I'll throw my two cents into the obligatory deluge of "how to keep your New Year's Resolutions" posts that come out around this time of year.
You want to know the absolutely worst time to start a New Year's Resolution? The answer is January 1st. And here's why.
By starting a resolution on Jan. 1st, you are engaging in the very behavior that got you in the situation that needed a resolution in the first place. You are setting up a world in which the changes you want to see will happen at a certain time in the future, and will also be completed to your satisfaction at some point in the future.
If there's one thing you'll never hear me back down from, it's this; you will never be satisfied. Never ever ever.
By planning to start something at the beginning of the year, you buy into the illusion that at some point in time you will be a different, more motivated, more responsible person. But you won't be. Because you're just who you are, and who you are is determined not by your good intentions but by your present and continuing habitual actions.
I repeat this to my PCPers ad nauseam, and I'll say it here again. A human is just a bundled collection of energy. Not in a new age panpipes and crystals sense, but in a real sense of spinning electrons, firing neurons, and neurohormonic-based psychological habits. You think the choices you make are entirely up to you, but step back and you'll see that most of your life is operating on a wave shape. Everything from the foods you crave to the music you enjoy rides along a series of intricate patterns that you aren't even aware of most of the time. (I'll write more on this in the future, so stay tuned.)
So New Years rolls around and we think that we're just going to up and change the patterns we've established over years of habitual action.
I remember when I was a kid we would go on vacation to the Florida panhandle. Everyday I'd go out into the water about waist high and play one of the many games kids who grow up alone learn to play with themselves. It was me vs. the ocean. I'd plant my feet and would vow not to move from that spot. Waves would come and I'd duck them, elbow them, even dragon punch them, but I wouldn't move from that little square of sand.
As you can guess, the waves won. Either from exhaustion or the sheer force of water I'd always relent and let myself be carried away on the inimitable force of the ocean. Trying to change a habit by "becoming a new person on January 1st" is a similiarly difficult battle. Try as many times as you want, but you won't win a fight against your habitual patterns that way.
So what are we to do? When is the best time to start your New Years Resolutions? The answer is today. Let's say you've made the decision to start doing yoga every morning in the New Year. Well, you've probably got a free morning on December 28th. Why not do yoga that morning? Because that's still your "off time?" Give me a break. If that's how you're thinking now what hope do you have on January 15th?
The truth of the matter is that the only way to overcome the waves of your habitual thought/action patterns is by changing the frequency of those patterns. And that can only be done right now, this moment. Every second you let the pattern duplicate itself the harder it will be to break it up and overlay a new pattern. By changing now you stop putting off the change you want to make and start becoming it. This way when New Year's Day rolls around you'll already be in the midst of creating a new healthy habit and not staring up at a large intimidating mountain.
There's no doubt, this is incredibly hard. But if it's important enough to you, you will find the reserves of energy and motivation to get you through. And if it's not that important to you, then you won't stick to it, and that's ok too.
In the course of my work I often encounter people who say they want to "lose a few pounds," become "a little more flexible" or be "a little more relaxed" in their daily lives. I sometimes ask them why they want this change. The answers are usually half-baked platitudes about being more healthy or guilt-driven desires for self-improvement. And they always fail. The reason? They don't really want those things they say they do. AND THAT'S OK.
It's ok to not want to lose a few pounds. If you really wanted to lose a few pounds, you'd already have taken steps to do it, not just half-hearted steps like asking someone like me for some tips. It's good that you now know that that isn't a big priority for you. Get on with the things that are a priority.
As I've documented in other blogs I have a big dream of acchieving true side splits. I really want to do this, it's not just a thing I thought would be neat to do one day. It's a serious goal that I will attain. So you'll find me spending several hours a week on it. For most people it's a pretty stupid goal. That's fine. The people that really want to do stuff will take the necessary steps to do it. The people that kind of want to do stuff will fizzle out along the way.
And we're all achievers and fizzlers in our own areas. It's great to achieve. It's also great to fizzle, because you then know one more thing that you don't honestly care that much about. Finding what you truly love striving for is the point of this meaningless life!
Happy New Year.
Factory Tour Lessons
Last week I went on a tour of the Celestial Seasonings factory in Boulder, Colorado. I've been a fan of the company for many years and we often serve their tea at the studio, so while I was in Boulder I figured it would be pretty lame not to go check it out.
I always seem to end up on beverage tours. As Atlanta grade-schoolers we were regularly trotted out to the CocaCola museum for class trips. I've been to the Guiness Museum in Dublin on two occasions. I've toured the Yebisu Beer Factory in Tokyo twice as well. And a handful of wineries in Europe as well. I'm not sure why I'm drawn to beverage tours but it probably has something to do with the desire for free stuff.
