The simple reason most people fail to improve their body

There’s one simple belief that separates all serially successful people from those who stay perpetually stuck and frustrated regardless of the New Year’s resolutions, the PTs, the research, the 75 day challenges, the tech, the money spent without this belief bodies don’t change. Life doesn’t change. Understand this and it will make success in anything extremely simple like many others. I first understood this in fitness and that’s what allowed me to figure out how to get all the results I wanted from a simple 40 minute a week routine. I’ve simplified the same thing to language learning, personality development, and building a business amongst other pursuits and we’ll call it brick wall theory. This is so powerful that depending on which side of the fence you’re on here, it is either unlocking everything you set your mind to or blocking you at every turn, and this is sadly the side that roughly nine in 10 people are on regardless of their goal.
So I want to explain what it is now so you can at least make your own choice a little more consciously. Success in anything, fitness, business, language, learning, you name it. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall because despite how many of us convince ourselves otherwise, you cannot think or plan your way to a result in anything. The reality is you condition yourself there through brutal repetition of what you can’t yet do until finally you do break through and you can do it, and then you find the next wall and you continue that process because the only thing that causes adaptation and therefore growth and ultimately success is failure. That is how your body develops. That is how your brain rewires. You don’t go and do muscle growth consciously. You just show up and try and move loads that are heavier than what you can currently lift.
You don’t do learning. You show up and try and use a language that you can’t yet speak. You try and read a book that you don’t yet understand. You try and build a business that you’ve never run before. The problem of course, is that banging your head against a wall isn’t fun. In fact, it’s quite uncomfortable. Most of us have been taught to experience failure as a negative thing. We don’t like it. We don’t like being bad at things, but the work that’s necessary to trigger growth is work in which we fail. So you’re banging your head against a wall repeatedly in order to get some future result. Add to this, the fact that you don’t know how thick the wall is and you have no guarantee that you’ll ever break through. Why would you whack your head in the first place, let alone do it repeatedly over a long period of time?
And so this is why people end up doing everything possible to try and avoid it even if they have the goal of breaking through the wall without being clear on this idea of failure and conditioning, our natural tendency is delay and avoidance of the discomfort required rather than show up and just whack their head against the wall every day, people will do research on the best head whacking techniques. They’ll watch motivational videos of wall breaking. They’ll buy all the best neck brace technology and wall gripping gloves. They’ll get a bloody degree in brick construction dynamics, but they won’t bang their head against the wall. We’ve never had more access to information out. Knowledge and research and tech and gear are not the thing holding you back. You can literally use AI to bring you any information you want in seconds. So then why aren’t you ripped and fluent in five languages dating supermodels with a hundred a month business?
And it’s because of following that natural tendency to avoid failure. People will watch endless fitness tutorials but not train heavy and intensely. Consistently. People will nerd out about advanced nutrition theory and what foods to avoid, but they won’t hit their protein target and calorie deficit consistently. They’ll use joy lingo inducing, mindless gamified drills, but they won’t try and read a book or have real conversations in the language and an absolute classic. People will read 20 business books and design a logo and make the perfect business plan, but they won’t go and show up every day and consistently market their business. It’s way too common to wait for the perfect time to start to tell yourself a story about how perfect you’ll do things in the future or just avoiding starting and failing now. It’s insane how good people are at avoiding the feeling of being shit.
The thing that all successful people realise at some point in the journey to getting to their goal is that the only way through the wall is to start banging their head so they block out everything else and just start banging and seeing through this lens, you quickly realise how ridiculous all these avoidance techniques are. You’re delaying because you want to get everything perfect. What does that mean? You want to bang your head perfectly against the wall, just start banging. You get better at it from doing it. You want to learn more and accumulate more information about it before you start time wasting. Just start banging your head because the reality is in any of these pursuits that you want to go after until you have thousands of reps under your belt, you will be shit. You have to fail a lot over and over and over again because how else will you possibly get good fitness is maybe more obvious.
And when you’re very experienced, any of these things are obvious in retrospect because you can’t be strong physically until you’ve done hundreds and hundreds of sessions failing at the limit of your strength to tell your body to keep improving, keep building muscle, keep getting stronger, and that’s what I learned learning my second, third, fourth language. You cannot be fluent until you’ve made thousands of mistakes, until you’ve not known a word thousands of times until you’ve messed up over and over and over in real conversations with people. So wanting to avoid any single instance of that is just cutting yourself off from success before you even started. For me more recently with business, I’ve had to learn the same thing again, like with YouTube, you can’t possibly be good until you’ve done hundreds of videos and I’m so early on with this, but it’s the only mindset that’s helped me start and get some progress and start making something half decent.
The natural tendency is to want to get everything perfect and not want to put low performing content out there. Again, the reality is the only way you figure out how to do that is through reps and through failure, and you don’t learn nearly as much from the videos that do well as all the ones that don’t. So from my perspective, there are three key implications from this brick wall theory that you can implement in whatever goal you’re currently pursuing that at least make it a whole lot easier to show up and bang your head against the wall every day. The first is that once you’ve decided on the wall you want to break through, simplify the task to the core essential of whacking your head against it and remove everything else that’s been distracting you to give yourself the best chance of simply doing the thing.
