 I just got back from a day of digging which is basically what I've been doing all day lately I'll show that eventually digosaurus complete over so while I'm doing this kind of manual labor I'm often thinking about things all day because it's just repetitive stuff and my brain goes all over the place so today I was thinking about a lesson I once learned when I was a kid many years ago it was a lesson about unintended consequences good unintended consequences and how those how those come about so I'm just gonna cut right to it so here it is unintended consequences when I was younger I knew I always wanted to have a very active lifestyle like I love doing this stuff even all day digging what I did today I love being active so when I was a kid I would I would play lots of sports and get lots of exercise and I was always finding ways to turn things into workouts and and try to get stronger so my mom had these awesome climbing trees in her backyard and we would play in them all the time and one day I was like well I'm gonna I'm gonna start doing a workout in these so what I did two times a week for a while was I would start at the house I would run to a tree there's a huge chestnut tree in the backyard I would run to that tree climb up all the way to the top then climb all the way back down touch the ground I'm all the way back up then climb all the way back down then run to the house and that was one and I would do that 10 times and that was one workout and I'd mix it up sometimes I'd only do go up and down once and just do it faster or some days I wear weights and heavy boots you know stuff like that another another thing I would do is like a lot of times I'd try to get passive exercise so like at high school there were lots of basketball courts and the basketball hoops were one of the pieces of equipment that always stayed there because they were kind of you know ten feet up in the air they're out of the way they basically always stayed there all the time so me and like you know any of the other jock guys anytime we're hanging around the gymnasium with nothing to do waiting for stuff we'd grab a basketball start playing or if there was no ball around we'd just start trying to jump and you know see how high we could get our hand at the hoop so I could usually get mine like there and I could dunk barely like on a good day I could dunk a basketball on a bad day no chance so one day I'm in the gymnasium and I hadn't had this experience in a little while so I was like let me grab a basketball play around and I was shooting around and I went up for a layup and shot the ball up there and I was like that hoop seems shorter than last time and so I backed up grabbed the ball and I went to try to dunk and sure enough like my arm is like up here on the hoop and I dunk no problem so I'm like oh because this was a this was not an unheard of occurrence for someone to have been messing with the things and just left it lower than normal so I'm out there you know Duncan spin Duncan backwards Duncan two-hand Duncan just all kinds of stuff and some guys are sitting there watching one of them's like whoa what's going on man and like yeah someone left the thing lower he's like oh yeah yeah and then you know I'm doing this for a while because anytime someone leaves the things low yeah guys always take advantage of like yeah let's pretend we're Michael Jordan for a while so then one of my gym teachers comes over and he's standing there like this and I'm thinking oh he just thinks I'm I'm an idiot because I'm all excited because I'm can dunk on a nine foot hoop fine whatever whatever so I'm Duncan and he says he did it again and I was like yeah so I went and dunked again and he's like how'd you learn how to do that and I was like what dunk on a nine foot hoop and and he says these ones don't go down they only go up and I'm like no no it's obviously lower look I can just stand here and jump up to hand dunk I wish I can't do that he's like no that's 10 feet right there look at the line on the wall because it lines up with the line on the wall and I'm like what somehow somehow in the last month or two since I last done this I gained this much height in my jumping ability what is going on and he's like well if you figure out what you've been eaten can you give some to the basketball team because no one on my team can do that so anyway so I go and I'm trying to figure out like what has changed and the only thing that I changed is I've added this tree climbing workout twice a week I'm like what is tree climbing have to do with Duncan basketballs well I thought about it for a little while and I realized it was the part of the tree climbing workout that I didn't can consider to even be part of the workout because I considered the workout to be climbing up and down the tree and I was squiggling around moving around you know moving all the parts and you know working my arms and everything but the beginning of the tree climbing workout every time I go up to the tree I run up to the tree and jump up to the first branch and the first branch is like nine feet in the air so it's low enough that I can jump up and grab it but high enough that I can't reach it without jumping so when I started doing this I would jump up grab the branch pull myself up put a foot against the tree kind of climb up there and then and then get going climbing up the tree and back down and then as I was I was doing this I I started thinking well if I get more momentum in this jump part I can get up and down the tree faster because I'll have up going momentum instead of grabbing the branch and then kind of hang in so I was always trying to like jump up higher and faster and it got to the point where I could jump up to this branch and just put my hand in and get right up on top of it without stopping to put my foot on the tree or anything I wasn't even really thinking about how this was part of the workout but because I put effort into the part that seemed unimportant I got this weird unintended consequence where I gained this frankly very difficult skill to learn because I tried to get I tried to get enough jumping ability before to be able to dunk like on purpose and it's really hard to do but just because I put effort into this thing that seemed unimportant I gained this skill now this this didn't stick in my head because dunking a basketball was gonna be a big part of my life I don't have basketballs here I never dunk a basketball it's not an important part of my life the reason I remembered the lesson was because I put effort into something that seemed unimportant and I got this unintended very cool consequence and I started applying that to just everything in my life and even today when I was digging I was like well this part when I'm doing this that seems like it's nothing let me just do that a little faster let me do a little more effort into that let me put a little more effort into this and this and this and I probably doubled the amount of digging I did today compared to yesterday because when you put effort into the things that seem unimportant you very quickly realize that everything is important