This morning I was doing curls. I count left-right as one rep, so my 75-rep target means 150 individual counts. On a good morning, when I can muster the energy, I get up to a 150 count (75 per arm). Most mornings I’m good for a 100 count (50 per arm). The muscles aren’t the problem. What makes me want to quit is tedium. The monotony of counting to 150 while my mind wants to be anywhere else.
I noticed something. I’d never noticed it before. I was paying attention this time.
Between each rep there was a small internal act. Not a word exactly. Not a pep talk. Just a low, quiet, non-verbal YES. Rep, YES, rep, YES, rep, YES. It was doing real work, and when I stopped paying attention to it, the reps stopped too, almost before I realized they had.
Every discrete thing you do starts with a small internal YES. It’s so small and so quiet that most people have never noticed it’s there. But it’s there. And it’s load-bearing.
There are two kinds of exercise, and the distinction matters for what follows.
The first kind is reps. Fifty squats. Twenty lunges. A set of curls. Each rep is a separate event. It has its own beginning. And every beginning needs a fresh, small act of initiation. That’s where YES lives.
The second kind is a sustained hold. Hanging from a pullup bar for as long as you can. Holding a plank. Staying in a chair pose. One continuous event, no rep count, just the question of how long you’ll tolerate what you’re feeling. That’s where a different inner voice takes over. The voice of “No, I won’t quit.” I’ll cover that one in Part 2.
For this piece, stay with reps. With initiation. With YES.
Someone will say: that’s just willpower with fancier packaging. It isn’t. Willpower is the downstream effect of YES working. YES is the thing that causes the behavior willpower gets credit for. Collapsing them into one word hides the distinction that matters, because you’ll train them differently.
Willpower is a story you tell afterward. YES is something that happened before.
Now extend it outward.
Your morning exercise is made of reps, and each one wanted a YES. But so is your morning itself. Getting out of bed was a YES. Putting on coffee was a YES. Opening the laptop and tackling the first email, YES. Moving to the second, YES. Responding to the text from your brother, YES. Standing up to refill the coffee, YES. Starting the phone call, YES.
By mid-morning you’ve said it dozens of times. By lunch, hundreds. Most of them you didn’t notice, because YES is loudest when it’s contested (I didn’t want to do those curls) and quietest when it isn’t.
By 2pm, in my experience, something changes. The reservoir (for lack of a better word) is lower. The reps that initiated easily this morning now meet resistance. I sit down to write and the sentences come slower. I look at the list and something in me wants a different list. I haven’t decided to stop caring about the work. The YES I was drawing on freely this morning now requires effort to produce.
Some of this is just being tired. But tired is the stimulus, not the mechanism. The mechanism is that every start today has drawn on the same inner well, and wells have levels.
If YES is a capacity you’re drawing from, that’s useful to know.
It means low-stakes starts use the same reservoir as high-stakes ones. Answering a junk email at 9am is identical, at the level of YES-expenditure, to starting the one hard task that actually matters. The Kernel (the place inside where YES lives) doesn’t know the difference. It just initiates.
It also means YES is trainable. I’ll get to that in a later piece (probably when I cover The Need for Tension, the third part of this series). For now, just notice it. Start watching your own YES. See where it’s loud and where it’s quiet. See what costs a lot of it and what costs almost none. See when in the day it gets thin.
You’ve been using it your entire life. It’s time you met it.
That’s a YES. Just one. A rep, a start, a small internal act that happens so quietly most people go their whole lives without naming it.
One more rep.
YES.