Which wolf are you feeding?
An old Cherokee Indian once told his grandson: “My son, inside every person there are two wolves, fighting and battling each other every day. One wolf is evil, born of Satan. The evil wolf’s traits are all our weaknesses: selfishness, laziness, arrogance and inferiority. The other is the good wolf, marked by strength, the ability to work hard, humility, giving your best and perseverance.”
The boy thought about this for a long time and then asked: “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”
The old man answered: “The one you feed more and better.”
The Tetris effect
Your level of success is largely determined by how you see the world. As it functions, our brain learns to store certain patterns. This is called the Tetris effect. One study found that people who played a lot of the old-school video game “Tetris” began to see interlocking building blocks in every aspect of life, from looking at brick walls all the way to city plans. This ability to form connections stemmed from the capacity, stored in the brain through playing “Tetris”, to look for and find certain patterns and structures.
In fact, such patterns and models get stored from any activity we focus on in depth. If our main job largely involves looking for and finding mistakes, that trait and skill will probably follow us home. In this case it may not work in our favor, because there is a high chance that we learn to focus solely on negative things and often stop seeing the good ones at all.
The good news is that we can also store good attitude and behavior patterns. Learn to see the good things in life and you will start to see and discover more and more of them. That also means good opportunities for developing and improving yourself (as a bonus, as this ability grows you will probably no longer be as grumpy as before).
Applying the Tetris effect can be a powerful tool in our training too. Do you see the world and its difficulties as obstacles/excuses or as opportunities? Is your constant attitude toward your workouts more along the lines of “I can’t squat” or “I need another junk-food meal”, or do you instead look for ways to get better in your training and nutrition, that is, see difficulty as a chance to grow? Both are habits: one is finding excuses, the other is seeking opportunities. One holds back your development, the other speeds up your progress and helps you reach your goals. Are you an excuse seeker or an opportunity finder?
Think about how you meet challenges. When you face a difficulty, do you start looking for ways to get past or over it, or do you automatically start finding excuses not to face the obstacle at all?
I’d like to think that all serious, dedicated trainees belong in the first category. We should understand that on the other side of every difficulty or challenge, an opportunity is waiting for us. The ability to overcome hardship that you learn in the gym, and to stand up to it, carries over into every area of our lives. Plenty of people shrink back in the face of hardship; they find excuses and thereby feed the bad wolf inside them. That is how they turn themselves into weak-willed, pitiful losers.
Translator’s note: I have told my young students the same thing many times. Our ability to overcome physical challenges, and the hardening of the will that comes from that perseverance, carries over into every area of our lives. Losing and giving up can very easily become a habit, especially when the consequences aren’t felt right away. Nothing happens if you finish last in a race in school PE class a few times, or if you now and then, very rarely, quit because of a side stitch. But if it starts happening regularly, then at some point, years later, looking back on your life, you may discover that you have spent your whole life losing, quitting, leaving things unfinished and giving up.
So, the Tetris effect means that the things you think about and focus on start to show up in every situation. Patterns of thinking, behavior and attitude, once stored, begin to manifest in everything we do. Stored thinking models and habitual patterns shape us and influence our behavior, our thinking and even our appearance. Are you programming yourself to find opportunities or to look for excuses?
In other words, which wolf are you feeding?
Author: Janar Rückenberg (translation)
Come and train! ArtGym
