The Big Question: Are You Better

Than Yesterday?

Big goals? Learn to think small. (Photo: H. Koppdelaney)

The following is a guest post from Chad Fowler, CTO of InfoEther, Inc.

He spends much of his time solving hard problems for customers in the Ruby computer
language. He is also co-organizer of RubyConf and RailsConf, where I first met him in
person.

Our second meeting was in Boulder, where he was kind enough to use his musical
background and natural language experience (Hindi, among others) to teach a knuckle-
dragger (me) the primitive basics of Ruby It was a wonderful experience, and I read his
book, The Passionate Programmer, on the plane ride back to San Francisco.

I found it to be full of actionable advice for non-programmers, just as I did The Pragmatic
Programmer. I am most certainly not a programmer, but the structured problem-solving
skills of programmers is impressive and worth emulating. I hope you enjoy the following
excerpt as much as I did.

Better Than Yesterday?

Fixing a bug is (usually) easy. Something is broken. You know its broken, because
someone reported it. If you can reproduce the bug, then fixing the bug means correcting
whatever malfunction caused it and verifying that it is no longer reproducible. If only all
problems were this simple!

Not every problem or challenge is quite so discrete, though. Most important challenges in
life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure. This
is true of software development, career management, and even lifestyle and health.

A complex and bug-riddled system needs to be overhauled. Your career is stagnating by the
minute. You are steadily letting your sedentary computer-programming desk-bound
lifestyle turn your body into mush.

All of these problems are much bigger and harder to just fix than a bug. Theyre all
complex, hard to measure, and comprised of many different small solutionssome of which
will fail to work!
Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn
our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is
why we procrastinate. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and
therefore procrastinate some more.

Ive struggled with getting and staying in shape for as long as I can remember. Indeed,
when youre miserably out of shape, just get in shape isnt a concept you can even grasp
much less do something concrete about. And to make it harder, if you do something toward
improving it, you cant tell immediately or even after a week that anything has changed. In
fact, you could spend all day working on getting in shape, and a week later you might have
nothing at all to show for it.

This is the kind of demotivator that can jump right up and beat you into submission before
you even get started.

Ive recently been working on this very problem in earnest. Going to the gym almost daily,
eating betterthe works. But even when Im getting with the program in a serious way, its
hard to see the results. As I was wallowing in my demotivation one recent evening, my
friend Erik Kastner posted a message to Twitter with the following text:

Help me get my $%!^ in shapeask me once a day: Was today better than yesterday?
(nutrition / exercise) today: YES!

When I read this I realized that it was the ticket to getting in shape. I recognized it from the
big problems I have successfully solved in my life. The secret is to focus on making
whatever it is youre trying to improve and make better today than it was yesterday. Thats
it. Its easy. And, as Erik was, its possible to be enthusiastic about taking real, tangible
steps toward a distant goal.

Ive also recently been working on one of the most complex, ugliest Ruby on Rails
applications Ive ever seen. My company inherited it from another developer as a
consulting project. There were a few key features that needed to be implemented and a slew
of bugs and performance issues to correct. When we opened the hood to make these
changes, we discovered an enormous mess. The company employing us was time- and
cash-constrained, so we didnt have the luxury to start from scratch, even though this is the
kind of code you throw away.

So, we trudged along making small fix after small fix, taking much longer to get each one
finished than expected. When we started, it seemed like the monstrosity of the code base
would never dissipate. Working on the application was tiring and joyless. But over time, the
fixes have come faster, and the once-unacceptable performance of the
application has improved. This is because we made the decision to make the code base
better each day than it was the day before. That sometimes meant refactoring a long method
into several smaller, well-named methods. Sometimes it meant removing inheritance
hierarchies that never belonged in the object model. Sometimes it just meant fixing a long-
broken unit test.
But since weve made these changes incrementally, theyve come for free. Refactoring
one method is something you can do in the time you would normally spend getting another
cup of coffee or chatting with a co-worker about the latest news. And making one small
improvement is motivating. You can clearly see the difference in that one thing youve
fixed as soon as the change is made.

You might not be able to see a noticeable difference in the whole with each incremental
change, though. When youre trying to become more respected in your workplace or be
healthier, the individual improvements you make each day often wont lead directly to
tangible results. This is, as we saw before, the reason big goals like these become so
demotivating. So, for most of the big, difficult goals youre striving for, its important to
think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in
your
efforts toward that goal than yesterday.