Anyway, after thinking on it a few days I've gotten my thoughts together about what I learned at the Celestial Seasonings plant. I'm going to list them here from the most personal to the most global lessons learned on this 45 minute tour.
1. I am a bit of a tea geek. Throughout the tour the leader paused to ask a few questions about tea history and the details of making herbal blends. Each time it was kind of embarrassing as Gwen, Joel and I were the only people with our hands up. In fact we had to stop taking the sample tea packets they were giving away as prizes because we had won too many. Most of the other people on the tour seemed to have little previous knowledge of tea despite having enough gumption to take a tour of a tea factory. I love knowing where the things that I consume come from. I also watch "How It's Made" whole seasons at a time.
2. Seeing how things are produced is a bit like meeting a celebrity, a bit of a letdown through the sheer ordinariness of the whole thing. Wherever there is a mystery, the mind will tend to fill in the gaps with information that is much more colorful than the reality. You can see this in old nautical maps marked, "Here be Dragons," in the way we imagine Hollywood stars must spend their free time doing unimaginably interesting things. The image I carried of Celestial Seasonings was of native peoples picking endless green fields of organically grown herbs to be masterfully blended by a man in a plaid shirt with suspenders and a beard. The reality consists of the mundane modern technology of forklifts, rolls of paper, and assembly lines. I remember one time in Morocco a French tourist was taking photos of the Berbers, and asked for a little boy to step outside the frame of a picture because while his companions were wearing traditional garb he was wearing a T-shirt. Funny how we want to keep the magic of our illusions even when the truth is staring us in the face.
3. Change or die. Celestial Seasonings is famous for its hippyish box art and feel-good quotes plastered on every side of the packaging. In fact the waiting room for the tour is a kind of museum with all the original paintings on the walls. It was pretty wild to see the original Sleepytime Bear painting just inches from my face. But if you've picked up some Celestial Seasonings recently you'll have noticed the design change. Gone are the syrupy quotes, the long haired fairies, and the unicorns.
They made this switch about a year ago, and I'm sure it was hard for some of the older staff to say goodbye to such a long tradition. But when I got home and looked at the tea boxes I had bought, I was looking at a cohesive branding effort with clean lines, a disciplined color pallette, and a feeling of being made in the 2000s, not the 70s. Sometimes the things about your business that you are most famous for are the same ones that are holding you back.
4. Robots are winning. One of the most surprising things about the tour was that on the assembly line floor there were only about half a dozen people. All of the tea that Celestial Seasonings produces, for all the world, 1.6 billion bags of tea per year, has a floor staff of 6. And those people are there just in case the robots break down. Everything is automated. There is very little chance that a human hand ever touched your tea before you take it out of the box. This doesn't bother me but it does convince me of one thing, we need to have less babies. Because there just isn't enough work for people anymore. Think about it. The regions that have the steepest declining birthrates, Japan, Europe, and the US, all have a lot of freakin robots.
5. We all need to think about our own factory tour. One thing that was clear at the tea tour is that the Hain Celestial Group has nothing to hide. Everything was open, we were actually on the floor, just inches away from the product, and not ushered through those skybox things that so many tours make you do. This tells me that Celestial Seasonings has a lot of confidence in the quality and for lack of a better word, "goodness," of its product. In contrast to the beer factory tours, it was nice to see a product being made that has little waste, is not noxious at any point during it's making, and is simple enough to be explained in a 30 minute walk around a factory.
This is a good way to think about your own business. Imagine you have to give a tour to a group of interested visitors. What part of your job would you be proud to show off? What parts would you have to hurry by lest anyone look too closely? How much spin would you have to apply? Perhaps it's time to address those things that you've been hiding away. I did this thought experiment on the studio and came to the conclusion that I would have been apologizing for the tatty signboards at the entrance. I'll be replacing them this weekend!
I always seem to end up on beverage tours. As Atlanta grade-schoolers we were regularly trotted out to the CocaCola museum for class trips. I've been to the Guiness Museum in Dublin on two occasions. I've toured the Yebisu Beer Factory in Tokyo twice as well. And a handful of wineries in Europe as well. I'm not sure why I'm drawn to beverage tours but it probably has something to do with the desire for free stuff.Anyway, after thinking on it a few days I've gotten my thoughts together about what I learned at the Celestial Seasonings plant. I'm going to list them here from the most personal to the most global lessons learned on this 45 minute tour.
