> 4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.

I'm not entirely with you about gyms in particular. Weights might just not be your thing as an individual, but "going to the gym is not fun" is often about the logistical problems of timing around gyms (peak hours, January rushes especially) and not necessarily that it's an inherently bad experience. If you're going when it's dead, it can actually be pretty great.

If you're doing it now, then yeah, it's a bad idea (and there's a separate ramble on that), but it doesn't have to be.

Broadly though, I agree with you. You'll never find me on a treadmill, but will find me on a DDR cab.

It depends. Sometimes it feels like a pain (which coincides with fewer reps to fatigue etc.). Sometimes I get a buzz. Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.

I've been lifting weights for 20 years and this is what I have discovered too. You can keep your sleep/nutrition/work schedule very consistent and some days things will just be harder in the gym. On those days, I will do a little less extra exercises and just stick with the basic compound movements that I was going to do.

On the flip side, there are great days too. Take advantage of those and get a little more done in the gym. Overall it's about consistency of the practice, not about an individual session being great.

> It depends… Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.

I have to say that physiological randomness of this kind is one of the main "use cases" for structured routines.

Before I lived such a structured life, I also felt like I would enter various activities with a roulette wheel of emotions. Which I found to be a big problem! But these days, and due to my structure, a) my mood is highly stable and predictable and b) on the rare occasions when my mood deviates, I usually have a very good idea of why, e.g. deviations in sleep.

> DDR cab

Dance Dance Revolution?

Yes. Cab being Cabinet, slang for an arcade setup of Dance Dance Revolution as opposed to the home version. I'm with you GP, DDR/ITG dedicabs have always been a way to get me out of a rut.

Stepmania is an option along with some USB pads. Works well on Linux.

Stepmania is great. I actually built a skeleton of a workout tracker for DDR a while back using the simfiles I was already playing this on. I haven't had a space to play in that consistently in years, though, so I never bothered to bring the hosted demo back up when Heroku killed their free tier and kinda stalled the development before it got more than just fleshed out enough to be kind of useful.

That said, there's a mostly working .sm to .ssc converter (it's still got a couple edge cases around punctuation in titles), as I had to migrate the simfiles to something with named properties anyway to get reliable data out of them.

This, and the seeder script (which I wrote using a bunch of fetch requests in order to also test a bunch of my frontend logic, before Node started shipping with that) that I used to seed all the DDR arcade tracks into a db, were actually my first experience with Deno. It's been my go-to experiment tool pretty much ever since.

If anyone's curious, it's under my github (same username) at step-step-recollection. (And ...recollection-scripts, and ...recollection-ui. Annoyingly I never got to experimenting with server-side rendering on it, so that's also a separate repo.)

> Going to the gym is not fun

Hard stuff is not until it becomes a habit. Then you begin to enjoy the details of it and get in the zone.

Great points!

I'm a big fan of all 5! Plus many, many more.

I wasn't being hyperbolic in my use of the term "80/20." The aim, fire, scan article truly only represents about 20% of the tools/techniques I swear by.

I still don't find habit useful, at least as I interpret it as something magical that reduces pain of something you do often. If anything, pain of something I do get worse and worse the more I do it. Anything I do regularly is always because of external pressure, without that my "habit" just vanishes.

> 5. Habits are very powerful. Your brush your teeth, right?

You'd be surprised. For some, brushing teeth is an explicit act of will every day, that never seems to habituate. ADHD perhaps?

This is actually how I figured out I should pursue a diagnosis, so yeah, maybe.

These sites are just digital versions of a Nathan For You episode.

Gym is fun!

I predicted your #1 was Jordan Peterson. Tony Robbins just made an appearance on Theo Von's podcast, This Past Weekend. I haven't watched it yet, but Theo is fantastic at getting his guests to open up. I am deeply skeptical of Tony Robbins overall, but I'll probably queue up the podcast soon.