Each year thousands of people take part in Tough Mudder events across the globe. Since beginning in 2010, the event has enjoyed soaring success with ever increasing numbers of people wanting to put themselves through the gruelling event. Many people have likened it to Navy Seal training, a myth the organisers are happy to go along with despite the fact that it was actually created by a couple of students studying at Harvard Business School.
Considering the extreme nature of the events, a spate of serious injuries and even death, one may wonder why so many people are clamouring to tick it off their bucket list. I believe the reason is that people like the IMAGE of themselves as being something more than their present reality. They like the idea that they can really push themselves and pretend to be a Navy Seal, and that IMAGE they have makes them feel better about themselves.
Of course, this is in no way going to prepare you to join the ranks of a regular garden variety Reserve Army let alone the Navy Seals, and obviously this one event is not going to make any difference to your overall level of fitness what so ever. And it goes without saying, that if your goal was to do something to help you get fit, could a program be designed that would be more demanding, more beneficial to your health but in an environment that was vastly safer where you didn’t end up covered in mud? Of course it can! But that wouldn’t give you the same IMAGE now would it.
The iconic image that people have of Tough Mudder is people covered in mud. The worse things seem to get, the better they feel the experience was. The dirtier and more covered in mud they are when they cross the finish line, the better they feel they did on the course!
In fact, a study conducted in the US at one of these events found a direct correlation between how dirty people were when they finished and their perceived level of fitness. Merely getting covered in mud can convince people that they are fitter then they really are!
How We Make Things Worse In Our Daily Lives
Well, the point I wanted to make here is that most people seem to have the same idea towards life. Just like the Tough Mudder who thinks they’re 10 times fitter than they are just because they’re covered in mud, people will often mistake the dirt and mud of life for progress. In other words, when we feel we’re not making any progress towards a particular goal, making the process harder or more painful can sometimes fool us in to thinking that we must be making progress because after all, we’re putting ourselves through all this torture!
We fool ourselves into thinking that if we’re being ultra-disciplined and putting ourselves through hell by making things harder then we must be making progress. Usually the opposite is true! Progress is the best indicator of progress, not merely having a difficult process.
I had a very real example of this in my own life a while back. Like most successful people, I believe it is vital to have a mentor, and I have several. Earlier this year I made the mistake of hooking up with the WRONG kind of mentor. I mean, I did all my due diligence and researched him and thought he would be the perfect mentor to help me get towards a particular goal. Once the relationship started however, and I signed on the dotted line, handed over my money, things took a dark turn. This supposed Mentor did not turn out to be as successful as he had made out. In fact he turned into a bit of a psycho! Told me that I had to cut everything out of my life except for this 1 goal, relinquish all my friendships and cut off all ties with my family for ever more and do nothing in life except work towards this 1 goal!
Yes, he had himself become a victim of the Tough Mudder Mindset. He was looking to make up for his lack of results by making his processes more difficult. The more sacrifices he made, the more he told himself that he was making progress, the more difficult and tortuous he made his processes, the more he felt he was achieving. Needless to say, I ended that collaboration quick smart. Sadly though there were many others who didn’t and continue to be duped by him.
Rather than adopting the Tough Mudder mindset, I believe that we should in fact be doing the opposite. I’ve always believed that the key to success lay not in how complicated or difficult you could make things, but rather in how simple you can make things. The more you can simplify your processes, the more successful you will be.
Likewise, I certainly know from my own experience that the more invested you are in a particular process, the harder it will be for you to be objective about the process. I know that there are times in the past when I have held on to ideas for too long because I’d already done so much work on the idea that it was hard to say this isn’t working and walk away.
But if you want to be successful, you have to be willing to let go of ideas that are not serving you. I now regularly go through a process of analysing all of the things that I do and asking myself, is this really working for me or am I suffering from Tough Mudder syndrome. Have I invested so much of myself into this, or am I going through such hell to make it work that I’m no longer able to objectively evaluate if this is working or not.
It’s all too easy when we don’t see results showing up in our lives, to punish ourselves and say well I’m just not working hard enough. So we say if I punish myself more, or if I work harder or longer, it will work. Like a mud covered Tough Mudder, we say the worse it gets, the more progress I must be making.
But as I said, the best indicator of progress is progress. If you’re not making progress then just making things more difficult is not going to make you any more successful. In fact, it will make you less successful.
Your homework is to do a self-inventory. Look at all the area’s of your life where you’re not getting the results you want and ask yourself, have you made this unnecessarily difficult, have you invested too much to be able to just walk away?
"The more you can simplify what you’re doing, the more productive and successful you will be."
As always, leave me a comment below to let me know how you’re getting on with this…