The real secret to health, wealth and happiness – Part 1

I recently read two fascinating books detailing current academic thinking on how greatness is achieved.

These books (Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle) present compelling academic data that “talent” plays a smaller role in making people successful (or great) than we typically believe. Rather, the research the books describe demonstrates that much of what we consider to be greatness is learnable by almost any of us – if we know how to acquire needed information and if we are willing to work hard enough at acquiring that information.

So, if you or I want to become great at a particular skill, what we really need to do is two things:

1. Practice it a lot
2. Practice it correctly – so we keep improving at a rapid pace

The core insight in these books is not in the first point. Everyone knows that if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, you need to practice.

The insights here are that:

1. HOW we practice has as much to do with being successful as HOW MUCH we practice
2. Most of us practice skills very poorly, and thus we learn more poorly and slowly than we need to

Two equally talented people can play tennis for five hours a week, or run five hours a week, or play chess five hours a week --- and what you invariably find is that, after a while, the one of those people who practices correctly advances far more quickly than the other.

You may ask, what does all of this have to do with health, wealth and happiness (which is the subject of this posting)? I would propose that the answer is … a lot.

Let’s begin with health. To keep our discussion simple, we’ll start by focusing on one small aspect of health … your diet. This is an important topic to me personally as I have struggled for years to eat healthily ... and, up until recently, had little success in doing so.

The majority of people I know say they “want” to eat better. As far as I’m concerned, “eating well” is nothing more than a skill you learn via deliberate and consistent practice. All the people I know who eat a healthy diet trained themselves in how to do so.

As such, if you or I want to eat a healthy diet, all we need to do is what Roger Federer did to become great at tennis: (1) work at it, and (2) work at it correctly.

Obviously, if you never take step 1 – by attempting to eat better, you will never improve your diet. That’s obvious.

What’s more interesting to me is that of the people who take step 1, often working very hard at eating better, many consistently fail. Are you one of those people – constantly on a diet, but somehow never achieving your goals? That was basically my story until recently. Common wisdom in our country suggests that our problem was simply a lack of willpower.

From my perspective and based on my recent personal experiences, common wisdom is totally wrong here. Instead, the issue here – which almost no diet books talk about – is that we were probably practicing the skill of healthy eating incorrectly. Going on a new hardcore diet for 30 days – powered by willpower, even if you lose 30 pounds in those 30 days, is a guaranteed-to-fail strategy if you wish to learn how to eat healthily in a consistent way.

Look carefully at the people you know who have mastered the art of eating well. The core difference between them and most of us really has much less to do with WHAT they eat than HOW they eat. For example, all the people I know who eat really healthy diets have cultivated in themselves an ability to be far more aware of how individual foods affect their bodies, even as the food is being digested, than average people. The fact is that, in the same way that Roger Federer taught himself to play tennis, these master-eaters have slowly and diligently taught themselves a wholly different approach to eating than most people. And that is the real secret to their success.

So … if you want to learn to eat healthily, please don’t go out and buy another diet book. Instead, buy one of the two books listed earlier in this blog – and start dedicating your energy to teaching yourself to eat in a different way. This is not easy work; it can be slow and painful. Nonetheless, if you really want to succeed at eating well, the approach I’m describing here (unlike those in most diet books) will absolutely work.

In upcoming postings, we’ll continue this dialogue, getting into more detail about the real secret to health, wealth and happiness.

How to eat a raisin

The first time that I went to a mindfulness meditation retreat, after several days had gone by, our teacher took us through a very cool mindfulness exercise entitled “meditation on a raisin.” In this exercise, you are given a raisin and asked to eat it as mindfully as possible.

The process here begins long before you taste the raisin. As a starting point, after you have been handed the raisin, before you eat it, you are instructed to carefully notice how the raisin looks, and the feeling that it generates as you hold it in your hand.

Only after this initial observation process feels complete should you even think about bringing the raisin up toward your mouth. But, during this step, you are to slowly and mindfully experience the process of moving your hand and arm and the sensation of holding the raisin in your hand during this. (Actually, as I write this, I’m realizing that these initial steps in the process are vaguely reminiscent of foreplay; did you notice that too?)

Then, when the raisin first touches your tongue, you are instructed to notice the vast world of sensations generated by the raisin on your tongue. You really don’t want to start chewing here right away, because there is so much pleasure and life available simply by noticing what the folds of the raisin feel like on your tongue, and you really don’t want to miss out on that.

Only when you feel complete with this prior step should you begin chewing. Here too, you want to go slowly – fully experiencing every moment and fully appreciating the beauty of the moment.

There are several more steps here before the raisin is fully consumed, but I’m imagining you have the idea of how the process works by now, so I’ll stop here.

