Imagine you are walking along the beach one day and see a lamp in the sand. It looks just like the lamp you saw in the move Aladdin so you pick it up and rub it. Suddenly you are transported into a room and see the largest book shelf you have ever seen in your life. It is wall to wall, floor to ceiling, nothing but books. The sheer vastness of it overwhelms you. After a few moments of gawking a genie appears. “What is contained in these books are all of the secrets to life. Whatever you want to know or do in life is contained in these. You have two options. The first is that I will give you complete access to these books. You can read them whenever you want, as often as you want, and take them wherever you want. I promise you that once you have read all of these books you will know everything that you need to know to achieve whatever you want out of life. The second option is you hire me. I have read every single one of these books and know them backwards and forwards. Not only that I have coached thousands of other people and helped them achieve everything they could possibly think of.” Your first immediate response is “What does it cost?” “Everything you own.” is his response.
So what would you do? Would you make that transaction? It ultimately boils down to time and surety. Would you be willing to trade all of the time that it would take you to read the books, implement them in your life, go through the trials and errors and all of the failures? Would you bet on yourself that you would be able to implement all of the information successfully? Or would you trade everything you own to have someone walk along with you who can guarantee your success in a much shorter time.
Ultimately this is a decision that we all must make in our lives on a much smaller scale. This is something that I have thought about a lot recently as I have always tended to try to do things by myself. I have learned a lot of lessons but it has also taken me a long time to learn some of these lessons. Looking back on it I could have saved myself a lot of time and heart ache by seeking out help earlier. Obviously in this story the price is much more than most of us are asked. However, if we were willing, hypothetically, to give everything we have to guarantee results then we should be willing to pay much less if we knew we were going to get what we were after. The only thing it is up to us to decipher is if the person we are looking to hire can actually get us where we want to go.
Health and fitness can feel like a vast overwhelming bookshelf. There are so many people these days saying so many different things that it can be nearly impossible to determine what to do. There is so much information readily available that the lack of information is no longer the problem, as it was in previous centuries. The problem is now determining which information to follow. I would encourage each of you to think about this parable in the context of health and fitness. Are you willing to try to figure it all out by yourself? Are you willing to sacrifice the time and surety of success for the money it would cost you to hire a coach? To hire someone who has helped hundreds of others before them achieve results? Every person has to decide but it is a decision each of us has to make for ourselves. Because, as Rush famously said, “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”