Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Steve Kamb of Nerd Fitness.
With last Monday being Labor Day, the unofficial end of Summer, I want to talk to you about determination, iron will, and hard work: lessons that I’ve learned from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith.”
My aim is to inspire you to continue pushing yourself to be better even though summer is over. The days will be getting shorter and colder, making many men feel the urge to pull the covers over their heads and hibernate. But while everyone else will begin a downward spiral until New Year’s Day, you’ll have been quietly and forcefully remolding yourself from now until then, hitting 2013 with a full head of steam.
Let’s see what Mr. Longfellow and his blacksmith can teach us.
The Village Blacksmith
Although you can read the poem in its entirety on Bartleby.com (highly recommended), I’d like to call your attention to a few key stanzas that have always strongly resonated with me:
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
The Blacksmith is a man we should all aspire to be. He understands that he is owed nothing simply for existing; his future is 100% dependent on himself and nobody else. Thus, he pushes himself to be better, going to bed proud each night, knowing that he’s done the best that he possibly can to create a good life.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow.
The Blacksmith understands there will be periods of feast and famine, times of triumph and times of sorrow, days where everything goes right and days where everything goes wrong. He doesn’t get overly excited when things go right, and he doesn’t pass the blame or make excuses when things go wrong. He knows that success doesn’t happen overnight, but comes from constant improvement, day after day, for weeks, months, and years at a time.
Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
Every morning, the Blacksmith sets out to begin a new task, and by the end of the day gets it completed. The Blacksmith understands the importance of getting things done. He removes all distractions, picks up his hammer, and gets to work! Once he’s completed his tasks for the day, he goes home to spend time with his friends and family, leaving the day’s toils and worries behind to focus on quality time with his loved ones. He’s found a work-life balance that makes him happy.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.
The Blacksmith understands that he can forge his own future, by any method he deems fit. A life worth living will require thousands of hammer swings, but he is in full control of how that hammer is swung.
You Are the Blacksmith
Starting today, I want you to imagine yourself as the Blacksmith and your life as the iron. You can be an ACTUAL blacksmith if you’d like, but for today let’s stick with looking at things figuratively. It’s your job to melt down, mold, hammer, and recreate your iron into something beautiful, functional, and strong. Nobody is responsible for the shape of your iron except for you, which is a wonderful thing. You can wake up excited about what the day will hold, and go to bed proud of your accomplishments. You can look at your iron, channel your inner Tom Hanks, and yell, “LOOK WHAT I HAVE CREATED” into the heavens.
It’s also important to know that failure is not a bad thing, it’s simply the breaking down of your iron. As mentioned earlier, iron must be broken down and melted before it can be recreated into something stronger. Every time you eat a healthier meal, read a book instead of mindlessly surfing the internet, or decide to exercise rather than sleeping in, you are swinging your hammer and molding the iron into something greater. Conversely, every time you fail at getting healthy, or fail at winning, or fail at whatever new plan you had for your life, you’ve successfully identified a path that doesn’t work for you! Congratulations, now you can move on to a different method in treating your life as a personal experiment.
Identify ways that you can improve your work-life balance. Do you often wake up overwhelmed, look at the 100 things on your to-do list, and then get exactly NONE of them actually DONE? Until I learned to manage my time at my computer, that was me. Work invaded my personal life and I struggled to separate the two, not giving my work nor my friends and family the full attention they deserved. Then, I decided to treat productivity like a piece of iron that could be fixed, hammering away and improving a little bit each day for months, until I emerged a radically different (and far more productive) person. I now have plenty of time to read, exercise and explore, relax with friends, and spend uninterrupted time with loved ones.
Understand that it will take thousands of swings of your hammer, steady and measured, to shape your iron into something you’ll be proud to call your own. It won’t happen overnight. It won’t happen in a week. It can take months and months of steady swings to improve yourself physically, while it might take years to improve yourself mentally or spiritually. Don’t let that deter you — each day, focus on just making tiny changes and measured improvements. My friend Joe is one of the best blacksmiths I know — he quietly swung his hammer for months and created something incredible, dropping 128 pounds in 10 months.
You are the Blacksmith. Your hammer swings up to this point in your life have made your iron into what you see in the mirror. If you are unhappy with the state, shape, and style of your iron, that’s okay! There is absolutely no reason you can’t fire up your forge today and start remaking it. Like iron being heated, melted, and rebuilt stronger, your body is broken down and rebuilt stronger with every workout and every healthy meal. Your failures bring you one step closer towards finding a method that works. So start swinging!
You have the ability to craft your future in the forge of life, nobody will create your future for you. Nobody will hand you your blueprint for a perfectly crafted body, or a finely tuned intellect. It must be earned through blood, sweat, and tears. You must grab your hammer, and continually swing in order to rework, remold, and restart. Make your iron.
As summer winds down, a majority of folks close down the forge until January when New Year’s resolutions dictate that they should, “probably make some changes.” I challenge you today to keep the fires burning through the coming months. I challenge you to push yourself to become a better blacksmith, to craft a better piece of iron, to find a way to balance your life, work, and family.
Today. Tomorrow. And every day after that.
Grab your hammer and start swinging.
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When he’s not trying to be a better man, Steve Kamb is helping nerds and average joes level up their lives at NerdFitness.com. You can sign up for the Nerd Fitness Rebellion and connect with Steve at @SteveKamb.
