I nearly got into a fight recently.
Like a legitimate fist fight.
To be fair, I’m using the term “recently” loosely here. It was right around Thanksgiving.
But given that my previous public fight occurred {checks notes} never, this feels recent enough.
I was at Lidl. Do you know this new grocery store Lidl? I think it started in Germany. In any case, it’s a strange place with a standard selection of groceries, some unusual foods and an aisle full of odds-and-ends you might find in a Dollar General or Five Below.
So I was riding solo at Lidl picking up a few necessities and found myself behind this older guy at the checkout line. He was buying turkeys and was upset that the turkeys he chose were not the ones that were listed for sale on the flyer.
The young woman behind the counter did everything to appease this guy. She explained these weren’t the same turkeys. She offered to have someone get him the correct turkeys. She offered him a discount - though not the same discount - on the turkeys he had already chosen just as a concession.
But this asshole couldn’t find satisfaction in any of it. And just become more agitated and belligerent and rude to this young woman.
Now, there are several things at play here. The most important is that the guy was being a dick for no reason (actually, this woman had a thickish foreign accent and I feared that was part of the reason). The second is that checkout at Lidl is already a nightmare and he was making things worse. The last is that I have an unchecked hero complex.
So I stepped up to this guy, got in his face (perhaps not my proudest moment) and asked him if he wanted me to buy his fucking turkeys and embarrass him in front of this entire odd-yet-inefficient German superstore?
Just as he balled up his fist a manager luckily stepped in and defused the situation. Somehow this guy got his turkeys and I managed to buy my eggs and beef jerky without any fisticuffs and was on my way.
I know, I know. Not such a satisfying ending. And, honestly, I’m not sure why I shared it with you.
Oh, wait, I remember. I wanted to tell you about something called The Grocery Line Principle and was looking for a way in.
So what is The Grocery Line Principle?
Well, it's a theory — mostly made up by me — that says: The longer we stand in line for something, the more likely we are to abandon it right before we get what we came for.
Not because it’s not working.
But because we lose faith. We get impatient. We see another line moving faster. We tell ourselves it’ll be better over there — more gum flavors, juicier tabloid headlines.
Or we just assume - based on nothing - that we picked the wrong line altogether.
And this happens all the time in fitness.
Someone joins a gym. Starts a program. Cleans up their nutrition. They feel better, maybe even see some initial results.
But then — something slows down. The scale doesn’t move. Life gets busy. Progress gets boring.
So they jump.
They bail on the plan. They switch programs. They try that thing their friend is doing. They Google “How to lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks” at 2AM while eating careful fingerfuls of shredded Mexican blend cheese out of a Ziploc bag.
And all the while, they were three people with two items all paying cash away from the front of the line.
If they had just stayed where they were — kept showing up, trusted the process, tuned out the noise — they might have actually seen what they were looking for.
And this isn’t limited to fitness.
It shows up in relationships. In careers. In goals of all kinds. The moment right before something meaningful happens usually feels like nothing’s happening at all.
The checkout line gets long. The doubts get loud. You wonder if any of it is worth it.
But maybe the real skill — the one that actually separates the people who succeed from the people who just stay stuck — is the ability to stand still when it counts. Kind of like a tree down by the river. It gets pelted by the wind but it does not move.
You must hold your place even when you’re uncomfortable. You must trust that just because you can’t see it yet doesn’t mean it’s not working. That there’s a payoff coming — if you just keep unloading your groceries onto the conveyor belt behind that silly plastic barrier that separates your items from the next guy’s.
So next time you feel like abandoning your training plan or quitting your gym or ghosting your coach because things got hard or slow or complicated?
Take a deep breath.
Check your cart.
And ask yourself one question:
“Do I really want to start over at the back of another line?”
Because trust me - they all look faster.
Until you find yourself stuck behind some asshole arguing about turkeys.
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Thanks in advance. I appreciate the support, Alana.