Maximum decisions

Now that it's been a few days since the seminar ended and I've been able to digest and inhale everything from the weekend, the thing that keeps echoing in my head over and over again was Ed Coan telling someone during the Q&A segment, in regards to maxing in the gym.....

"You only have so many big attempts in you over the course of your career.  Save em all for the meet."  

Now I could start going on and on about sub max programming and not maxing in the gym, but I think I've beat that horse to death 17 or 18 times over the last year.  I think it's pretty clear that my stance on training in the 90+% range has more drawbacks than benefits.  Especially if you do it for more than about 2 weeks.  So I don't feel like writing another blog post about that shit.

Rather, I thought about how that seamlessly flowed into so many aspects of everything we do.

Generally, over the course of your life, you will end up making possibly a dozen decisions, maybe less, that have significant and long lasting consequences or rewards.  

I'm not talking about making the decision to order that Pay-Per-View rather than save the $50 or the decision to switch to a cheaper dog food for the pooch.

I'm talking about decisions that echo and reverberate throughout the days of your existence.  "Max" decisions that change the course of what your life looks like, friends you make, loves lost and found.  Things that ink themselves onto the pages of the book that is our life.  Changing jobs, moving, getting married, getting divorced, coming to grips that you have an addiction, going back to college.  Other times, it's simply the words you let slip from your tongue.  Words are impatctful and powerful, yes indeed.  Acta non verba means "deeds, not words" but make no mistake...words matter.  They can move mountains, create wars, or declare peace.  The words you say to people are a representation of who you are, and what you are about.  People can and will hate or love you based on the words that you give them.  That is also a choice they make.

Unfortunately, often times you make "max" decisions without even knowing.  The butterfly effect for small decisions can still be dramatic and life changing.

Maybe that's what having a plan or a code is really all about.  To limit the number of small decisions that have "max effort" consequences.  Even then, inevitably you're not going to be able to dodge landmines forever. People will walk into your life and events will happen that change the landscape of what you perceived as your future very quickly.  Sometimes for the good, and sometimes well, for the not so good.

However for the most part, the life we etch out looks like that way because of the decisions and choices we make.  It's hard to put the onus on yourself for everything bad that happens to you, and oh so easy to accept that it was you that caused all the happiness.  But as I get older I realize so much of the joy or bereavement that envelopes our life is indeed causation from our own actions, choices, and decisions.  So many of our choices are often driven by things we want, or to appease the selfish nature we all have inside of us.  We want things we shouldn't have, or things we don't need, but nevertheless we want them because we covet or feel entitled to them.  These are the times when we tend to make max decisions when letting go of such things would be a better answer.

I was friends with some people who had a perfectly fine house, however they couldn't pass up the chance to grab a house that had been foreclosed upon for a steal.  So they bought it as well, and rented the other home out.  A few years later when the market went under and he lost his job, they ended up losing the new big house, and had to move back into the old one.  They also lost all of their savings trying to maintain both places.  That's a high level overview however, what cost them was greed.  Not being thankful for what it was they had right in front of them.  It wasn't enough.

"This looks better, and I really WANT that!"

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
I guess overall what I'm getting at is, max attempts should be saved for the meets, and max choices should be made at appropriate times and in appropriate ways in your life.  This will always come back to ones own judgement and ability to stay true to the code you've carved out for yourself.  Eventually, over time, you'll know if that code is causing you to take max attempts at times in life when you could have spared yourself some misery.