Joy & Curiosity #56 - by Thorsten Ball - Register Spill

There’s a certain category of often repeated sayings that, even though you’ve heard them all your life, only truly make sense many years after you first heard them. “Life’s not fair”, or “money doesn’t buy happiness”, or, hey: meta, “you’ll understand when you’re older”. As a six-year-old, you say “totally” when someone says “money doesn’t buy happiness”, but only when you have or earn money do you start to see what the phrase wants to say. One of them, for me, was “don’t lie to yourself.” As a six-year-old, I went “roger that, why would I?” and shrugged it off. It took me about twenty-five more years and starting to lift weights to understand what it means. Because when you have 150kg on your back and someone tells you to do as many reps as you can, it’s very tempting to tell yourself "that’s it, two reps, can’t do more.” It’s very easy to tell yourself you did something with good form. It’s very comfortable to believe that you did as much as you could. It’s convenient to say “no, I’m

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