1. I am a bit of a tea geek. Throughout the tour the leader paused to ask a few questions about tea history and the details of making herbal blends. Each time it was kind of embarrassing as Gwen, Joel and I were the only people with our hands up. In fact we had to stop taking the sample tea packets they were giving away as prizes because we had won too many. Most of the other people on the tour seemed to have little previous knowledge of tea despite having enough gumption to take a tour of a tea factory. I love knowing where the things that I consume come from. I also watch "How It's Made" whole seasons at a time.
2. Seeing how things are produced is a bit like meeting a celebrity, a bit of a letdown through the sheer ordinariness of the whole thing. Wherever there is a mystery, the mind will tend to fill in the gaps with information that is much more colorful than the reality. You can see this in old nautical maps marked, "Here be Dragons," in the way we imagine Hollywood stars must spend their free time doing unimaginably interesting things. The image I carried of Celestial Seasonings was of native peoples picking endless green fields of organically grown herbs to be masterfully blended by a man in a plaid shirt with suspenders and a beard. The reality consists of the mundane modern technology of forklifts, rolls of paper, and assembly lines. I remember one time in Morocco a French tourist was taking photos of the Berbers, and asked for a little boy to step outside the frame of a picture because while his companions were wearing traditional garb he was wearing a T-shirt. Funny how we want to keep the magic of our illusions even when the truth is staring us in the face.
3. Change or die. Celestial Seasonings is famous for its hippyish box art and feel-good quotes plastered on every side of the packaging. In fact the waiting room for the tour is a kind of museum with all the original paintings on the walls. It was pretty wild to see the original Sleepytime Bear painting just inches from my face. But if you've picked up some Celestial Seasonings recently you'll have noticed the design change. Gone are the syrupy quotes, the long haired fairies, and the unicorns.
They made this switch about a year ago, and I'm sure it was hard for some of the older staff to say goodbye to such a long tradition. But when I got home and looked at the tea boxes I had bought, I was looking at a cohesive branding effort with clean lines, a disciplined color pallette, and a feeling of being made in the 2000s, not the 70s. Sometimes the things about your business that you are most famous for are the same ones that are holding you back.
4. Robots are winning. One of the most surprising things about the tour was that on the assembly line floor there were only about half a dozen people. All of the tea that Celestial Seasonings produces, for all the world, 1.6 billion bags of tea per year, has a floor staff of 6. And those people are there just in case the robots break down. Everything is automated. There is very little chance that a human hand ever touched your tea before you take it out of the box. This doesn't bother me but it does convince me of one thing, we need to have less babies. Because there just isn't enough work for people anymore. Think about it. The regions that have the steepest declining birthrates, Japan, Europe, and the US, all have a lot of freakin robots.
5. We all need to think about our own factory tour. One thing that was clear at the tea tour is that the Hain Celestial Group has nothing to hide. Everything was open, we were actually on the floor, just inches away from the product, and not ushered through those skybox things that so many tours make you do. This tells me that Celestial Seasonings has a lot of confidence in the quality and for lack of a better word, "goodness," of its product. In contrast to the beer factory tours, it was nice to see a product being made that has little waste, is not noxious at any point during it's making, and is simple enough to be explained in a 30 minute walk around a factory.
This is a good way to think about your own business. Imagine you have to give a tour to a group of interested visitors. What part of your job would you be proud to show off? What parts would you have to hurry by lest anyone look too closely? How much spin would you have to apply? Perhaps it's time to address those things that you've been hiding away. I did this thought experiment on the studio and came to the conclusion that I would have been apologizing for the tatty signboards at the entrance. I'll be replacing them this weekend!
The Scientific Method and Zits
In grade school I was always a good student but there was one thing that I just couldn't get my young brain around: Science projects.
A Science project required 3 things I had a lot of trouble with as a kid. 1)Long Term Planning, 2)Actually physically doing something instead of just reading, and 3)Interacting with judges in the Science Fair.
In the eighth grade I didn't even do my Science Project. My teacher was irate but I had nothing but A's for the rest of the year so I got by with a B. In response to this she changed the rules the next year that failure to complete a Science Fair Project resulted in a fail.
For some reason I just couldn't wrap my head around the scientific method. Like, some kids did a project to see how receiving light 24 hours a day affected plants. I couldn't see the sense in that. Real plants don't get light 24 hours a day. Who cares? I also had a lot of trouble with the idea of a hypothesis. I kept thinking that if my hypothesis turned out to be incorrect I'd done something wrong. So I'd mess with the data until it turned out the way it should have been. I was a terrible scientist. We were also supposed to keep a log of all the progress made on our project. I didn't do it of course, so it turned into a creative writing project the night before the seventh grade science fair when I went back faked three months of entries, complete with little details about the seasonal changes.
