MABA and the power of doubt
1,000 a day every day, burpees in a firetruck and more
Do me a solid, would you? Share this newsletter with anyone you know who’s doing MABA. MABA has more than 1,100 participants. But the MABA newsletter doesn’t have anywhere near that many subscribers.
My great good friend Sam “Kramer” Feld set a ridiculous goal for MABA—1,000 burpees every day. So far, so good, I suppose, but I’m not his shoulders. I love him for setting an audacious goal, not least because it gives me an opening to write about a topic that should be on everyone’s mind during MABA: Doubt.
Kramer — that’s him above hugging a tree upside down, which I’m not going to explain because I think it’s more fun for you to imagine how and why I took that photo — is one of the fittest men I know, and he’s also one of the most stubborn, and yet I still doubt whether he can do this.
So does he, or he would not have set it as a goal. He declared his chances as 50-50. “I entirely expect some part of my body to give out,” he said.
And yet he is trying anyway — and made his attempt public so all of his friends will know if he failed.
I hope by now you’re doubting whether you can finish the 3,100 burpees of MABA / whatever lofty goal you set for yourself. I hope you’ll keep going anyway, embrace that doubt and let it fuel you. Frankly, if you’re not doubting, maybe you should have set a more Kramer-ian goal.
I hope you felt at the beginning of MABA like I often feel when I start writing a story: That you have no idea what you’re getting into.
I often write about subjects about which I start off knowing little or nothing. I have long since stopped trying to hide my ignorance as I gather information. I’ve come to enjoy asking stupid questions. That’s a learned skill, and for this I have NASCAR Hall of Famer Tony Stewart to thank.
I first interviewed him 20 years ago, and I had a racing-related question that I wanted to know the answer to but I never asked of anyone because asking would reveal my ignorance and show me to be a fraud. He and a couple other star drivers were lefthanded. It was a small sample size, sure, but the proportion seemed off. Considering NASCAR races consist of drivers sitting on the left side of the car and turning left for hours on end, I wondered: do lefties have an advantage?
At the time, Stewart was, how to put it, not always the friendliest person to interview. On a good day, he was thoughtful and funny and gave you answers you would use in a newsletter about burpees 20 years later. On a bad day, he gave witheringly sarcastic answers to dumb questions that would make you want to do burpees instead of asking him another question.
Lucky for me, I got him on a good day.
I began: “I have a stupid question …”
Stewart: “Do you know the answer?”
Me: “No.”
Stewart: “Then how can it be a stupid question?”
I think about that exchange whenever the topic of self-doubt or lack of confidence or the dreaded impostor syndrome comes up. Someone who “suffers” from impostor syndrome doubts their accomplishments/talents/skills and worries that they will be exposed as a fraud.
That’s a syndrome? Like, with a name and everything? Doesn’t everybody feel like an impostor, (almost) all day, (almost) every day?
I sure do. I feel like an impostor all the time, especially during MABA. Who in the hell am I to ask/encourage/exhort people to do 100 burpees a day every day in January? Who in the hell cares what I have to say about burpees?
I wouldn’t know what to do if I suddenly thought I knew what I was doing. I have no doubt that I’d be lost without doubt. I suppose I can look back on my career and see that I’m not nearly as ignorant as I used to be. But, um, that still leaves plenty of room for doubt.
For years I wanted to feel like I had arrived. How long am I going to be a writer, I wondered, before I stop doubting if I know what I’m doing?
And then I came to not only accept doubt but to embrace it—even to be wary when I lack it. Now doubt motivates me instead of cripples me.
You know who doesn’t suffer from self-doubt? Bloviating shouting heads on television. Self-righteous schmucks on social media. Yankees fans.
The world needs more self-doubt, not less. The antidote to doubting you can do something is not self-confidence but doing it anyway with your doubt fully intact. The solution to doubt is not believing in yourself but the courage to keep going anyway.
We should be overrun with Ted Talks about embracing doubt instead of incessant drivel that “you’ve got this.” I doubt that the beginnings of my stories are good, I question whether the endings are worth the keystrokes it took to create them, and don’t even get me started on the middles. The way to make my stories better is sure as hell not to tell myself that I’m good enough.
