I took it as the implication. That could have been mistaken. If it was, then okay, but what then did you mean? (And the goalpost moving is thus not intentional, even if still a matter of fact.)

I don't think "terrible" and "weak" go together. I think it's wrong to call seriously traumatized people "terrible".

In what way? Given that Paralympics is a thing, there's almost surely some form of "athletic"-grade training that can work for pretty much anyone - the trouble is whether it is feasible to follow given other constraints in your life, not least of which is the possible presence of a full-time job.

If these tips were directed specifically to aspiring athletes, they would be fairly decent ... but also kind of pointless, since any such would almost certainly already know this stuff.

For anyone else, it is very likely you can't "train like an athlete" if you have a full-time job. Moreover, you don't need to if you simply want to be healthy.

"Dangerous mistake" in this context would be something that, say, harms another in a real way, or that puts you at a risk of serious (possibly physical) harm, and that you could have avoided with more careful, informed, and rational thought.

"Wasting valuable time" / "too much time": yeah, that's much more grey, but basically you only have so much time in a lifetime so if you spend the whole thing until you're dead and failed that's the extreme, but even before that we have the inevitabilities of things like aging, changes to the world, and so forth that may cause the goal's achievability to recede from you or become less relevant if you dally too long in getting there.

Sure, but how do you avoid making dangerous mistakes or errors and how do you avoid wasting too much valuable time? Or are those concerns themselves part of the problem and blitheness might actually be better?

Shave the head. Lose the lbs. Learn to dance - and if dance isn't your thing, find something else that is that also exercises the body and spirit.

Yeah, I know, your skin still isn't blue. But I think that's just kinda shallow.

Or to put it another way, there's failure, then there's ethical failure, and the latter absolutely deserves all the excuses in the world to not want to court it. (But then what about if someone says "you're then making too many excuses" ... and it is precisely that failure mode that I get myself tied in knots about in many cases with things like, say, why it took so long for me to even begin to get into political "organizing" - I didn't wanna break personal boundaries in making relationships around sensitive topics due to a dearth of social skill and knowledge of how to navigate the innuendo-laden social world.)

So how do you deal with those, then, when they seem like they are so damn true to you, e.g. I remember having had an online convo where I wore someone out with questions because I really, really felt I needed all those answers they were giving as the questions seemed so reasonable, but what if this was some of that "intellectualizing" error or similar? How can you deal with that? What do you do with the places where information is missing?

Sure, but "don't compare" makes me then wonder "well what if I'm settling". How do you annihilate that fast to make sure that you don't and still achieve genuine goodness?

I suspect it means that there is a tension between, say, settling down, buying a house, and starting a nuclear family; and working toward an ambitious goal, ad the latter may require mobility, not to mention kids = big time (and money) commitments.

When it comes to the elite, yes - for everyone seriously vying for it is already quite likely working at the top of their game. But that just comes down to the question of what "success" does and should mean for you personally.

And in the beginning at least, it's also learning what exactly you want to do and to have a point of focus. (I am kinda jealous of those Olympic athletes, not because they work hard so much as because they KNEW what they wanted from the youngest age and didn't worry about opportunity cost). And practicing deliberately, meaning you are consciously aware of what parts of the skill are missing and adjusting your practice accordingly.