Progress Starts after 10,000 Steps

🚶‍♂️ Progress Starts After 10,000 Steps 🚶‍♂️

Everyone talks about getting to 10,000 steps a day like it’s the finish line. But what happens when your body adapts? What happens when “good enough” becomes your comfort zone?

In this episode of Two Nobodies Who Know Nothing, we discuss why growth happens when you take one more step, do one more rep, make one better food choice, and keep pushing forward even when nobody is watching.

Your body adapts. Your mind adapts. Success comes from continuing to challenge yourself after you’ve already hit the goal.

🎙️ Watch now on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

👉 If you enjoy the episode:
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 ✅ Share it with someone who’s working on becoming a better version of themselves

Every step counts. The next one might be the most important.

#TwoNobodiesWhoKnowNothing #ProgressStartsAfter10000Steps #OneMoreStep #PersonalGrowth #ShapingSuccess

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

What is up, everyone? Welcome back to another edition of Two Nobodies Who Know Nothing on the Shaping Success Network with myself and Robert Watson. We missed last week. I just couldn't get out of bed. So I apologize. What's going on, Robert? How's it been? How was your father's day?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

My father's day was good. I'm not having a very good hair day this morning, I can see. But that's okay. That's okay. We'll get there.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

No, it was nice. We're the most critical on ourselves, so I don't think anyone's gonna notice. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 0:45

Good morning, Nikki. No, I had a good Father's Day. I did uh my father has passed, so um I've got a chance to enjoy um some time with uh my uh fiance's father and with my kids, so it was it was all good.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Yeah, we how about you? We didn't, you know, we kind of tried to decide what to do. My wife kept asking me if I wanted to go out to the local distillery and and a couple other things, and I just was like, nope, I think I'm just gonna take it easy. So we went and played some tennis, got some coffee, I mowed the lawn, and I barbecued. So that was kind of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Oh, that's that's absolutely perfect. That's the way to spend the day. I probably at the end of the day was a little sleepy and uh um was ready to uh literally get the week started. You know, sometimes your weekends are a little so hectic you're like, oh thank god I go back to work.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yep, yep. And it's you know, that's that's kind of the it's funny, it's the it's the Mondays. I mean, are you taking summer classes this year, or are you basically do you take the win the summer off? Well, I mean you never take time off, but you take school off, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Yeah, and my summers are uh are always spent writing. Um my last summer was spent preparing my thesis for uh uh this last May. Uh I'm writing a book now. Of course I'm on Substack, but I'm writing a book. Um and I'm gonna start another MA program in the fall uh before my PhD because my PhD class is put off because of government funding, so it won't be uh around at least until 2027 or 28.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Why don't you tell, you know, it's funny, people ask me all the time, they're like, What does Robert do? How do you know Robert? And it's kind of funny because I I met you a few years ago through another friend, and and then that kind of that friendship kind of disappeared. I don't know where that person went, but it's funny. We we started, we had a couple interviews, you know. We talked about your book, which I got somewhere around here. Oh, here we go. Your book. You wrote this book, and then we started To Nobody's Know Nothing was ended up, it was just shaping success, and we were just talking through your book, all the chapters and things like that are going on. But tell us a little bit more about that so people can kind of we haven't talked about you in a while. People know who I am because all I do is run my mouth, but tell us a little bit about you.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

Well, no, I'm um at the at the moment I am uh running a Substack account and uh writing my uh emphasis is on geopolitics and actually uh what's called narrative dominance. In other words, how do leaders basically create the narrative of which everybody kind of revolves around? In other words, think of American exceptionalism as a narrative. You know, it's not there's no real scale out there to decide what American exceptionalism is, but yet it's you know repeated over and over again and people embrace it. And so that kind of narrative dominance idea. So I got I quit uh being kind of an active nine to five person about probably about 10 years ago into kind of semi-retirement, and then decided that I was going to go back to school. So I picked up a bachelor's, uh, two masters so far, uh, going for my third one before a PhD. And it's basically to broaden my education out and prepare myself as an academic. I've been published a couple times. I'm uh currently working on an academic book. And so mine is pretty much just thinking and getting ideas out there.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

