First Things First...

[splok]

TLDR: This is a long post about how we can suck less at life. This is a bunch of stuff I’m working through myself, so to be honest, I’m mostly writing it for me. I needed to get this stuff organized and out of my head. Maybe it can be useful to some of you as well.

First Things First:

Don’t Die.

Ok, so that’s probably tough to do in the long run, but if you accept that we have some control over our general health and, consequently, the number of healthy, vital years we have left in us, shouldn't we be working on that?
Maybe you’re close enough to optimal health that it’s not worth worrying about, but I’m not. I’m fat, and a decent percentage of you are as well. Even if you’re not fat, you may still be eating unhealthy food, drinking/smoking too much, living under chronic stress, sitting in front of a computer 12+ hours per day with little exercise, etc. etc. We all have areas where we could improve, so why don’t we improve them?

Diworsifying your life?

A while back, I was talking over Snowbank’s Diworsification post with one of my friends, and I realized that the same idea applies to your entire life, not just your business. If multiple areas of your life are off-track, trying to fix them all at the same time just makes it less likely that you’ll succeed at fixing any of them. Of course, how far off track they are makes a difference. Once you have one business running smoothly, maybe you can start on a second one, and once you have one of your life’s problems mostly sorted out, maybe you can work on the next one.

I’ve been making this mistake my entire life. Every time I feel like I’m really ready make changes for real this time, I try to change everything at once, and obviously nothing ends up changing. It’s just like trying to start 10 businesses at once. So I finally realized that my health was the most important thing and everything has to take a backseat to getting it back on track.

Whatever it takes, sort out your health!

I’ve seen a lot of my friends say things like “who cares, the last 20 years are terrible anyway!†F*ck that, if you were going to die today, what would you do to get 20 more years? How much is that feeling going to change once you’re a bit older? Ironically, if we were actually dying tomorrow, most of us would move mountains to be able to hold on to a few more years of life, but how many of us won’t bother to get out of our desk chair for a few minutes per day for the same deal once the payoff is moved into the future?

Quality of Life doesn't only matter once you’re old…

It’s not only about the future… How many flights of stairs can you jog up right now without being winded? This shit affects our quality of life and our effectiveness in the here and now. Lots of us here seem to like the idea of traveling, and I agree! I want to live a life where extended travel plays a big part. I want to go out and experience all the world has to offer! However, that’s actually a lot of work. If you really want to go and see the world, you can’t just drive up, take a few pics, and hop back in the car. Your ability to walk/hike around for hours (sometimes carrying a bunch of shit) will directly affect how much you can get out of your traveling. I may be fat, but in the last decade, I've spent more time living without a car than with one. I’m used to walking pretty much everywhere I go, but even so, going out and trying to be active in a new place, taking advantage of the opportunities… It’s F*cking exhausting.

And don’t forget about business!

In one of positively affect practically every other aspect of your life.

We know what to do, so why don’t we do it?

But you know all of this, right? I hope that the idea that we should take care of ourselves isn't a ground-breaking revelation to any of you. But we still don’t do the things we know we should do… I’m sure you've seen the graph before, but really, it’s always at the root of our avoidance of the really important things:

​

We spend our lives in working in the wrong quadrants. We do just enough in quadrant 1 to fend off disasters. We spend our most productive hours in quadrant 3 and feel like we’ve gotten lots of shit done! Then we fill up the rest of our time with quadrant 4 activities that are worthless other than as a way to disengage our brains (which is useful, but there are better ways).

The things that really matter, that really make a difference in our lives, are almost all in quadrant 2. But sadly, most of us will do anything and everything to stay out of it. The entire concept of procrastination exists almost entirely to keep us out of quadrant 2! The only way that some of us ever get anything worthwhile accomplished is to create a situation where the important becomes urgent. We engineer crisis after crisis for ourselves so that we actually get things done! Because we know that otherwise, it will never happen…

Why do our brains hate us?

It’s really the lizard brain at work. It’s not that it hates us. It’s just that its goals are very different than ours. Basically, as long as the status quo is relatively safe (not starving, not running from a tiger), our bodies want things to stay the way they are. We’re pretty fantastic at maintaining the status quo, both internally and externally, and not just in subconscious lizard-brain land. If you’ve ever been a part of an organization of practically any size, you can see this manifest itself in every meeting/discussion.

Most of us on this forum probably like to think of ourselves as considerably smarter than the average person, and I’ll agree that we’re probably right. If you’re here, you’ve likely come here because you have, at some point, realized a couple of things which almost guarantee that you’re smarter and more capable than the average person: First, that there are people who know more than you about some things, and second, that you can improve yourself by learning from them.

So grats to us! We’re smart!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[splok]

But that only compounds the problem…

The problem is that we can know something intellectually and still have an incredibly hard time pairing action with our knowledge. It’s the same as in any story where the protagonist at some point has to face himself. The smarter you are, the more capable you are of resisting your own best intentions. We use everything we know against ourselves. You know that sense of reason and logic that you value so much? It’s the perfect weapon for your lizard brain to crush your hopes and dreams. Face it, you can justify anything. We’re amazing at rationalizing even the most unhealthy/unproductive decisions. Ok, sure, we can, but why would we want to?