Anyway, I got it into my head that I just wasn't cut out to be a scientist. It took me quite a long time to get over that self-created mental block. But eventually I found out that I really love science. I love understanding how things really are, finding the underlying structure of the world, and being excited, not dissapointed, when the hypothesis is wrong.
A few months ago I started getting these weird pimples along my brow line. I have no problem with the occasional zit here or there, it's part of life, but these were little clusters of small dots in a very specific line going from the tip of one eyebrow to the other. I've never had pimples there, and it seemed clear that these were being caused by something new in my life. So I started thinking about how to find out what was bringing these on. My exercise habits hadn't changed recently, so it seemed likely to be a food that had been consuming more of than usual.
My first hypothesis was the Excelsior Mocha. The weeks leading up to the outbreak, for some reason I had been craving this drink from Japan's Starbucks ripoff, Caffe Excelsior. This mocha is in no way a good thing to drink. It's made by a machine, with a syrupy chocolate sauce that forms a sludge on the bottom when you finish. It doesn't even taste that good. But for some reason, I kept on craving those things a few times a week. And since Cafe Excelsior is about 10 steps away from the studio, I was really hitting them hard. Surely overdosing on this nasty chocolate mixture was causing the zits.
So I quit the mochas and haven't had one since. But the pimples remained. They were still getting that oily fuel from somewhere. My mocha hypothesis was wrong. So I started looking for other things I had changed in my diet recently.
Around the time the pimples came I moved from my apartment, and for a few weeks was unable to prepare many meals as the gas was off, the pans were in boxes, I didn't have time to go to the grocery store, etc... As a result I was supplementing my sparse meals with these things called BalanceUp from the Asahi corporation. I really like these little bars. The blueberry ones are super tasty and they have a lot of vitamins, not that I care about that. If you have to eat from a convenience store you could do worse. I had been eating one of these things a day during the moving time, sometimes more. They seemed so innocuous, but the only way to check my hypothesis was to stop eating them and see what happened. So as with the mochas I quit BalanceUp and haven't had one since.
And within a few days the pimples cleared up. Ah Ha! Culprit found! Blog post over. Or is it?
You see, I told you before I am a terrible scientist. And to assume the Vitamin Cookies were to blame would be terrible science. To make a valid claim about the effect of anything you must have a control group. So the kid who did the plants that received 24 hours of light a day had another batch of plants that got normal amounts of light. That way you can see if your results are truly from what you're doing and not from another factor you hadn't considered.
Control groups are pretty easy to arrange for fruit-flies and flora, but human beings offer a huge challenge. Even if you get two people of the same sex and age there are billions of differences between them. Their DNA, the way their body reacts to things, their mental states, their living conditions, the list is endless. The bottom line is that you'll never find a suitable control group for yourself, because there's only one you.
So the pimples could have been the BalanceUp, but that would be at best a guess. Let's think about the situation that was leading up to me drinking a lot of mochas and eating convenience store snacks. I was moving. On top of the multiple jobs I do, and running three simultaneous PCPs. I was stressed. That's why I kept wanting those cathartic mochas. That's why I didn't have time to cook real food and was eating packaged crap from 7-11. Once I settled in, my stress levels returned to normal.
Stress is a really toxic process for your body, (I wrote extensively about it here) and probably introduces a lot more nasty stuff into your system than a daily vitamin cookie. Of course it could have been some weird reaction to my new apartment. It could have been anything.
And that's the point isn't it, that we are such a complicated collection of physical processes that there is never a simple culprit behind disease. We want there to be. We want there to be a clear reason some people get zits and some people get cancer, but it's just not there. Making peace with this is a good start on moving towards a balanced life. When you accept that you can't target any one thing to magically make you healthy, you start to cover all your bases. Which in terms of your body is consistent diet, exercise, stress management, and social interaction.
It's not very satisfying for our scientific minds, but it's far more realistic than wildly swinging between fad diets, magic pills, and expensive analysis.
A Science project required 3 things I had a lot of trouble with as a kid. 1)Long Term Planning, 2)Actually physically doing something instead of just reading, and 3)Interacting with judges in the Science Fair.
In the eighth grade I didn't even do my Science Project. My teacher was irate but I had nothing but A's for the rest of the year so I got by with a B. In response to this she changed the rules the next year that failure to complete a Science Fair Project resulted in a fail.
