I just got off the phone with my buddy Larry. He’s around 50 years old. He said that he was unhappy about a show that he enjoyed not being renewed, and he told his 13 year old daughter, Haley, that he was going to write the network a letter. Haley said, “You mean that you are going to the trouble of getting a piece of paper and a pen, writing it all down, putting it in an envelope, licking the envelope, putting a stamp on it, and walking to the mailbox to send it?”

“Yes,” he said. She couldn't understand it.

You may be saying, “Who cares about knowing how to write and mail a letter, just write an email.” I'm thinking that maybe that's a skill that we don't use much any more, but something inside me says that it is a skill worth having. These types of fundamental skills, I feel, are vital to life, and having to actually go through a little trouble seems more worthwhile to me than just sending an email.

Lots of stuff has changed over the years and especially from when I was a kid and a teenager in the 1970s and 80s. Some stuff has gotten better, no question. Surgeries and medical stuff have advanced, among other things. But over the years I think that we have lost some of the ability to do things for ourselves, and to have to work hard to learn about something.

I think that we have an instinct to seek things out, but I also think that if it's right in front of us we will always take the easy way.

Do kids still love lifting weights like we did when I was young? From the 8th grade on, I was obsessed with lifting weights and getting bigger and stronger. I needed to learn everything about it, all of it. Sometimes, I think that with the overwhelming distractions of video games, social media, and phones, maybe kids today don't have the head space to love gaining all the knowledge that they can about lifting weights.

Don’t get me wrong, I use all that stuff, too. Except video games. Never played one. (I lied, I played a hunting game ten years ago, twice.) But I had none of those things when I was first learning about training with weights. I had to learn about it the hard way, just like everyone did back then.

I loved it from the beginning, and have loved it ever since, over 40 years of it. Maybe one of the reasons that I liked it so much was because we had to use our imaginations a little. Pictures were a big deal. I would read the Dallas Cowboys Weekly and if I saw one picture of the Cowboys – especially Randy White – lifting weights, I would take note of everything in the picture. I remember that one particular issue in the 1980s that had Randy alone lifting weights with his Rottweiler next to him. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Another picture had him doing curls outside in Texas with a dip of Skoal in his lower lip.

I studied those pictures. Just the coolness of him being alone with his dog, getting his lifts in, sent me to the weight room right away. I’d imagine that I was cool like that when I lifted. It meant something to buy a magazine and for it to have some great pictures of guys lifting heavy weights. The pictures captured the strain, the exertion, the spotters at the ready, the people in the gym gathered around with incredulous looks on their faces.

I still remember a picture in a magazine of Mr. America, Casey Viator, in the 1980s incline benching 315 for reps with veins like snakes sticking out of his forearms. Or powerlifter Jim Cash deadlifting with insane muscle and vascularity. That was some magical stuff, and so inspiring. Hell, even reading about great lifting fired me up. You would play the movie in your head as the author described the lifter crushing some prodigious poundage, or a hard set. There was something to all of that. There was a certain mystery about everything.

Hell, it takes away from the specialness of it all when you know all the facts about the person that you used to only be able to read about in magazines or pay to see in seminars if by chance they came to your town. Now, you follow them throughout their whole day from when they wake up in the morning, all their meals, their training, all of it. It leaves nothing for the reader to wonder about. And you see their faults, you see that they are all human. People like that stuff, but I don’t. I don’t want them to be normal like all the people I know. Those guys were like gods to me, and that made it way more cool when you actually saw or talked to one of them in person.

I used to think that kids today have it made with all of the information out there and the videos and all. But I don't think like that anymore. It's just more confusion and so damn easy. What do they have to learn on their own? Who do they have to seek out for information? I can remember, in high school, my friend and I would go to gyms just to watch people lift weights. I can remember going to the Washington Redskins training camp in the ’80s, sucking in a deep breath and forcing myself to walk into the weight room and ask the assistant strength coach if I could ask him a few questions. He did make a little sighing sound like he was busy, but I persisted and he opened up and answered my questions. Once you got people going, they would talk to you.

Everyone likes to talk about their craft. I can't imagine my sons doing that. And they both love lifting weights, but not that much – not to have an insatiable thirst for knowledge about it, to go out of their way to ask questions like I did. I can't even picture them doing that. Everything is right there on their phones, or on YouTube, right now. And because they don’t have to do the hard searching, they don’t.

You see, when one doesn't have to search for knowledge, and then experiment on their own and make mistakes on their own and then go find people with the knowledge to teach them, or go to the bookstore and buy a magazine about lifting weights or find a book about it and then, on their own, figure out what works and what does not work, their life is missing something. It is missing experiences, of course, but it's the difficulty of the seeking and the finding that makes it all worth it. Without that, it can't possibly mean as much.

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