You might want to try this exercise some time. When done correctly, it takes about 10 or 15 minutes to eat a single raisin. More importantly, though, if you’re like me, you might want to try to use this process as a metaphor for how every moment of your life can be lived. What this exercise clearly illustrates is that there’s a universe of sensations and life available in every moment if we just slow down enough to notice it.

Today I plan to try and live all my moments in the same way that I learned to eat a raisin; I hope that you do so as well.

Leveraging the magic of compounding to turbo-charge personal and professional growth

I learned the math behind compounding as a little kid, and I have seen it in action over and over, in multiple settings, since then, but it never ceases to amaze me with its power or applicability to a broad range of situations.

My belief is that, when you are able to see – with certainty – where and how compounding is occurring in your life, this insight can be transformative. My hope is that, after you read this blog entry, you will see compounding’s immediate applicability to your own life – and where it can make an impact.

I was reminded about the value of compounding when reading the book The Snowball, Warren Buffett’s recently published biography. According to this book, Buffett internalized the power of compounding as a little kid (in this case, as applied to money) and designed much of his investing life to capitalize on this principle. Here’s a quote from page 60 of the book:

“[Buffett] could picture the numbers compounding as vividly as the way a snowball grew when he rolled it across the lawn. Warren began to think about time in a different way. Compounding married the present to the future. If a dollar today was going to be worth ten some years from now, then in his mind the two were the same.”

Now in this blog entry, I’m not going to write about the power of compounding regarding money. Instead, I’m going to write about its equally potent applicability in other areas of life – and show how it can offer you practical help.

To start, let me remind you about the classic compounding story – the widely told fable about the man who invented chess:

The King, for whom chess was invented, was so pleased with the invention that he offered the inventor a large pile of gold. The inventor suggested an alternative reward: he would get grains of wheat, as follows: one grain of wheat on the first square of the chess board, two grains on the second square, four on the third, eight on the fourth, etc., doubling the number of grains each time. The King saw that this must be a much better deal for him than the gold pile, and accepted. Of course, when you do the math, you realize that the inventor suckered the King here because the amount of wheat on the 64th square (18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains) is worth far more than all the gold in the kingdom.

The reason that this story is cool, I believe, is the mathematical mind-fuck it creates. It’s really hard for a normal human to comprehend how a grain of wheat, then two and then four – seemingly nothing growing at a seemingly infinitesimal pace, can magically turn into a vast fortune only a few steps later on in its evolution.

Next, let me please tell you about a personal life-experience where I learned about the power of compounding applied to a very different situation:

• I started going to therapy when I was 40 years old. When I started, I was unhappy, lonely, and feeling like a total failure.
• After two years of diligently going to therapy, I really felt no better than I felt when I started, and my career and relationships, if anything, had gotten worse. I told my therapist about how discouraged I felt at that point, and she responded by saying that I was actually making huge progress – pointing out that I had had several very important insights during those past two years.
• Another two years went by, and after that point, I started to feel a little happier every once in a while, but I was still quite unhappy and lonely most of the time. Furthermore, I remained quite discouraged about my future prospects. When the subject of my discouragement came up again, my therapist repeated her mantra about how much I had grown.
• Another two years went by, and by this time, I was happy pretty frequently, well on my way to being a multi-millionaire, and starting to feel pretty good about myself. By this point, I was no longer discouraged, but I couldn’t make sense of what was happening, and I felt sure that my progress would fall apart any day.
• Another two years went by (which brings me to the end of last year), and by that point, I was happy almost all the time, frequently blissful, financially secure for the remainder of my life, and starting to recognize that my internal changes were securely in place and dependable.

So, do you recognize the mathematical pattern here? We’re on the chessboard again. The fact is that I’ve been growing at a constant logarithmic pace for the past eight years, I just didn’t recognize the mathematical pattern ‘til recently.

And, guess what else. I’m not going to stop growing at this pace – so you (and I) can rest assured that my life will be exponentially more amazing only two more years from now.

So, how does this obscure mathematical principle apply to your life? To answer that question, please try the following exercise:

Today: Take a goal that you really want that seems unreachable to you. I don’t care what the goal is as long as you really want to achieve it. And then, put into place one very small AND SUSTAINABLE building block right now to get you a millimeter closer to your goal. I don’t care how little progress you make here; you just need to make progress and put something sustainable (and easily do-able) in place. One common error here is that, when working toward a goal, we often make changes that create apparent short-term progress, but create no lasting value. Remember, your goal is several squares down the road here.

One week from today: Acknowledge the progress you made in the first week of your project, remind yourself about the power of compounding, and put a second small building block in place toward your goal. Again, the building block needs to be sustainable and easily implemented. If you’re like I was eight years ago, you’ll be totally discouraged after this point because you still won’t see any progress. But please, don’t give up at this point.

