This message is not for everyone. It is not for those who are genuinely unable to act due to circumstances beyond their control. This is a direct, honest conversation for those of us who are able, but have chosen not to be willing. The ones who feel the spirit isn’t willing and the body has grown weak.
You know who you are.
You’re the one choosing the bottle over your family. The couch over your health. The slow, quiet surrender over the hard, necessary fight for your own life. You are waiting for the end to come, and you have decided to just sit there and take it.
This is not a judgment. It is a diagnosis. Because I have been you. I know the profound, gravitational pull of that apathy. And I am here to tell you, from the other side, that it is a lie. It is a comfortable cage. It is a slow-motion suicide, and you are the only one who holds the key.
The first step out of that cage is not complicated. It does not require a gym membership, a personal trainer, or a fancy diet plan. The first step is simply to get up and move. To exercise.
The mission is not to get ripped or to run a marathon. The mission is to do one simple, powerful thing: to give yourself time. Time alone in your own head, away from the noise of the world. Time to just take in the scenery, to feel your own lungs work, to listen to your own heartbeat, and to remember that you are a living, breathing creature who is still in the fight.
You’ll tell me you hate it. You’ll tell me you have no motivation. I get it. I used to hate to run. Hated it with a passion.
Then, after 9/11, the movie Black Hawk Down came out. I was watching it, and I saw the scene where the first helicopter gets shot down. The rage I felt… the aggression… seeing my brothers in that situation… it made me so angry I just started sprinting. I was running a 6:30 mile pace for a half a mile before I even realized what I was doing.
I took that emotion, that raw anger, and I consciously and deliberately forged it into a tool. I tricked myself. I built an emotional connection between that feeling of righteous fire and the physical act of running. Now, it is a trigger that I built on purpose.
So I ask you: What is your trigger? What is the one thing—a memory, a song, a movie scene—that makes you feel something real, something powerful? Find it. Latch onto it. Use it as the fuel for your first step.
The mission is simple. It is not to be perfect. It is not to be an athlete. It is to take that one, single, difficult, and profoundly necessary first step.
The rest of your life is waiting for you on the other side of it.