is bored. ;)
Remember, these are only a couple methods of the vast possibilities. Unleash your creative side and see how else you can use them to be challenged.
I experiment, explore, create, and just try to figure out new ways to enjoy my life. You can read about my thoughts and adventures on my blog: WhiteHatBlackBox
Birthdays, Self-Reflection, and a Better Year Ahead
Sep/090
I recently had a birthday. As I’ve gotten older, birthdays have become for me a time of intense self-reflection: where am I in my life, where do I want to be, what could I improve? They don;t depress me, like they do so many others, but they do make me think.
Birthdays are also natural times for me to make new resolutions. New Years Day has never felt like much more than an accident of the calendar, but birthdays – especially with mine falling right at the start of the academic calendar that has dominated most of my life, when I really am making a new start in much of my life with the dawn of a new academic school year – seem like a natural time to start making choices about the year ahead.
Now, I said “resolutions”, and we all know resolutions fail. My fellow Lifehack writers have written about the failure of resolutions over and over again, as for instance in Steve Errey’s post entitled pretty unambiguously New Years Resolutions Don’t Work – Here’s Why. But I think we need to reframe the idea of resolutions, to think about them not so much as goal-setting but as problem-solving.
When we think about resolutions, we tend to think of them as a matter of resolve, that is, of willpower. “I resolve to do x, y, and z.” Of course, if we had the willpower to work on our novel, pass on rich desserts, or be more outgoing at social events, we wouldn’t need to resolve those things in the first place. And so yes, they fail – and often leave us bitter and disappointed with ourselves.
But what if we thought about resolutions not so much as a matter of resolve but of solutions – that is, as a re-solution to life’s problems? My father, a great collector of quotes, likes to repeat Einstein’s dictum that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”; it seems to me that most of life’s problems remain with us because the solutions we’ve adopted don’t really solve them – and so we try the same solutions, over and over, harder and harder, thinking eventually those problems must give ground.
Consider, for example, this situation which many of us are or have been in:
- Problem: Your aren’t advancing in your chosen career.
- Resolution: Work harder, put in longer hours, apply for higher positions more often.
- Re-solution: Are you still committed to this career? Maybe you don’t have the passion and drive you had when you entered it ten years ago. If money weren’t an issue, would you still want to do what you do? What would you do? Inventory your skillset and your passions today and start looking into changing careers.
Maybe that isn’t how you’d address the problem, but you get the idea: a real re-solution needs to address the problem not in terms of what you aren’t doing often or well enough but at the very core, questioning the assumptions that the problem itself is grounded in. If you’re stalled out in your career because you no longer have any passion for it and are just putting your time in to collect a check, then a career change may well be in order – and if so, then it no longer matters that you’re stalled in your current career.
Let’s try applying this to a personal matter:
- Problem: You’ve been dating for months/years/decades and can’t seem to find someone with whom you’re interested in a relationship.
- Resolution: Get out more. Join an online dating service. Visit a professional matchmaker.
- Re-solution: What are you really looking for in a partner? Maybe you’re spending too much time and energy dating people because you should be interested in them, not because you are. Or Maybe you’re dating anyone who seems interested in you at all “just in case”. Take time to figure out the pattern in your past dating life and then act to consciously break that pattern.
Again, this may not be your re-solution, but the principle applies: whatever you’re doing isn’t working, so don’t do more of it, do something entirely different. And you can’t know what to do differently without really examining not just the behaviors that make up your current practices but the reasons you are behaving that way in the first place.
For the last few weeks, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing – re-thinking my goals, my choices, and my habits to see what simply isn’t helping to solve the things in my life that I’m not quite happy about. And, at the same time, the things I am – this isn’t about self-flagellation, but about an honest inventory of strengths and shortcomings, so that the one can be applied to the other.
Two years ago, that process led me to embrace a fledgling second career as a writer; last year, it led me to seriously rethink my approach to relationships and what I wanted in a partner; this year, who knows? I think I have some answers I didn’t have a month ago – and I have another 12 months to figure out what to do with them.
Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.
Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.
