Motivate

If your New Year's resolution was to exercise more but you haven't been sticking with it, don't sweat - the medal of self-control isn't that straightforward.

I'm talking about the cycle of forgetting resolutions that we have experienced over the years. This is common to all of us in ways small and large. There's, of course, the lesson of keeping the true north in mind. To paraphrase Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. Little do we realize that instant gratification is more useful to motivate ourselves than long-term goal. Instead of fantasizing the health benefit like longevity, we should focus on an immediate payoff of exercise. What's important to nudge myself to exercise is that I can readily find its value.

Think about my experience this weekend, when my routine is to borrow a book to share with my daughter on her way to gymnastics class. I checked out 12 Great Tips on Writing Poetry today, and much to my surprise, my daughter finished the book quicker than I'd expected.

"Daddy, can you find the next one for me: 12 Great Tips on Writing Fiction?"

The easiest answer would be taking taxi to borrow that book, yet a little homunculus in my head continued to jump up and down, shouting at me - "but I should take the errand as a chance to exercise." I reasoned that my tight jeans (and equally tight schedule) won't be that good for running. My back-up plan is to figure out a game: head to library by taxi and then unlock a GoBee bike for return trip, trying to beat the time of taxi ride with a bike that cost me one-tenth of the taxi fare.

I don't think there's anything I find more blissful than such simple way of keeping my momentum to exercise.