Less Guilt and Shame

August 20, 2012 by Scott "Q" Marcus Leave a Comment

If guilt and shame were motivational, we’d all be more successful.

It’s amazing how quick we are to beat ourselves up and how slow we are to congratulate ourselves. For some reason, we think that if we say enough critical stuff to ourselves, it will motivate us to do better.

If we said out loud to children what we say to ourselves in our heads, we’d all be locked up for child abuse.

Find ways to congratulate yourself for what you do well and constructive ways to improve what you don’t do well. The alternative simply does not work.

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Get Your Act Together

August 13, 2012 by Scott "Q" Marcus Leave a Comment

You will never have your act together.

But keep working on getting it there.

Learn to enjoy the process as much as you can. There is no “there” there. Once we get “there,” we find out that another “there” exists over the next horizon.

No matter how much we grow and change and evolve; thinking we’ll finally “get it,” we find out that there is still more to learn.

Growing is life-long.

The best idea is to learn to enjoy the process and stop waiting to be “there” because you never will.

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Labeling Results Determines Future Results

July 19, 2012 by Scott "Q" Marcus Leave a Comment

Recently, I stumbled upon some noteworthy details.

First factoid: Supposedly (I say “supposedly” as I’m not sure of its veracity), the average overweight American needs to shed 38 pounds to level the scales at his correct weight. Obviously, some must lose more, and some less. Yet, should one take the collective poundage our citizenry must remove to be healthy, and divide it by the number of citizens who must drop those pounds; the resulting number would be just shy of 40.

Factoid two: That same “average American,” upon deciding to rid himself of the above mentioned 38 pounds, usually quits prior to 16 weeks; a shade less than four months.

The final datum is that — despite pie-in-the-sky claims made by “miracle weight loss cures” falsely proclaiming one can drop five to ten pounds a week — an “average” healthy, sustainable (two important distinctions) weight loss is between one-half and two pounds per week. Let’s split the difference down the middle and declare that number to be one and a quarter pounds every seven days.

From these bits of information, we can make a central deduction.

If the “average person” desirous of losing the “average amount of weight” sheds the “average amount per week” and quits in the “average number of weeks,” he will be approximately half way to his goal when he throws in the towel. (Sixteen weeks multiplied by 1.25 pounds per week = 20 pounds; just the other side of the midway point of 38.)

This prompts a quasi-philosophical question: Is one a “success” or “failure” if she drops 20 pounds, when in actuality, her goal is 38? It’s one of those “half-empty, half-full” scenarios.

The greater issue is not how many pounds one might lose, but how one views how many pounds she has lost.

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