by Jim Harmer
Other than the more pinkish shade of skin, the trainer very closely resembled the Hulk. He was a towering mass of lumps of muscle. He was about six foot three. Oh, funny, you thought I meant he was six feet three inches tall? No, no. That was the circumference of just one of these dude’s biceps. The man was an impressive physical specimen.
I sat down in his office and unloaded everything. The marathon, the pills, the unmitigated willpower, the calorie tracking, everything. I just wanted the change, and I would do exactly what he told me to do to get there. I’d pay him whatever it takes.
I signed the contract for a very expensive personal training program. He’d create a precise meal plan for me and stand right beside me for every single rep of weightlifting until I reached my goal. We were in this together.
Two days later, I returned for my first workout. I had never done any real weightlifting before, so he had to show me every single step. I remember the first time I laid down on the bench to do dumbbell chest presses and I couldn’t figure out how to lift the heavy weights into position on my chest. They were too heavy to lift up to my chest from the lying position. I looked up at my trainer after three or four attempts and he had a most amused and bewildered look. Eventually, I stood back up and used the momentum of me falling onto the bench to swing the weights up into position on my chest and catch them.
Seeing this, the Hulk said, “That was the most ridiculous and dangerous way I’ve ever seen anyone move a dumbbell.”
Nice. Way to make Santa feel welcome. Apparently, when you sit down on the bench, you’re supposed to rest the dumbbells on your knees and then kick up your knees to push them up to your chest after laying down. Who knew? I thought my toss-the-weight-and-catch-it method was pretty clever, though admittedly ineffective.
Wall sits, lunges, chest presses, and Romanians—the stupid names for the torturous exercises only added insult to my pain. After my first one-hour weightlifting session, I felt weak in the knees as I slowly hobbled out to my car. I sat down in the front seat of my aging Nissan Sentra and immediately the windshield fogged up from my hot, sweaty, giant Santa Claus cheeks. I looked in the rearview mirror at myself and blood was pouring from my nose. It was the first bloody nose I’d had since I was a child. I exerted myself to a breaking point. I just sat there in my car for 20 minutes before I felt that I could drive home. I was absolutely going to achieve my goal, and it wouldn’t be a lack of exertion on my part that kept me from it.
The workouts didn’t get any easier over time, and the soreness didn’t subside in time for the next workout to come. I had to take ibuprofen every single day to push through the pain.
Because my primary goal was weight loss, my trainer set up a routine optimized for that. He hadn’t worked with overweight people before, since most of his business was focused on preparing people for bodybuilding competitions, but he felt confident he knew what I should do. Instead of eight to twelve reps of each lift like a traditional weightlifting routine, we would do four sets of 40 reps for each lift, with a generous three-to-five-minute pause between lifts. I would also raise my calories significantly to provide fuel for muscle growth.
No matter what the personal trainer asked of me, I gave 110%. I gave all of myself for many months. I was shocked at how much work it was, but I knew I would reach my goal. The Hulk obviously knew how to get fit, so I could trust him, right?
It took me eight months of the most grueling physical labor of my life, but the day finally came that I stepped on the scale, nervously looked down at the numbers, and read the same weight as I had before starting the program: 220.
I was completely shattered, but I knew the scale didn’t tell the whole story, so I pulled out my before picture and compared it to the after. The “after” picture looked like a photocopy of the “before.” My arms looked the same, my chest looked the same, there was the tiniest little lump of muscle in my calves, but other than that I looked precisely identical to the “before” picture. I was still the same weight and appeared to have the same amount of fat. How was it possible?
After a few very frustrating months, I finally got the gumption to try again. This time, at the recommendation of my sister-in-law, I tried a meal delivery service. I was interested in the concept of having five delivered meals a day so that I didn’t have to choose what to eat. It was all there in a box for me. I could just grab one of the packages, rip it open, eat, and know I was on track. Simple. Then, one meal a day, I’d eat a piece of chicken and some broccoli. Dead simple. I read about it online and watched all the YouTube videos and was getting excited about it.
Then I went to order the meal service and stopped. I saw on their website that it was an MLM (multilevel marketing business, where the company has sellers who make commissions not only for their sales but for the salespeople they recruit to the business). I hate MLMs. Oh, no. I just said the dreaded acronym. My wife knows that I can’t resist going on my MLM tangent. I see it all the time. Emily is constantly getting invited to a “party” one of her friends is throwing. The women show up, and then the host introduces her “really successful friend who drives a Mustang and is going to show us her cute jewelry business.” Argh. I’d rather drive a pencil through my eye.
I digress, but only to explain my disgust when I found out this was an MLM. But my sister-in-law, who was not selling the stuff, had given me a good review of the service, so I was interested. I swallowed my MLM aversion and called my local “coach.” Ugh, I hated that they were called coaches. I would have felt much better about it if they were just called salespeople. Anyway, I called my coach/salesperson.
It didn’t take me long on the phone with my new salesperson to change my mind. She said something that stuck with me. She asked me how long I’d been overweight, and the story of how I got to the point that I called her. I told her that I had tried and tried so many different things and that I was a hard worker and had really pushed myself, but just couldn’t find what worked for my body.
