DailyJim: Muhammad Ali, rope-a-dope, and the endurance and consistency to winning people over

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym today is thursday may 1st 2025 i missed a couple weeks but back at it um today i want to talk about muhammad ali rope a dope and the endurance, and consistency to winning people over so i'm not here to talk about boxing i'm not here to talk about defeating someone i'm talking about winning somebody over i'm talking about winning their perspective, winning their hearts, basically forming a deeper relationship, coming onto the same team with this person, bringing them along with us, ideally towards a more loving, more resolving future.

And where does this come from? This idea that I realize I have been so focused on fundraising, trying to sell a huge vision to people, basically trying to deliver a knockout blow in boxing terms like I'm trying to give that one haymaker punch that's going to knock people out and they're going to go wow what you're working on is the most fantastic loving uh urgent and important thing we need in society and so it's so how to and I'm going to give you thousands of dollars to do it now and I trust you to do it and that is kind of going for the Hail Mary, as we say in football, or to the American football, or the huge haymaker knockout punch.

Another analogy is to look at how Muhammad Ali, one of the best boxers of all time, won a fight against George Foreman, I believe. And it was called a rope-a-dope technique. From my understanding, the idea was that he would lean against the ropes and to take punches. Punch, punch, punch, punch, punch. He would let Foreman punch as hard as he could for as long as he could and take the punches and use the ropes to absorb some of the impact of the punch and look for opportunities to counter-attack and basically wait until Foreman got tired.

And I think this analogy, this perspective might bode me better, and maybe a lot of us. Instead of trying to knock the person out with a huge punch, what about just having the endurance and the strength to take a lot of punches over and over and stay in the fight and keep going and keep going and getting up and keep going and keep going and keep going.

So i think that's the approach i am more excited to take right now, as it seems that's kind of how i approach life in general when it comes to romantic relationships when it comes to family relationships when it comes to exercise when it comes to web design, i have never really been good at delivering the knockout punch or maybe i, I don't know, maybe I'm good at it, but I'm not as good as I want to be. I have in my mind this ideal of, wow, I can knock them out with one second. I've run workshops where in 45 minutes people are crying and hugging each other and forgiving people that they've held grudges against for years. So I still believe I can deliver powerful punches like that.

But I still think that often I'm so focused on trying to deliver the huge ones so quickly that it's near instantaneous and I overlooked the Muhammad Ali strategy the rope-a-dope the, one foot in front of the other I can't remember where I was reading it but I think it was talking about navy seals and their energy to run and stay in shape and something about and getting through hell week which is their crazy training week and I think there was some point about it where it says, you don't focus on the finish line you focus on one step after the other one step right left right left, just focus on the steps, you'll get there.

And I think that's how I want to be with the work right now. Because I believe the funding model that I'm talking about, the way of interacting that I'm talking about, where we give and receive unconditionally to each other, we solve each other's problems unconditionally. We see each other's problems as our own problems.

We see other people as ourselves, extensions of ourselves.

To get there, it may be a lot longer than I expect, because I don't know if people are ready for that right now. A lot of us aren't. It seems like maybe such a foreign concept, or as one person was telling me today, that the idea that someone would give me money, just give money to me to do this, was chasing windmills, a reference to Don Quixote, how he became crazy and started chasing after imaginary windmills and fighting imaginary windmills. And yet I believe that at its core to what I do.

But instead of spending all my time trying to line people up and give them the one big punch so they understand it, maybe I can just give a jab here, a jab there, a jab there, a jab there. Constantly jabbing with Daily Jim episodes like this, with Ask Jim Anything episodes that I'm going to be starting up that I've already done two versions of, where you can ask me, I'm going to be answering 10 different questions coming from the audience. If I don't fill up the questions from the audience, then I will ask myself some questions, which is fun as well, but I prefer getting questions from the audience.

And then I think another segment where I'm going to have guests, and honestly, right now it's just been called Jim Kleiber Show, the main segment, but I think it would be fun to have a segment called Jim and Friends, where I talk with some of my friends, and it's not just about talking with them, it's about modeling how to have friendships with lots of people across lots of different backgrounds. Because if I think of one thing that we are struggling with in the world right now, it might be friendships. So many of us are estranged from our friends or just don't talk to them that much or have active hatred towards them and we're just slowly disappearing.

And so I'm really excited to do that as well. But when I frame it this way, it's more of like, What do I do every day? What do I just wake up and do? Bam, bam, bam. One of the things that I can almost predictably do every day, at least Monday through Thursday, and try as hard to hit that target Monday through Thursday.

Because I believe the way that we change the world, the way that we change our lives, the way that we change anything, is step by step by step by step. Very rarely is there a huge, huge sudden change. Often it's a slow change we're changing all the time we're getting more uh we're getting gaining weight we're losing weight we're gaining muscle we're losing muscle we're gaining, abilities losing abilities we are gaining relationships losing relationships slowly slowly step by step by step by step and we can change the direction if we just pay attention to those steps instead of going after the really big thing that's what i'm saying to myself so So I'm going to take a step back from the big fundraising, I think, and focus just on what's the routine, what's the steady pace that I want to keep, especially as it relates to the public. How do I stay public and consistent?

So that slowly, slowly, we start to see that there's a different way to live life. There's a different way to deal with relationships. There's a different way to reflect.

There's a different way to process emotion and anger and hatred.

And this is just a different way to live.

And yeah, so I'm excited. I hope you pay attention. I hope you listen to these. I think these will stay audio-only episodes for Daily Gym because I have fun kind of pacing back and forth when I record them. But then also doing the Ask Gym Anything episodes, which are going to be video. It'll be 30 minutes long. I'll post up on YouTube, and then I can split it up into two-and-a-half-minute videos for clips per question or shorter. Maybe we'll see. And then I'm thinking the Gym and Friends episodes will be probably an hour to two hours of longer form and then also split them up into clips that are interesting, you know, anywhere from 30 seconds to maybe five minutes. So if you're interested in any of this, please pay attention. I still have to figure out the distribution strategy. What am I going to do to consistently distribute and let people know what I'm working on?

My gut says to have the Jim and Friends forum, which is friends.jimkliber.com,

and to have everything based there. But then also to venture out into the different social media platforms, which is Twitter, which I like to call it, Instagram mostly, TikTok, Facebook.

Maybe Threads or maybe LinkedIn as well, and then have a lot of it reside on YouTube, have all the videos reside there. So if you're interested in this, oh, and maybe an email list. I'm thinking maybe an email list on Fridays. I just send out one regular email every Friday giving an update on what happened. Nice thing about the forum is that it will give you email updates about what's happening in the forum. And you can talk to me, you can talk to other people, ask questions there. Yeah, so it's just a nice spot to convene. And I think, again, a lot of us just don't have a lot of friends or we don't have close relationships with our friends. And we could build stronger, deeper, and longer-lasting relationships and learn how to maintain them through this process. So again, maintenance is slow, slow, consistent, punch, dot, dot, dot, dot. So if you're interested in this, please, please, please check out the videos, the audios, and yeah, throw me any questions that you have. I'd love to answer them. I don't have too many for today, so I'm going to do 10 on my own. But uh yeah please please bring the questions it can be anything from politics to personal stories that you're in personal conflicts to um physical exercises to uh dance to things you know random questions you'd ask somebody on a talk show so all right i'm kind of out of breath and i will finish this and talk to you all later take care.