Difference Between Simple Implementation & Life Hacks

In Episode 3 of The Tim Ferriss PodcastKelly Starrett made a point about life hacks that I believe is highly overlooked. To paraphrase, he said, “People always ask what the best diet hacks are out there. If they would just eat natural food, they wouldn’t need to search out every quick hack to see results.” [Heavy paraphrasing in that quote. -DD]

Kelly couldn’t be more spot on.

Choosing Blindness

No one will admit to you that they just want to cheat the system when they ask for the best life hack for whatever it is they are trying to hack. To those in search of hacks, cutting the corners isn’t as much a cheat as what they perceive to be the least painful, arduous way.

Those in search of the hacks are choosing to be blind to that which they should be doing.

One of my best examples of this is when two of my best friends were getting married. The bride wanted to lose some weight for the wedding so she came to me, one of her fittest and healthiest friends asking, “What should I do to lose weight?”

My answer: Eat no processed foods and hit the gym for 30 minutes every other day.

A week or so later, the groom, whom I lifted with a couple times per week, couldn’t stop laughing when he told me that his bride-to-be wanted a second opinion from another fit friend of theirs and his answer was identical to mine. Great minds think alike.

The bride was choosing to be blind to the advice that was of more painful, more arduous. She wanted the hack and only that.

Simple Implementation Versus Life Hacks

I will admit to checking out sites like LifeHacker and LifeHacks daily. Millions of others do too. There’s a major gap between most of those millions and myself. How, if we’re reading the same things?

In the Four Hour Body, Tim Ferriss, one of my inspirations and brightest people I follow, discusses a diet hack. He suggests eating 30 grams of protein in some form every morning within an hour of waking. He saw great results and many of his followers did too. That is a diet hack that brought results. However, I wonder how many people applied the same thing, but never presented their negative results?

I’m not trying to say that Ferriss’ approach doesn’t work. We just rarely hear from the people that failed at the 30 grams of protein or P90X or Crossfit or Paleo or Atkins or whatever other diet or fitness regimen they followed.

Hacks have their place. Too often, we place hacks ahead of simple implementation. Why? Hacks take less time to implement, but rarely lead to on-going or even semi-complete results.

The strong argument could be made that Ferriss’ approach falls somewhere in-between diet hack and simple implementation. With that said, the approach is a hack on one’s diet to achieve results through a way beyond the organic approach which is eating a natural, unprocessed diet. The natural, unprocessed diet is not a hack.

For example, there are hundreds of different keyboard commands I could learn and try to use while editing photos in Photoshop. I could learn each and apply accordingly. However, if I did this when I first started learning Photoshop, I would have thrown in the towel years ago with the program. Why? Learning that control + an arrow key moves the layer 1 pixel when nothing is selected would not have helped me make as big of strides as learning the basics of the program. Instead of jumping straight to learning the 500+ useful keyboard shortcuts for Photoshop, I dug in and spent the time learning how to actually use the tool and not the hacks.

What has provided me and those I’ve helped with the greatest amount of direction has been to forget the hacks until mastering the principles.

Need to lose some weight? I eat unprocessed foods for 95% of my meals.

Need to get my endurance up for a race in two months? I lay out a running plan and run.

Notice how neither included some hack. I didn’t lose weight by only eating bananas grown from trees in Costa Rica nor did I improve my running endurance by running for 5 minute per day with a snorkel.

I have no idea if the Costa Rican bananas or the snorkel running will hack my diet or fitness. What I do know is that until I hit the 90-95% success mark through eating clean and putting in the miles, I won’t try implementing the hacks.

In other words, I build my base by implementing the basics and learn the hacks once I’ve hit my ceiling with the basics.

Finding that ceiling is the tough part. Most people think they have a low ceiling with the basics, give up and ask for the cheat codes. Most people however, have a much higher ceiling with the basics than they are willing to look up and try to reach without hacks.

The hacks are supplemental to that which is necessary. That which is necessary is exactly what those searching for the hacks are choosing to be blind to.

Just Do the Work

Do life hacks work? Some do, some don’t.

What Kelly Starrett’s point was is that diet hacking should be second to just eating real food. Eat real food and worry about the hacks later when you are trying to kill off that last five pounds. Sure, a hack might help you lose that first five pounds too, but after those first five pounds then you still have to implement the necessary clean diet to achieve the majority of weight loss. Might as well start with what works for the long term rather than the here and now.

I’m not trying to give hacking diet and fitness a bad rap. It has it’s place. Just make sure that it’s place follows you doing the work that actually works first.

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