Since I moved to Chicago, I've experienced something that would shock my old roommate, my mother, and is currently shocking my new roommate, my brother.
I'm consistently waking up early. I'm talking before 8 am, often before the alarm. Three months ago, in my basement apartment bedroom, that wasn't the case. On his best day, the best old Jared could do was 10a. On his worst, you might not see him until midday.
Old Jared had decent sleep hygiene, but it turns out that the lack of light made it difficult for him to wake up earlier. Once I moved to a well-lit room, I started swinging .500 off the back of the work I'd put into my sleep habits. New Jared is slugging.
While I did just make a cross-country move, I didn't start a wildly new routine when I got here. In my first week, I went to bed at the same time, used the same alarm app, and still slept with my phone away from me. I didn't change anything to make myself wake up earlier, but unconsciously, I took the donut off.
Take the donut off to make your life easier, build momentum, and develop courage.
In baseball, a donut isn't a ring-shaped fried cake of sweetened dough. It's a ring-shaped, dense weight you drop around the handle of your bat and slide down around the barrel. Players use donuts to make their bats heavier during practice and lighter when they go up to bat.
Like weighted vests, ankle weights, or wrist weights, donuts are used during practice and taken off for the game.
In life, donuts are obstacles, challenges, or difficulties that make things harder in the short term. We can drop these around our routines and lifestyles in the short term to make tasks, projects, or life easier in the long term.
Real-life donuts can look like living far when you want to become closer to friends and family, mindless spending when trying to get your bread together, or living at home when some independence would allow you to become the freak you were always meant to be.
Donut mechanics go like this:
In life, the mechanics are the same. However, you don't always get to pick your donut; life may do that for you. No one asks for trauma, but you're the only one that can take it off.
While it makes sense to follow the ritual from top to bottom in baseball, we're talking about taking it off: steps 1, 4, and 5.
S/o my DC apartment, we had a time, but that joint was in the basement. My room had windows but not enough light to make a difference. Even my room before that in the Bronx had a big window but was north-facing, the direction that receives the least light. So for the last two years, I've been "struggling" to wake up while trying every sleep hack in the book when the thing holding me back the most was a lack of light.
In your reflections, in your journal, in your thoughts, in your conversations with friends, what do you keep returning to as an obstacle to your goals? What thing did you try recently that made a task 10x easier?
In conversations with yourself and others, which obstacles are recurring and related to a meaningful goal? Or what weight have you tried removing lately and seen game-changing results?
Before I moved to Chicago, for real, I came up for a weekend to help my brother move in. In those three days, I saw three sides of my family and saw them more than I had in the past three months.
Even though I had already committed to moving here, I could see the donut was the physical distance between me and my family.
Taking the donut off in your life means removing restrictions. You're looking for things that are slowing you down, like weights, or stopping you, like obstacles.
First, see what other people have done to get that weight gone. Read up on it or ask a friend. Next, take it off incrementally. Don't expect to be able to drop every weight off the bat. Finally, make sure that joint stays off. Put systems in place to ensure that weight doesn't get onto your bat again.
Mindlessly spending? Track your purchases for a week. Live far from friends and family? Make a plan to go see them more. Live at home? Start putting money aside for that security deposit.
When you swing the bat with the donut off, it feels easier.
When you go to complete a task without the weight holding you back, it feels easier.
When doing something feels increasingly easier, you start to feel more confident while doing it. That confidence can quickly turn into momentum.
When you have the confidence from running this ritual every time you go up to bat, you build courage. And the benefit of courage is that it's transferable. You start waking up early, and now you're looking at woodworking (having no woodworking bag to speak of) and licking your chops. You start telling yourself, "If I put the time in, I could get nice at this."
I'm waking up early, yeah, but that's not the only thing that's improved.
I'm putting avocado on my toast now, working out three or four times a week, and I'm more locked in at work.
Don't let donut removal be an excuse for you to cop physical things you don't really need.
I shouldn't tell myself that lacking expensive photography gear keeps me from getting better at shooting. I don't need a new lens; I need better angles.
Material things won't always be the secret to you living the life you want to live.
Donuts are not one size fits all. What I'm trying to remove might be exactly what someone needs to add.
I needed this big eastern-facing window. You might need to just put that phone down before you go to bed 🤧.
The sports scientists are saying that practicing with donuts doesn't actually improve swing velocity (performance).
They're saying practicing with a donut won't help you reach your goals on its own. But the confidence you got swinging with a weight on will have you hitting homers by the time you take that joint off.
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