Welcome to Mobile Nursing LLC!

You see, exercise is a competition. From birth, we are limited by genetics to how tall we can grow, how many type one and type two fibers we naturally have, how much our VO2 capacity caps out at. Then it seems pointless—why bother to become stronger, faster, more athletic if we aren’t physically inclined? Anyone who succeeds in any sport has trained their entire life for that moment to go on stage and amaze everyone. Watch as feats of human capability are shattered time after time, just as in practice, behind the scenes ironically. Then you realize, yes, not everyone can be great, not everyone can be remembered, not everyone can be Shaq.

In sports, the goal is to win. Nobody cares if you ran more laps, cut more weight, hit more balls. Regardless of if you started as the weakest or slowest, what matters most is how much better you can perform than the enemy. Singleplayer, multiplayer, 20 years old, 40 years old, it doesn’t matter in the moment. To win is to score more. Winning justifies someone is better. Then it might translate, to win is to be better. But we all know that is not the case.

The Paris Olympics recently ended. Most notable in my mind was the match that I never saw, but the picture was enough for me to understand just how unfair life is sometimes. There was a Judo match between Teddy, who is 140kg, and Lee, who is 80kg. Just think about having to throw someone who is a world-class to the ground, on their home turf. Someone who is 11 inches taller, 60kg heavier, and has the name of a bear. Now don’t run away before you hear this fact: apparently Lee’s team planned it. What?

When faced with an undeniably difficult task, we find ourselves conjuring excuses. I don’t want to workout today. Staying underneath the blanket feels much warmer. There isn’t any honey outside in the cold, dark rain. Although fighting someone in a much higher weight-class isn’t anything new, it’s not common. Why would anyone throw away their chance at a medal and years of training to give up? In this case, the game was multiplayer, and the heavyweight on the Korean team was saving his energy to fight the big man himself. So, there was a reason.

In my case, after freshman year of college, I got into lifting weights. I had a surprising amount of success with that endeavor. I was overweight throughout my adolescence, so my body was storing that extra fat for the energy to fuel my future workouts. I would chug my chocolate protein powder every morning without fail, one of the only times when I wouldn’t fail given the nature of progressive overload. Obsessed with the numbers I was putting up, I made sure my diet and rest were on point. I set off the lunk alarm in my head, becoming a specimen of my own, bulbous and succulent, feeling good about the progress I was making. Never would I have thought I would become a gymbro.

How does Shaq fit into all of this? Well, everyone knows he’s the big black guy. He earned a lot of money playing basketball, throwing balls into hoops above the ground. The king of inadvertently making everything else look small in comparison. We might imagine him and think to ourselves, man I wish I were him. I wish I were tall. I wish I made lots of money. I wish I had hands the size of a small toy pickup truck. Okay, maybe not that extreme.

However, did anyone take Shaq into consideration? What if he wanted to be a professional gymnast? An elite marathon runner? A renowned rock climber? If he spent his entire career training for those functions, he might have some success given his natural capacity for fitness. Yet given his size, he would never be world-class at any of those. To argue against that statement would be pointless. Countless people give more than 100% and still fail. What makes Shaq any different if not for his natural size? He is correct for having stuck with basketball. Anyone who fights their natural tendencies is stupid for doing so, right?

Many have devoured years of their lives for the sole purpose of becoming great at one thing, and whether that thing is meaningful depends on them. What gives them the motivation to work every day at the same thing relentlessly? To some extent, it seems idiotic to devote ourselves to becoming better at something which becomes mindless entertainment, especially sports. But perhaps those same people haven’t achieved the same level of success to cause their minds to enjoy it, whether forced or learned. If we can’t avoid it, we might as well enjoy it.

Take work for example. Many people don’t like working. Some even hate it. Yet we do it anyway because we need to earn a living. We need to be able to afford nice things. We can’t just sit around all day and pontificate about hypothetical situations of other peoples’ lives and imagine multiple scenarios about how certain situations would result given a change in parameters. What kind of life would that be?

But at the end of the day, just realize that there’s 20,000 trillion ants in the world more qualified than the most elite human beings. They don’t complain, they risk their lives every day, and can carry up to 50 times their weight. These ants haven’t even trained for anything beyond scouring their environment, tunneling their nest, and protecting their queen. Everyone, and I mean everyone, would literally still lose against your most underqualified ant. A basement-dwelling, fedora-sporting potato might have a better chance, given the free time they have to research how to escape the ant apocalypse. Now imagine if these ants were the size of Shaq. As industrious, disciplined, and patriotic as they are, humans shouldn’t consider themselves better than ants until we change too. Learn from ants and we can be great, with some luck—just don’t get obsessed to the point of limiting other areas of your life.