Obviously, the most important and urgent task first. Next come those urgent but not so important tasks and those important but not so urgent tasks. Tasks that are “perceived” to be neither very important nor urgent tend to be left till the end, that is, if they ever get finished at all.

The problem is, as you may have guessed now, sometimes your perceptions of what is important or urgent are not very accurate.

Let’s say you have been stuck at the same weights for bench press for a few weeks now. That means you have a task of trying to figure out the reason why you’ve been stuck there for so long. Unfortunately, that task is only one of the many different tasks you have to deal with in your busy everyday life. Now, the question is: When are you going to finish that task (i.e. how important and urgent do you perceive this task to be)?

Your perception of the importance and urgency of this task clearly depends on your knowledge and understanding of training for muscle for an ectomorph. Specifically, if you are not aware of the fact that you HAVE to be able to gain weights on your bench press EVERY time you bench (once or twice a week, depending on whether you are a beginner or intermediate), being stuck at the same weights for a few weeks doesn’t seem like such a big deal to you. Also, at the right rep range (8-10), not being able to increase the weights means you are not giving your body enough stress to stimulate muscle growth (i.e. you are not getting any bigger). Not knowing this, you may not find it so urgent to figure out why you’ve been stuck for so long (two or three weeks are extremely long given that your goal is to gain 15 pounds of muscle in 15 weeks).

So how do you fix this problem? Here are my suggestions:

• Carefully read these three great books on training: Starting Strength, Beyond Brawn, and Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. You will get a comprehensive understanding of training just with three books, and will be able to have correct perceptions of the importance and urgency of any task related to training from then on.
• It takes a while to completely digest all the teachings from these books (or any other books or forum on training). In other words, it takes a while for you to develop the proper perceptions that we’ve been talking about. Until then, what to do?
  • It is advisable that you make training your top 1 or 2 priorities in life (three months is best).
  • With that, everything is easily put into perspective: anything related to training must be done first because it is your top priority in your life now (for these 3 months).
  • Here’s the post explaining in more details why you should make training your top priority in life for a while.

You think about many random things. Pay attention to them. Do you see that there is always a plot to everything you think about?

When you think about a girl you’re having a crush on, do you think only of her beautiful face? Noo. You also think about some special moments you shared with her, how you can get her to be your girlfriend, and all the fun activities you two will have together. There are countless scenarios that you can easily come up with involving you and that girl.

The same goes with thinking about a game, a movie, an activity, or a road trip, etc. It is always a story that you think about. Never a single image. And you always try to come to an ending for every story—most often a happy ending. You come up with many constructive thoughts that help you reach your happy ending. The whole process is fun, and that’s why you always think about everything that way.

So, you have one or two projects/goals to achieve. Every night in bed, you will think about how you can achieve that goal, what to do to get you there—all the different scenarios, different activities that you can think of to get you closer to your happy ending. Of course, the process gets you pumped up on working toward reaching your goals. In fact, it is such an inspiring and motivational experience that you cannot wait to wake up the next morning and lift some heavy weights. You become one with your goals. Achieving your goals and thinking about them are among the few things in your life that give you happiness and peace of mind.

You become super focused on your goals. That is the best thing ever!

Unfortunately, no matter how pumped up you are thinking about your goals, the experience pales in comparison with the pleasure you get from fantasizing about a computer game, a girl, or a movie, etc. And thanks to the well-known fact that your mind prefers to think only about what is most pleasurable, you’ll quickly find yourself barely ever think about your goals at all.

That’s why you should control your desires: so that you don’t have girls, games, or any distraction to think about. Start your journey fresh, without any distraction to worry about. Keep focus on the goal throughout the journey, and you will enjoy every minute of it. Lose focus and soon doubts will block you from ever reaching the end of the journey.

“The first law of success is concentration – to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right or to the left.”  -William Matthews

So what to do now? We all have other important/fun things to do. How can you fit working out into your already overwhelmed schedule?