To mangle a Gordon Gekko quote from Wall Street, doubt is good. Doubt is right. Doubt works. When I listen to my doubts, it helps stories turn out far better than if I thought every word that shoots forth from my fingertips drips inerrant wisdom.
Just about the only thing I’m confident about is that doubt is inseparable from my motivation to get better. If all of a sudden I thought I could do 100 burpees a day in January, that’s the first sign that I won’t actually make it.
I occasionally drop 100 burpees a day into my workouts throughout the year so that when MABA gets here, I’m something close to ready. But completely ready? Never. In the same way, doubt drives me to make extra phone calls, to write and rewrite and rewrite again. It drives me to seek out mentors, to ask peers for help, to get rid of the original opening for this newsletter and replace it with something coherent.
And yes, I did that already. If you think the NASCAR opening stinks, you should have read the one about latchkey kids that I threw away.
Back to that opening: Stewart’s answer to the question of whether being lefthanded gave him an advantage was this: “I don’t know. I’ve never been righthanded.”
Was he being sincere or sarcastic? It was probably both, but I’m not sure. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to look like a dope.
It didn’t occur to me to do burpees instead.
Send me video/photos of yourself doing burpees in strange places
MABA has blessed me in many ways. Not least is that I get slack messages like this one from the author of Thursday’s newsletter, Jason “Cherry Limeade” Meinershagen. He’s 100 feet up in the bucket of a firetruck. That is the baddest ass burpee in MABA history, and it’s up to all of you to top it.
Meet the 1,000 burpees in one day lunatics.
A handful of men have completed at least one day of 1,000 burpees. I’m going to introduce you to them over the next few weeks.
John “Suffolk” Cashin was the first that I know of to do 1,000 burpees in a day this year (1,101, technically). He sent me a time lapse video of himself doing them on New Year’s Day, which led to the following exchange.
Ralph: Wut?
Suffolk: Yep.
Ralph: Holy crap.
Suffolk: Indeed.
Ralph: Are you nuts?
Suffolk: Most likely.
Ralph: How long did it take?
Suffolk: 2 hours 45 minutes
Ralph: You took your shoes off? What the …?
Suffolk: Socks slide better on the mat. I added pants for the same reason to save my knees.
Ralph: Seriously what’s the matter with you? Why did you do this?
Suffolk: It was January 1st, 2023 and I had just finished reading the book Endure by Cameron Hanes, who is known for pushing the limits with ultramarathon running, bow hunting, etc. He’s cut from the same cloth as David Goggins, and both of them talk about finding your limits and doing ridiculous things in any type of weather to find out what you’re really capable of. As I put the book down, I felt inspired and pumped up to go further than I’ve gone before-- what are my limits?!!
With the start of MABA that same day, what better to do than see how many burpees I could crank out in a single session! Initially, I had no goal. My M figured maybe I could do 400 and I thought 400, 500 maybe? But when I arrived at 500 burpees, lying face down in the mud in front of my house, it was clear that I could still fall down, and I could still get up, again and again. In fact, I did not find my limit that day.
What I did find was that I was able to fall down and get up a lot more than I ever thought I could. In hindsight, it was quite metaphorical.
This year, my F3 buddies already knew I had done 1,000 burpees before so what else can you do but one-up yourself? I now know I can do at least 1,101 … and I figured at this point I should provide proof and make a time lapse of the effort.
Thanks again for organizing it all, doing hard stuff together is a great way to strengthen the bonds between men.
And for the record, I do not actually like burpees.
SIGN UP NOW FOR Year 4 of MABA. There’s still plenty of time to log burpees. MABA—Make America Burpee Again—is an annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day (on average) every day in January.
More than 1,100 men, women and children on six continents have completed 1.75 million burpees. Why? Loneliness is killing us, middle-aged men especially, and MABA is a cure. You can’t be lonely when you’re doing 100 burpees a day with your friends.
MABA’s theme is Fall down. Get back up. Together.
We all fall down. We all have to get back up. We must not do it alone.
Sign up today and challenge your friends, enemies and frenemies to join you. If your kids are doing burpees with you, please log them as a separate entry. They will love that, and so will you! Every burpee counts!
Log your burpees here. And you’re not going to do 3,100 burpees and not buy a shirt, are you?
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