As most of y’all know, I’m a pretty big fan of rap music, and while I know there’s plenty of songs made by rappers that are dumb, crude, or just flat out annoying; there’s a lot of songs that have a strong message attached to them. The title of this blog is a line from a song from one of my favorite artists, Big Sean.
In recent years, Big Sean has been someone who appeared to just burst onto the scene and took the music world by storm. If you don’t pay attention to rap music, then I can see how this is something you could easily think is true. It just seemed like you turned on the radio one day and there he was. Well, the truth of the matter is that he had been making music and performing in small clubs all the way back in the early 2000s. He was famously discovered by Kanye West when Sean went down to his local radio station that Kanye was visiting and just performed on the spot for him. Kanye thought he had potential, but of course didn’t just give him a deal on the spot. Sean had to send Kanye music regularly and continue to perform in clubs without pay in order to see if Kanye could really turn him into a hit-making artist. After many years, Sean got his first break when his first studio album was considered a hit in 2011.
The title of this blog is a line from one of his more recent songs in which he explains that he’s been doing all this work for a long time, but now that people are noticing, they think it was all just handed it to him on a silver platter.
I think this mindset plagues a lot of us when we see finished products and think they just rolled off the assembly line like this. Tanya is a great example of this (though she’s not a finished product; we all have things to keep getting better on every day). People, WHOM SHE HAS KNOWN FOR YEARS, look at her all the time and say, “Man, it must be nice to have such good genes.” As if Tanya just woke up one morning and lost 20 pounds. Tanya was more than 170 pounds during college. When I first met her back in 2013, she was having a beer (or two) every day, was north of 160 pounds, pushing 170. She had to put in YEARS of work to get to the physique she has today. It began with focusing on the quality of foods and then morphed into weighing and measuring EVERY MEAL, EVERY DAY for 30 days, NO EXCEPTIONS. She was able to get down to 142 pounds after that.
I feel like we’re all always looking for shortcuts, because we think that there has to be one or we just don’t have the patience to put in the work. Any finished product takes time and sacrifice. There is no quick fix. No, you can’t try intermittent fasting and still have that Saturday night out with drinks and dessert. No, you can’t try going vegan and eat “cauliflower pizza” and expect to lose body fat. Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that support exercise but not body fat. Do it for 30 days without making a mistake. It works.
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