When we haven’t achieved something yet (e.g., building our dream body, reading 300 hundred books, meditating daily for year straight) we often think that doing so requires a heap of blood, sweat, and brute force effort, rather than fun. I think this is because we know that there are certain actions we have to take regularly to get a result (exercising and eating healthily, reading, meditating) and, based on our experience to date, we don’t find doing those actions very enjoyable. We think that getting sick results requires willpower, because we have tried doing what we think is necessary and found it boring. So we end up believing that the only route to success requires sucking up that boredom and acting against our emotional drives indefinitely.
Little do we realise, however, that it’s not the result-driving actions themselves that cause that emotional response. Rather, it’s the inefficiency of our approach. Because here’s the thing: Very little of what we so often do, even when it’s for the sole purpose of getting results, actually matters for getting those results. How many people have you seen eating “healthy” and running every day who are still lacking a physique you’d call impressive? (By my count, plenty.) And on some level, this hurts. In all my experience, a huge amount of the negative emotion associated with trying to achieve the things we want (be it fitness, knowledge, or emotional awareness) actually comes from all the wasted effort surrounding the important, results-driving behaviour, not from that behaviour itself.
Realise this: Reality does not care how we get shit done. There’s no reason that getting in shape should take you five workouts a week and require eating chicken breast and brown rice. Beliefs likes this are simply misattribution errors created by humans watching each other and trying to figure out what’s going on. When you learn to hack away to only what’s essential for results, and then just do that, you suddenly make getting the same result far easier for yourself, requiring a fraction of the effort you assumed it to (for no reason other than a lack of testing otherwise) before. And if you can successfully find and act on just those essentials, you soon appear to others to be some sort of freak with insane willpower (one who’s ripped like an elite athlete, deeply read and knowledgable in your field of interest, and has the emotional grounding of a monk). But in reality you just know what works and you do it consistently, without wasting your time on a bunch of other junk like most people do.
Better still, this type of behaviour is fun, because doing what gets you results that you care about (getting ripped, learning how to achieve your main life/career goals, gaining emotional clarity) is the most reward system stimulating behaviour possible—far more than porn, TV, excessive food, drugs, and social media can ever hope to be. You’re simply no longer doing all the surrounding bullshit that people associate with the same results without realising is actually irrelevant to getting them, and therefore wasted effort—behaviour which is very not fun, as your brain inherently recognises its futility and drives you away from wasting your time on it by making it “boring” (no dopamine stimulation). It’s just a shame that this feeling of boredom or resistance so often causes people to give up on the pursuit itself, rather than cut back what they are doing. They assume that suffering such negative emotion consistently (which is unfeasible—the very purpose of negative emotion is to be aversive) is just a necessary part of getting results, completely oblivious to that fact that that very emotion might instead be there to help them to change their approach: pushing them to do less, to focus more on what matters, and stop wasting their time with all the other bullshit. Because somewhere, deep down, their intuition recognises that they could be getting the same result for a mere fraction of the effort they are currently putting in.
If more people realised that getting results in any domain they care about is inherently fun and stimulating (if sometimes challenging and emotionally uncomfortable), then when facing emotional resistance they might more often persist in looking for ways to improve the efficiency of their approach, before giving up on the goal entirely. If this were the case, we’d likely see a lot more physically fit, wealthy, emotionally healthy people walking the streets.
So, following this logic, if we can figure out how to do the minimum possible action to get results (the minimum viable effort), and do it consistently, we’ll soon
a) get those results,
b) realise that getting results—when you do so little to achieve them—is actually incredibly fun,
and the process will quickly reinforce itself and become a highly enjoyable, highly productive part of our lives (as lifting, reading, and meditation now all are for me).
Let me give you some tangible examples to put this into context.
Example #1: Reading
People often think that to read (non-fiction) books, they need to sit down and slog through them one by one, front to back, finishing each book they start before moving onto the next. This is ridiculous, as:
a) It would take forever to read books with this approach
b) You’re almost by definition not reading the stuff that’s most important/useful to you in order of its importance/usefulness. Instead you’re locking yourself into a slog that is unnecessarily restricted. Authors usually write books about a single idea, so the purpose of reading should be to simply grasp the idea enough to apply it, after which you should be then moving onto another idea so you can apply it sooner. You can always come back to the original book later once you’ve tried applying the idea and want some more specific insight.
By reading whatever interests you on the day, skipping through to sections that are most interesting to you, and staying with it only for as long as it remains interesting to you, you allow your intuition to guide you to the most relevant and useful information possible, and thus get the most out of your reading time. Positive experience, rather than being a byproduct, is actually a useful indicator to help you stay on target with productive reading.
Set yourself 15 minutes a day to try this approach, and see what happens.
Example #2: Meditation
People often think they need to sit down and slog through 20 minutes of sitting by themselves doing nothing to become “spiritually enlightened” or receive some vague scientific benefit they read about online. That’s also ridiculous. Meditation a tool. It’s as practical as brushing your teeth. If it’s not enjoyable, you’re probably not getting much out of it.
I personally could never see the purpose of meditation for many years. And the habit didn’t develop as a result of people saying I should do it. Instead, it came from me wanting a result. When my life got busier and emotions and stressors started building up, I realised I needed mental clarity; space to focus on my emotions and deal with them methodically (based on the assumption that every emotional signal serves some sort of purpose and is therefore able to be dealt with, given the space). It quickly became something I did every night before bed to clarify everything in my head, figure out the appropriate action for it (or resolve and longer worry about it), and return to my ideal “mind like water” state, ready to attack the next day from a clean slate. It’s now an essential practice of mine, for this purpose. And I don’t care how long/little it takes me. Sometimes it’s two minutes, sometimes it’s 20—I do what I need. When I can’t be bothered, the minimum viable effort is one minute—that’s all I’ve got to do to receive some benefits. (And as my state changes from doing that minute, it usually feels so amazing it turns out to be much more.)
Example #3: Fitness
How I built my dream body by doing less than most people who are out of shape
Then obviously, there’s everyone’s approach to getting in shape. I want to briefly show you how I’ve applied this model to fitness—specifically, to getting very strong and sub-10% body fat—and replicated those results to the point of shocking myself and everyone who I’ve had the honour of coaching to date.
Back when I was first learning all this fitness stuff, I did every diet and training thing I could latch onto that I subconsciously thought would get me ripped.
- Strict intermittent fasting time windows
- Evenly spaced protein allocation
- Paleo (cutting out all processed food, wheat, dairy, etc)
- HIIT cardio intervals
- Training religiously, doing all sorts of strength, mobility, and movement stuff, trying to conquer via complexity. Four workouts a week for a while.
Eventually I questioned the specific purpose of each thing I was doing, because (as I realised when I went to college) living was a lot better than flitting time away for no reason, so there had better be good reason for everything I was doing, or it wasn’t worth doing it.
What I came to realise eventually is that there are only really two tangible things you can achieve from fitness pursuits (outside of the general health and wellbeing benefits of doing any form of regular exercise):
- More strength (and therefore muscle mass)
- Less body fat (therefore making that muscle visible)
(There is also mobility, but that’s just range-specific strength, and can be built the same way and largely at the same time. More on that another time.)
So to get results from my fitness efforts, I just had to stimulate my body towards those two things. There are two factors we can manipulate to do this.
1. Training
- To stimulate all muscle gain possible from training, you only need to build up strength on each major plane of motion, which only requires working five movements. I’ve found all the results I could want to come from training each of these once a week, constantly at my maximum strength threshold, until it’s no longer fun. This is usually a couple of minutes’ work each, equating to less than 40 minutes training time a week, including rest time. That’s all I do.
Cutting training back to this little means that every second I spend training is purposeful and immensely rewarding. There is simply no reason I wouldn’t want to do my 20-25 minutes of focused strength work over the week when I can see it resulting in this:
2. Nutrition
Nutrition is an insanely complex topic that overwhelms most people into paralysing confusion. But there are only two nutritional factors that I worry about manipulating, because they are the only things I have found to make any difference to my physique.
- Protein. I don’t care when I get it (I consume most during one meal a day for simplicity), but I hit a daily protein target (1.8g/kg bodyweight), because this actually helps results (muscle growth and fat loss). Outside of that, if I just eat a balance of food (some vegetables, fats, carbs, salt, and acid), I’ve found that to be a pretty safe approach.
- Calories. Most of the time I just fuel my appetite (i.e., eat roughly to maintenance), as your body does a pretty good job of signalling you how much it needs over the long run. You can then use periodic 4-12 week calorie deficits (eating 20% under maintenance) to lose body fat when desired. I wouldn’t worry about this until you have started building some strength, are hitting a protein target, and are tracking your bodyweight consistently, but this is what will allow you to cut down and get as lean as you want. No further complexity required.
And that’s literally it. By defining this as the minimum viable effort required for your fitness pursuits, and not worrying about trying to do anything else, you allow yourself to actually do these essentials consistently, which is what gets you stupid results when compounded over enough months. Realise that you can’t speed the body’s processes up, so attempting to do so by adding in more work or effort is only going to make it less likely that you do actually stick at this consistently for enough years to see the results you want.
Whatever your goal, realise that you are human and are going to best enjoy achieving said goal through a process that is efficient—one that works, without wasting your time. When you encounter emotional resistance, rather than skipping on your actions for that day (which is the first step to giving up entirely), ask yourself: “What is the minimum viable effort I could put in today to push the needle forward, just a bit?” Try to figure out how you could get some sort of result for less effort. It’s almost always possible, and if you can do it, you might just find that you’ve not only saved the pursuit of the goal itself (by making it enjoyable again so that you keep doing it), but saved a bunch of time and effort along with it.