H.W.P.O

 

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: “Why are you living?” life, if it could answer, would only say, “I live so that I may live.” That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living. —Meister Eckhart

I am a proud, yes proud, owner of an H.W.P.O. t-shirt. I am proud of the skills of persuasion I employed to get my hands on the shirt. I ingeniously persuaded it off a man’s back because I actually did not want to spend that much money on a shirt of such poor quality. Quality aside, the four letters printed in blue on a white background simply speak to me. 

I started following CrossFit during the Matt Fraser era. Brooke Ence led me to CrossFit, and I was instantly and insanely hooked. I watched enough to know who Rich Froning Jr. is even though he had stopped competing as an individual and had moved to the team division. I prefer individual sport rather than team sports, and that in itself reveals a lot about me. I am like Ryan Reynolds in Red Notice, “Teamwork, it feels weird in my mouth.” So, when I started watching CrossFit, I watched individual competitions exclusively, still do. CrossFit athletes, to me, are like gods made flesh. The things that these athletes can do is something that I still can’t wrap my mind around. I probably respect gymnasts and cirque performers just a little bit more but it's just athleticism to another level. 

Fraser has five Fittest Man on Earth titles which is one title more than the legend Froning Jr. In 2020, Fraser retired and went into coaching. He named his training program after his personal mantra: Hard Work Pays Off. It is simple, hard-hitting, to the point, and has just enough punch to make you want to work harder. There is a little caveat though, it is not true. Well, it is mostly not true.

I have probably mentioned this before in one of my earlier essays, but I live in a country that is a glaring example of how hard work doesn’t pay off. The economic backbone in this country is black people, they are the hardest working people in this country and yet they are the poorest. They manage to eke out a living month to month and there is zero correlation between the work they put in and the pay they take home at the end of the month. On the other side of the coin, there are many examples of people earning or inheriting money without having to work at all. From winning the genetic lottery to generational wealth, networking to becoming a Minister of such and such, there are many examples of how working hard is not even a prerequisite to having a certain amount of money in the bank. 

Facticity

In Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, he contrasts two baseball Hall of Famers, Bath Ruth (1936) and Lou Gehrig (1939). Gehrig was the quintessential athlete, like LeBron James, who was absolutely disciplined when it came to what he ate and how he took care of his body and one look at Ruth showed you that he did not care about any of that. 

Most kids like to play sports. Lou Gehrig saw in the game a higher calling. Baseball was a profession that demanded control of, as well as care for, the body—since it was both the obstacle and the vehicle for success. Gehrig did both. He worked harder than anyone. “Fitness was almost a religion to him,” one teammate would say of him. “I am a slave to baseball,” Gehrig said. A willing slave, a slave who loved the job and remained forever grateful at just the opportunity to play. This kind of dedication pays dividends. When Gehrig stepped up to the plate, he was communing with something divine. He stood, serenely, in a heavy wool uniform that no player today could perform in. He would sway, trading weight between his feet, settling into his batting stance. When he swung at a pitch, it was his enormous legs that did the work—sending the ball off his bat, deep, deep, out of the ballpark… There were players with more talent, with more personality, with more brilliance; but nobody outworked him, nobody cared more about conditioning, and nobody loved the game more. (Holiday)

There was a point where Ruth was a whopping 240 pounds, because his diet consisted of soda and burgers, and yet he was one of Baseball’s finest. To Holiday, he disrespected the sport by not taking it seriously enough while Gehrig dedicated everything to the game. The simple fact of the matter is that Ruth was great at the sport, and it seemed all he had to do was show up and hit the ball. Then there were athletes like Jim Thorpe and Bo Jackson who were so genetically endowed that there was no amount of hard work that opponents could put in to match their skills. There was a great talent divide which no amount of hard work could bridge.

Let me take an example from CrossFit. There is a CrossFit athlete who goes by the name of Colten Mertens, a pig farmer from Iowa, who just recently missed out on securing his ticket to the 2024 CrossFit games in the semi-finals. Mertens is someone whom I would describe as having that dog in him. He is hardworking and if he was a little bit taller, he would stand a chance of winning the CrossFit games. He is 5’ 4” which is very short for a CrossFit athlete. While there are some events that favour shorter athletes, these are few in comparison to those favouring taller athletes. From a probabilistic perspective, there is just no way that he would be able to win the games. Fraser is also on the shorter side, 5’ 7”, in comparison to other male athletes, but it is not a height that he cannot compensate for. His height is a height deficiency that can be overcome with more effort.    