For some reason I just couldn't wrap my head around the scientific method. Like, some kids did a project to see how receiving light 24 hours a day affected plants. I couldn't see the sense in that. Real plants don't get light 24 hours a day. Who cares? I also had a lot of trouble with the idea of a hypothesis. I kept thinking that if my hypothesis turned out to be incorrect I'd done something wrong. So I'd mess with the data until it turned out the way it should have been. I was a terrible scientist. We were also supposed to keep a log of all the progress made on our project. I didn't do it of course, so it turned into a creative writing project the night before the seventh grade science fair when I went back faked three months of entries, complete with little details about the seasonal changes.
Anyway, I got it into my head that I just wasn't cut out to be a scientist. It took me quite a long time to get over that self-created mental block. But eventually I found out that I really love science. I love understanding how things really are, finding the underlying structure of the world, and being excited, not dissapointed, when the hypothesis is wrong.
A few months ago I started getting these weird pimples along my brow line. I have no problem with the occasional zit here or there, it's part of life, but these were little clusters of small dots in a very specific line going from the tip of one eyebrow to the other. I've never had pimples there, and it seemed clear that these were being caused by something new in my life. So I started thinking about how to find out what was bringing these on. My exercise habits hadn't changed recently, so it seemed likely to be a food that had been consuming more of than usual.
My first hypothesis was the Excelsior Mocha. The weeks leading up to the outbreak, for some reason I had been craving this drink from Japan's Starbucks ripoff, Caffe Excelsior. This mocha is in no way a good thing to drink. It's made by a machine, with a syrupy chocolate sauce that forms a sludge on the bottom when you finish. It doesn't even taste that good. But for some reason, I kept on craving those things a few times a week. And since Cafe Excelsior is about 10 steps away from the studio, I was really hitting them hard. Surely overdosing on this nasty chocolate mixture was causing the zits.So I quit the mochas and haven't had one since. But the pimples remained. They were still getting that oily fuel from somewhere. My mocha hypothesis was wrong. So I started looking for other things I had changed in my diet recently.
Around the time the pimples came I moved from my apartment, and for a few weeks was unable to prepare many meals as the gas was off, the pans were in boxes, I didn't have time to go to the grocery store, etc... As a result I was supplementing my sparse meals with these things called BalanceUp from the Asahi corporation. I really like these little bars. The blueberry ones are super tasty and they have a lot of vitamins, not that I care about that. If you have to eat from a convenience store you could do worse. I had been eating one of these things a day during the moving time, sometimes more. They seemed so innocuous, but the only way to check my hypothesis was to stop eating them and see what happened. So as with the mochas I quit BalanceUp and haven't had one since.And within a few days the pimples cleared up. Ah Ha! Culprit found! Blog post over. Or is it?
You see, I told you before I am a terrible scientist. And to assume the Vitamin Cookies were to blame would be terrible science. To make a valid claim about the effect of anything you must have a control group. So the kid who did the plants that received 24 hours of light a day had another batch of plants that got normal amounts of light. That way you can see if your results are truly from what you're doing and not from another factor you hadn't considered.
Control groups are pretty easy to arrange for fruit-flies and flora, but human beings offer a huge challenge. Even if you get two people of the same sex and age there are billions of differences between them. Their DNA, the way their body reacts to things, their mental states, their living conditions, the list is endless. The bottom line is that you'll never find a suitable control group for yourself, because there's only one you.
So the pimples could have been the BalanceUp, but that would be at best a guess. Let's think about the situation that was leading up to me drinking a lot of mochas and eating convenience store snacks. I was moving. On top of the multiple jobs I do, and running three simultaneous PCPs. I was stressed. That's why I kept wanting those cathartic mochas. That's why I didn't have time to cook real food and was eating packaged crap from 7-11. Once I settled in, my stress levels returned to normal.
Stress is a really toxic process for your body, (I wrote extensively about it here) and probably introduces a lot more nasty stuff into your system than a daily vitamin cookie. Of course it could have been some weird reaction to my new apartment. It could have been anything.
And that's the point isn't it, that we are such a complicated collection of physical processes that there is never a simple culprit behind disease. We want there to be. We want there to be a clear reason some people get zits and some people get cancer, but it's just not there. Making peace with this is a good start on moving towards a balanced life. When you accept that you can't target any one thing to magically make you healthy, you start to cover all your bases. Which in terms of your body is consistent diet, exercise, stress management, and social interaction.
It's not very satisfying for our scientific minds, but it's far more realistic than wildly swinging between fad diets, magic pills, and expensive analysis.
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