First, answer this question: Do you want to be that guy who doesn’t really know what he wants, or maybe kinda knows what he wants but never manages to do anything that will get him closer to it? Or do you want to be the man who knows EXACTLY what he wants and is determined and focused on getting JUST that?

You’re a MAN. Men KNOW what they want. Men GET what they want. Women LOVE men who KNOW and GET what they want. And people RESPECT and FOLLOW men who KNOW and GET what they want.

So sit down and ask yourselves now, what do YOU want? Not right now, but in the large scheme of your life. What do you want to happen in your life in the next 3 years, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years?

All those things will give you directions throughout the rest of your life, or at least the next 3 years. You cannot have everything in the world, so choose carefully. Choose only 1 or 2 things for your 3-year plan (a better physique is one of them). Something that will make you miserable if you don’t achieve it. Something that will give you guilty conscience anytime you are not working toward achieving it.

Now look again at your daily schedule, STOP doing anything that does not contribute toward reaching your goals.

Think it will be tough? Well then here is the truth you may not know about yet:

If you have a burning desire for something, and you have set a clear goal and a good plan for achieving it, then working toward achieving you goal will give more pleasure than doing anything else.

Wanna watch a TV Show?  When you know that watching it will take away your time from studying and working, thus indirectly taking away your time from training, hindering you from reaching your goal, and making you miserable, do you still want to watch it?

Let’s get a Fresh Start. Let’s throw away all the trash that is complicating your life. Let’s break free. Let’s claim back your precious time. Let’s plan for a better body. Let’s plan for a better life style. Let your dreams take over you. Let them give you the power and motivation to dare to dream big, to set lofty goals, and to push on through.

No more watching stupid youtube videos. No more staying up late to finish up on your work just because you were lazy the whole day. No more hanging out with friends that want to hold you down. No more wasting time with girls that are below your league. That’s right. You will be HOT soon. Your league is different now. Concentrate on your goals. Focus on working toward achieving everything you want. And set your expectations on a different level. You are a new man now!

Welcome to a new life.

RECAP: Sit down and spend some time to determine exactly what you want in the next few years. Examine your daily schedule and STOP doing anything that does not contribute toward getting you what you want.

You will naturally think more and more about that girl. That lack of concentration means longer time needed to finish your tasks, and that in turn means you will have less time for training (working out, eating, sleeping, and resting).

As I said, at first training must be one of your top two priorities in life. Only after it has become a part of your life can you consider having another one or at most two other priorities. Too serious? Well, if you want to transform that skinny frame of yours into a great physique in less than 2 years and save time for other awesome stuffs that come after, then that’s what you have to do. Training to get big is your goal, and you have a strict plan to reaching that goal. Don’t decide to pick up a goal if you are going to sabotage its attainment by taking up something else along the way.

Having a crush on a girl would greatly reduce the amount of time and concentration you can afford on thinking about training.

The same applies for playing a new game or watching a new tv shows (but to a lesser extent).

The point is: Things that seem totally unrelated to training actually affect the result of your training a great deal. Be careful of anything that take your focus away from training.

Remember:

“The first law of success is concentration – to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right or to the left.” Napoleon Hill.

The fact is, no matter how old you are now—16, 21, 24, or 30 (or even older)—there are always things that you are supposed to do. Your parents, your friends, your environment already set rigid expectations of what you CAN and MUST achieve in life.

And that is all totally and perfectly natural. We all hang out with people that do not push us out of our comfort zones (most similar to us). We go to school and work at companies with people that are within our intellectual levels.

The point is: everything is fine as long as you share the goals and viewpoints with the people you hang out with.

Problem is, you are always special in some way. As an ectomorph, you have a very unique set of problems to deal with everyday. And a unique set of problems calls for a unique set of solutions.

