That dense book you want to read but has been lying on your desk while you procrastinate on twitter. You know you’ll have to tune everything else out, and read slowly, word by word, trying to understand and make sense.

That vague blog post idea swirling in your head while you look at cat pictures, one after another. Distilling your thoughts and putting them down for general consumption is a lot of thinking and effort away.

That ${cool_programming_thing} that a talk got you excited about so long ago. But, watching talks and intending to start using it is all you do about it. You know its going to take a fair amount of reading, thinking and time, before you can really use it well.

Like all those squats and lifts you dread, these things are building your muscle. The thing about building muscle – it needs effort and feels like so much hard work.

You can’t build muscles effortlessly. Go do those effortful things! Only if you care about those muscles, anyway.