She said, “Yes, we’ll need to figure out exactly what works for your body, but more importantly, I want to know why you’ve allowed yourself to get unhealthy in the first place, and why you allowed yourself to remain unhealthy for so many years.”
That hurt to hear, but I knew the question was only pointed because it was on point. The answer was that I had simply convinced myself that I was doing my best that whole time. In reality, I just hadn’t committed to 90% of the work. Yes, I nearly died in my bed after running a marathon and survived months of abuse from the Hulk, but that’s an optimization of the body compared to the most important part—regulating food intake, which achieves 90% of the result.
I fully committed to the program. All I had to do was wait for the box of food to come, open it up, and eat five of their snacks each day, then eat a piece of chicken and broccoli for dinner. I had to swallow my pride when they insisted on calling the snacks “fuelings” and hearing the marketing people in the videos use the phrase “gentle, fat-burning state” every-other sentence. It drove me nuts, but I was committed and I wouldn’t break. I also didn’t like it when my health coach texted me and “checked in” to see how I was doing, but over time I actually found her to be very encouraging and helpful.
My weight began to plummet. I was hangry. Oh, believe me, I was hangry. “Gentle, fat-burning state” was completely the wrong phrase to describe how I felt. I felt like my body was eating itself as I wasted away, dying in the desert for want of food. For the first 18 days, I felt constantly on the verge of losing my patience at people around me with no provocation. It was all I could do to resist grabbing my kids’ crackers as I passed them on the kitchen counter. Then things changed. My body adapted, and my mind adapted. On day 19 of my journaling, I noticed that I didn’t really feel hungry, my energy was back, and it wasn’t difficult to turn down other foods.
I was absolutely perfect on that diet. No days off, no cheating. And you know what? It worked. I’m now a healthy 175 pounds—down 35 pounds from the 220-pound st
arting weight. I went from a size 38 waist to a size 32. I wore an XX-large T-shirt and now I wear a medium. I still have a slight muffin top and pooch, but I am at a healthy weight and moving in the right direction.
I have learned so much about health over the last few years. I learned what didn’t work. I learned cardio is helpful but by no means sufficient. I learned that counting calories is really tough to do accurately and that meal plans on the internet are usually wrong, since I followed so many without losing a pound.
I learned that my personal trainer was either inept or lazy. Looking back, I realize that I was incredibly sore without reaching my goals because of the routine he had chosen. We’d do 35-40 reps in four sets frequently. That’s very far off the mark of what most knowledgeable trainers would do. It was probably because he just didn’t want to rearrange the gym and set up a new machine to move to new lifts more frequently. I learned that training when incredibly sore is rather pointless because the muscle is already torn and needs time to properly heal. I learned that the meal plan I was given may have been great for someone with a significant amount of muscle but was a terrible idea for my body.
More than anything, I learned something about motivation that I had never realized. While not all of the plans I’d made were successful, I was able to follow some of them perfectly, and others not at all. Since my primary work energy is overcoming hard things to get praise, I needed a plan that I could feel convinced would lead me to success if I merely followed it. To other people, that doesn’t work at all. If they see all of the work ahead of them that needs to be done, they feel intimidated and shrink immediately. For me, just trying to track my own calories and setting my own caloric intake goals failed because I wasn’t sure I was right on the numbers. The more specific the program was and the more confidence I had that it was the most efficient path—even if it was far more difficult than other plans—the more I was able to follow it. I needed to be motivated in the right way for myself.
Because my work energy is achievement and I thrive on accomplishing things and want people to be proud of me, it was actually better for me to have an intimidating and difficult plan so I could, in the end, say, “Look at me, Ma!”
Yes, I know it sounds childish, but that’s my work energy. In the end, something deep down inside me must be looking for praise even though I don’t recognize it. If you think about it, though, all of our work energies seem childish on the outside.
So what finally worked for me? I focused on the one thing that gave me 90% of the result. I didn’t even exercise at all while dieting. I simply ate less food on a strict schedule. I focused 100% of my energy on reducing my food intake and that got me 90% of the way there. Then, once the weight was lost, I could focus 100% of my energy on what’s needed now—not looking “skinny fat” but gaining some muscle definition.
Once I had identified the one action that would get me 90% of the way there, I simply groundhogged that day until success. I had the five 100-calorie snacks each day, then a small meal of chicken and veggies for dinner. I repeated that day until I reached success. Because I had correctly identified the 90% action of regulating food intake, I saw rapid progress and thus, maintaining the daily action was easy. It’s easy to work hard when you see rapid progress.
You may read this chapter and argue with my plan. You may be far more fit than I am and know a lot more about optimizing weight loss and health than I do. That’s the problem, however. I was trying to optimize things by going the extra mile and running a marathon, lifting weights with the Hulk while I was losing weight, and using pills and supplements to expedite the process. There is not a thing wrong with any of those things, but optimizations should never be implemented during the groundhog phase of a goal when you just need to get the bulk of the result. Once you’ve achieved 90% of the goal, it will likely take optimizations to achieve the last 10%.