Two weeks from today: Again acknowledge your progress and take another step. You’ll find that you can take a slightly bigger step at that point than you took the first week, but it’ll still seem like you're going nowhere. Don’t worry, the compounding will work.

And so on…

After several weeks (or maybe months or maybe years) of diligent seemingly slow progress, you will start to feel like you’re getting a bit of traction, and you might see the outlines of solid ground emerging. This is the point where you will be most at risk – not at risk of quitting, but rather, at risk of resting on your laurels. Please, don’t quit the process at this point. That’s when it gets fun, and really rewarding. Here, you need to keep building, systematically putting new building blocks into place every week that continue to solidify and further your progress.

Now, if you like this exercise and want to tell me about your journey, I’d love you to post a comment. With only two people following my blog as of today, I’m still on square 1 of my blogging journey (so I’m not yet deluged with an impossibly large following). Get your feedback in now, though, because once I have 10,000 people following my blog (which is a short journey from here after I double my number of visitors every week), it’ll be a lot harder for you to get my attention then.

Why I’m writing a blog

Almost every time I think about starting a new project I experience a few hours of excitement … and then a wave of internal resistance that internally tries to stop me from undertaking the project.

True to form, shortly after I started thinking about writing this blog, my mind became filled with thoughts about why this blog is a really bad idea. Here are my three favorite resistance-linked thoughts that are making their presence felt in this arena:

My Top Three Resistance-Linked Thoughts About Writing This Blog

• "I have nothing new to offer." The internal dialogue here is as follows: thousands of self-help books have been written, many by people who are far more enlightened than I am, and it’s very unlikely that I will have any ideas to offer about happiness or success that are either new or better stated than what others have put out.


• "This endeavor will be a failure." My fear here is that almost no one will read this blog, and that the few people who do will hate it. This thought is closely linked to an emotional experience where I feel ashamed in anticipation of my imagined failure. Believe it or not, I’m feeling that shame right now – even as I type this idea down.


• "I have nothing worthwhile to say." After all, what do I know about personal growth?

So, Why Am I Writing This Blog?

The bottom line is that I'm writing this blog because, deep in my heart - and despite the thoughts listed above, I know that I want to and that it excites me. I know that I want to put my own voice out into the world to share what I have learned ... and I also know that I want to touch and inspire other people with my voice.

Now, as for the resistant thoughts listed above, my life experience has taught me that the fact that I’m experiencing resistance to this idea is probably a clue that it’s a very good thing to do for me.

There's one final point to this story. After seven years of intensive therapy ... and spending hundreds of hours dispassionately observing my thoughts ... and meditating ... and yoga ... and all sorts of other growth activities, I have now nurtured and supported the development of a wholly different identity inside my head than the one that says all the mean things to me described above. And this other identity has a very different perspective on the value of my blog than what is described above. This evolving identity strongly disagrees with all of the bullshit that is listed above, and in fact, gets angry when it hears the above-listed thoughts in my head. This evolving identity looks at the facts - and knows that I do, at this point, have something worthwhile to say which will touch people ... and that I am not the kind of guy who fails at things when he takes them on ... and most importantly, that when my heart is strongly drawn to something, it’s usually a good idea for me to pursue … no matter what my mind may say. And that, my friends, is why I'm writing this blog.

How to achieve effortless power

There is an approach used in some martial arts schools in which you learn to use to use an opponent's strength against them. When this technique is used effectively, an almost imperceptible movement on a practitioner's part can cause an opponent to literally fly across a room.

I had the privilege of studying t'ai chi as a martial art a few years ago from a great master named John Salgado - and had the very weird opportunity of experiencing the type of effortless power I'm describing in action. When I was on the winning side of an interaction, what felt so bizarre was the sense that there was no effort involved in my actions, but yet I had done something quite powerful. When I was (more frequently) on the losing side, the experience was equally bizarre, because I would find myself flying through the air (or on the ground) without knowing what had happened to me.

Once I discovered the secret to effortless power in the martial arts arena, it started to have almost mystical impact on my outside life. I found myself closing multi-million dollar deals effortlessly, solving problems effortlessly, even finding parking spots in New York City effortlessly. The practical result here was that my stress levels dropped while my productivity, effectiveness and happiness grew.

Effortless power has to be experienced to be truly appreciated. To realize it, the great martial artists achieve a state-of-being characterized by being: calm while alert; grounded while light, and flowing while deeply focused. Personally, I am still far from realizing the type of transcendent power that you can read about in the martial arts classics, but at the same I am improving at this every day – and I already have achieved a level of personal power and ease that surpasses anything I ever imagined would be possible for me.

Today I have entered a new phase of my professional life – dedicated to giving back, and using what I have learned in the past 49 years to help others define and achieve their own life dreams.

Much of what I hope to offer (through both my coaching and this blog) is the value available to you from learning to harness your ability to generate effortless power.