You need a routine that’s clear and objective and keeps that goal as the goal. For instance, with fitness six movements, the whole point is that we’re going to fail every time we train, and so keeping it to just those six with a single strength goal reach and the intent of training them once a week means you can ignore everything that’s possibly going to distract you and fire for your attention that’s easier and more complex and might seem cool, bright, shiny object and just do the set six sets a week, one of each. Go as hard as possible, fail learning a language, and I’ve applied this to Spanish with a lot of success. Five minutes per weekday. Do something, do something that’s challenging, read a book, speak it with someone. If you’re super early on, just try and reverse translate sentences from English to Spanish until you start to succeed for business.
Write an email once a week, make a video once a week. Accumulate reps have objective, clear targets like that, that you know over time will contribute to the growth you want and just get them done. There’s some examples. All of those tasks involve failure by design, all of them with the right intent of guaranteed to lead to an outcome long term. Figure out what makes sense for the thing you’re pursuing and turn it into a regular objective, actionable input target. Second step, once you clear on the general input target, you have a routine, make that thing as efficient and effective as possible, meaning we want to minimise the required input in terms of time and maximise its potency. IE, how fun and stimulating and difficult it is. These things might seem counterintuitive, but they’re how we engineer serious and sustained results. Did a video diving deeper into this recently, if you want to watch more, but for example, fitness.
We have our one set per week. We maximises efficacy by going at maximum intensity, failing from the start, forcing the negatives, eliminating anything that’s sub maximal sub failure, and then we just aim for one good rep a week. As long as we’ve done full range of motion once up and down, we’re done, everything else is bonus. You can just go until you’ve had enough language we alluded to, but rather than sitting there doing mindless sub maximal drills on an app and doing that for ages, much better. Just bringing it right down, making the minimum input five minutes, but then going as hard as possible in those five minutes, constantly challenging yourself, focusing, trying to use it. I would get you far, far further in, much less time, and one of the best things I ever discovered for work was the idea of three daily goals.
Having just three things in a workday that a higher leverage and moving the needle forward in your business or your career that are all you focus on getting done. The other things come up, admin, necessary maintenance tasks, but having three clear objectives that are actually important. Minimise the scope and overwhelm down and allow you to put all your effort and intensity and mental capacity into doing a really good job of that way, way, way better. So you get three essential needle moving tasks done for the day than to spend 12 hours spinning your wheels and not actually making any progress. The final step that I’ll suggest to help you get through your wall is to find someone who’s already broken through it themselves, because nothing gives you more confidence in your process. When it’s hard and your forehead is bleeding and you have no idea how much brick is left between you and the other side, nothing gives you more confidence and certainty in yourself than having someone standing beside you telling you to keep going because you are getting there.
The beauty in getting coaching or mentorship from someone else with more experience is that it gives you the confidence to execute relentlessly without thinking, without getting distracted, and to just stay the path long enough until you get there. You get results, you get traction, and then that takes over and gives you the confidence to keep going yourself. For fitness, not necessarily plugging me in rings drug, but they’re a huge part of the value in what we do in our programme. I think watching my students who succeed, it’s not incredibly genius work, but it’s the fact that they stop telling themselves stories and start showing up consistently and putting in real effort on the work that matters, and they have the confidence to keep doing that long enough to the point where they realise, oh, I’m doing it. I’m getting stronger. I’m transforming. This works. This is real and I’m able to do it.
It doesn’t have to be with me, but finding someone that you believe in that you’ll trust to guide you to where you want to go can be insanely, insanely valuable. Personally, it’s the single greatest thing I ever did with business. Getting a coach who I believed in allowed me to do things that I never would’ve known how to do myself, I never would’ve had the confidence to just stay a path long enough and know it was the right path and go to work, never would’ve done it by myself, and it’s the reason I’m here and get to share all this with you today. It’s also helped me to an insane degree with Spanish. Getting a teacher I can talk to once a week to just simplify the learning process, it’s allowed me to accelerate so much quicker in tandem with the rest of my practise.
So I can highly recommend if you are serious about getting a result and you can find a coach or a teacher that you trust. In my experience, it has been worth every penny investing in that help because there’s a wall between you and your goal and you know have to bang your head against it thousands of times to get through. You can probably figure out how to do that work, but having someone in your corner to push you on all the way, even when it’s very hard and you have very low confidence, that’s one of the most valuable things in the world, I can highly recommend it. So you want a result, a better body, another language, a business, a new skill. Getting there is not easy, but it is way simpler than you probably think it is. Figure out what banging your head against the wall looks like.
If in doubt, it’s the tough, uncomfortable stuff that you know is ultimately necessary to get you to your goal that you’re not doing consistently. Then decide if you’re willing to do the banging of the head until you get there. And if not, that’s fine. Don’t bother starting. If you are ready and you decide it’s worth it, which for all the things I’ve listed so far, it has absolutely been worth it. Define what the routine needs to look like, simple as possible, facilitate pure repetition. Then just start, then optimise to make it fast and effective. If in doubt, do less, but put more focus and energy into what you do do and if you can get guidance, it will accelerate everything and give you a much higher chance of getting there sooner. And just realise that that constant feeling of failure is not an obstacle, but the only way forward to where you want to be. If this is at all useful or interesting or you want me to elaborate on any of the above, please let me know. Thanks so much for watching Chat soon.