Ep. #342: Motivation Monday: What Got You Here (Probably) Won’t Get You There

Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics back with another episode of the podcast, a Modi Monday episode. I apologize. I missed last week’s. My excuse is, this took a bit longer than I anticipated going into it, however, I hope you like it. Now, before we get into this episode, I’m sorry, but I have to shill for something to pay the bills.

No, I’m just kidding. I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. Instead, I’m just gonna quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my newest book, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, this book was fun to write because it really is my personal and 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for transformation, both inside and outside of the gym.

And I promise you that it will provide you with new and valuable knowledge and skills that you will use for the rest of your life. In short, I wrote this book to help you fix the things that are most holding you back from doing and achieving the things you care most about. So if you want to learn how to overcome the mental blocks that are making you unmotivated, unhappy, and unhealthy, then the Little Black Book of Workout Motivation is for you.

And you can find it on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Amazon. com. Google Play, and I should also mention that you can get the audiobook 100 percent free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you’re not currently listening to audiobooks.

I love them myself because they let me make the time that I spend commuting, prepping food, walking my dog, and so forth. more valuable and productive. So if you want to take audible up on this offer and get my audiobook for free, simply go to www. workoutmotivationbook. com slash audiobook, click the sign up today and save button, create your account and voila, you get to listen to my audiobook.

Little black book for free. All right. That’s it for the salesmanship. Let’s get to the show. So let’s start with a quote. And the quote is from Marshall Goldsmith. And he said, quote, people forget your promise. Remember your performance. So in 1969, a man named Lawrence J. Peter published a book on business management called the Peter principle.

And it’s central hypothesis was. Simple. It was that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In other words, employees do well and are promoted until they reach a level where they’re finally outmatched by the job, incompetent, and incapable of earning another promotion.

Look around where you work and pick out the people who have reached their level of incompetence, Peter wrote. You will see that in every hierarchy, the cream rises until it sours. Moreover, Peter asserts in the book that this phenomenon is the key to an understanding of the whole structure of civilization.

Now, The Peter principle struck a chord and quickly became a runaway hit, staying on the New York times bestseller list for over a year. And it’s still in print today, 45 years later with over 1 million copies sold. It has also caught the eye of academia and a number of studies have since demonstrated.

It’s validity for instance, research conducted by scientists from the Carlson school of management, MIT Sloan school of management and Yale school of management and published in 2018 involved the analysis of 214 American businesses and found that high performing salespeople were more likely to be promoted to managerial roles.

And then fail as managers. Quote, I expected that the best sales people would become merely good managers. Some skills translate to management and others don’t. One of the researchers said to see that the best salespeople were becoming the worst sales managers was surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the fact that the Peter principle started as a.

Joke, the entire book was satire. Peter’s evidence came from a hypothetical case file that contained employees like Miss Oval, Mrs. Cylinder, Mr. Eclipse, Mr. Cube, Mr. Sphere, and Mr. Tinker. And some of the book’s practical suggestions include using pretended incompetence to prevent Promotions that might lead to your professional demise creative incompetence, as Peter calls it in the book, hiding true incompetence by focusing exclusively on preparing for work as opposed to actually doing it by, for example, reaffirming the need for action, researching other ways to get the job done and seeking expert advice.

That’s called substitution in the book. And another practical suggestion is. Pseudo promoting incompetent people by simply upgrading their titles. And that’s called a lateral arabesque in the book. Now the irony produced plenty of laughs, but many readers also knew that Peter was onto something real that was going on in businesses everywhere, the higher.

They looked in organizations, the more incompetence they found, and it turns out that Peter’s hypothesis helps explain why that is now. For my part, I think Peter’s principle holds true in far more than just business. I believe that in life we do not rise to the level of our ambitions, but to the level of our incompetence.

In other words, we can only get so far in any area, activity, or endeavor with the mindset, knowledge, and skills that we currently have. Moreover, chances are those boundaries are well short of where we ultimately hope to arrive. And that’s okay. It happens to the best of us. Take Ray Dalio, for example, who is the billionaire founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates.

