Anything above zero compounds.
There’s a story behind that to upgrade your mental game today. And this message is dedicated to the amazing warrior Ginny MacColl.
This is upgrade number 1235.
You may think you started too late, but upgraded thinking knows the only start that’s too late is the one that never happens.
This story is titled Beginning.
Ginny MacColl was a Broadway dancer. When she was growing up, strength training wasn’t encouraged for women. Too bulky. Not feminine. So the first time she stepped into a gym, she was retired. She was 63.
Two things got her there. Her doctor told her she had osteopenia, the thing that comes before osteoporosis. And she watched her daughter, Jessie Graff, a Hollywood stuntwoman and one of the top athletes on American Ninja Warrior. Ginny saw the grace. The strength. The muscles. And she thought, “I don’t know why I don’t have those.”
So she asked her daughter how to start. Jessie said, “Do pull-ups.” Ginny put a bar in a doorframe. It took her one full year to do one pull-up. One year. One rep. But she kept at it. Up and down. Up and down. Every day.
Ali Abdaal says, “Anything above zero compounds positively. But zero compounds negatively.” One year. One rep. That’s what above zero looks like. It doesn’t look like much. Until it does. Then a neighbor who’d built obstacles in his yard let her train on them.
Then the producers called. Then she was standing on the course under the television lights thinking, “Oh my gosh, what have I done?” She cleared the first step. On the second step, she went straight into the water. She came up devastated. And her daughter, the one Ginny had cheered for all those years, said, “Don’t let one fall define you.”
So Ginny kept going. She started posting her workouts. People wrote back saying they were getting out of their recliners because of her. Finding out she was motivating other people motivated her to go back. She’s competed on American Ninja Warrior four times. At 71, she became the oldest person ever to clear an obstacle on the show. She holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest competitive female ninja athlete. Her doctor told her she stopped the osteopenia in its tracks.
She says she’s stronger now than she ever was. Think about where Ginny started. The world record started on the day she couldn’t do a single pull-up. The year of failing to do one rep wasn’t the delay before her story. Every day you wait, it gets a little easier to keep waiting. But one rep, even a rep you can’t finish yet, starts the other kind of compounding. You don’t need a perfect start. You need a beginning.
The better story to tell yourself is, “I don’t need to start big. I just need to start above zero.” Go get your one rep today. Just imagine where you’d be a year from now if you did one rep of it today.
Tell me a story of someone who started late to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What would you start today if you knew it wasn’t too late?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com. Please like, comment, subscribe, or follow. Your engagement helps the algorithm and makes it easier for others to find these messages.
