Put on Trial
A powerful idea I have started to incorporate to my decisions. Thoughts as of February 17th, 2024.
Within the past year, I heard on a podcast a quote from Jimmy Carter:
“If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”
My first reaction to the quote was to think along religious lines and what I would say my religious beliefs are at this moment in time. Raised Catholic and going to Catholic school for K-12, would I still call myself a Catholic? Would a jury convict me? On what evidence?
After the initial reaction, it quickly expanded to other parts of my life. I say I want to lose weight. Oh yeah? Then why are you eating a full bag of tortilla chips before bed? Why aren’t you getting your steps in every day? These are good questions, and I think a great point. Fortunately for me, I have been able to lose a bunch of weight after my football career.
Peak to trough was approaching 100 lbs without being horrendously out of shape at the top, or wasting away at the bottom. Throughout the process, and ever since losing the weight, a lot of people have approached me and said, “man I wish I could do that” or “I really want to lose weight” and in my mind I think, do you?
My high school football coach had several quotes that have stuck with me over the years, one of which was “I see better than I hear” which gets at the same idea as this post. It is easy for me to say that I want to be a writer, or a comedian, or change jobs, or move to a new city, or go out more, ad infinitum, but are my actions reflecting those desires? If not, then I am probably just full of it.
As I have thought over this concept, I have realized an important nuance. I don’t think it is necessarily true that your actions not aligning with your proclaimed wants invalidates the fact that you want it. I think that the kicker is where your desire lies in the landscape of your desires. It is easy to come up with examples when thinking about diet or weight loss.
Somebody says, “I want to lose weight to look like X or to be able to do Y.” How could this be true if they are consistently making choices like late-night snacks and junk food? Certainly seeing those behaviors, a jury would never convict them of that desire. This is because the allure and desire to eat junk or drink alcohol, watch TV, etc. is actually greater than the desire to lose weight.
This is an easily testable assumption, because if it was true that dieting was more important than eating that extra slice of cake, or can of soda, then you’d be able to make a decision in the moment. Concepts like willpower and discipline can be tricky and elicit pushback, but at the end of the day, if the stakes are high enough - discipline and willpower fall away.
Recently, as there has been a lot of change in my life and decisions that need to be made, I have had to look myself in the mirror. Tim Ferriss often says, “Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask.”
I have been dwelling in the realm of the vague wish for far too long. I believe that quote to be true, and much of the information I have consumed over the past few years has served to corroborate that idea. Believing this to be true, and yet not acting in a way to benefit from it, is cowardly.
It is scary to take a leap and define your goals specifically because that opens up the avenue for failure and ridicule, but how much worse is it to live in limbo where you have no specific goals, not even knowing whether you are winning or losing?
In several different parts of my life, I have very much not been “in the arena,” and in no way would be convicted of what I proclaim to be interested in nor working towards. Coming back to this blog and putting my ideas into writing is one such step to move from the realm of the abstract back to reality.
Step one is defining my beliefs and who I want to be. I am in the early innings of explicitly defining what exactly that looks like; however, that has not stopped me from starting to build up a body of evidence to make my case.