> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.redmargin.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Time Is Going to Pass No Matter What - URL: https://www.redmargin.co/time-is-going-to-pass-no-matter-what/ - Published: 2026-09-22T12:55:39.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T12:55:39.000Z - Author: Reid Habenicht One thing I’ve struggled with basically my entire life is my weight. Ever since I was little, I’ve always been the kid that loves a snack and loves a treat. Specifically, Cheetos. Since discovering my love of Cheetos, I’ve gone up and down in weight more times than I can count. Since probably second grade, it feels like every year I’ve been 15 pounds overweight and then somehow worked my way back down again. It’s actually kind of impressive how consistent the inconsistency has been. It was never really a problem until I got to high school and became the fat, slow kid trying to play receiver on the football team. That combination doesn't exactly make sense. Receivers are supposed to be light and quick. I was neither. ## Going Faster Doesn't Always Get You There Faster That sent me into what was basically a starvation diet during my sophomore/junior year. I went from nearly 210 pounds down to 155 pounds soaking wet at 5 foot 8. 5'9" on a good day. There were good things and bad things that experience taught me. The first was that I could actually do it. There are going to be times in life where things legitimately aren't fair or where circumstances outside of your control make something harder. You can't control the uncontrollable. But there are usually still things you *can* control. And learning to act on those things instead of obsessing over everything you can't change is incredibly valuable. The second lesson was that going faster doesn't always get you the result you actually wanted. Was I lighter, faster and more agile? Certainly. Did that help me play receiver better? Definitely. Was I also weak, easy to tackle and basically without any muscle? Also certainly. That wasn't exactly the goal. And no, before you ask, this transformation did not turn me into some college football superstar. I barely played left bench in high school. But weirdly enough, that's probably why football ended up being so valuable to me. ## Game Day Is About 1% of It The actual football game is such a tiny percentage of the time you spend playing football. Most of it is practice. Lifting. Running. Meetings. Showing up when it's hot. Showing up when you're tired. Doing boring stuff over and over again for the chance that maybe it matters on Friday night. The preparation is 99% of the experience. And in my case, that 99% ended up being far more valuable to my life than the 1% where I wasn't doing much on game day anyway. You learn a lot about yourself when you keep showing up without any immediate reward for doing it. Sometimes you don't even realize what you got from that experience until years later. That *is* the reward. ## Then I Discovered the Slow Grind Fast forward to college. I gained a lot of the weight back. Right around 200 pounds again. I'd love to tell you this was part of some carefully planned bulk. It was not. But during that time, I became obsessed with lifting weights and getting stronger. I learned a ridiculous amount about how muscle actually develops and completely changed my frame over a period of years. I remember eventually walking back into one of my hometown gyms and seeing a buddy I played football with. He looked at me and said: > "Wow, I almost didn't recognize you. You look huge." Not huge in the fat way. Important distinction. The biggest thing I learned from lifting wasn't some secret exercise or complicated training technique. It was that progress required consistently training hard, keeping the movements relatively simple, controlling your ego and getting close enough to your limits that your body actually had a reason to adapt. More importantly, building muscle taught me something that crash dieting never did: **You can't really rush it.** Fat loss can happen relatively quickly. Building a meaningful amount of muscle takes years. There isn't some six-week transformation where you wake up looking completely different. You just keep training. Then one day somebody who hasn't seen you in a while almost doesn't recognize you. ## The Time Is Going to Pass Anyway That ended up being the missing piece when I eventually wanted to lose weight again. This time I didn't want to just make the number on the scale drop as quickly as humanly possible. I had spent years building muscle. I wanted to keep it. So I had to accept something that younger me was terrible at accepting: **Slow progress is still progress.** And honestly, once I really understood that, dieting became easier mentally. Because the time is going to pass no matter what. Six months from now is coming. A year from now is coming. Five years from now is coming. You don't get to vote on that part. So you can spend the next year repeatedly getting frustrated, quitting, restarting and wishing you had made more progress. Or you can spend the exact same year slowly moving in the direction you wanted to go. The year passes either way. ## We Are Terrible at Waiting Technology has made basically everything instantaneous. Food shows up at your door. A movie starts immediately. You can buy something in about four clicks and have it sitting outside your house tomorrow. You can ask a computer almost anything and have an answer before you finish thinking about the question. That's awesome. It's also made waiting for anything feel unbearable. And unfortunately, most of the things that actually make your life significantly better still take time. Getting in shape takes time. Building wealth takes time. Building a career takes time. Building a relationship takes time. Learning something difficult takes time. There is no DoorDash button for any of that. There's a cliché that I actually think is useful: **Choose your hard.** It's hard to spend months working toward something without immediately seeing the result you want. It's hard to say no to something today because you care more about where you'll be later. It's hard to keep showing up when nobody is giving you credit for it. But it's also hard to look back five years later and realize you spent the whole time waiting to feel motivated. Life is going to be hard in some way. You might as well choose the version of hard that actually moves you somewhere. ## Let the Time Work for You I used to look at six months and think: "That's going to take forever." Now I look at it completely differently. Six months is going to happen whether I do anything or not. So is a year. So are the next ten. The question isn't whether you're willing to wait that long. **You're going to wait that long anyway.** The only choice you really have is what you're doing while the time passes.