The existentialists use a term, facticity, to sum up the hand we are all individually dealt. Our height, race, parents etc. are all a part of our facticity. There is nothing we can do to change these things. They are what they are and there are therefore certain limitations that we must make peace with. However, the existentialists believed that we still have options, given our facticity. We still have freedom to create our lives. I think this is true, provided we let go of the finite games that we human beings typically play. The big games are those we play around money, status, and looks but I actually don’t think that those games are for everyone to play, let alone win. The essay I wrote on “free will” titled Turtles All the Way Down made me seriously rethink this whole discipline thing. While discipline is highly valued in today’s society, the gods were closing their eyes and may have been slightly inebriated when they dispensed of it. There are things that I am very disciplined about, and things that I am not. When it comes to physical activities, I am there for it. I will show up every day, when I am supposed to, where I am supposed to, in the heat or cold, and with a smile on my face. Wake me up at 2 AM yelling “Who's going to carry the boats?” and I'll be yelling back “ME!!!” But ask me to do my admin, and I fall apart at the seams. There is truly nothing that I procrastinate more than doing admin. If my discipline was measured by how I show up to my admin duties, my score would be low. I would not think of discipline as freedom, a la Jocko Willink, I would think of it as pulling my teeth out. As it so happens, the things that I am disciplined with are the things that are important for my overall wellbeing so overall being disciplined for me is quite pleasant even if there is hard work involved. 

Following is an excerpt from Roland Lazenby’s biography of Michael Jordan which reinforces my point: 

The fifteen-year-old boy who pinned his hopes on trying out for the Laney High School varsity basketball team in the fall of 1978 was a far cry from the supremely confident Michael Jordan the world would come to know. That young man was stalked by self-doubt. He wasn’t a bad student, mostly Bs and Cs, but there was no indication that he was headed for stardom in academics. And he hated working, making no effort to do anything to earn extra money. He was oblivious to the example of his brother Ronnie’s two jobs during high school, and it was clear to his father that Michael would do anything to avoid anything that resembled effort.

That’s the laziest boy I’ve ever seen, James Jordan would say time and again. “If he had to get a job in a factory punching a clock, he’d starve to death. He would give every last dime of his allowance to his brothers and sisters and even kids in the neighbourhood to do his chores. He was always broke.”

Yet that laziness magically disintegrated when it came to sports. If it involved a ball in the air, a contest to be settled, the switch came on. In his adolescent mind, Michael figured maybe he could be a professional athlete. That was really about the only thing that interested him, which made him no different from millions of other daydreaming boys his age. He couldn’t see how to make that happen, but rarely is there a clear or even a sane path to a life in professional sports.

Time had narrowed his options. He had watched his advantages in baseball mostly disappear. And his mother was determined that he drop football entirely. His choices seemed so bleak that Deloris even suggested he begin taking home economics courses so that he could learn to sew and cook for himself. Chipping away at his self-esteem, she implied it might be wise to do so because he didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who could easily attract a mate. It was her way of saying, “Just go on in the house with the women.”

Rather than getting bent out of shape, Jordan took her suggestion and signed up for the courses—and found he liked them. “I remember he baked a cake in school that was so good we couldn’t believe it,” his mother said. “We had to call his teacher to verify it.”

Nonetheless, at age fifteen, Jordan was verging on the melancholy common to so many teens. Truth be known, he didn’t have a lot of friends. The single beacon, the one bright spot in his life, was basketball.

Now considered the Greatest Of All Time when it comes to basketball, no one would associate laziness with Michael Jordan. And yet, there were things that he was lazy at because they just were not interesting to him. One of the biggest deceptions in our culture is that we all should be interested in the same things and have the same preoccupations. There are a handful of idols which almost all of us have bought into and when we just can’t get ourselves to worship at the feet of those idols, we feel like ‘losers’. We spend so much energy and time trying to convince ourselves to do things that we would rather not be doing because they have been given the social thumbs up.  

