urge – From the desk of Adam Thomas

You can’t destroy energy.

That is the first law of thermodynamics.

When you resist the urge, you are trying to destroy it. This will not bring your desired effect.

What happens instead of destroying the urge is you give it energy. Like I mentioned yesterday, you create a slingshot effect.

By pushing that energy down, you are creating a force for it to come up.

That’s why that part of the training montage doesn’t sit right with me. Stories matter. If it seems rational to fight the urge, then I will try.

Remember your last diet. You tried to destroy that urge to eat pizza and eventually you found yourself eating pizza, ice cream, and chocolate cake.

Disaster.

So what can we do instead?

Listen.

That’s it. Just listen to that urge. Don’t try to explain why it exists. Just listen.

Don’t force the unenforceable

I am a big fan of Kung Fu movies.

One of the major relationships in kung fu movies is the connection between student and teacher. My favorite part of that relationship is the training montage.

The training montage is where the young and rambunctious student learns all the cool moves you see the master do in the beginning. After a few minutes, the student becomes a fighting machine.

There is always one part of the montage that bothered me. The movie shows the student in “perfect meditation.” Nothing bothers him. After running a few miles, every vice that got to him before his training is now ineffective.

He somehow mastered his urges. He has turned into a robot. A high-flying Kung Fu robot.

The reason it didn’t sit well with me is that when I try to fight my urges, I never become a high-flying kung-fu robot. I don’t even become a low flying kung-fu robot.

I just lose.

After a few days of me resisting, the urge comes back and does so with a vengeance.

You can’t destroy energy. That is the first law of thermodynamics. By resisting the urge, you are loading the urge into a slingshot to hit you square in the face.

What can you do? Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Before then, if you never watched Drunken Master, do yourself a favor, and catch it where you can.