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.