So imagine this for a minute, you’re Dalio it’s 1982 and you and your growing team have spent eight years working tirelessly around the clock to build an investment firm, which is well on its way to becoming a world class. Now, based on your understanding of the economy, you are absolutely certain that a catastrophic financial crash is on the horizon and that the feds strategy to avert it is going to fail and sooner rather than later.

In fact, you are so sure of your insights that you testify before Congress. That there is a 95 percent chance that the Fed’s efforts will fail to save us, and a 5 percent chance that they’ll work, but they’ll also trigger hyperinflation. And then you double down by betting the farm on your prognosis.

You’re dead wrong. The economy responds to the Fed’s efforts and inflation falls while growth accelerates. The stock market soars and begins what will become a historic bull run, along with the most painful experience of your life. Here’s how Dalio described the downfall in his book Principles. He said, quote, My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat.

Being so wrong, and especially so publicly wrong, was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business with nothing to show for it.

Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one. At one point, I’d lost so much money I couldn’t afford to pay the people who worked with me. One by one, I had to let them go. We went down to two employees, Coleman and me. Then Coleman had to go. With tears from all, his family packed up and returned to Oklahoma.

Bridgewater was now down to just one employee. Me. Losing people I cared so much about, and very nearly losing my dream of working for myself, was devastating. To make ends meet, I even had to borrow 4, 000 from my dad until we could sell our second car. I had come to a fork in the road. Should I put on a tie and take a job on Wall Street?

That was not the life I wanted. On the other hand, I had a wife and two young children to support. I realized I was facing one of life’s big turning points, and my choices would have big implications for me and my family’s future. So Dahlio didn’t simply rise to the level of his incompetence. He loaded himself into a cannon, pointed it at the sky, and then blasted himself into smithereens.

Now, what do you think you would do if you were in his shoes? Would you just pack it in? So Dahlio didn’t give up, obviously. But instead, he decided to turn The catastrophe into an invaluable learning experience and figure out where he had gone wrong and why more specifically, he wanted to figure out where his systems failed him and how to improve and prepare them for another run at the markets.

I’m not going to spoil the entire story here. I recommend you read the book. Very good. But This process that he went through ultimately led to the development of a revolutionary new investment strategy, a new system that would catapult Dalio to even greater success than before and really set the trajectory for the rest of his life.

Now, I think that one of the key lessons that we can learn from Dalio’s incredible story is threefold. One, no matter who we are, we can all be struck down by the Peter principle. Two, we should give just as much attention to our level of incompetence as our goals. And three, the better our systems, the higher we can rise before reaching our limits.

We can also observe that the greater the goal, the more robust the system must be for achieving it. Mere hustle is not enough because that’s just energy that can move the machine, not determine the outcome. Hustle is a means, not an end. Know this, as important as goal setting is, System building is far more no matter how beautifully we populate the landscapes of our futures with lush dreams and desires, only equally magnificent systems can build bridges across the chasm. Between what currently is and what could be. So your goal might be to increase your power lifting numbers by 50 pounds. For example, your system would involve the way you eat, train, recover, and supplement.

Or maybe your goal is to build a successful business. Your system then would involve how you create and sell products and services, recruit and retain employees, and use and manage finances. Or maybe your goal is to learn a new language. Your system though would involve how often you practice, how you go about learning new words and grammar and syntax.

A textbook example of the power of systems is the Story of the legendary college basketball coach, John Wooden, who won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years and went on an unprecedented 61 game winning streak. Now, what many fans don’t know is that Wooden coached his Bruins for 15 years before winning his first championship.

During that time, he worked in relative obscurity to assemble his System, his basketball system piece by piece from recruiting the right players to developing his coaching philosophy to advancing the full court press style of play. Now, no one quite understood or appreciated what wooden was doing all those years until So suddenly the humble coach and his team started trouncing every competitor.

So my point is this, while clearly and properly formulating goals is an important aspect of successful living, effective systems are ultimately what produce success. Achievements. And I believe that too many people focus far too much time and energy on formulating goals and far too little on building and refining systems.

