The Ankle That Is Still Not Good Enough

It has been two weeks since I injured my ankle.

Two weeks since I have been on the mat for a real class.

I have been to the Sunday open mats.

I have watched class.

I have taken notes.

I have pointed and laughed at my classmates messing around and messing up.

But I have not trained.

I have not been able to take advantage of the instruction my coach Jason Hunt delivers every session.

And some days, that bums me out.

Then I remember an equation I learned a few years ago.

It is simple, which is why it works.

Most principles that actually hold up under pressure are simple.

Complexity is for people who want to sound smart.

Simplicity is for people who want to be useful.

Here is the equation:

That is it.

Your happiness at any given moment is nothing more than what is actually happening, divided by what you think should be happening.

If the numerator is bigger than the denominator, you are good.

If the denominator is bigger than the numerator, you are miserable.

It took me a long time to see this pattern.

But once I did, I could not unsee it.

And it explained almost every time in my life I had been unhappy for reasons I could not name.

The Math of Misery

Let me walk you through the equation with two examples from my own life.

Same man, same temperament, same basic circumstances.

Wildly different experiences of joy.

For 35 years I worked on construction projects.

Some of them were big.

Multi-million dollar jobs.

Billion-dollar jobs.

The kind where you are pulled in multiple directions simultaneously, the way Grandmaster Han would have us face multiple opponents at once during sparring drills.

He taught us that the key to surviving multiple attackers was mobility, adaptability, and lining them up so you only had to deal with one at a time.

The construction site was the same lesson in a different uniform.

On those jobsites, my expectation, especially when I was younger, for how the day would go was sky-high.

• I expected the schedule to hold.
• I expected the materials to arrive on time.
• I expected the foreman to communicate clearly.
• I expected the other trades to stay out of my way.
• I expected to make progress at a pace that felt satisfying.

And every day, reality fell short of those expectations.

Sometimes by a little. Sometimes by a lot.

The denominator was enormous because I had convinced myself I knew how things should go.

That gap between what I expected and what actually happened was where my frustration lived.

Now contrast that with a vacation.

When I traveled, my only expectation was to relax, breathe, and experience whatever was in front of me.

The denominator was tiny.

Almost zero.

So when things went wrong, a delayed flight, a wrong turn, a restaurant that was closed when we arrived, it did not ruin the trip.

It became part of the trip.

I could always sit back and notice the architecture of the buildings.

After all, I am a builder. I have spent my life looking for better ways to build things. I notice details most people walk past. I could watch how a different culture solved the same problems we solve at home and learn something from it.

Same man.

Same brain.

Same basic wiring.

The only variable that changed was the size of the denominator.

When I expected nothing except to be present, joy flooded in through every crack.

When I expected everything to go according to a plan I had written in my head, every deviation felt like a betrayal.

The "Should..." Trap

Here is where this gets personal for most people.

And by most people, I mean you.

Most, if not all, of what you are doing right now, you have never done before.

That sounds obvious until you sit with it.

• You have never built this business before.
• You have never been in this relationship at this stage before.
• You have never recovered from this specific injury at this specific age before.
• You have never parented this child at this phase before.
• You have never navigated this year of your life before.

Every single one of those things is unprecedented.

And yet you walk into each of them carrying a detailed set of expectations about how long they should take, how they should feel, and what the result should look like.

Where did those expectations come from?

Not from experience, because you have never done this before.

Not from data, because your sample size is zero.

They came from somewhere much less reliable.

They came from stories you told yourself.

From what you saw other people do and assumed would apply to you.

From what you think you deserve.

From what you are afraid will happen if you admit you have no idea what you are doing.

And then reality shows up.

Reality does not care about your story.

It does not care about your timeline.

It does not care about what you think you deserve. It just is what it is.

When reality and expectation collide, the equation does its work.

The denominator swells. Joy shrinks.

And suddenly you are miserable, not because anything bad is happening, but because something different from what you imagined is happening.

That is the trap.

You are not suffering because your life is bad.

You are suffering because your life is not matching the movie you wrote in your head.

The Ankle That Would Not Cooperate

My ankle was supposed to be better by now.