Yeah. Well, it's it's interesting because I think that a lot of times people kind of, you know, the the name of the show is To Nobodies Who Know Nothing. And obviously, you're a little bit more educated with and worldly than I am because you've been through a lot more things than I have. Um, but I think that it's a great perspective that we bring typically because it's two different generations talking about what's going on. And you know, I think we both got started in this kind of just to motivate people to be better, to think outside the box, to work a little bit harder, to understand that things are not out of reach when you when you work that hard, you know. Um I think one of the things that's really cool that people need to see is that you at your age, and I'm not saying you're old because you're not, you know, ages age is in the eye of the beholder, and we think about like you're running and all the things that you're doing, but the fact of the matter is, is that what the the moment that you quit trying is the moment that you've basically given up. And I feel like that push for knowledge is something that we have lost because we think that we know it all, right? Like there's so many people who just like I know it all, I don't need to know anymore. And and I feel like it's great to see you do that because it shows people that learning is something that happens for a lifetime, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Well, and and also, too, one of the things that I've learned as a researcher is that I don't know very much. And so what that means is that every day, uh maybe not every day anymore, but at least two or three times a week, I'm confronted with something that I didn't know was out there, a new concept, a new idea. Someone's writing that that I you know picked up a piece that was written in 1972. I didn't know who the person was. And you know, it's kind of like for me going down different little rabbit holes when you start to find uh a niche of uh scholarly research that's really, really interesting. I engage, you know, multiple cultures. I have friends from I I think I count in one day, I have friends from 48 countries, and so I'm constantly engaging other cultures and other ideas, and so that's that's the thing when I say I don't know very much, is that if you're really smart and you're doing a lot of time digging, you find out you really don't know very much, and you you scratch the surface on something new and you're always surprised. You're like, I didn't even know that existed. Or, you know, and so you're trying to conceptualize things that people have never conceptualized before. Again, this is another way of looking at the world and these changing perspectives, and so um we're in a very we're in a multiple bubbles, all of us. We all have bubbles that we exist in. These are the people that we interact with most of the time. It's kind of a like think of it, a bubble is kind of network theory. You have a little network of friends and you kind of stay and revolve around that network. The smallest network you have is your family, your wife and your kids, and then it just kind of revolves out from that. And if you don't have um ways to get outside your bubble on a regular basis, your perspective is very narrow. And so I was watching, watching, for example, I was watching a soccer game yesterday with Iran and Belgium, and that may not sound really interesting to anybody, but I was at um the house of some Iranian nationals, and so they were struggling because they wanted to cheer for their country, but not cheer for the regime that's in charge.

SPEAKER_01 8:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

And so that's not something that we encounter oftentimes, you know, where they look at the people that are in charge of their country as criminals, yeah. So it's a very different way to look at the world.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

I it's funny because I, as you're saying that, I'm thinking about our country right now and how divided it is. It seems like it I I mean, I honestly wonder how divided it actually is. But you think about that really drastic scenario that's going on right now, and you think about all these people who they think about our country, you know. Obviously, we're gonna celebrate 250 years as a country coming up here, but those countries over there have been around for a very long time, a lot different than what we have going on here. But we have people who are like, I don't it they they look at that and they look at what we have and they're comparing the two and saying they're the same thing, they're not even close. Not even close.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

No, and you when you have a culture that's been around a couple thousand years and actually doesn't consider themselves Iranian, they're Persian, and you know, that's where their culture and their heritage comes from, and that somebody would in you know, in 1980 or 79, 81 would decide to change the name of their country, you know, you begin to understand that you you do not have the division that you think you have when we we have issues, yes we do, but this is the democratic process. The democratic process is for us to fight about things. I mean, not viscerally, but you know, f to challenge each other and to debate. Okay. In in the cases of some of these countries, there's no challenge. The uh the people that were on the other side had to leave.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Or perish.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

And so, we have a choice to discuss and talk and go out and and where you would be persecuted and persecuted in another country for doing the same thing. I mean, you look at the UK, that's what's going on right now. It's like you can't even say anything on social media, you may go to jail. Like you're losing your freedom of speech. And we sit there and we act like it's no big deal to have that. But once something like that is taken away from you, it's a completely different scenario.

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Well, and you and I would both say, even though we operate slightly differently in generations, that when we grew up, we had more freedom of speech than we do now.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

And and the reality is, as I say that, because the government's not the one restraining us. Society is restraining us because there's certain things you can't say. One of the things that happened to me when I first went back to school was my kids who are not kids anymore, they're all full-grown adults. They said, Dad, be careful, you can't talk the way you talk now in our generation.

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

And I said, you know, you you all have a problem with the idea that everything needs to be couched for you. Some things don't need to be couched, some things don't need to be sugarcoated. They just are. And we can debate those as they are. We can agree to disagree, but not be disagreeable. Right. And that is where we have to get as a culture to be able to discuss this and say, you know, Wes, you and I aren't going to agree on this is cool. Thank God we can at least talk about it openly. But we would agree that in our lifetime, that though we've got more freedom, for example, more diversity of people in the treatment of certain aspects of people, that we are talking less openly than we did 40 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Yeah. Yeah, you can't. And I I think that that's the insanity of the whole thing is you can't do that. You can't, you know, there's a big debate going on right now. And I don't know if you saw this or not, but this is kind of I I it never stops showing up, even though the debate's kind of over. But something as simple as the baseball teams, the Giants, they just in Texas, it's funny because Texas is the the Rangers, is the only team that does not celebrate this. But it's it's June, which is national Pride Month. They get a whole month of Pride Month, right? And San Francisco Giants is one of my favorite baseball teams, and they're wearing the Pride hats, which is a rainbow flag on it. And there's a three guys who decided, well, once it I'm not gonna wear it, which is okay, you don't get to wear it. You don't have to wear it, but you have to wear the regular hat if you do that. And the other two altered their hats and put a Bible verse on there next to the Pride flag, which talked about the rainbow. And now it's a big thing because their freedom of speech supposedly is being violated. And it's it's crazy to see that we sit here and we say we don't have freedom of speech, but they were able to do that. It was on national TV, and now there's this big hoop law around that where these teams are forcing players to do things that they don't want to do. And you couldn't have done that in any other country because you would have been persecuted for it. It's it's amazing to think that we're gonna have our rights taken away for for things like this and think that it's okay to tell someone. Because the debate is you can't do that, you shouldn't do that. How dare you do that? How dare you stop that? And it was funny because I saw JD Vance, you know, he's like, we don't we don't have to worry about that anymore. We don't do that anymore, but we still do. It's still a problem. We still have these thoughts where we have to think that we can't say certain things because if we do, we're gonna offend someone. And it's just crazy how persecuted you can be, because this is a a pretty big deal when it's not really that big of a deal.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Right. And and I, you know, listen, I applaud everybody for their point of view, and I I think the beauty of it is as I always told people I put on a uniform, picked up the weapon, and stood a post to guarantee your freedom. Right. Not for me or any of my brothers or sisters to suppress that. It is the idea that, but now put things in the context of me growing up. So I lived 40 miles away from Kent State University when the National Guard shot students who were protesting the Vietnam War. Okay. So we also have to take a step back and realize where we are, and that as much as we might want to say we're being muted, um, they brought out National Guard troops on a regular basis. And my son, who's in Mexico City, they were actually just having a soccer match, right? And people don't realize in other countries, when you have soccer matches and finish, the police are wearing riot gear.

