The phase where everyone quits

Goal pursuit involves two distinct phases: an initial “fuck around phase” where extensive effort yields minimal progress, followed by a phase where focused work on what actually matters produces rapid, obvious results. Most people quit during the first phase because they cannot see the path forward. However, understanding this phase exists is crucial to persistence. Jack illustrates this through personal examples in fitness and language learning, showing how three years of unfocused effort eventually led to clarity, enabling him to achieve remarkable results in minimal time once he identified what truly mattered. Three key strategies help navigate this phase: recognising that failure only occurs by quitting, not by slow progress; seeking guidance from experienced coaches rather than consuming endless information; and trusting your intuition through real-world experimentation. While any serious goal typically requires five years to reach a high level of competence, the path to success is far easier and faster than most people believe—it simply requires persistence through the initial confusion and commitment to what works.

In every goal that you decide to pursue, there are basically two distinct phases. And the first is where you are doing lots of work for not a lot of outcome. The second phase is where you start to see the sheer amount of work ahead of you, but you also know what that work looks like and you can actually design your process to just facilitate consistently doing that work. And this is the point where everything becomes really easy, success becomes obvious, and there’s basically nothing stopping you. The difficult part is learning what that work looks like until you have spent enough time strength training it, until you have mucked around enough trying to learn languages, until you have fall on your face enough times trying to start your business. You just don’t know what the work looks like. And so there is this period where you spend fucking around trying everything.
Your energy goes in every single direction and it amounts to a whole lot of not much progress. And this is where most people quit because if you extrapolate this experience of getting nowhere into the future for all this effort and time and energy that you put in and the negative experience of failure, well, who in their right mind would want to sustain that long term? It’s stupid. Of course you wouldn’t. And that’s why I think it is so important to realise that this phase exists because if you are not prepared for it, this is why so many people I think never reach their goals, whether that is in fitness or in whatever other pursuit they take on. For anyone in this initial phase right now, I think it will shock you to your core how little time and energy and with how much ease you can get to a goal way beyond probably what you even want now.
Whether that be your physique, how your body feels, how fluent you are at Japanese, how much money you’re earning. You just need to get past this first stage. And I’ll give you some examples to tell you what I’m talking about. My fuck around phase lasted a good three years with fitness. I spent ungodly amounts of time on everything, doing movement flows, handstands, acrobatics, all sorts of random strength exercises, targeting weak links, doing prehab mobility routines for hours and hours every week, lots of research for not a lot of tangible progress in any direction. Three years into very consistent work with strength training and everything else, I was pretty average in terms of physique. Strength was nowhere near what I wanted to be. Did not matter how smart I was with my training. I didn’t have very high level calisthenic skills at all or handstands or anything like that.
And it took me years to reach the point where I started to get some clarity on what small percentage of the work that I was doing actually was driving progress towards the things I wanted with my body. And so as I got to that point and cut out everything else and just started to focus on basic movement patterns, pushing to get stronger in them, eating to fuel that progress, realising that I just had to build sheer raw amounts of muscle and nothing other than just brute effort consistently every week with the right nutrition to support it would get me there. As I did that, training and fitness took less and less and less time, but it was more and more focused on what mattered. And it wasn’t until I got to that point that I really started to develop. I really built muscle, my strength started going up.
I started unlocking movements and mobility and calisthenic skills. And I got a six pack and started to develop an awesome physique. By the time I really started gaining traction with that, I was training no more than two hours a week, which eventually became 40 minutes or less. Compare that two, three years of hours and hours and hours getting not very far. When I saw what I really needed to do and had the confidence to block out the noise of everything else that I could be doing, then progress became obvious. Then it became very straightforward and easy and not much time involved at all. But I only got to that point by proving to myself by trying everything and getting nothing out of it, that didn’t need any of that. It wasn’t going to help me and there were no secrets other than focusing on the few things that I had decided mattered.
Another really obvious example with this is language learning. My first foreign language I learned was French at high school, and at the time I had no idea what I was doing, how the process ahead was supposed to look. But by the time I got around to learning Spanish, which is my current project, I had a pretty good idea that all I needed was exposure and use and lots of it. And so with that in mind, I just made my process very clear and very easy to stick to long term, which was get some basics and then read good books that I want to read anyway, consume good TV, that I want to consume anyway and have conversations with people so that I’m actually using the language as I want to long-term as the goal. Much like with strength training, practise as close as possible to the strength goals that I want to achieve.
