Matt Hoskins, founder of CheetahFit training, gives you five reasons why when life gives you lemons you need to suck it up and eat the damn lemons. Hint: if at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

Matt Hoskins, founder of CheetahFit training, gives you five reasons why when life gives you lemons you need to suck it up and eat the damn lemons. Hint: if at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.

1. Chase your losses

There is always a moment in poker when you’re chip pile is being eaten by hungry beavers wearing Dale Earnhart shades and bad hats. You are getting desperate. This is the moment when most players go ‘on tilt.’ Suddenly it’s borrowed time and stupid decisions. Most people say count your losses and go home. Screw that. Go with it. Throw everything all in and start surfing on the edge. If your boat is filling withwater do you start bailing or make a run for it? Gun the motor and give it all you’ve got.

2. Lift without a spotter

We are awesome at thinking we don’t suck, when we do. The only way to overcome this inherent narcissist state, shared by pretty much all of humanity, is to truly reveal where our overinflated opinion of ourselves ends and reality begins. In the gym, your spotter allows you to go beyond your natural limits thereby creating the false impression that you are stronger than you are. Lift without a spotter, leave the collars off and go heavy. Explore the reality of your frail position in the universe.

3. Eat the taboo

Don’t eat carbs or gluten. No dessert. Beer is bad calories and will make you look like a non-paleo piglet. Screw that. If you like Bologna, eat 10 packages. Cake sound good? Ditto, go ahead and load up a huge cart with Costco food-barn white cakes and live on them for five days straight. The cure for Gluttony hiding in our bodies, minds and bellies does not lie in deliberately reducing our use of pleasurable things. That would be repression. The permanent fix is a temporary state of Amish Rumspringa: get it out of your system and the craving will go away.

4. Go homeless

Dress in the worst clothes imaginable like a homeless person. Get it right. The odor, the walk, the whole character. Walk the streets like a half-zombie and see how everyone gives you ‘the look’. They pull the kids back, walk the long way around, maybe toss a dollar your way. How does it feel? When you put your normal clothes on the reason for “going homeless” will be obvious. Appreciation, man.

5. Embrace the suck

Think about what you do really bad – the worst – then do it a lot. Can’t throw a football or a Frisbee? Go to town. Ask anyone that will play with you to go outside then drive them crazy with hundreds of bad throws until they leave. Find someone else and start over. Throw the Frisbee until you get a blister on your finger. Eventually, the master of the Frisbee — or whatever task you choose to overcome — will reveal itself and that will be you.