I cant, for example, guarantee that Ill be less fat today than yesterday, but I can control
whether I do more today to lose weight. And if I do, I have a right to feel good about what
Ive done. This consistent, measurable improvement in my actions frees me from the cycle
of guilt and procrastination that most of us are ultimately defeated by when we try to do
Big Important Things.

You also need to be happy with small amounts of better. Writing one more test than you
did yesterday is enough to get you closer to the goal of being better about unit testing. If
youre starting at zero, one additional test per day is a sustainable rate, and by the time you
can no longer do better than yesterday, youll find that youre now better about unit
testing and you dont need to keep making the same improvements. If, on the other hand,
you decided to go from zero to fifty tests on the first day of your improvement plan, the
first day would be hard, and the second day probably wouldnt happen. So, make your
improvements small and incremental but daily.

Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new
baseline for tomorrow.

One of the great things about this simple maxim is that it can apply to very tactical goals,
such as finishing a project or cleaning up a piece of software, or it can apply to the very
highest level goals you might have. How have you taken better action today for improving
your career than you did yesterday? Make one more contact, submit a patch to an open
source project, write a thoughtful post and publish it on your weblog. Help one more person
on a technical forum in your area of expertise than you did yesterday. If you every day you
do a little better than yesterday toward improving yourself, youll find that the otherwise
ocean-sized proposition of building a remarkable career becomes more tractable.

Give it a try:

Make a list of the difficult, complex personal or professional improvements youd like to
make. Its OK if you have a fairly long list. Now, for each item in the list, think about what
you could do today to make yourself or that item better than yesterday. Tomorrow, look at
the list again.

Was yesterday better than the day before? How can you make today better? Do it again the
next day. Put it on your calendar. Spend two minutes thinking about this each morning.
GROUND ZERO: GETTING STARTED
AND SWARAJ

For most of us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice
weve followed.

The Harajuku Moment: The Decision to Become a Complete Human details the case of
Chad Fowler, an IT expert who lost 70lbs+ (32+kg) in under 12 months. Fowler had been
overweight for a decade and Ferris wanted to know what his tipping point was. What had
made Fowler suddenly so determined to change. The answer lies in the moment that, while
shopping in Harajuku, Tokyo, Fowler heard himself say For me, it doesnt matter what I
wear; Im not going to look good anyway. Embarrassed by his tone of helplessness, he
started on his road to remarkable weight loss.

Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isnt painful enough. Its a
nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no Harajuku Moment.

Elusive Body Fat: Where Are You Really? introduces Ferriss father as a case study. He had
lost 59lb (27kg) in seven months, yet was lamenting the fact that his weight loss had
slowed during the last two months. Ferriss points out while his father wasnt seen to be
losing weight during this period; he was in fact enjoying lean muscle gain. His father
continued in his efforts, to see his muscle gain slow and his fat loss begin to show on the
scales again. In all, he lost 72lb (32kg). Ferriss uses this example to prove a point about not
relying on what the scales tell you. He goes on to discuss several methods for calculating
body fat; dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), BodPod and BodyMetrix coming out
in his top three.

Starting a body recomposition programme without measurements is like planning a trip

without a start address. I guarantee you will regret it later.

From Photos to Fear: Making Failure Impossible discusses the underlying psychology that
affects the ability to lose weight, gain muscle or stop smoking. Summarizing these failures
as a failure in logic, Ferriss proposes four principles of failure-proofing behavior.

We break commitments to ourselves with embarrassing regularity.

1. Make it Conscious: Flashing and Before Photos shows how the use of food diaries
when attempting to lose weight has been proven to increase results by as much as three
times. Ferriss goes one step further and advises you take a picture of what you are about to
eat. The so-called flash diet works by making you more aware of what you are eating. Its
a concept that, even without dieting, will result in fat loss. He goes on to advise that you
take an accurate picture of your baseline. Sure, it wont look great but ignoring the problem
wont fix it.

2. Make it a Game: Jack Stack and the Stickiness of Five Sessions uses the example of
businessman Jack Stack who, together with some colleagues, took a loan of $9 million
(5.6 million). He turned that loan into $400 million (250,000 million) by combining daily
goals and public accountability with daily rewards and public recognition. Its an approach
that lends itself to redefining the body. Arguing that measurement equals motivation,
Ferriss points to the Nike+ team, who have found that users who track their running efforts
five times are hooked on the process and continue to run. He concludes that no matter what
your goal is, if you track something five times, you are likely to keep on doing so.

3. Make it Competitive: Fear of Loss and the Benefits of Comparison deems potential loss
as a better motivator than potential reward. Ferriss explains that by pairing up with
someone or joining a group you can expect greater results. No one wants to be last.

4. Make it Small and Temporary offers four actions, of which you are advised to adopt two
as a starting point.

Do I really look like that in underwear? Take photos of yourself wearing underwear
or swimwear from the front, back and side. Put it somewhere you cant ignore it.
Do I really eat that? Take a photo of everything you eat for three to five days. Put
your hand next to the food so you get a true picture of your portion size. Put them
online for maximum effect.
Who can I get to do this with me? Find somebody to do it with. Enter into a friendly
competition and compare changes in body fat percentage or total inch loss.
How do I measure up? Determine your total inches by measuring both upper arms,
waist, hips and both legs. The total of these numbers is your total inches.

Take the pressure off and put in your five easy sessions, whether meals or workouts. The
rest will take care of itself.
The Harajuku Moment
2011.03.15 12:00 am

A few years ago, sitting in the July heat on a wall in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, I came
to a conclusion: I had let myself be a loser. At least, I had let myself become a partial loser.
I was fat and unhappy. My skin looked grey. I was slowly killing myself. I was obese. I
made excuses to myself and others. I used my success in other areas as a justification: I just
wasnt a fitness guy.

It was bullshit.

Me (on the right) and Michael Foord

These days Im still not an elite athlete, but Ive turned things around. Ive lost nearly 100
pounds, gone from a max ability to run 45 seconds at a time to running a half marathon, and
lost 10 inches around my waist.

Me after losing 70 pounds (photo by Duncan Davidson)

Before, I was incomplete. I allowed myself to believe in a partial picture of myself. Now,
Im closer to the real me. Im still a smart, creative guy. But I can also do more pushups in
a row than the average American male, and can run longer and faster than most guys my
age. And I feel great. I feel noticeably better almost all the time.
Im often asked by other obese and overweight people how I did it. People see me at
conferences and other venues and literally dont recognize me. How did I make such an
incredible transformation?

If youve asked me this question, this post is for you.

Its a long story. But Im going to give you the very very short version: it was easy.

I could tell you exactly which system I devised and exactly what worked for me. But that
would be missing the major point. The most important element of making a change like this
is that it is easy.

If you could trade your body for one that is 50-100% better in a year, what would you
give? If you had asked me in early 2008, I wouldnt have even believed it possible. I would
have given a lot. What about 6 months? Obese or overweight people, what if I told you that
in 6 months you could be in almost unrecognizably better shape? Would you jump on
whatever I was selling?

The secret? Im not selling anything. Its just true. Choose any non-bullshit system and
actually stick with it for 6 months and you can and will experience life-changing results.
You can extend your life span significantly.

If youre reading this and you want to change, heres what I want
you to do:

1. Recognize how deep in denial youve been

2. Measure yourself now. If its weight thats your issue, get on the scale immediately.
Stand on it and cry. You probably havent been measuring it, and its probably worse than
you think. Embrace how far youve gone in the wrong direction. This is the end of that
long, drawn out series of lies youve been telling yourself.
3. Find any program that doesnt look like snake oil and try it for 20 days. Measure your
progress. If you dont know what to try, start with 45 minute light cardiovascular exercise
sessions 4 times per week (find a TV series to watch on a treadmilla one hour show
without commercials is about 42 minutes), forcing yourself to eat a protein-heavy breakfast
within 30 minutes of waking, cutting out empty calories and sugars (coke, sugar-heavy
coffee drinks, beer, etc.), and eating 5 small meals per day.
4. After 20 days, youre almost 1/6 of the way through a major transformation. You have
probably gone down one clothing size or are close to it. How far do you want to go? Pick
something you didnt previously think you were capable of and commit to it. Maybe its a
bike race or a triathlon or doing Cross Fit.

The funny thing about huge change is that making it happen isnt usually as huge an effort
as we think. We just get stuck. All you have to do to go ALL of the way is to go SOME of
the way.