Derek Thompson

I hear you naming some of them.

Persistence, an attitude of, if not quite optimism, then almost cheer, right?

A willingness to try even when trying is painful and hurts.

What are the other key ingredients of excellence?

Something is really interesting in terms of different domains of achievement.

Yeah.

You're a deadlifter and you write books.

And there's an interesting way in which exercise and book writing are opposite achievements.

You and I have both written books.

When you write a book, you've written the book.

You'll always have written the book.

Abundance will always have been written.

The way of excellence will always have been written.

And so in a way, the achievement cannot be

denigrated or depreciated through time.

But one of the things I love about exercise that makes it feel more like a metaphor for life than writing a book is that if you do that 30-day workout to get the six-pack abs, if you don't work out for another week, they're gone.

Everything that you did for that month is wiped away.

And in that way, I remember when I initially started working on it, I was like, God, it's so frustrating.

You have to keep doing it.

That's the point.