What Do I Actually Want?

After a little hiatus from this blog I am back. We had our babygirl, Aurelia Mae Kiser, on May 14th at 2:37. She came in at 7lbs 9oz and after a week of breastfeeding is already back to birth weight and above. Mom and baby are doing wonderfully, labor was pretty darn long but with no health complications and Adelaide is recoverying really well.

Now, as I imagine with most people, having a baby really forces you to look at your life. It is a huge paradigm shift that holds light to this burning question, "What do I actually want?" All of the self serving, ego driven goals sort of fade away when your wife has been in labor for hours on end. You stop performing.

It's funny, the thing that actually sparked this newsletter was not our birht story, but what was happening during: Adelaide's 18 year old sister is doing "75 Hard".

For those of you who do not know, "75 Hard" is a self improvement challenge created by Andy Frisella. It consist of 75 days straight of the following:

• 2 45-minute workouts - at least one of those has to be outside

• Follow a diet

• Read 10 pages of a self help book

• Drink 1 Gallon of Water

• No Alcohol

• Take progress photos

All of these daily, no rest days, no cheat meals. If you mess up, you start the whole thing over. If you have read anything from me before, you probably know that I really hate these kind of "all or nothing" approaches to fitness.

I want to step away from 75 hard to talk about a concept that is crucial to my point of why I don't like it, and that is the difference between stated and revealed preferences.

As an example, a guy is talking with his coworkers and says something along the line of this, "I don't really care about what a girl looks like, I really just want someone who has a good personality." Upon looking at his history of dating however, you discover that every girl he has ever dated shares very similar physical characteristics, but differ wildly in their personalities. Or a girl saying, "I don't care about height." but all of her exes could be a professional basketball team.

There is often a seperation between the things we say we want/like, and the way our actions reveal our actual desires. We do this because if we said our actual preference, there is often a social taboo involved. It is difficult to acurately state our desires, especially if it holds some kind of social weight, yet those desire exist nonetheless.

The issue with only following our stated desires is that we will inevitably be less effective at getting to the thing that we actually want.

So back to "75 Hard," what is the goal? Well if you read Andy Frisella's stuff online, the goal is "mental toughness." But this is a stated preference, when you look at why people actually do this we can see the revealed preference. Why do you think Adelaide's 18 year old sorority girl sister is counting calories and working out a bunch? Maybe some part of her wants the mental toughness, but if she did, there are much harder things to do than all of that. No she, as with pretty much everyone else who does "75 Hard", wants to look better. That goal is built into the heart of the challenge itself, thus the daily progress photos. A progress photo doesn't build a lot of mental toughness, yet it is a cornerstone of the program.

I want to say that there is nothing wrong with a goal to "look better." I think that is a great goal as I myself have that as one of my primary goals. The A in AFL Coaching is Aesthetics. But for some reason we dance around that goal. We struggle to state that our goal is to be more attractive. It feels more socially acceptable to say "I want mental toughness" or "I want to be healthier" when really at the heart of getting into fitness for a lot of people is the desire to look good. And if we can acknowledge that that is what we really want, then we can be more effective in achieving that goal, and as a result we can get all of these downstream effects like mental toughness, health, longevity, vitality, energy management, etc. Healthy is hottest. It's easy to fall into obsession over how lean you can get, or how much muscle you can put on, but the most attractive version of you is going to be the healthiest.