The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [30]
“More than a few people shrieked upon finding out my strategy (working out, running, and eating more): ‘What!? You can’t run! You’ll lose too much weight!’ All I could do was point out that it seemed to be working: I’d already completed one-third of the bet in the first seven days. There wasn’t much they could say to that.
“Everyone’s got an opinion about what you ‘should’ do. But the truth is, most of them are full of hot air and you can get it done using a few simple steps.
“I ignored every one of them.”
3. He focused on the method, not the mechanism
“People warned me that I had to understand how lipids and carbs and fatty acids worked before I started. That’s such nonsense. What if I just started working out and ate more? Could I learn all that fancy stuff later? You don’t have to be a genius to gain or lose weight.”
4. Make it small and temporary: the immense practicality of baby steps
“Take the pressure off.”
Michael Levin has made a career of taking the pressure off, and it has worked. Sixty literary works later, from national nonfiction bestsellers to screenplays, he was suggesting that I (Tim) do the same: set a meager goal of two pages of writing per day. I had made a mental monster of the book in your hands, and setting the bar low allowed me to do what mattered most: get started each morning.
Dr. B. J. Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, wrote his graduate dissertation with a far less aggressive commitment. Even if he came home from a party at 3:00 A.M., he had to write one sentence per day. He finished in record time while classmates languished for years, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.
Understanding this principle, IBM led the computing world in sales for decades. The quotas for its salespeople were the lowest in the industry because management wanted the reps to be unintimidated to do one thing: pick up the phone. Momentum took care of the rest, and quotas were exceeded quarter after quarter.
Taking off the pressure in 4HB means doing experiments that are short in duration and not overly inconvenient.
Don’t look at a diet change or a new exercise as something you need to commit to for six months, much less the rest of your life. Look at it as a test drive of one to two weeks.
If you want to walk an hour a day, don’t start with one hour. Choosing one hour is automatically building in the excuse of not having enough time. Commit to a fail-proof five minutes instead. This is exactly what Dr. Fogg suggested to his sister, and that one change (the smallest meaningful change that created momentum) led her to buy running shoes and stop eating dessert, neither of which he suggested. These subsequent decisions are referred to in the literature as “consonant decisions,” decisions we make to be aligned with a prior decision.
Take the pressure off and do something small.
Remember our target to log five sessions of new behaviors? It’s the five sessions that are important, not the duration of those sessions. Rig the game so you can win. Do what’s needed to make those first five sessions as painless as possible. Five snowflakes are all you need to start the snowball effect of consonant decisions.
Take the pressure off and put in your five easy sessions, whether meals or workouts. The rest will take care of itself.
In 2008, a 258-pound Phil Libin decided to experiment with laziness.
He wanted to lose weight. This is common. As is also common, he wasn’t particularly keen on diet or exercise. He’d tried both off and on for years. The intermittent four- to eight-week programs helped him drop pounds—and then his other behaviors helped him gain them back even faster.
He began to suspect there might be an easier way: doing nothing.
Phil had a simple method in mind: “I wanted to see what effect being precisely aware of my weight would have on my weight.”
This is where we depart from the common. Phil lost 28 pounds in six months without making the slightest attempt to change