How do we do that though? How do we build better systems? Systems that will enable us to do all the things that we want to do? Fully answering those questions would require probably an entire book, but That doesn’t mean that we can’t benefit from a brief discussion of some of the more important insights.

So let’s begin by first answering a simpler question. What is a system? In her incisive 2008 book, Thinking and Systems, a book I highly recommend, the MIT scientist and systems theory pioneer, Donella Meadows, defines a system as an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

By definition then, a system consists of elements, parts, interconnections, how the parts affect each other, and a function or a purpose, the effect produced. Now in systems theory lingo, an element that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time is referred to as a stock. So examples of stocks are the food in your pantry, the people in a town, the nutrients in a plant, the money in your bank account, and even your level of happiness.

Now, interactions Interconnections can be harder to spot and learn about, but boiled down to entities that make stocks increase or decrease, like a faucet or drain that changes the stock of water in a bathtub. Technically speaking, this movement of material is known as a flow. Now, in many cases, flows involve the transfer of information, like the concepts you’re learning right now through my use of the system of language, but they can also involve physical flows, such as the blood moving through your veins.

Now, when viewed this way, a basketball team is a system. Its elements include players, coaches, a court, and a ball. Its interconnections include the game’s rules, the coaching strategies, the communication between the players, and even the laws of physics that govern how the ball and players move. And its purpose can vary by team and player, and can include winning games, having fun, getting exercise, or making money, or all or none of these, or something else altogether.

Diet and exercise regimens are systems that can create muscle strength and vitality. Curiosity, education, experimentation, and refinement are all part of a system that can create professional advancement and success. Admiration, affection, respect, gratitude, compromise, and communication can be combined into a powerful system for developing deeply satisfying romantic relationships.

My point is we can find systems everywhere we look. Schools, cities, countries, companies, economies. Animals, plants, forests, planets, solar systems, and even galaxies are all systems with concrete structures, interactions, and functions. Now, you might be wondering what isn’t a system, and any collection of things without any meaningful mutual connections or function is not a system.

So a mass of people walking in a park is not a system per se. You can add or subtract people and you still just have people walking in a park. Remove the point guard from a basketball team or a piece of your cardiovascular system, however, and the desired outcome may no longer be possible. There are also a number of ways to improve systems, and as far as personal achievement goes, two of my favorite methods are quantification and ritualization.

Now by quantification, I’m referring to measuring and quantifying. paying attention to things that are important. And by ritualization, I am referring to developing and maintaining the right habits. So let’s review each of these things in a little more detail. So quantification now in his best selling 2008 book, better a surgeon’s notes on performance, Atul Gawande wrote the following quote, count something.

Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine, or outside of medicine for that matter, one should be a scientist in this world. In the simplest terms, this means one should count something. It doesn’t really matter what you count. You don’t need a research grant. The only requirement is that what you count should be interesting to you.

Now counting is crucial because it’s a powerful way to determine whether a system is fulfilling its stated purpose or not. So if your goal is to gain muscle and strength and you don’t record your workouts or your body measurements, you won’t have the raw data required to know with certainty whether your diet and exercise systems are working.

You might have intuitions or educated guesses, but these can be faulty. And you can never really be certain. This uncertainty can then slowly or quickly sap your motivation and your willingness to continue dieting and training. By quantifying and tracking at least one thing that’s important, however, you are installing in your system what is known as a feedback loop.

Which is a significant component of all complex systems. Now, by definition, a feedback loop is formed when the change in a stock of a system affects the flows into or out of that same stock. So in other words, it’s a mechanism whereby an output can loop back to and affect the thing that produced it. So when you assess the balance of your bank account, That’s a stock, right?

The amount of money there. If you feel the level is too low, you may adjust your work hours upward to bring in more cash. That’s a flow in, or you may curtail your spending. That’s your flow out. On the other hand, if you are feeling flush, you may decide to work less and bring in less money, or you may decide to spend more freely, or both.