And then eventually as I keep doing that approximation of the strength goals, get closer and closer and closer until I’m there. And like this stuff is all so simple, but it’s not about what’s included. It’s about what you build the confidence to eliminate from your practise, whether it’s learning Spanish or getting really strong and jacked, or whether it’s in your business or getting really good at squash, whatever it is. And these thoughts come up to me as I’m working on my business and making content and doing these things where you realise so much of your energy is put into the things that just aren’t helping you. And I still think I’m far from being out of the fucking round phase with this stuff. But every time you get that glimpse over the horizon, you can kind of see a path that’s way more direct and easy and clear and straightforward to your goal than what you’re doing now, that’s very exciting.
And I think if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this video, it’s that that path exists, whatever you’re trying to achieve, it exists. And that’s why I push so hard to tell you guys with fitness, like 40 minutes a week, six movements, all you need to get as many results as you could possibly want. It does exist. It’s real and it exists for any pursuit, any goal that you want to achieve, which is a very exciting reality. And so the fuck around phase is not something you get to skip. You need to go through it. There are three things that I’ve thought of that may help and have certainly helped me get through this phase on multiple fronts. The first, and I think this is just like the most important thing ever, and I don’t know why it’s not more obvious, there is no such thing as failure.
There’s just giving up. I think everything takes so much longer than we expect it to. When people say, oh, 10 years for fitness, it’s like, yeah, it just takes so long to get to an elite level. I think any pursuit, if you want to get like pretty good at it, whether that be build a business, build a great body, learn a language to reasonable fluency, I think you need five years. I just think it takes a good three to four to get out of the fuck around phase, and then you have a couple years of real progress and then you’re in a really good position. But I think any timeline less than five years for serious results, like if you’re getting to a really good level where you go, “Hell yeah, I’m there.” It just takes time. And so realise that you haven’t failed if you’re nowhere where you wanted to be three years in.
I was nowhere near where I thought I would be two years into making content and coaching. I had no clients. It wasn’t a serious business. Another two years later, my life is now unrecognisable. Same with fitness. As I said, three years in, utterly uninspiring results. Didn’t look very impressive. Strength lose ambridge. Again, three years on from that, unrecognisable. And you see where I’m at now. All there is to keep going. Another thing that’s helped massively, and I haven’t applied this to everything, but realising that guidance is exponentially more useful than information. Because as I said, information just gives you a lot of noise and you don’t know what to pass from that as being useful for you because all that matters is implementation. But if you’re trying to do a hundred percent of the possible things, then say 2% matters, you’re only spending 2% of your energy on the things that are getting results.
Imagine if you put 100% of your energy into that, you’d be getting 50 times the progress. And so I don’t really have a shortcut for getting to that point of clarity other than working with someone who has already got it. So for whatever you pursue, if you can afford a coach, I think the value that they give you back in terms of clarity and your ability to just block out the noise and focus on what matters because you believe them, you’re paying them for the confidence that you know what you’re doing is right. I mean, that’s the reason that I’m able to be here sharing my stuff with you. I made a decent start with my business, but my coach came in and saved me. One of my clients before he signed up the other day asked me like, “Why should I work with you?
” And that was basically the answer I gave you. But regardless of whether you work with someone or do this by yourself, I think the most important thing of all is to trust your gut because that is ultimately the only way to calibrate it. After listening to a lot of advice in fitness and business and everything else, it’s hilarious that in the end, your intuition ends up being right. If things don’t fit with you, there’s a reason. And whether that be because you’re misinterpreting what someone’s saying or just because it’s playing wrong for you, the only way you’ll figure out why is if you try and get real world feedback. And so I think one of the biggest shortcuts possible in life is to just do what you think will work. Do what you feel is the step in the right direction because if it’s not, you’ve now got real world information and it’s not textbook advice.
It’s not someone yapping on the internet. It is real lived experience that then changes your brain to the point where that is now something you know about the world. And that is how over time you calibrate your intuition to the point where you just know intuitively how to get results efficiently, directly. Remember this, there are like infinite piles, infinite methods to get to your dot. You only need one, and so you want to get to the path that’s right for you as fast as possible, at some point you’re going to need to start listening to your gut. Results are a long game, probably far longer than you think, but I can almost guarantee that it can be achieved far easier and with far less time than you think. But I just hope this video gives you a sense of why whatever you want probably feels a lot less achievable than it is.