My Beef with "Just" Doing It - or Anything....

“You’re one dollar short,” said the woman across the counter, counting out the last of the crumpled five and one dollar bills I’d handed her. I reached into the pocket of my jeans, remembering then that the last dollar I’d saved was in change. 

I’d spent months hoarding every cent so that I could buy my first pair of Nike Air shoes and it had taken until just after my 11th birthday to collect the $41.98 for those blue and white Air Pegasus. 

In fifth grade gym class the next day, I heard one of the kids behind me, admiring my new Nike Airs, pronouncing the word Nike like Mike. It was some level of debate at that time as to how you pronounced the brand, and the idea that a pair of shoes might have air in them was mind blowing. (The shoes with visible air pockets were just being debuted in 1987, but certainly hadn’t made their way to a small town mall in rural Western Pennsylvania.)
It was the next year, in 1988, that Nike debuted what is now three of the most iconic words in advertising:

“Just do it.”

Here is the first commercial to feature the slogan, in case you're curious:

As an athlete, I loved that phrase. I was like “yes! Put my nose to the grindstone, sleep when I'm dead, grind or die!

Or whatever else I thought when I was in my mid-teens and feeding off of Rocky's I-IV for inspiration. 

In doing a little research on the history of the slogan, I was blown away to discover that the slogan was based on the final words of a convicted Utah murder who, when asked for his last words upon facing a firing squat uttered, "let's do it."

Okay, blown away is a poor choice of phrase there, there but....

The thing is, when it came to sports and my approach and love for sports when growing up, I could think of nothing else. Schoolwork mattered only as much as that it passed the time during the day until I could get to practice.

I loved practice and I loved training.

When I got to college, I fell in love with running.

But somewhere over the years, that saying of Just Do It morphed from a rallying cry that inspired the athlete in me to work harder, to an oversimplification of the motivation that, in my lowest moments, felt so hard to come by.

In the throws of my ugliest struggles with chronic low-level depression, those same words did not help me drag myself off of the couch to "just" do anything. Instead of inspiration, I felt shame.

I suppose it's the over-simplication of the sentiment of doing that is why, despite my support of Nike the brand, you'll never catch me wearing a JDI t-shirt. Yes, at some point you absolutely have to take the plunge when it comes to behavior change. If you want something in your life to be different, there is nothing else to do but to act differently.

I'm a fan of Atomic Habits' author James Clear advice to "cast a vote for the type of person you'd like to be," as an actionable approach.

Because the most important part of the change is the doing. But instead of doing something to the exclusion of everything else - that all or nothing approach that many of you struggle with that served you well as an athlete - you're more focused on doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.

You're understanding that whatever change you would like to make for yourself has to be connected to your day-to-day reality.

Do what you can.

And let that doing be enough.