I did not write that timeline down anywhere.

I did not consult a doctor and get a recovery estimate.

I just felt, somewhere in the back of my mind, that two weeks should be enough.

Two weeks feels like a reasonable amount of time for a body to fix itself.

Two weeks is what I expected.

My ankle did not get the memo.

And for a few days, I was frustrated.

Not at the ankle. At the gap.

The gap between the story I had told myself about how this recovery would go and the slower, less dramatic reality of what was actually happening.

Then I remembered the equation.

I looked at the denominator.

I had set an expectation based on nothing.

No data. No precedent. Just a feeling.

And I was letting that feeling steal joy from the actual experience of watching my body heal at its own pace, of being present at the gym even when I could not participate, of noticing things from the sideline that I miss when I am in the middle of the action.

Once I saw the pattern, the frustration dissolved.

The ankle will heal when it heals.

I have been doing this long enough to know that bodies do not care about your schedule.

They care about rest, nutrition, and time.

My job is to give them those things and stay out of the way.

How to Shrink the Denominator

The equation is not complicated, but applying it takes practice.

Here is what I have learned.

First, notice when you are miserable and ask yourself a question.

Most of the time, it is the second one.

The sun still came up. The people you love are still there. The work is still meaningful.

The only thing that changed is the story about how it was supposed to go.

Second, get curious about where your expectations came from.

• Did you pull that timeline out of the air?
• Did you assume this would be easy because someone on the internet made it look easy?
• Did you confuse a desire with a prediction?

Most expectations are not based on evidence.

They are based on hope dressed up as certainty.

Third, when you are doing something you have never done before, which is almost everything worth doing, lower the denominator to near zero.

• Expect to learn.
• Expect to be surprised.
• Expect to be wrong about half of what you think you know.

That is not pessimism.

That is accuracy.

You have never done this before.

You do not know how long it will take or what it will feel like.

Pretending otherwise is not confidence. It is self-deception.

Fourth, and this is the one that took me the longest, stop telling yourself that things should be different than they are.

The word “should” is a joy-killing machine.

It takes what is actually happening and compares it to a fantasy.

The fantasy always wins, because fantasies do not have to deal with gravity.

They do not have injuries.

They do not have other people with their own agendas.

They are perfect, and perfect is not real.

When you drop “should,” you are left with what is.

And what is, if you are paying attention, is usually enough.

What Is Actually Happening

Right now, as I write this, my ankle is healing.

Not on my preferred schedule. Not as fast as I want.

But it is healing. I can walk. I can stretch. I can show up.

I can be in the room with my training partners even when I cannot be on the mat with them.

Right now, my business is growing.​

Not as fast as the version of me who has never built a business before expected.

But it is growing. People are reading. People are reaching out.

The systems I am building are starting to work.

The denominator keeps trying to creep up, and I keep pushing it back down.

Right now, my life is unprecedented.

Yours is too.

Nobody has ever been exactly where you are, doing exactly what you are doing, with exactly your combination of strengths and weaknesses and circumstances.

There is no benchmark.

There is no standard.

There is no timeline that applies to you except the one you invent.

So why invent one that makes you miserable?

The Invitation

This week, pick one area of your life where you are frustrated.

It does not have to be the biggest one.

Just pick one.

Now ask yourself:

If it is the gap, shrink the denominator.

Drop the expectation.

Let the thing be whatever it is, at whatever speed it is moving.

You can still work hard. You can still push. You can still show up every day.

But stop measuring your progress against a timeline you pulled out of the air.

You have never done this before.

You do not know how long it should take.

Nobody does.

The people who look like they have it figured out are just better at hiding their denominators.

The ankle will be ready when it is ready.

The business will grow when it grows.

The project will finish when it finishes.

And in the meantime, you can be miserable about the gap, or you can be present for what is actually happening.

One of those options costs you nothing. The other costs you everything.

Choose the one that leaves room for joy.

⚔ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Mental Declutter

Write down:

• Everything bothering you
• Everything you’re avoiding

Pick one to address.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​Algorithms to Live By by Brain Christian​

Why?

Because every day we need to make decisions so we might as well have a system of making better decisions easier and faster.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck