Feb 2 simple but not easy
A remarkable number of personal problems are simply solved but not easily solved.
In the past month and a half, I’m been diving nose-first back into optimizing my fitness. I love my gym sessions, watch loads of videos on how to improve muscle growth and cardio, and I am eating incredible amounts of protein. The deeper I dive into it and the more I learn, the more I realize that getting healthy is simple, but it’s not easy.
The explosion of GLP-1s and their efficacy has made me think about this idea more. Losing weight has always been simple - burn more calories than you consume. But it’s not easy. Burning calories is not fun and consuming calories is.
This is a very powerful conclusion, but it has also made me wary of how much I can deceive myself. For the past few years, I haven’t made much progress in the gym despite going to there multiple times a week. While I’d like to think that I’ve had shifting priorities and that my lack of progress hasn’t been so much of a lack of discipline as it has been a lack of interest, I’m starting to realize that the problem is the discipline.
It’s not a complex problem to get fit but it is a hard one.
We can go one step further here (and this may be more of a self-critique than a human one). I’ve poured lots of money throughout my life into attempting to get more fit. I’ve bought protein powder, DEXA scans, creatine, and have even considered getting complex blood panels. Do all these things help me? They do. Frequently, however, they’re a lie. They appeal to the delusion in my mind that the thing blocking me isn’t my own work ethic or discipline - rather, it’s the complexity of the problem. If my computer science degree has taught me anything, it’s that complex problems often have elegant solutions.
The solution to this problem is not elegant. It’s not complex. It’s simple. A lot of what I’ve done has taught me how to solve the complex problems. It’s taught me less about how to solve the simple ones.
When I think about myself a year down the line, I’m working at Bain, hopefully loving what I do and learning a lot. Do I want fitness to be a big part of my life? Yes, I need it to be. But will it be? Well, I’m not so sure. Work will be hard and so will be keeping up my health. It will be simple to solve. More importantly, it will be hard. I think acknowledging that is the first step to making it happen.