“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Welcome to the Toil Upward blog. My name is John Muldoon.
I started this blog as a public form of accountability as I work to grow as a person and entrepreneur. The name was inspired by the quote at the top of the page.
The word toil means “to work extremely hard or incessantly”
The word upward means “toward a higher place, point, or level”
The premise isn’t sexy or glamorous. This is a place for me to write about hard work and self discipline. No shortcuts or lifehacks here. No tips or tricks. This is a blog about focus and effort, of intentionally choosing the difficult option, of facing challenges and pushing through them instead of turning away from adversity or fear or discomfort.
Why? Because those are the things I struggle with. I’m lazy. I don’t follow through. I’m inconsistent. I’m disappointed in the results brought by half-assed effort and believing my own bullshit and excuses.
There are three main areas of my life I am working on:
Fitness
Business
Mindset
Where I’m starting.
Fitness – Starting from zero.
My current fitness level is ok. It’s not great. I injured my shoulder three years ago, and I went from being extremely fit to being skinny-fat and lazy. I did a half-assed job of rehab and physical therapy. PT is boring. I could have been way more consistent and focused with it. I miss rock climbing. A lot. I miss being able to do hard workouts and compound lifts. I say I’m starting from zero, not because I’m the world’s most unfit person, but because I am approaching my fitness and physical therapy with the mindset of a beginner. I’m focusing on the fundamentals, of making them as good as I can make them before I start to build on top of them and try to get stronger again. A couple weeks ago, I almost had shoulder surgery to repair the damage caused in my injury three years ago. At the last minute, I decided to postpone it. I had to confront a multi-year recovery, and I was forced to acknowledge that I hadn’t truly done all I could do to get better. So, now I will.
Business – Starting from zero.
I’ve been an entrepreneur for the last 12 years. Or is it 13 years? I honestly don’t know. I’ve built a couple of really good companies. A consulting business that has helped hundreds of clients and afforded me extraordinary freedoms. But the truth is that I never tried to make it great. I’ve been lazy with it. I settled for almost-great. So, I’m starting from zero. I’m scrapping the whole business and starting over. New company. New name. New focus. And by “new focus” I mean there is an actual focus this time. I believe I can put in some effort and take the company from being pretty good to being world class.
I don’t want to have the same year 10 times. I want to have a business that grows every year for 10 years.
I’m also committing to being consistent as a writer. This is something I have outright failed at the last few years. I started a really amazing and rewarding project called the Monthly Experiments Project. I have never enjoyed anything more in my life, yet in the last 12 months, I’ve published a grand total of two blog posts. That’s a failure. Straight up. I have something like 300 unpublished blog posts. That has to be some kind of mental illness. I don’t know. I’ve never asked a therapist about it. I have an unfinished book. Or three.
Mindset – Starting from zero.
I think I’ve been ridiculously lucky in life. Truly. I think I skated by on some basic level of talent and intelligence, and never really learned how to try. I have expended minimum effort with almost everything. School, work, fitness, relationships, creative projects, everything. Somehow I’ve managed to look pretty successful from the outside, but on the inside I know I’m squandering my potential in a really huge and terrible way. It literally keeps me up at night. I have so much more to give. So much more work to do. So much more effort that never gets spent. This blog is my commitment to changing that.
I failed at climbing a mountain this year. It was a pretty big deal. I wrote about it over at Monthly Experiments. I spun it as a lesson learned, and I think that was honest writing. But it would be more honest, additionally honest, to say that I regret the hell out of that failure. My brother and I were set to make another attempt, but we kept running into obstacles that would have been irresponsible to ignore. Injuries and weather. There’s always next year. As soon as the snows melt and the rock is dry, we are going to finish what we started.
So, that’s what this blog is about. Starting from zero and toiling upward toward my better self. Actively pushing into the unknown, toward my own potential.
If you want to follow along, you can subscribe via email. I’ll send you new posts when they come out. I don’t have anything to sell you, unless you count the idea of selling you on your own potential.
You can also email me about anything you want. Fitness. Blogging. Business. Dogs. Climbing. Whatever. I like people. I especially like you; because you read all of this and still want to talk to me. That took discipline. Good for you!
I’m not going to post my email address on this page because a bunch of spam crawlers will find it and send me ads for viagra. So just reply to the confirmation email when you subscribe, and we’ll go from there.
See you on the other side.