Without such an assessment, however, you may change nothing in the system until Outside factors come into play like a check bouncing or a desire to make a large purchase like a home. Thus, a simple bank statement can help form a feedback loop. Similarly, by tracking your workouts and body measurements, you can assess the changes occurring in your whole body strength and muscle, right?

Those are stocks and then know whether something in your system needs to change or not. Now the same goes for any goal and accompanying system. A cardinal rule of good systems is you should always be tracking something, and ideally the thing that best measures the fulfillment of the function or purpose.

Sometimes this can be hard to do because what matters most isn’t always easily quantifiable. If the purpose of a system is to increase your happiness, that is harder to measure than, let’s say, improving your golf game. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. For example, The Oxford happiness questionnaire is a comprehensive and evidence based quiz that can help you quantify your subjective sense of wellbeing.

And as of this recording, you can take it online for free. It takes about 10 minutes. You answer a bunch of questions and it gives you a number, I believe ranging from one to five, I think. And so that’s something you could track over time. Now, whatever you do. Make sure that you do not fall into the trap of setting goals around things that are easily measured instead of what’s truly important.

Our culture is obsessed with numbers and tends to pay the most attention to things that can be clearly defined and counted and disregard those that can’t be readily gauged. which are often qualitative in nature. And sometimes, quality should be the focus, not quantity. Okay, so that’s quantification.

Now let’s talk ritualization. Now, if you look over the most common New Year’s resolutions for the last decade or so, it’s clear that many of us are struggling to achieve many of the same. Goals. Year after year, millions of people resolve to eat healthier, lose weight, exercise more, save more money, focus more on self care, and read more, only to fall well short of the mark again and again.

Now, when viewed through the lens of Systems theory, none of these things should strike us as particularly complex undertakings. Moreover, thanks to the staggering amount of high quality information available on how to do any of these things, they really don’t require much in the way of creativity either.

One of the primary reasons these ambitions are So thorny is the systems that produce them often require major deviations from people’s habitual behavior patterns. And all of us know how difficult it can be to stop doing the things we shouldn’t be doing and start doing the things we should be doing.

The result is oftentimes the new routines, the new systems that we. Adopt or develop to improve our diets or shrink our waistlines or swell our savings accounts, lack resilience, which is a technical term, which comes down to the ability to survive or persist in an ever changing environment. That’s resilience.

The reality is it can take a tremendous amount of thrust to escape the gravity well of what is life. And once we have, it can be frustratingly easy to fall back into it due to stress, temptation, or just malaise. Thus, the better we can ingrain the right habits and avoid the wrong ones, The better our systems will operate, the more resilient they will be.

So here’s how Charles Duhigg explains it in his blockbuster 2012 book, the power of habit. He said, quote, habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness or can be deliberately designed habits often occur without our permission. but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts.

They shape our lives far more than we realize. They are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense. Indeed, according to research conducted by scientists at Duke as much as 40 percent. of our daily actions are dictated by habits. Now, biologically speaking, this makes sense.

By habitualizing activities, our brains are able to conserve energy and perform common tasks more efficiently. How then, Can we get better at wielding the power of habit and thereby increase the resilience of our systems for positive change? The following three strategies can help. The first one is start easy and small.

The second one is improve gradually. And the third one is expect failure. Now let’s discuss each. Start easy and small. So when it comes to building and breaking habits, consistency is the name of the game. The more often you do or don’t do things, the easier it becomes to continue doing or not doing them.

This is why you want to avoid biting off more than you can comfortably chew in the beginning of any new endeavor. Instead, you should start with something that is so easy and small that you simply can’t say no to it. So let’s say you want to get more and better sleep. I would say start with going to bed just 15 minutes earlier than usual each night.

If you want to eat a healthier diet, how about you start with eating one highly nutritious meal per week or one more than you’re currently eating? If you want to increase your net worth, okay, let’s start with saving just 1 percent more of your income each week. Remember that in the beginning, the goal is simply to get in motion, not go for radical transformation that Okay, so the next tip, improve gradually.

