Less Talking, More Doing

As a former professional athlete, I see gyms differently than most. For me, the gym was my workplace. I didn’t go there for fun or for leisure or so I could film myself doing curls and because of that, I find the gym behavior of mere mortals hilarious.

It starts with their outfits, which don’t make it clear that they’re serious about working out but do make it clear that they’re serious about the time they’ve put into making it look like they work out. For the guys, it’s something from the future, as if they’re lifting weights on a spaceship. For the gals, it’s something that shows off just enough skin that the Instagram photo they’ll inevitably take will get the appropriate number of likes.

Then there is the seriousness with which they approach their workouts. It’s as if they think they’re what I once was: a professional. They approach each lift with the gravity of an autopsy, an attitude that’s aided by the ubiquitous headphones, as if they couldn’t possibly work out without the perfect playlist or podcast in their ears.

The coup de grace, though, is the lifts they do—-lifts that cause me to nearly buckle in laughter. They train as if they’re doing the last bit of sculpting before a competition; as if everything else on their bodies is perfect and now they just need to GET IN THIS LAST SET OF DIPS BRO! The other day, I saw a guy who’d brought with him a harness for his head so he could do some kind of neck-strengthening lift that would only be appropriate for an outside linebacker.

What these folks need to do, of course, is to think less about weightlifting accoutrement and more about why they’re there in the first place. And then, maybe someday, when they’re working out at Musk’s Fitness on Mars, they can apply all these accessories.

But this isn’t just about the gym. We live in a time when people seem less interested in doing the thing and more interested in looking like they do the thing. People call themselves entrepreneurs but do very little entrepreneuring. People say they’re writers but ask them what they’ve written and they clam up like a virgin on a first date. The “networkers” know nothing of networking. The “influencers” do no influencing. And God help us with the AI experts.

All of it serves as a reminder of something we all know but often forget: the harder someone tries to look like they’re doing something, the less of that thing they’re actually doing.

Stop talking about the thing you want to be. Instead, do the thing you want to do. And then let other people talk about what you’ve done.