In Putting the Work Hard Delusion to Rest, Thinking Ape shares a study of how conscientiousness has a genetic component to it. Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits that is most aligned with “hard work.” Not only is our conscientiousness not entirely up to us, but even what we are conscientious about is not entirely up to us either. How do we then make the most of our facticity in such a way that we aren’t always feeling like we are missing the mark socially? Authenticity. I am of the opinion that we have all been uniquely gifted and that the gifts that are available to us as the human race are inexhaustible. There are people, right now as I type this, who are spending their lives engaged in something you and I have never even heard about. Take myself as an example, I’ve recently dedicated 10 hours of my weekly hours to learning the Cyr wheel. At the beginning of the year, I didn't even know what a Cyr wheel was, and now it is an important part of my life. There is so much possibility out there and with every passing year, I realize how vast the vistas of human potentiality are, if only we would attune ourselves to them. To fully access these possibilities though, we have to let go of the mindless conforming forces in our lives.

Trauma specialist Gabor Mate once said that the worst thing a parent could ever do to a child is to make them choose between authenticity and acceptance. From what I see, society has taken over the baton from toxic parents and consistently makes us choose between authenticity and acceptance. There is a cruelty in this choice and death on either side. Since most of us choose acceptance over authenticity, there is a sense of deep mourning for not having truly known our own particular and unique shape and discovering our own potentialities. We remain existentially stuck as children, accepted, yet never really knowing what it means to grow and become who we are. That’s why it's called never never land, we never land into our truest selves, and remain estranged from ourselves. 

Our authenticity is too great a price to pay especially since we only just have one life to live, and we do not have the luxury of time on our side. At any given moment, our brief candle can be blown out and we would have withered away this one chance we have at life by living other people’s lives and worshiping at the feet of their idols. I could not think of a worse way to live than inauthentically. I’ve personally managed this supposed dichotomy by refusing for it to be paradoxical or dichotomous in nature. Being accepted is just as fundamental and indispensable as it is for the next person, but I have selected and qualified those whom I seek acceptance from. There are people, whose names I can string together in a single breath, who have fully accepted me in my authenticity. We think we do, but we do not actually need the approval or acceptance of the general public. We just need the eyes of those precious few to rest their warm loving gaze on us and know that we are seen. It may be family; it may not be. It may be friends or mentors or people passing by who have significantly altered our lives’ trajectory in a positively significant way. You know those people, right? Those on the side of your personal growth and development regardless how ambiguous and vague the path may currently be. Those are your people and everyone else can, well, just do them.  

In Mastery Robert Greene writes about how we all have a life’s task, and it is our life’s task and the mastery of it that should take up most of our lives. I truly believe that we all have a life’s task and that it is our duty to explore and listen when that life’s task is revealed to us, and to follow it. A life’s task is not a procrustean bed on which we have to amputate or stretch ourselves to fit onto, it is the bed which fits Goldilocks perfectly. It may be one thing or several different things which call to us along the path and create an exquisite bricolage when combined. Ours is to heed the call and diligently follow through on it. Someone like Mertens may truly be drawn to the CrossFit games and it may be something that he wants to do even if winning is off the table. That is still pretty cool because that means that he is motivated to continue on the path from the inside out. 

Morality and the Protestant Work Ethic

It was definitely during the reformation where morality and hard work were betrothed, 'til death do them part, and it has been difficult to separate the two since. It was believed that those who worked hard and reaped the rewards of the hard work were in God’s favour, a prosperity gospel at its finest. Earning our way into God’s graces by works goes against the entire “it is not by works we have been saved” project, but society in general seems to not have gotten that particular memo. It also seemed that when God died in the Nietzschean way, the protestant work ethic proved harder to kill than the terminators. Our modern bent towards hyper-productivity, where our first encounters with each other are marked by the classic “what do you do?” can have us forgetting that before we were human doings, we were human beings. Our human doings were meant to be in service of our being, not the other way around. A sleight of hand prestidigitation that has most of us working like dogs, worse of all identifying and priding ourselves as such. So, what is the deal with hard work? 

The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow in The Further Reaches of Human Nature differentiates between two types of hard work. The band Tenth Avenue North begin their song By Your Side, with the opening line “Why are you striving these days?” which offers a clue on the type of hard work which we should not be engaged with. Throughout the entire book, Maslow makes reference to Taoism which is in concert with the self-actualization process. The Tao is also known as The Way which if you think about it, embodies an effortlessness to it. When you are on the way, your particular way that is, then you will be doing what you are supposed to be doing. There will be resistance as Steven Pressfield describes but it will be of a completely different nature. It won’t be miserable. There may be tons of work on the way, but you won’t be miserable. It’s the Albert Camus line, “we must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Sisyphus was fated by the gods to carry a rock up the mountain which would eventually roll back down of which he would roll back up the mountain again, in perpetuity. We like to imagine Sisyphus miserable because from our perspective, there is a futility to his efforts. Perhaps if we look a little closer then we may see subtle changes in his boulder rolling skills. He may be getting better and better with each subsequent roll that there is a beauty to it. He would be like Bach, making music with his rolling. His body and the rock communing, his strapping muscles, calloused hands, clenched jaw, protruding calf, as he makes his way up the mountain, striking our hearts like poetry. In a similar way, we must imagine Mertens happy. “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. We justify our existence by being faithful to our life’s task to the point of beauty and disconsolate tears. 

