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I Take Dozens of Cold Showers Every Day
Don’t think — do. When I have something in front of me that needs to get done, I don’t give myself any time at all to think my way out of it. I just get it done. Now. Immediately. Like a cold shower, it sucks at the beginning, it doesn’t get much easier, but it allows me to keep going and execute.
When you can’t think about anything else other than the cold — your one most important task — everything else completely falls away. All that enters your conscious awareness is the cold, the task, and you stay with it until the end.
When you jump into a task like a pool of freezing water, suddenly you’re just in it, and then it’s okay. You can stay in it, tough it out — you’re capable of this — but you just have to jump in.
For the record, I do take actual cold showers occasionally — I also live in Canada, which is like a giant frozen pond for nine months a year — but when I started thinking about difficult tasks in terms of cold exposure and diving right in, I was able to unleash some epic productivity.
For example, I just finished reading my 1,000th book. It took me about seven years, but I did it. That was on top of being a bodybuilder and model, working out hundreds of times a year on top of my “real” job, putting a ton of energy and work and heart into becoming a professional writer, and just on and…
