The veteran artist mindset to your fitness lifestyle: consistent effort over peaks of effort

As Tiago Forte writes in this article on the Second Brain system:

“Stop completing your projects via “heavy lifts” – grueling slogs of painful work where you create everything from scratch. There is another way – you can slowly gather ideas, in the background and over time, using “slow burns.” Once the project gets underway, you’ll already have a rich collection of interesting ideas, insights, examples, facts, and illustrations that you can easily combine together without burning yourself out.”The 10 principles of buiding a second brain, Forte Labs

“Stop completing your projects via “heavy lifts” – grueling slogs of painful work where you create everything from scratch. There is another way – you can slowly gather ideas, in the background and over time, using “slow burns.” Once the project gets underway, you’ll already have a rich collection of interesting ideas, insights, examples, facts, and illustrations that you can easily combine together without burning yourself out.”

The 10 principles of buiding a second brain, Forte Labs

The principle of slow burns vs. heavy lifts can also be applied to your lifestyle and fitness practice. In this context, “slow burns” means showing up consistently to your training sessions and reasonable nutrition regimen and merely doing so. Showing up consistently over the long term is enough for progress. That is if you value establishing a fitness lifestyle. Because the first question you may want to ask yourself is if you value fitness and physical performance in the first place.

If you do, implementing a slow-burn mindset may come more effortlessly than if you are attempting to internalize the belief that “exercise and eating healthy are good for you” only because of mimetic effects and because you can see this mania all around you in society. When it comes to habits and slow burns, establishing routines is the key. Accepting the mundanity of the activity is part of the process of creating a new routine and habit. Deriving dopamine and pleasure from the routine itself rather than from external rewards is a pivotal principle to establishing a successful habit or routine.

The way to derive dopamine and associate positive feelings with an activity is through *slow burns *and letting go. “Slow burns” means merely showing up over time and doing the thing, without expectations or trapping your identity into it. “Letting go” means dropping the emotional attachment to failure or success in doing an activity or achieving results through it.