May 01 • 2 min read

🌲 The Ground Up Newsletter: Issue 102

The Lifestyle Barrier and "Doing the Thing"

This Week's Note

The Lifestyle Barrier

The Lifestyle Barrier represents the contextualized work it will take any person pursuing any activity to build and develop skill. In essence, the Life Style Barrier is the culmination of the effort, time, and capacity it will take to continue growing. For most, approaching the Life Style Barrier (LB) represents the end of the road or at the very least the end of progress. Being asked to change our habits, our routines, how we spend our time for the sake of our interests, hobbies, or silly muses is for most, not worth the cost.

A general refusal to change how we go about life for the sake of progression shouldn’t be a surprise though. In fact, most of us will decline to summit most LBs (lifestyle barriers) that come our way. We decline an opportunity to change when we (for whatever reason) can’t commit to the training, investment, schooling, or networking it will require. Most often, we develop our craft to the point of no return and choose to stay on the shore. For nine out of ten hobbies, pursuits, and endeavors declining the challenge of the LB is (probably) the right call. We can’t go changing our lives at the whim of everything we find appealing. If we became obsessed with every direction the wind blew we’d barely make any meaningful progress at all.

In practice there is nothing wrong with declining the opportunity to overcome LSB, but every so often we’ll feel a tug toward a new interest, a call to the wild, a beckon to the unpredictable and it's these moments we should be okay with change being introduced to our lives. Luckily, lifestyle change is not some menacing foe, we do not have to take out a second mortgage to truly establish ourselves dedicated writers, teachers, golfers, or woodworkers.

To overcome a Lifestyle Barrier we simply need to pursue and reflect upon what we’re doing and change in accordance with what our practice seems to need. Maybe a Lifestyle Barrier is packing a running bag so you can hit the trail after work, maybe it's deciding to take night classes, maybe it's hiring a career counselor. When we allow our lived (and contextualized) experiences to influence how we go about developing our skills we honor the call of our passions without sacrificing the rest of our lives to do so.