Hyperbolic Discounting

The problem is that hyperbolic discounting exists and it sort of makes sense. We value getting something today more than we value getting that same thing later. That makes sense. Things today are typically worth more than things later. Even if that weren’t true, our situations change and we don’t live forever, so getting some utility from something now is guaranteed while there’s only a chance that I’ll get to enjoy that utility later. So, using our giant, rationalizing brain, we can pretty much convince ourselves that anything is a great idea… wasting an extra hour in front of the computer/tv, not saving/investing money, not exercising, etc. etc.

We can always start tomorrow…

And it’s true. One less day of exercising over the course of your life is utterly inconsequential. As is one less day of saving, moving your business forward, etc. This is the really scary one, because it’s a very effective deterrent because it’s entirely true.

The end of our lives is (hopefully) quite far away, and filling a desire now has a much more direct sense of benefit than making ourselves imperceptibly healthier. Anything affecting your health is really the perfect storm of hyperbolic discounting. It may take a long time (months, years, decades, possibly never) for the true benefit to be realized. You’re actively deciding to avoid something that you want to do, each and every time you want to do it. And what’s worse, most of these things are actively destructive! Instead of giving your pleasure or satisfaction, they bring you discomfort! Even though we intellectually know what we should do, it’s pretty easy to see why the status-quo-enforcing-lizard-brain would be pretty pissed about our trying to replace a well-known pleasure with an unfamiliar pain.

Self-Delusion

Most people instinctively think that a delusion is an undesirable thing, especially so when you’re doing it to yourself. I’ll suggest that it entirely depends on the delusion. We typically think that false things are bad and that true things are good, but what if holding a false belief was able to get us closer to our goal? Think of a habit that you’d like to change (quitting smoking, starting to exercise every day, etc). If you actually believed that the second you lit up a cigarette you would literally and instantly die, I bet you’d find smoking pretty F*cking repellent.

It took me a long time to get on-board with this one, and even though I’m now totally on-board intellectually, I still know that it’s a delusion. I still wonder how I could delude myself so hard that I wouldn’t realize that the delusion wasn’t true (and I wonder if that isn’t the only way for it to be truly effective).

Maybe we have to apply our reason to the unreasonable.

A ton of self-help material that sounds like complete trash to our rational brains can still be effective if it gets people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do. I see this question asked everywhere as a way to inspire introspection and to find out what’s really important: “What would you do if you couldn’t fail?†But consider for a second what you would do if a genie granted you that magical ability. You still have to do the work, but assuming you do, your next business endeavor will absolutely succeed.

Now, what if there was no genie, but you actually believed that this was true. What would your chances be? Ok, maybe still pretty low, BUT would they be higher than before?

Small Changes Matter

One thing that I’ve had partial success with is to focus on the habit of doing something instead of the actual thing in question. Instead of thinking about whether or not I should have a Coke with lunch (and the benefits/consequences that will result), I’ll think about the habit of having a Coke at lunch instead. I’ll try to think about what having a Coke with lunch for the next 20 or 40 more years will do to me. Each coke I have reinforces the habit, so each time I have one, I’m tacitly agreeing that I’ll have coke forever. That’s not technically true. I could stop tomorrow instead of today. But that’s the healthy delusion to have:

One more Coke = 20 years of Coke… (1 year of having 1 Coke per day is over 90k calories btw)

One more day without exercise = 20 years without exercise…

Then the consequences matter. Then maybe the pain is worth it.

So where am I at?

As of this morning, I’ve just finished my 5[SUP]th[/SUP] week on yet another attempt to change my health for the better. I’ve managed to stick to my eating habits fairly well (down 30 lbs), with only one slip so far (much better than I’ve done in any attempt since I was an undergrad), largely due to this being my main priority now. To be honest, I’m likely not eating as much as I should, but it’s way easier for me to eliminate things than it is to add things I don’t really like, leveraged laziness I suppose hehe. I’ve felt surprisingly good really, though exercise of any sort is very draining, making me pretty resistant to it, though I’m trying to steadily increase my activity. This is the first step on what I hope is a long journey of living more deliberately.

 

[stranger]

DON'T DIE is the best phrase in your soooooooooooooooooo long post.:eusa_clap:

 

[jon.a]

Don't Die!
It sounds funny but it's pretty important. I had a "small" heart attack a couple years ago. I remember thinking Don't Die, Marcia will be pissed.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Mike.B]

The rest of my life is F*cked right now, but I'm working on my health again. I've started running again even though I'm 40 pounds over weight. I'm going to do another marathon next year if it kills me! I'm shooting for a sub 3 hour marathon at the age of 46, and I want to break my all time 5k record of 15:30.

 

[stranger]

Don't Die! - the real important thing for every fastlaner :icon_super: