Somethings Better than Nothing
You should start improving things, but what you do as a first step isn't the forever solution
Everyone knows a person who is tremendously out of shape.
Currently, I have a co-worker who, if he takes 100 steps in a day, I’d be shocked. The guy has a big, comfy, gamer chair at his work station, a bunch of big monitors, and a mini-fridge that is an arm’s length away.
He works his 8hour day, just using flex time where his hours are 11am - 7pm. Then gets food delivered for 7pm and immediately swaps out his work computer for his gaming computer. He then proceeds to sit in the same spot and play video games till 2-3am. And his physique reflects that lifestyle.
Now imagine a person like that. And they decide to do ‘something’ finally. (Which is great - making a big lifestyle change to be healthier, wealthier, and/or happier is always a positive).
They stumble upon some fads and take them up.
The Roy G. Biv diet - where you only eat 1 color of food each day (yes its real. And yes, in the linked article this quote exists “I heat up a can of Campbell's tomato soup and we go over some ground rules….“I have a box of white wine,” Sean says. “You can only drink that on yellow day.”)
A shake weight and a thigh blaster combined with an under desk pedal for the cardio…
Now this is someone who lived on donuts, full sugar soda, and takeout and never moved. And is now paying some attention to what they slam down the gullet and is doing 100x the activity they have in decades.
Guess what…the weight starts dropping, albeit slowly, and after some initial muscle soreness the first few days, they start feeling not completely weak and achey.
It is progress.
But after a few months, it comes to a critical point. Does our person continue to progress by finding more and more efficient things? Or do they hunker down into an online community of Roy G. Biv & Shake weight maximizers who swear they have the answer?
Yes, this fitness example uses hyperbole to highlight the absurd to make a point.
But everyday you find people who found something that worked a bit in their lives during the initial phase of going from nothing to something. And because of that little initial success, they turn into a rabid advocate for that one thing being the answer to all of life’s problems.
You see it with carnivore dietooors or Peatooors who jump into Twitter threads and claim that their particular way of eating not only makes you jacked and lean, but also cures any disease, helps with fertility, and literally anything you can think of.
And you see it in personal finance where a person built a brand on one thing and now that one thing is the only way to do finances. So today, we will talk about evolving.
Yes, if you are doing nothing, then doing something will get you results…even if that something is inefficient or outright dumb. But at some point, you need to progress. You eventually hit a wall where you got all you could out of the dumb and inefficient program and doing dumb inefficient things harder isn’t the answer.
(You can also just skip dumb and inefficient by getting Zero To Some and getting a jump start on fixing your finances.)
I promise, the rest of this post has significantly less shake weight references.