Invest in Yourself

Written in 2012, in my sixth pro season. The three things at the bottom I still do.

About seven years before I wrote this — so around 2005, the year my hip was replaced — I found a book that reshaped how I thought about my own body. Core Performance, by Mark Verstegen.

One paragraph did it. I'm paraphrasing from memory:

People will take extraordinary care of their cars. Oil changed at 3,000 miles, dents fixed, tyres rotated on schedule. But when it comes to their own bodies, care and maintenance are too much of an inconvenience.

I read that at twenty, two years after a surgeon replaced my hip, and it landed somewhere permanent.

What investing in yourself actually means

It isn't realising health is important. Everybody realises that.

It's being willing to spend actual resources — money, time, effort — on the decisions that determine how you perform. In sport or anywhere else.

Health should never be the secondary thing. And your level of discipline will always be proportional to how much you want out of whatever it is you do. Those two sentences have held up for me across twenty years, a pro career, and a business.

Three things that actually worked

Surround yourself with the right people, deliberately. Not passively — invest time in those relationships the way you'd invest in anything else you wanted to grow.

Buy the thing that makes the good decision easy. You love ice cream. This week you buy strawberries instead. It sounds trivially small, and it is, and that's the point: these compound. Once you start making that decision consistently you gain momentum, and the right choice keeps getting easier and more satisfying.

Get a dry erase board and put it where you can't avoid it. By your bedroom door, on the fridge. Write things where your eyes land constantly. Mine has said "Get Better EVEryday" and "Sweat equity" and, plenty of times, just a reminder to do my push-ups.

That last one is the one people skip and it might be the strongest. It's a positive commercial running for your subconscious every time you open the fridge. You cannot un-see something you've walked past forty times.

Why any of this matters

Once you decide to invest in what you want and go at it every day, you've already got most of what you were chasing. The rest is details.

The thoughts you have the moment your eyes open in the morning are the fuel for the whole day, and you get to choose them. That isn't something you figure out once. It's a practice: change how you think, execute, refine, repeat.

Swap "baseball" for whatever your thing is. It works the same.

Stay ruthless.