When we set aside the striving, we are left with what Maslow calls trust. When we begin to create our lives as opposed to striving to be other than what we are, then we also begin to open ourselves to trust. We trust ourselves, the world and the way. 

All of the foregoing happenings imply a kind of trust in the self and a trust in the world which permits the temporary giving up of straining and striving. of volition and control. of conscious coping and effort. To permit oneself to be determined by the intrinsic nature of the matter-in-hand · here-now necessarily implies relaxation, waiting. receiving. The common effort to master, to dominate and to control are antithetical to a true coming-to-terms with or a true perceiving of the materials (or the problem, or the person. etc.) Especially is this true with respect to the future. We must trust our ability to improvise when confronted with novelty in the future. Phrased in this way, we can see more clearly that trust involves self-confidence, courage, lack of fear of the world. It is also clear that this kind of trust in ourselves-facing-the-unknown-future is a condition of being able to turn totally, nakedly, and wholeheartedly to the present. (Maslow)

This is the other facet of trust, the return to the present. Most of our strivings are externally rewarded which means that most of the time our consciousness is in the future while our bodies are in the present. We approach our work in a disintegrated state which inhibits us from being completely absorbed and arrested by our life’s task.  

Rather than being focused on hard work, it may be more beneficial to focus on peak experiences and entering states of flow which is one of the behaviours leading to self-actualization. There is a Japanese concept called muga. “This is the state in which you are doing whatever you are doing with a total wholeheartedness, without thinking of anything else, without any hesitation, without any criticism or doubt or inhibition of any kind whatsoever. It is a pure and perfect and totally spontaneous acting without any blocks of any kind. (Maslow)” Muga becomes possible only when we have transcended or forgotten ourselves. The prevailing work ethic is solipsistic in nature, it is entirely focused on the self and what the self may hope to achieve through its effort. In this instance, the external rings loudest, with a preoccupation of biting the fruits of our labour checking for ripeness. Be it God’s favour, prestige, status, the material trappings of worldly success or even the number one title, these get in the way by pretending to be the way. 

The Jonah Complex, according to Maslow, is one of the reasons that we never enter into our fullness. Named after Jonah from the Bible, who when called to take up his life’s task, ran away and wound up in the belly of the whale. There is something quite vanilla, safe, uninvolved, when it comes to doing what other people want us to do. We can always blame others for our smallness, and the world offers us ready-made answers to life’s pressing questions. But the world punishes us for this smallness. The megaphone of social media broadcasts our ineptitude, reminding us that we are not good enough and that we are not working hard enough. There are no solutions, as it has been said, only trade-offs. The belly of a whale is no place to live. “The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live dangerously,” writes Nietzsche. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas.”  Taking up the challenge to go your own way is dangerous because you risk standing out and facing persecution for it, you can’t avoid the responsibility that comes with acknowledging your own unique gifts. Unlike the man who received one talent in the biblical parable and buried it, you have to contend with the possibility and danger of failure by putting your talents to use, and you have to make peace with perhaps parting ways with security and control. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Hard work is indispensable as illustrated in Maslow’s “secondary creativeness”, but this hard work is different in nature. 

Meister Eckhart writes that it is not our works which sanctifies us but rather we who sanctify our works. It is not our hard work which sanctifies us but rather we who sanctify our hard work. We have to reimagine ourselves as something other than beasts of burden worked until our backs break or our minds depart from us. We have to look at our hands and the wondrous works thereof in a sacred light. Our hard work is an arc in the story of our self-actualization, itself hardly the main theme in our lives. Who we are and become through our works and how we serve the greater humanity in our own unique ways is what it all boils down to, what remains when everything else evaporates away. It is not hard work that pays off, but the heart committed to creating meaning through work, the radiant body which offers itself in focused service, and the quiet self-actualizing mind trained on being rather than doing.

The worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the [work] is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of its [unique self-actualization] and dead to the [world’s]. (Meister Eckhart inspired)