The Fortitude Chronicle: A Weekly Digest of Athletic Determination

Monday Momentum

For the Relentless Mind

The Miracle Is That You Exist. The Tragedy Is Wasting It.

You are impossibly rare. Not in some motivational-poster sense, but statistically, biologically, historically rare.

The exact combination of genetic material that became you had roughly a 1 in 400 trillion chance of existing. Your parents had to meet. Their parents had to meet. Going back just ten generations, you required a specific sequence of thousands of people crossing paths, surviving, choosing each other. One different decision in 1823 and you don't exist. One delayed train, one different college, one near-miss during wartime—and the entire genetic lottery reconfigures.

You won an impossibly specific draw. And then you had to show up and actually live it.

But here's the part most people miss: the version of you reading this right now is just as rare as the genetic odds that created you in the first place.

The you that exists is one of infinite possible yous

Every decision you've made—and every decision you've avoided—has been a fork in the road. Each one created a different version of you.

The you who chose to stay an extra hour after practice. The you who sent that text, made that call, walked away from that relationship. The you who said yes when it was easier to say no. The you who quit, who showed up anyway, who lied to yourself for two years before finally getting honest.

All of those choices stacked. They compounded into the person sitting here today—your habits, your skill set, your relationships, your confidence, your scars. This version of you isn't accidental. It's the result of ten thousand micro-decisions and a few massive ones, most of which you made unconsciously, on autopilot, or under pressure.

Somewhere in the multiverse of alternate timelines, there's a version of you who made different calls. One who took the scholarship to the other school. One who stayed in that toxic relationship. One who never got injured, or got injured worse. One who gave up earlier, or pushed harder, or chose an entirely different game.

Those versions exist only as ghosts—what-ifs and could-have-beens. You are the one that survived all the other possible yous and became real.

You are the sum of decisions and indecisions

Most people focus on the actions they took—the workouts, the late nights, the confrontations. But your indecisions shaped you just as much.

The promotion you were too scared to ask for. The conversation you avoided for three years. The training program you kept "meaning to start." The relationship you let drift because it was easier than the difficult talk. The version of yourself you've been too afraid to try on because being a beginner again feels humiliating.

Indecision is still a decision. It's a vote for the status quo. And when you vote for the same status quo long enough, it stops being a placeholder and starts being your identity.

So if you're standing here today feeling like you're not where you thought you'd be, the reason isn't bad luck or lack of talent. It's that somewhere along the line, you stopped making decisions that aligned with the person you said you wanted to become. You let comfort, fear, or distraction cast the tiebreaking votes.

The future you is not inevitable

Here's the uncomfortable truth: you are not "becoming" anything. You are actively building something, whether you realize it or not.

The person you'll be in five years is being constructed by today's choices. Not the goals you write down or the vision boards you create. The actual, unglamorous, moment-to-moment decisions: what you eat, how you talk to yourself, whether you keep your word to yourself, who you spend time with, what you consume, how you handle discomfort.

You're not drifting toward some pre-determined destiny. You're compounding in a direction based on what you're repeatedly choosing. And right now, you have full agency over what that direction is.

The version of you that you've always imagined—the one who's disciplined, confident, successful, at peace—is not waiting for you to "unlock" it. It's waiting for you to build it, one decision at a time, starting now.

You get to choose what kind of rare you become

The genetic lottery already happened. You can't change that. But the identity lottery is still in play.

You can become the version of you who stayed comfortable, who played it safe, who always had a reason not to swing. Or you can become the version who treated every choice like it mattered, who refused to let fear be the loudest voice in the room, who looked at the gap between current-you and future-you and decided to close it on purpose.

Both versions are rare. Both are real outcomes of the same starting conditions. The only difference is which decisions you make consistently over the next 1,000 days.

Most people never realize they have this kind of agency. They think identity is something you discover, not something you design. They wait for permission, for the right moment, for more clarity. Meanwhile, every day they're making choices that either reinforce the current version or build the next one.

You are the one-in-400-trillion genetic combination that happened to show up. And the person you are right now is the one-in-infinite version that survived all your choices and indecisions up until this moment.

Moving forward, you don't have to keep voting for this version. You can start building the one you've been putting off. Not someday. Not when conditions are perfect. Right now, with the next decision you make after reading this.

That version of you isn't a fantasy. It's a blueprint. And every choice you make from here is either a brick toward it or a vote to stay where you are.

The odds of you existing were impossible. Don't waste the miracle on a version of yourself you're only tolerating.

Two Quotes

1. "Most people don't want to be part of the process, they just want to be part of the outcome. But the process is where you figure out who's worth being part of the outcome." -- Alex Morton

2. “You’re going to have good days, horrible days and in between days. Embrace all of them... because you need all of them.” -- Bradley Beal

Four Posts

To Building Fortitude.

 Best Regards,

Colin Jonov, Founder & CEO Athletic Fortitude