Self-discipline it is not 8 into the building blocks of the future. We look at the past only long enough to learn from it. Psychotherapy tells us that the only tragedy of the pain or mistakes that we experience in our lives is not to learn from them. Somewhere along the way, I put on weight, developed a cholesterol problem requiring medication and realized that I had turned into a pudgy sloth. As I began to grapple with the whole diet and weight-loss thing, I realized that the weight-loss industry saw diet, exercise and weight loss itself as something that one just disciplined oneself to do! One of the reasons weight loss has an 80 % failure rate is that people have the psychology of motivation all wrong. As I looked more closely, it became apparent that the state of the art in motivation was disturbingly embodied by the legendary Nike marketing motto“ Just do it.” The message is‘ If you’ re cool and disciplined you will and if you are a dweeb and undisciplined you won’ t’. This awareness took me back to my previous life as an owner of a health and fitness center, more commonly known as a gym. Hunting down motivation I had graduated from medical school almost two years prior and was a few months into my psychiatry specialty training when the gym came up for sale. At the time, I was share-renting with Flat Food Larry and Silly John. Larry was so named because he was great at cooking‘ flat food’ – i. e. any food that was either flat or could be cooked in a pan and was not meant to do anything fancy … like rise.( The oven was something we used for drying clothes – until the day they caught on fire.) Larry was the kind of guy for whom gyms were invented. He seemed to develop muscles simply by walking into a gym. While most of us