unknown 14:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

Because they expect people to come out and act unruly to the point of needing shields and batons. Over a stupid game. Over a soccer game. Okay. So you know, we we the negative is we we want to be talked more openly. The positive is we're not shooting students in the streets for violating for for protesting a war that made no sense to be in. The the point is, is I I that's the whole point of protest. The idea that these students protested the Vietnam War probably got us to move out of the war faster than we naturally would have. That's the whole point of a democratic system. Right. Okay. The sad part is that, you know, the governor of Ohio decided to break out the National Guard, and instead of having dummy, you know, um rubber bullets, they had live rounds. But these are real stains on our culture that thank God, at least at the moment, we're beyond. And I'm and I'm grateful for it. And that's the one cool thing about our culture is I'm I'm not comfortable with the way our society deals with um being so sensitive about words. But I am glad we're not back in the 60s.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah. Yeah, and I think that that's the thing. It's like we have to understand that, like you said, that the process is the process. This is what we go through. You know, you think about uh we talked about it the other day, like it's it swings super hard one way and then it swings super hard back. Like you can't say that, then it's you can like then there's one side that's can say whatever the hell they want, and then there's a middle, right? And we're I feel like we're going back towards the middle with those things, like the wokeness that was a huge thing. It's like, oh, don't say this, don't say that, call on by this, call on by that, you can't do this, you can't do that. And then all of a sudden it's back in the middle. It's like, okay, well, it might not be very nice to say that, and you probably shouldn't say that, but we're not going to persecute you every time you say something, you know. And I it's kind of in between there, but then there's still like that little, you know, part of those people who sit there and they try to stop you from saying everything that you say. You know, I mean it's they're still there, they're moving around, it goes back and forth, but we have to do what's right for the country, not what's right for you or what's right for me.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Right. And and I think that people will, if both sides sat back for just a second and talked about justice, equality, and diversity, they would say that the idea behind what people were trying to do with getting us more diverse, more just, more equitable, had all the right motives, had all the right endpoints that we were aiming for. The method for getting there was the problem, as you called it, the process. It's not that the country doesn't want that in general. I think, by and large, that if you got people in a very rational conversation, I think you find people very agreeable on the idea. The application, of course, became draconian, and of course, then got, as you said, the pendulum swung that way and then it swung back the other way. Right. And when we do need to find that middle ground where we are just, we're diverse, and we're equitable, absolutely. Because to be honest with you, the 60s was a legit fight over two huge issues. Vietnam War, which didn't need to be in, and the way we treated black Americans. That's that's there's no question about that. These are good things that came from that. It's sad that we had to do it in that fashion and form.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. Nikki posted down there, and this is something that, you know, I kind of it's it's amazing to me to listen to this, but um, she said, freedom of speech has consequences like loss of job. And we had a comment a couple months ago, and I can't remember what it was, but there was a guy who basically said I was gonna lose my job for saying something like talking about it. It was a comparison of Renee Good and the Charlie Kirk thing. And yes, you can comment whatever you want, and we're still gonna talk about it because that's the way that it is. But he's like, You're gonna lose your job. You're and then all of a sudden it goes, You're a racist, you're a Nazi, you're a bigot. Good luck finding a job. And it's like, we're not doing that. We can have an open discussion about this. And yes, people will certain things can make it so that you lose your job, right? But having an honest conversation about the comparison of two things like that is insane to think that you're gonna lose your job. Well, at the end of the day, the guy goes, Well, I don't even live in America. Well, guess what's going on in another country, and I don't know what country he's from, they're telling him that he's gonna lose his job for this this situation. Like if you say this, you're gonna lose your job. And that's that's insane to think that having that conversation about something like that would make you lose your job. But, you know, four or five years ago, it could have happened.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah, and and I, you know, there's gonna be a lot of ideas that I don't like, and a lot of ideas that I would be pushed back on in the hardest possible way. But I go back to saying the same thing. You know, I put on a uniform, stood a post so that you could say that. Yeah, and so that the idea is one of the things I love is when somebody pushes back or tries to draw a distinction or tries to understand better. I like what that does. You know, in our in my world, in the academic world, we have what's called peer review. I mean peers review what we do and they push back against your ideas, and they try to in in the effort is to make the product better, right? The effort here in democratic debate, right, is to make democracy better. I want you pushing back if you think we're being unjust, unequitable. I want you pushing back. Why? Because I think it makes our country better.

unknown 20:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah, I I think that it's insane because I I think you and I have had this conversation before, because a peer review to me is kind of like a criticism, right? People take this criticism word and they put this negative connotation behind it every single time. And when someone criticizes me, they're talking about some there's different types of criticism, right? But like the way that I look at it in my job, okay, this is gonna be a really simple way to look at it. I go in and I measure some windows, right? And there's a certain type of shade that you gotta measure, you know, a little bit tighter because if you don't, then it comes in a little bit narrow. Customers complain about light coming in, they want it to be room darkening, and it's not that dark. Well, I go in there and I measure it, and it's too tight, and I get a call from the installer. Hey, listen, you need to adjust the way that you measure these because every single time I go in there they have to get cut down. And I could go, that that's a simple criticism, right there, right? They're telling me, they're critiquing me, they're telling me what I need to do to make it better. And I have two choices. I can say, screw you, you're wrong. You just do what you're doing, I do my job, you do like get offended by it or make the adjustment, right? And I think the first thing is anytime. Someone tells us that we did something wrong, we automatically get offended. And it's not that we did anything wrong, it's it's something that could make the situation better. And instead of making the adjustment, we don't we don't we get upset about it. It's it's just like swinging a bat, right? These guys, and I bring baseball back into it all the time because if you think about it, if you are up at bat and a guy throws you a fastball and you're super slow behind it, are you gonna swing the same way that you did on the next at bat? Are you gonna try and get started sooner? What are you gonna do? You have an instant feedback and you have just criticized yourself. But when someone else has a criticism of you that could help you or make it better for you, you refuse to take that into consideration because you're offended that they told you something, you're never gonna be able to move forward. You're never gonna be able to get better at what you're doing. And I think it's tough because a lot of people just think they know everything. And it's we take a problem when someone tells, or we we take uh we have a problem with it when someone says something to us that tells us that we're not doing it the right way. And I think if we could all just figure out how to take that criticism just a little bit better, we might move forward faster.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Right. And again, it back to the process idea that you're always in a process, you're you're in pursuit of something. I think we're we've reached the point in time where we're confused. Okay. And I say this I'll put it in football terms. So the idea for the NFL is to reach the Super Bowl and to win. That's it. Okay. And you have to win enough games and to get into the playoffs, and then you have to win every playoff game. Very, very simple, right? Very that pursuit and that Super Bowl championship lasts for that minute. Once the Super Bowl championship is over, once you've lifted the trophy, once you've got underneath the ticker tape, you are the Super Bowl champion theoretically until the next one. Right. But the point is, is if you're you're living the world the way it really is, you put the trophy down when you when you have to win, and you start to work on the next season. Right. Because no one's gonna give you a free pass the next year. Matter of fact, you are guaranteed you're guaranteed to get the worst competition in the world. And so that's the idea of process. So it's funny, but you mentioned that because I changed my routine up a little bit. So I didn't run before our um our work today on the podcast. I did stairs before. So I've added stairs to my running and my rowing in a sauna. I've added stairs because I need additional mobility. I want to take my lower core and do more things with it. I need to raise my heart rate. And so I'm doing things that are changing the way my body composition is. And so consequently, I don't get to do less. I have to do more. Yeah, I have to do more to get what, you know, I'm this next birthday, I will be 66. So I have to do more to get what I was given for free at 25.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