I include this chapter in the book not to completely embarrass myself by talking about thigh greasing, short shorts, and my belly. I include it to warn you about focusing your effort on the wrong thing.
What’s the Right Thing?
Before you can design a day and groundhog it into success, you must first be absolutely certain that the day contains no “good ideas” or “optimizations.” Only focus on the most crucial aspect of the work that will achieve 90% of the result. Do not forget or stop your groundhog day once you’ve achieved 90% of the result and need to begin focusing on optimizations for the remaining 10% of the goal.
If you want to win a local election, focus only on personally speaking to as many people as you can. The design of your yard signs, debate prep, flyers, raising funds, and everything else can wait.
Focus only on the action that achieves 90% of the result.
If you want to climb Everest, put on a 100-pound pack and hike up the steepest hill in your city each morning before work while wearing an altitude mask. Studying routes, choosing your guide, fretting over which ice axe to choose, and all other considerations can wait until you reach the optimization period—after you’ve achieved 90% of the goal.
If you want to buy a bigger house, focus only on saving the big $500 chunk each month instead of worrying about saving $2 on a smoothie here and there. You can scrimp and save every last penny, but if it drives you crazy and pushes you to fall off the horse and book a $5,000 vacation, it won’t amount to much.
My brother Paul ran an Ironman race a few years ago. After a 2.4-mile swim in frigid water, he raced to the changing tent to get off his wet suit and put on his dry clothes. His hands were so cold and he was so tired that he was shaking uncontrollably, trying to get the zipper down on his suit. An older man walked up to him and put his hand on Paul’s shoulder.
He said, “Son, I’ve run over 20 of these races. I’ll tell you one thing. You are not going to win this race. Focus on finishing. So sit down there for five minutes in the warm tent and get your temperature back up.”
At first, he was taken aback by the lack of confidence the man had in him, but he soon realized it was true. This was a 15-hour race and 30 seconds of fumbling with a zipper would not catapult him onto the podium. His mission was to finish. By ignoring the optimization of fumbling with his zipper and pushing through the cold, he was able to calm down and focus on simply finishing the race. If he’d pushed himself to optimize for every second, it still wouldn’t have put him on the podium, and he may not have even finished the race.
Action Step Six: Identify Potential Optimizations of Your Goal (and Skip Them!)
Set aside all optimizations until you have achieved 90% of the success. Re-evaluate the 90% action to ensure it will accomplish the correct result.
Write a list of all of the actions you could take to help you achieve your goal. Identify which action is the most vital to get you to your goal. Then separate out all of the optimizations into another section to work on only after you’ve achieved 90% of your result.
Here is an example: John is 35 and unmarried. He feels it is time for him to settle down and start a family. He has dated plenty of girls but hasn’t yet found the right one.
John makes a list of all of the actions he could take to help him reach his goal: get involved in community organizations to meet women, lose weight, become financially stable, go dancing on Friday nights, go out with friends more often, get some new clothes to look better, save up for a wedding ring, go on dates.
We can debate which action is most important, but John feels that he spends plenty of time hanging out with groups of people. Going on actual one-on-one dates is the most important thing he could do. John then designs a day to achieve his goal. Each day on his lunch break, he will text at least two women he wouldn’t normally text. On Tuesdays he’ll start attending a singles group he found on Facebook, and over the entire week he’ll work toward finding a date for Saturday night. Because he’s been texting people all week, that shouldn’t be too tough. Going on actual dates is the thing he’s determined will get him 90% of the way there. Now John s
imply groundhogs that goal until success.
All of the other items on his list, like saving up for a ring and becoming financially stable, are good things to optimize, but they are likely to divert his attention from the most important action—going on dates. John gets 90% of the way there, and then in the finishing phase he can work on the other optimizations to prepare him for marriage and starting a family. It wouldn’t help John to get married if he got a job at night delivering pizzas to save up for a wedding ring and never even met the girl he wanted to marry.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
—Elon Musk
At this point, you have the complete work energy formula. Understand your work energy and your barricades, dream a goal, identify only the most vital actions that will drive 90% of the result and that match your work energy, then groundhog the goal until success. Those steps will empower you to crush goals that the vast majority of people will never achieve. Yet success isn’t quite that simple.
The entirety of Part II of this book focuses on overcoming the common problems that pop up as you follow the work energy formula. Anyone can tell you to get on a good diet and keep dieting until you’re skinny, but that wouldn’t solve your problem, would it? The truth is most goals are incredibly simple. The work energy formula will get you to where you need to be, but the trouble is the work energy formula is being implemented by a lazy lump of lard. By that, I mean a human being who, by nature, does not want to break into unknown territory.
You may think that you simply need to be more disciplined to achieve your goals. That’s not the answer either. Your mind has a few tricks that it loves to play on a disciplined mind to slow it down just the same, and the rest of this book will help you learn the tactics to overcome that issue.