Weights and Balances  •  Part One of Three

You Were Never Supposed to Be Perfect

There is a number you have probably chased, we all have. A version of yourself that lives mostly in your head and partly on someone else's feed, due to these sweet ass algorithms which seem to dictate our lives. (Side bar: if you take social media off your phone, you will be happier. At the very least, turn off the notifications.) You have probably also missed it, then felt like the miss said something about who you are. You may wonder how all of these other people seem to do it, but you can't.

It does not. That is the first thing I want you to know. If you stop reading this right now, cool, just take that little bit with you.

We are going to spend the next three posts on a concept I focus on, with members and with myself. I call it weights and balances (it's real, Sue). Not just how much weight you can lift, though that counts. The bigger idea is that a good life, and a healthy life, is not built through perfection. It is built by tipping a scale in a positive direction. You want the good to outweigh the bad in a way that actually fits the life you have. I like to tell people, we want the gym to support your life, not the other way around. 13 years ago, I would have said something different. I would have wanted to see you six days a week, plus yoga Sundays with Dr. Kim.

This concept sounds simple. The reason it is hard is that almost everything around us sells the opposite.

Health is a spectrum, and perfection is not on it

It is not an end result, and I have to remind myself of that all the time.

A researcher named Aaron Antonovsky spent his career on a question that sounds obvious but mostly gets ignored. Not what makes people sick, but what actually moves a person toward health. He landed on a model worth borrowing. Picture health as a line. One end is total ease, the other is total dis-ease, and every one of us sits somewhere on that line right now. We are always somewhere on it. Stress nudges us one way. Sleep, food, movement, and the people we love nudge us the other.

There is something this model leaves out, and the person way smarter than me who built it left it out on purpose. A finish line. There is no point on the spectrum labeled done, and there is no point labeled perfect. There is only the direction you are heading and the question of what is moving you forward an inch at a time. This reframes the project of you, because that is a lifelong individual project. You are not trying to arrive. You are trying to keep tilting toward ease and living your BEST life. Whatever that looks like to you.

Perfection is not a higher rung on that ladder. It is a different game, and it is one nobody wins, but our phones and algorithms like to make us think we can. When the target is perfect, every normal human week, not the 90 seconds of an influencer's life you scrolled past, reads as a failure. Miss two workouts, eat the thing, sleep badly for a stretch, and the all or nothing scoreboard says you blew it, so you might as well stop. That is not a willpower problem. That is a target problem. For some of you, maybe this is why you stopped working out or working on your nutrition. A few bad days. A few bad days, weeks, or even years will not define a life. If it did, I would have stopped growing mentally and emotionally in my 20s and would not be sitting here writing this today.

It was never and has never been about willpower

The story says healthy people simply have more discipline, and if you are struggling, you just need to want it more.

For a long time, science seemed to back that up. The idea was that willpower works like a muscle that wears out, and there were famous experiments to prove it. Then researchers did the honest thing and tried to repeat them. In 2016, twenty three labs ran the same willpower experiment with more than two thousand people, and the effect that an entire theory had been built on basically vanished.

Same story with the famous marshmallow test, the one about kids who waited for a second treat. I actually did this to my son, and if I can find the video, I will share it. When researchers looked closer, the kids who waited were not secretly more disciplined. They mostly came from stable, well-resourced homes, where waiting reliably paid off and food was never in question. Their circumstances did the work we kept crediting to their character. The reality is it was about privilege and circumstance.

I am not telling you willpower is false or a fake construct. I am telling you it is, as a foundation, a poor way to build a life, and an even worse thing to beat yourself with. The same holds at the medical level. The consensus on obesity is now explicit that it is driven by biology, environment, and factors working together, and that it should not be treated as a personal failure or a lack of willpower.

So if it was never and has never been a character flaw, the first move is not to "try harder." It is to accept where you actually are right now. Not the resigned acceptance that results in not making an effort, but the honest kind that stops arguing with the current reality. You are here, on this part of the spectrum, with this body, this schedule, and this history, and that is the place any real change can truly start from. All the energy you have been pouring into guilt and self-criticism is energy that is not going toward moving.

Acceptance can give your life back to you. It isn't easy. I am working on this every day as a business owner, coach, father, partner, friend, and human.

So, retire the good and bad scorecard

Rip that f*cker up and toss it right into the trash.

Here is a habit almost all of us carry, and I want to name it with zero judgment, because I have done it too. We sort everything into good and bad. Good workout, bad day. Clean food, cheat meals. Good week, fell off the wagon.

The labels feel motivating, for a moment. They are not. They are a moral scorecard, and the trouble with a moral scorecard is that the moment you land in the bad column, the all or nothing logic kicks in. You already failed, so the rest of the day, or the week, stops counting. Most people do not quit on their health because they ran out of effort. They quit because the scorecard told them they had already lost.

So we are going to retire the good and bad. Not because nothing matters, but because those words measure the wrong thing.

Try this instead. Ask whether a choice is aligned with your goals or misaligned with them. That is the whole swap. A late night with people you love might score as bad on a sleep tracker and be deeply aligned with the life you are building. A flawless macro day might score as good on paper and be completely misaligned if it cost you the dinner table with your kids.

And aligned with whose goals? Yours. This matters enough that part two is built around it. The internet is a firehose of people prescribing their life onto yours. Their diet, their training split, their morning routine, their definition of best. Some of it is even good advice for them. The question is never whether it worked for the person filming it. The question is whether it fits you. Your body, your schedule, your people, and the resources you actually have in front of you. You can keep trying to drink from it, or you can walk away.

Where this leaves us, you and me

Stop aiming at perfect, because perfect is not a point on the spectrum. It is a way to guarantee you always feel behind. Stop grading yourself on a good and bad scorecard that was practically designed to make you quit. And stop carrying willpower like it is a character trait you somehow missed out on at birth.

Start somewhere more useful and a lot more honest. You are already on the spectrum and playing the game. Today, with whatever you have, you can tilt it a little toward ease. There is a name for the belief that your own actions actually move the needle. It is called self-efficacy, and it is one of the better predictors of whether a person sticks with a change at all. The good news is that it is built, not born, and it is built the same way every time. Through small wins you can actually see. The good does not have to crowd out the bad. It just has to outweigh it, often enough, in the directions that matter to you.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

In part two, we get into how the scale actually works. Across your training, your food, your sleep, your stress, and the people around you. And why we coach from a prescription built for your life instead of a template borrowed from someone else's. That is the whole reason I say the thing I say.