I thought the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi was nauseatingly boring.

If you’ve never seen it, or never heard of it, the movie chronicles an 85-year old (at the time) sushi chef who is widely considered the greatest sushi chef in the world, who administers a 10-seat restaurant in a subway station in Tokyo.

Most people who write about Jiro Dreams wax poetic about mastery and the dedication to his craft he has exhibited over a literal lifetime of perfecting his sushi, and implore you to pursue your own endeavors with the same dogged determination to continual improvement.

I see something else.

Personally I can’t think of anything worse than doing the exact same thing every day for sixty years. Acknowledging that I’m oversimplifying and dismissing what I’m sure is an expression of creativity and innovation over that time, it’s still the same thing for six decades.

See, something I know about myself is that I don’t thrive on that end of the learning curve. The thought of the energy and time required to eke out that last little bit of improvement puts me to sleep.

I live for the front end of the learning curve. I’ll dive head first into something I know nothing about, apply the models and understandings I have from other things, and dig and experiment and stumble until I’ve got it mostly figured out. I don’t mind the difficulty and frustration of being bad at it initially. In due time I’ll get half-decent at it.

And then I’m ready for the next challenge.

I know this about myself, so I embrace it. I will never be the best in the world at anything, except maybe the best at getting decent at a lot of things. Not only am I ok with that, I’m absolutely thrilled that I know this about myself so I never have to beat myself up for not going too far past that point in the curve.

I just started baking sourdough bread a couple months ago. The first loaves were mediocre. Now they’re pretty damn good. They’re likely never going to win international competitions, althooooough someone did remark that my bread was better than a bakery in Philly that is known as one of the best in the country.

In general people only think of mastery as the “correct” route to take. You see it exalted, and spoken of as if it’s the only pursuit that’s noble enough to be worthy of your time.

Not everyone is going to be a master! There are dozens of reasons why, and they don’t really matter.

The important thing is that you can reduce your own internal friction significantly by recognizing and embracing which part of the learning curve you thrive in.

If you hate being a beginner and you meet a lot of internal resistance starting new things then perhaps sticking to tried and true is better for you. Maybe you’re even well suited to pursue mastery.

But even if not, certainly you shouldn’t force yourself to try lots of new things and beat yourself up because you don’t enjoy it.

Or, maybe you know you hate the initial stages of learning something new, you thrive in the middle ground, and you know you’re not interested in mastery. Well, at least you know which part of the dip you need to push through.

The possibilities for where you lie on that spectrum are endless, but the overarching point is to identify and embrace the part of the curve that for you represents the least internal friction.

That way, you can spend more time doing things you enjoy with ease and fluidity, and less time frustrated and upset.

This week has been, admittedly, pretty electric in Philly. In case you truly don’t pay attention to current events, the Eagle won the Super Bowl and people take that to be a Very Big Thing™ around here. Within a few minutes of the game being over hundreds of thousands of people had already clogged Broad St. and were marching towards City Hall. No idea what their plan was from that point. We’ve since had a parade and everyone is way happier than normal.

Now listen I am not big on the pigskin. In fact, I had purposefully boycotted the entire season and didn’t watch a single down. I don’t watch much football to begin with, but this season I made a point not to watch even if it was on around me. Between the systemic racism and total disregard for the health and wellness of players (not just the reckless disregard for the severity of concussions) I just can’t in good conscience contribute to it.

But, god damnit, sometimes your principled stand runs right into what is, whether you like it or not, a major social and historical event for a city. So I caved and watched the last two games.

You could write a dissertation on all the interesting things going on with something like this, but here’s what I really liked.

Listening to the analysts and commentators it was absolutely painfully clear that they neither expected Philadelphia to win but they didn’t even want them to win. Every possible opportunity to lean towards the Patriots in analysis and commentary was taken. At the end they were literally talking about what they’d “hope for” so that Tom Brady could pull off the comeback win.

And the Eagle simply did not give a fuck.

In a hilarious and impassioned rant, the Eagles’ center explained the team’s attitude towards all of the talking heads that dismissed them all season long.

And he closed it out with a rousing rendition of the famous “No one likes us, we don’t care​” football hooligan chant.

Here’s the thing. In probably the majority of cases where you are doing something fantastic people are going to expect you to fail, and they’re not even going to be disappointed when you do. If even a single guy on that field had decided late in the fourth quarter that he was just really tired and you know what, the Patriots really just are the better team and there’s no sense in continuing to push forward no one would have blamed him at all. The analysts would have talked about the Eagles’ improbable run that ended exactly as everyone expected it to.

But these guys decided they were going to ram through the dip with every bit of everything they had, talking heads be damned.

And look how that turned out.

You know it’s like I said the other day, you have to know when to quit and when to keep going.

But if you’re going to keep going, you better keep going no matter what anybody else says.

Nobody likes us?

It’s ok.

We don’t care.

You know those questions people ask rapid-fire at the end of podcasts? It seems like everyone sourced their list from the same place because they’re often the same, and I still manage to totally flub one here and there, like this one. But anyway generally I love doing podcasts and I like that part.

So a question people often ask is what book do you give away most often, and it’s a great question because I’m always able to answer it immediately.

Seth Godin’s The Dip.

I’m a big fan of Seth, I met him in 2004(?). He doesn’t like shaking hands, he really doesn’t like hugging.

I’ve given away literally hundreds of copies of this book. I like it mostly because it’s not some rah-rah about how you need to keep pushing forward at all costs, but instead it’s about quitting and cutting your losses when it’s not worth pushing through.

I got to thinking of it the other day because of the big dip we went through with Lift Weights Faster Daily. Most people wouldn’t think of this, but the fact that we have a database of over 550 exercises that have all been completely photographed with beautiful and instructive exercise descriptions written for them, not to mention about 50% have instructional videos and then on top of that we have a database of over 400 workouts that are all tied back to those exercises…

Well it’s just an insurmountable dip, let’s say a competitor who wanted to copy the idea, for someone to go through. I don’t remember if Seth makes this point in the book but it’s almost like the opposite of the dip is an asset in the sense that once you go through the dip what you’re left with is a massive asset. Do I need to explain the power of assets to you? Probably not, right?

Anyway, my point is not that you should keep pushing through and persisting no matter what, nor is my point that you should quit everything!

In fact knowing which route to take is exactly the challenging part and anyone who tells you they have the answers is full of shit.

But, you should have an overarching method and strategy to how you make those decisions. Mine is borne out of the same ideas that underlie my training philosophies – ease, lack of tension and friction, and congruence and resonance with what is best for me and my body.

What’s yours?