“You know, you have to be a little stupid.”

It may not sound like much, but let me tell you the who-what-when-where-why of one of the most compelling, impactful, and important things anyone has ever said to me.

INT. GYM/WEIGHT ROOM – AFTERNOON

We’re somewhere in 2008 of the timeline.  I’m at the gym working out with my two good friends Joe and Chris. They’re a lot bigger than me, and to give you a visual of that, picture the standard icon of the strength of your signal on your cell phone.  There’s five bars, and if I’m the middle bar, Joe and Chris are labeled to the right respectively, aptly giving you the best possible signal on your phone for crystal clear conversation.

Many times I wondered why they let me train with them.  Maybe because I made them laugh – not because I told jokes so good that they could be exchanged for pure gold, or wit so sharp it made you say cheddar, no.  They laughed because I couldn’t lift weights for beans, and understandably so, that holds a lot of entertainment value.  Fair enough; I laughed at myself, too.

We’re doing burnout sets, which means we’re flirting with death until we decide it’s okay to come back to life.  More technically, we’re doing one exercise – repeatedly – toward the brink of utter exhaustion at the end of a series of exercises that were performed in a more standard x reps for y sets.  You can imagine it’s only fun if you’re crazy.

Or in this case – stupid.  But, in a good way.  Let me explain.

For the burnout set we’re doing push ups – a classic exercise with the right amount sadism.  Naturally, I burn out first.  I can’t even tell you how many I did (couldn’t have been much), but I can tell you how hard my body flopped to the floor at the end of it.  Have you ever seen someone try to run through a glass door they didn’t see was there?

Harder than that.

Chris, the tallest bar of the cell phone signal icon, actually burns out second.  That leaves Joe as the iron man of the burnout set, and my jaw drops watching him keep at it.  One after another, he pushes himself up, and descends down, then back up, and repeat.  I didn’t lose count, because I wasn’t trying to keep one.  At this point, I was awed and inspired.  Chris, drenched and dripping with his own sweat, turns to me and says these words I’ll never forget, and words I have and will continue to live by:

“You know, you have to be a little stupid, you know?  You have to be stupid to just keep going.  That’s all pain right there, why wouldn’t you just stop, you know what I’m sayin’?  Like, stupid to the point that you can’t even register what pain is.”

Joe is still going – one push up after another.  Grunting, muttering expletives under his heaving breaths.  Just when I think he’s going to burn out, he pushes right back up.  His determination was so heavy it felt like you could gather chunks of it from the air, pack it up in tupperware and save it as a post-workout snack for later.  Joe finally burned out his set, but even after a gutsy display of tenacity I still thought he could have easily kept on going.  I was convinced he felt more tiresome of Chris and I staring at him with jealous eyes.

While it seemed like an insult (albeit a playful one) at first, there is something powerful to be grasped from Chris’s genuinely honest observation about Joe – what we all understand as an innate human reaction of instantly pulling your hand away once you touch a hot stove was something Joe seemingly didn’t have.  In this case I took this not as a lack of intelligence, but rather a strong indication of mental toughness.  Only in the specific manner in which Chris diagramed his view of Joe did I conceive strength in a completely different light:

“Stupid” people won’t know how to quit, even when they’re burnt halfway to hell.
“Stupid” people take on challenges that are already labeled as impossible.
“Stupid” people go toe to toe with adversaries that will beat them to a pulp, and “stupid” people will find a way to get back up.
“Stupid” people avoid using excuses, especially the most valid ones.
“Stupid” people find ways to be vulnerable, in order to stay humble.

Joe is pretty stupid, in fact one of the most stupid guys I’ve ever met.  Chris is no different, and I’m lucky to have met and befriended several other people that can be just as stupid.  I want to be the same, if not even stupider.  In fact, I try to be the most absolutely stupidest person in any given room I walk into.  I want people to say about me, “That guy?  Michael Arce?  That’s one stupid motherf—-r, man.  So stupid he *willingly solves math problems when he’s completely inebriated with alcohol.”

So, Joe and Chris used to call me Mikelovin’.  There’s absolutely no point to me mentioning this at all, I just wanted to say it because I’m still the shorter end of this cell phone signal metaphor, I have zero appeal going for me so far, and we’re already at the end of this story.  I needed appreciate the ego boost.  I’m the one writing it, and I can do so.  Do somethin’.

I’m with stupid.

*true story