Once an easy and simple habit has taken root, you can improve it by adding difficulty or complexity. Don’t try to do too much too fast, though, lest you trip yourself up. Be patient and strive for small incremental improvements that in and of themselves almost seem trivial, but that can add up to significant changes over time.

Think of it this way, if you were to improve something, anything by just 1 percent per day for a year, it would be nearly 38 times better. Then when you started just 1 percent better per day for a month yields a 135 percent improvement. This is the power of compound interest applied to our lives. And it explains why making regular small refinements to our habits is a surefire path So let’s take another look at the habit of going to bed 15 minutes early that I mentioned earlier.

Once that’s on automatic, you could slightly increase the difficulty and the complexity by pushing your bedtime forward or earlier another 15 minutes. And ending your screen exposure 15 minutes earlier than usual. And then by repeating this process of acclimating to conditions and then adding difficulty or complexity, you can eventually have a powerful system in place for being maximally rested.

Now, for the purpose of eating a healthier diet, you could increase the number of healthy meals per week, have Fewer servings of sugar, start taking a high quality multivitamin supplement and so on. And as for increasing your net worth, you could start diverting a portion of your savings to a retirement account and then increase those contributions accordingly.

Then you could maybe start building a fund for buying a home. I think you get the idea. Many people mistakenly view successes as distinct events, as things that just suddenly materialize, like lightning flashes in the sky. This is almost never the case. Instead, most wins are the natural and inevitable result of the slow and steady accumulation of marginal progress.

The raindrops that slowly fill the reservoir until it finally overflows. Okay. My third and final tip for building better habits and thereby better systems is expect failure. Now, Dan John is an author and record holding strength and conditioning coach. And he often tells his new athletes that they are not good enough.

To be disappointed. Now I would say that this goes for any of us starting anything new and challenging. What is there to be disappointed about? That we didn’t experience immediate breakthroughs? That we made the same kinds of mistakes that everyone else makes at first? Instead of expecting perfection and then scolding ourselves as soft, stupid or unskilled when we fail to live up to that standard, we should cut ourselves some slack and focus our energies on moving in the right direction again instead.

We haven’t earned the right to be disappointed yet, so why get ahead of ourselves? The fact is, failing in an attempt doesn’t make us a failure. It just makes us normal. Every system has its flaws and falters from time to time. What matters more is how quickly You can bounce back and resume normalcy. So if you are still listening to this podcast, I think it’s fair to assume that you want to get better and not just in the gym, but in many other ways as well.

I think you also probably realize that you are going to have to make meaningful changes in your life. To get better that doing the same things that you’ve been doing even more vigorously probably is not going to get you to where you want to be. What this means then is that you are going to have to be more than a good worker.

You are going to have to be a good designer as well. You are going to need better and better systems that can transform your energy and effort into better and better outcomes. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility. And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won’t miss out on any of the new goodies.

Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at musclefullife. com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself, and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. All right, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Oh, and if you liked this episode, then you are going to love my newest book, the Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. You should definitely check it out because this book is my personal and 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for transformation, both inside and outside of the gym. I promise that this book will provide you With new and valuable knowledge and skills that you will use for the rest of your life.

In short, I wrote this book to help you fix the things that are most holding you back from doing and achieving the things that you care the most about. So if you want to learn how to better overcome the mental blocks that are making you unmotivated, unhappy, and unhealthy. Then the little black book of workout motivation is for you and you can find it on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play.

Now I should also mention that there is an audio book as well, one that I recorded myself. So if you like listening to me talk about this kind of stuff on the podcast, then you’ll definitely like listening to the audio book. And you can actually get that audio book 100%. percent free when you go to www.

workoutmotivationbook. com slash audiobook and sign up for an Audible account. Now, I myself love audiobooks and highly recommend them to everyone because they let you take downtime. that you spend commuting, prepping food, walking dogs, stuff like that into something more valuable and productive. So if you want to take Audible up on this offer and get my audiobook for free, simply go to www.

workoutmotivationbook. com slash audiobook, click on the little sign up today and save button, create your Audible account and voila, you get to listen to my little black book for free.