Specifically, you have a very important decision to make:

Choosing between:

• A low-risk, low-fun choice of enjoying all the little things just as everyone else around you (not as fun to you as to other people because you are an ectmorph; they are not)!
• A riskier but higher-return choice of training properly for an awesome physique and sacrificing the many little fun activities you can enjoy with your normal friends.

Just because you are not doing all the fun things everyone is enjoying does not mean that you don’t know how to enjoy life. On the contrary, it means you want to enjoy life at a higher level than other people and you have the right long-term view.

Sometimes, in order to enjoy something great in life, you have to sacrifice all of the little things. That’s just a choice.

RECAP: Our friends, our parents, and our environments dictate what we are supposed to do. As ectomorphs, we have a very unique set of problems. And the solutions require that we give up enjoying many of the little things and work for the big pay-off: a great awesome physique.

Obviously, then, being gung-ho for one or two weeks or even a few months is not enough to get you big. Especially for ectomorphs, even if you gain some muscles after that short period, you will soon lose it all away if you don’t keep on working hard. After all, nature never intends for your body to have much muscle anyway.

The question now is: How can you be consistent?

By having a consistent lifestyle.

How can you have a consistent lifestyle? By following basically the same routine everyday, with maybe a very slight degree of variation for weekends and holidays. For example, you can vary your meals just enough so that you can stuff enough food down your throat everyday. As we are all busy with thousands of things to worry about, I think it would be best to pretty much eat the same thing everyday. After all, eating is now a JOB, not something you do for sheer pleasure or to survive. Other examples: go to bed, wake up, go to the gym, and eat meals at the same times everyday, regardless of whether it is weekend or weekday.

What are some of the factors that bring chaos to your lifestyle? Friends, family, new activities, new hobbies, etc. In short, anything that gets introduced to your life after you have already settled down with a good routine. As you first start to train seriously, it is best to make training your number 1 priority in life for at least 3 months. You will make progress, understand almost everything you need to know about training, and get into a healthy and consistent lifestyle. After that, slowly and carefully, you can introduce more activities to your life.

RECAP: Ectomorphs like you will NEVER get big unless you are consistent with your efforts and lifestyle. Friends, family, new activities, new hobbies, etc. are all possible sources of chaos to your lifestyle. So be careful.

Source:

1. First photo: yankeeschick.mlblogs.com
2. Second photo: politicalhumor.about.com with my own caption
3. Third photo: clintjcl.wordpress.com with my own caption
4. Fourth photo: pictures-of-cartoon.blogspot.com with my own caption

I was not always like this though. Like most people, I used to yearn for a thousand little things. From reading glossy magazines, from looking at other cool people, from watching exciting commercials, I kept adding to my list of wanted stuff and skills almost every other day. Soon, I spent more time on daydreaming about these trivial objects and knacks than on finishing my actual tasks at hand. And the thing is, none of these desires are strong enough to seriously push me to take action toward attaining them. They were just there all the time, nagging on me constantly, making it impossible to focus on anything. I was never satisfied with what I had. I always wanted more. I was never really happy.

For you ectomorphs training to become stronger and bigger, it is imperative that you spend the majority of time, energy and money on training at least for a short period of 12-16 weeks (then you can gradually add more goals). How, then, can you stay focused on training when you want a thousand things? How can you keep your burning desire for a muscular physique when it is lost in a sea of other yearnings? How can you keep feeding your hunger for gaining massive muscle while you have to feed countless other hungers? It is simply impossible.

So:

• Control your desires. Pay attention to where you get your desires.
• Limit your desires to only 2 or 3. Having only ONE desire for a short period of time (e.g. 3 months) is the best!
• Make sure your burning desires are strong enough to push you through when the going gets tough. If you are not willing to jump through hoops for your desires, then get rid of them. They will just make you unhappy.

RECAP: Have only 2 to 3 desires (training for a bigger and stronger physique is one of them) and make sure those desires are strong enough to push you on till you’ve achieved what you want.

Related posts: How many goals should you have beside your training goal?