LIFE GRADES ON ATTENDANCE

College was good TO me, but was not good FOR me.  I went to an all boy catholic high school, with a very regimented schedule.  I was a 4 year student athlete, starting with football my freshman year before transitioning to wrestling in my sophomore year onward, and when I wasn’t in season, I was in the marching band, and after I got home from school, we would quickly scarf down dinner and get to Tae Kwon Do practice.  This meant that my day was pretty much mapped out from morning to bed time, and I had minimal distractions from the fairer sex to contend with.  I then enrolled in a university with a 70:30 female to male ratio with NO wrestling team nor a band that wanted anything to do with me.  Suffice to say: my schedule was suddenly freed up, and I had many distractions from academia.  One of my classes, in particular, I had cracked the code on: I only needed to go every OTHER class.  Why?  Because our professor would always spend the FIRST half of class going over what he covered in the LAST class, and then would introduce new material in the second half, which, if you’re doing the calculations, means I had TWO opportunities to learn that new material.  However, the only reason this plan worked was because, unlike high school, this professor did NOT grade on attendance.  As long as I was able to demonstrate mastery of the material come the time of the test, my grade would reflect that.  Life, however, is not as gracious as that professor: irregular attendance will ultimately result in a failing grade.  Because folks, high school was honestly trying to teach you a lesson more valuable than the academic material we learned in undergrad: life grades on attendance.

Thankfully for me, THIS isn't true

 

Much like Woody Allen’s quote that “80% of success is showing up” and Dan John echoing a similar sentiment, irregular attendance in the pursuit of our goals is going to result in a failure to achieve them.  Because unlike academics: we have NO option to “cram before the exam”.  This meme is ever present in our culture, with one of my favorite movies of all time, Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School”, giving an outstanding montage of academic cramming before a major comprehensive exam. I know I’ve been guilty of employing the same as well, the notion of filling the brain to the brim of all manner of fact and figure relating to a subject, showing up, purging it all onto a piece of paper, and promptly forgetting everything for the rest of your life.  The outcome of attempting to cram for physical transformation is going to have the same ephemeral result.  We observe this frequently in training facilities: those folks who failed to attend throughout the majority of the year now DESPERATELY trying to cram before the exam of some sort of beach vacation or spring break or homecoming or whathaveyou, slamming 4 hour training sessions on diets of lettuce and water in a futile attempt to be ripped and jacked in a matter of weeks.  At best, they’ll lose about 4lbs, the majority of it being water, while bearing the looks of someone tweaked out of their mind on stimulants, dry, wiry, haggard and scrawny.  But it gets worse…

 

Not only is attempting to cram ineffective: it actively sabotages you.  In one of the cruelest ironies of physical transformation, the harder we try, the worse we get, like some sort of Chinese finger trap.  Oh sure, hard training IS important in order to achieve physical transformation, but it needs to be hard ENOUGH, and once we cross the threshold of “enough”, we immediately start UNDOING out progress.  As per Dan John’s quadrants, when we enter the realm of “train hard-diet hard”, we enter a realm that is ultimately unsustainable: we are existing on borrowed time.  And when we borrow, we ALWAYS pay interest.  As we continue to push our bodies beyond their ability to recover, we incur a debt that will be paid off once we inevitably crash, resulting in a rebound that quite often leaves us WORSE than when we started.  The crash diet we followed in order to try to lean out quickly had us drop significantly more lean mass than had we simply attended diligently, and when the cravings eventually overcome out willpower (which they will), the weight we put BACK on will NOT be mostly lean mass, meaning that we will end up WORSE than how we started: with more fat mass and less lean mass.  To say nothing of how whatever “strength” we accumulated through our ridiculous peaking program will rapidly deplete and our shattered and broken body will need to be rebuilt before we can train reasonably again, taking away training time that could have been better spent on the path to something more sustainable.

Sunvabitch, MtG figured this out so long ago...

 

The meme of the “lazy genius” is so appreciated in our culture because it re-affirms something that we WISH was true: that we can just coast through life without effort and STILL pass the test.  We deride those who actually dutifully attend class, do the homework, work on the project throughout the year rather than saving it all for the last minute as “try-hards”, nerds, and other such derogatory terms, primarily because we want to deny the reality that life grades on attendance…but it is quite simply true.  Large, all out efforts engage in irregular frequency will never beat out consistency over a long stretch.  And the thing is, those large all out efforts MUST be engaged in irregular frequency.  Simply by nature of the demands placed upon us, they’re unsustainable by definition, so attempts to pursue them are destined to fail.  This does not mean that they cannot be pursued every once in a while, when one is in need of some manner of shake up, but to attempt to live in such a manner is an attempt to be truant through the process of physical transformation, and life will be quite cruel in their employment of truancy officers. 

 

And, in truth, we can even observe these lessons IN the realm of academia.  I will shamefully admit that it took until my senior year of undergrad to realize the benefit of gradually working on the end of term paper over the course of the year, rather than saving it all until the night before it was due.  I had convinced myself that the latter approach was the superior one, primarily because I wanted to delude myself into believing this to affirm my own procrastination and laziness, but I operated under the premise that writing it all at once would mean all the information was fresh in my mind and the narrative of the paper would be comprehensively written in one sitting, maintaining continuity.  However, when I took the time to work on the paper gradually, I was able to pace myself and give each section I worked on my absolute and total focus, and when I had reached a point where my work quality was deteriorating due to fatigue, I’d simply put the paper away for the day and come back to it when I was ready for more.  When the day before the paper was due arrived, I was already complete with my work AND had already had the time to review it thoroughly, make revisions, and include new material I had discovered along the way, whereas, previously, all that “post work” had to be forfeited due to scheduling issues.  I also observed that I had earned the ire of many of my classmates, who wondered why I wasn’t staying up all night using the on-campus restaurant’s wifi (this was mid 2000s, so wifi was still limited) and mainlining energy drinks trying to condense an entire academic semester into 10 hours of work.  Because we WANT to believe in the lazy genius…but it doesn’t work.  Because life grades on attendance.

Although I suppose there ARE other ways to get the paper done...

 

And that paper is an allegory for our own results in physical transformation.  You will earn the ire of those who are irregularly attending when you’ve been dutifully attending for decades, because they THINK they’re putting in more effort simply because, during the brief periods that they DO attend, it’s quite intense…to the point of sabotage.  The final product they develop is ultimately inferior to the one developed gradually over time.  For much like how we shut down the paper when the quality starts to decline, we shut down the training and nutrition when high quality is no longer being produced, meaning we are ONLY the product of high quality inputs, resulting in high quality outputs.  Because life is grading us on attendance.  Even if we KNOW the material, even if we can demonstrate mastery of it, even if we can pass the test, if we haven’t shown up to every class along the way, we’re going to get a failing grade.