Dakota Coombes Blog

My wife has an ability I envy - well multiple abilities, but I am going to focus on one.

She has the ability to bust her ass anytime she works. Somehow, she is able to crush the activation energy needed to get started on something and can knock out tasks before I even have a chance to start.

I, on the other hand, will wait. I will let the pressure of delaying the task build to a point where it gives me near crippling anxiety before I do it. Sometimes I let the anxiety take over and don’t ever do the tasks - if you watch my early videos, the plants in the corner are a prime example of this.

We were discussing this today and we came to a partial conclusion of what has led to these differences in our approaches.

For me, going through school was pretty easy. I could learn most things - unless I was disinterested. If I was disinterested, I didn’t push myself hard at all. I couldn’t force myself to conquer the activation energy without procrastinating. Even then, I would briefly learn whatever I needed to, brain dump it, and then let it go.

This got me through high school and college with relative ease and has even propelled me to a certain level of success within my career.

The problem that this has created for me is that I really don’t know how to work hard. When I work hard at something I am interested in, I absolutely smash it. I always have, but it’s rare for me to do this. Unlike her, I haven’t built the skill of working hard to work hard.

Contrasting this with her, she talked about how she always had to push herself to do well in school. She always had to work hard. To start projects the moment that she got them. She had to push herself in volleyball to have any chance at competing with her peers.

I witnessed this first-hand when she was in college and grew to really admire that about her. The craziest part to me was that it seemed like she didn’t even realize how hard she worked compared to most people. She would crush a week’s worth of work in hours. Not because she had to but because that’s just her modus operandi.

This was baffling to me. Especially considering that I knew I barely pushed myself and would get lauded by my employers for doing the bare minimum.

I’ve told her many times that any employer that would pass her up would have to be idiots because she is the type that you could hire into a field that is completely unrelated to anything she’s ever done and she would pick up on it within the week. Not purely based on intelligence but with her drive to attack her work.

You could argue that she has “talent” but I would argue that she is good at pretty much anything she does because she is relentless in her desire to be the best and outwork others.

Me on the other hand…. I didn’t grow up like that. In fact, I’d argue that I have coasted through much of my life to this point. That isn’t to say that I haven’t worked hard at some things, but anytime I find myself bored, where she would buckle down, I find something new and shiny to distract myself.

This theme has repeated itself throughout my life, predating the time that we have been together.

I used to compete with one of my friends in college to see who would do better on our exams in the classes we had together. We took many exams together and I beat him on all but one. He would shake his head and say that I was so lucky as I never really studied - many times simply cramming content the hour leading to the exam and passing it with some degree of ease.

To contrast, he would spend hours the night before studying. What he did took effort. It took him being intentional with his time. He was also a wrestler and if you have ever seen a wrestler cutting to make weight - you know just how serious their work ethic is. So when he said he spent 3 hours studying, I knew he was busting his ass.

I would be completely locked in to what I was studying in my cram session but really I was good at learning what I needed to to be a king at effective process of elimination on our multiple choice exams.

We ended up working for the same company in the same role a year after graduating from college. He absolutely hustled and would double the inputs that I did to be successful. I would lean on my ability to connect with people, doing half the work with my inputs and match the level of success he experienced.

We would joke about this but I believe that ultimately, his need to work harder to match my output set him up for greater success than what I would identify as natural talent.

I struggle more than both him and my wife when things get hard. I am more likely to throw in the towel when I run into a wall. They are more likely to run harder and harder until they look like Juggernaut running through a wall - busting through it with ease coming on the back of intentional effort.

This has translated to them having a stronger ability to work hard while I am now working to refine and develop this skill.

While I know my friend envied me at times because I didn’t have to work as hard as him - I now find myself jealous that he had to work hard because it fostered the development of his strong will that I find myself having to cultivate now - much later in life.

This realization has helped me set the goal of being a person that does the hard things so I can achieve my goals. David Goggins talks about his goal of being the baddest motherfucker alive. While that’s not quite the degree that I am trying to achieve - I want to show myself that I can - in-fact - create the life that I have always believed I could.

I have always believed in my ability to be successful. I have always believed that I can create the life that I want. That I can have an impact on people.

But I haven’t put the effort in to earnestly pursue this goal.

Until now.

Here is what I am currently doing to accomplish this:

My current goals are 2 blog posts per week, 1 video post per week, going to the gym 5 times a week, hitting 12k steps a day (increasing 1k per week until I hit 15k steps), and hitting my calorie targets to cut weight (currently 2730).

My goal isn’t to just hit these goals - it’s to crush them (okay, the calories right now I am aiming to hit - not crush… I don’t want to be at 1k in calories - I’m already hungry most of the day).

So what does this look like?

Instead of 2 blog posts per week, I am targeting 1 blog post per day. Once I am consistently hitting that, I will increase it again.

My goal of 1 video per week? I am targeting two per day until I hit 50 videos posted to YouTube. I am targeting a video library of 100 videos before I publicize all of them. I am curating a content library so people can consume as much of my content as they would like initially. I want them to be able to determine if what I have made so far is helpful for them and having more content will allow them to judge me off more than one video.

The above two goals are areas that I am really pushing myself in. I coded my website with the help of AI to get a minimum viable product that I can post my blog posts to. I knew nothing about coding before doing this.

I have always wanted to do YouTube but locked myself into niches I couldn’t sustainably do like fish videos in high school and product reviews (which I enjoy but can’t see myself doing as a full time job) - this is the big pivot.

I am pushing volume right now because I need reps. I need to grow my creativity muscles to refine my product. I want to make an impact on people and this is forced, rapid growth to help me accomplish this. Make no mistake - I am dedicating to all of my goals for the long term but I need to learn how to work hard and if I work in 3 year chunks, I will limit myself and how hard I push.

There was a study of college students making perfect pottery or pictures or something - I don’t really care - but those that did more reps had better final projects than those that focused on perfection. It’s time to be the guy that works hard and does the reps.

As for my lifting, steps, and calories goals, I have hired a dietitian for help. I pay $280 a month because I hit a wall where I wasn’t cutting the fat I wanted to despite consistency. I knew I needed to be better about my diet but didn’t want to take the time to do this so I paid someone to coach me - afterall, I have been coached for most of my life… I just was lucky and it was free up to this point.

I have a spreadsheet where I track all of my progress and we do weekly check-ins in addition to him coaching my lifting form as we are doing hypertrophy training that I am not accustomed to.

Pushing myself here is not over-eating. It is pushing myself to failure on my sets and pushing my brain past the point where it thinks I am going to fail. It’s hitting my step goals even if it takes me to 11:30 at night - I hate when I do this btw. If you are going to try to follow this, learn from me and aim for half of your steps by noon, before you have gone to the gym if possible. It makes life so much easier.

I share what I am doing, not to make you feel like you should do the same thing - do what’s right for you. I want you to see the intentionality that is going into this so when I make it, you know what I did to do it.

Find what works for you but be intentional. If you don’t think you can do something - push yourself to do it.

I can feel my fear in creating 2 videos a day. That means I need to do it to show myself I’m capable.

Being naturally talented is only a gift if you learn the discipline of hard work. Otherwise, it can serve as your biggest flaw, causing you to envy those that achieve what they want in life through the relentless pursuit of their goals.

Find what motivates you. Find your why. Get after it. Do the hard thing.