Yeah. That's just a reality. That's the funny thing. It's like you sit there and you think about it, like you hear these people say, Well, I walk 10,000 steps every single day. Okay, that's great, but your body needs you to do 10,000 one tomorrow, 10,000 two the next day. It needs you to continue because it's gonna adapt, it's gonna make an adjustment, and you have to do certain things to make it different. And it's really funny because it's easy to say, hard to do, but that's that's it. It's like 10,000 is not enough. 10,000 is a base mark, but you need to add more to it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Like it's oh, and and you nailed it right on the head because I looked at Teresa this morning and we looked at the time because we do basically 40 flights of stairs. And I looked at her and I said, you know, that felt pretty good. You do realize not this week, but next week, we gotta up that.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 26:04

And she's like, Why? I said, because what we're doing now is we're getting the time down, yeah, right. And now we need to change the intensity and and change the, you know, get our hearts really moving. And she said, This is kind of a never-ending process. And I said, Yes. You know, it really is. It's it's you know, and next we'll probably reach a hundred flights and then we'll have to alter something. Don't know what we're altering, but we'll alter something.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Something different because it's it's crazy. Like I, for like two and a half weeks straight, I walked probably six to seven miles a day, and my body's just like, screw you, screw you, screw you, screw you. Pain, pain, pain. And and then, you know, it adjusts, and then you got to do something different. Like, that's what you have to do. You have to continue to keep working on it and and changing things so that those muscle groups don't get stagnant because they are gonna get stagnant. You look at like David Goggins talking about his running, and you know, I've done this to my body so long that it's made every muscle in my body so tense that I can't I can't make it work. Well, his body's adapted, and so he realized that he had to stretch like an hour a day to get his body back because it was destroying the way that everything worked, because certain groups were so tight because you don't use them the way that you know you should use them, or you're using them a single way, your body adapted to it and and made it so that you know it's used to doing this one thing.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Well, and that brings up a wonderful point. So my other half decided to change, and so she went to work for a company and became a uh flexologist in stretching. So she stretches people because we knew we needed to add stretching to the again, longevity, your ability to function. And so, you know, we're adding stretching now. So she went off and learned how to be one so that we could get the best kind of stretch in. But this is a never-ending process. And next week's topic could be longevity because there's been some real breakthroughs that are being very cool to talk about.

SPEAKER_01 28:07

Yeah, and it's funny because it's only it's only the scratching the surface. There's certain things that you have to do and you have to adjust and you have to make yourself better every single day. But at the end of the day, just because you do it doesn't mean that's the end of it. It's still a process, it's still gonna have to keep working, and you have to always try to be better every single day and improve what you were doing. Don't be stagnant where you're at.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Yeah. Well, Robert, tell everyone where they can find you on the Substack and what's going on this week for you.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

You can find me at Global Strategy Institute.substack.com. I'll be writing this week about probably strategic denial. Very cool.

SPEAKER_01 28:50

And you know, I have a couple different places. If you want to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash West Hankersley. We've got shaping success, Treasure Valley Shaping Success, just the regular one, and two nobodies who know nothing with myself and Robert Watson. We do this every Monday, and we will see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

Have a wonderful week, everyone.