Lazy moderates, impatient extremists, and unrealized habits
Let’s skip the small talk and get straight to real talk:
Moderation = half-ass commitment to a solution
Extremism = full commitment to a half-ass solution
That’s our problem in a nutshell. But we need to dig a bit deeper to get to a clear and simple solution that truly solves both problems.
Moderation and Habits
The biggest problem with moderation is that half-ass commitment to anything prevents new behaviors from solidifying into habits. If a behavior never becomes automatic, you never free up your will power to build the next habit. And if you keep using all of your energy on a single behavior, you’ll never reach a high level in anything. Mastery requires the accumulation of habits so that momentum grows over time.
It’s vital to understand that 80% commitment is inherently harder in the long run than 100%. A 100% commitment saves you the effort of constant decisions. Example: I drink 120oz of water every day. I track it with a handheld clicker each time I empty my 12oz container until I hit 10 for the day. It’s clear, it’s simple, and since I never waver, it became easy quite fast.
If instead, I “tried to get as close to 10 per day as I could manage” (80% commitment), it would be immensely harder. Every day that I have less than 10, I’d sabotage my habit and eventually I’d stop tracking it because nobody likes to measure failures.
I’ve tried committing to drinking “intuitively” many times, but it always fails in the long run. For a long time, I valued intuitive solutions above everything in large part because I found rules suffocating. They are. They suffocate indecision. BUT there is a huge difference between rules that you impose as right, wrong, good, or bad on all of existence versus rules that are simply definite decisions for the direction of your own life and pursuits.
Extremism… and Habits. Again.
Extremism is the opposite imbalance of moderation. Rather than giving too little effort to reach the jet stream of habit, you end up trying to force a habit that is out of your reach. Extremists are known to ignore the bottom of the iceberg and go full bore toward the visible peak (extreme) at the top.
By no means should you ignore the peak you seek to summit, but you can’t climb a mountain if you’re not willing to start at the bottom. In short, extremists are prone to skipping steps… which brings us back to habits.
One of the primary misunderstandings about habits that continually sabotages extremists is when we lump them all into one category and make overarching pronouncements. To say that a habit universally takes 14, 28, 30 or some other magical number of days to acquire is absolute bullshit. If a sedentary person wants to develop the habit of training for 3 hours per day, that’s going to take MUCH longer to solidify than a habit of training 30 minutes per day.
This is important for 2 primary reasons:
(1) If you try to jump into a habit you’re not ready for, you are much more likely to deplete your will power and quit before you make your habit automatic.
(2) When we skip steps, we tend to break ourselves down rather than build ourselves up. Overreach by a little bit and you can likely make up for it with extra effort to get through the dip. Overreach by a lot and you may not even produce forward progress at all.
Lack of proper application of this principle causes countless people to apply high effort with little (or negative) payoff.
The source of much of the confusion around extremism is that a highly successful person in any field appears to be an extremist. Their many years of gradually developed habits tend to get ignored in favor of the end snapshot.
Big goals are beautiful and necessary, but the habits necessary to attain them cannot all be developed at once. Those who seem to become great at something quickly have typically developed transcendent habits (ex: patience) in other domains and transferred them over to the new field in which they may appear “talented.”
*Note: Why isn’t complete lack of effort the opposite of extremism? Because that IS extremism, just taken in the opposite direction. Just as in politics, if you go far enough left OR right, you end up with a dictator. In any subject, be it politics, nutrition, or physical training, the answer never lies purely on one side of the equation.
Patient Commitment to a Definite Process
Doesn’t sound sexy, does it? The truth rarely is. The development of something sexy requires a long-term commitment to methodical, un-sexy, steps.
When I first came across my teacher (Ido Portal), I was mesmerized by the things he could do with his body. He moved with the strength of an elite gymnast, the grace of a contemporary dancer, and the creativity of a true artist. I was equally mesmerized by the wisdom with which he conveyed his approach to practice.
I’ve spent years re-watching, re-reading and re-listening to every breadcrumb he ever shared online. Prior to finding Ido, I was already roughly a decade into my coaching career, had my own training facility, a Masters degree in Exercise Science, and yet I was still searching for something I hadn’t yet found. I was getting closer, but finding Ido’s work changed everything. I finally found a human who had not just reached an incredible level of mastery, but had a surefire process for developing it in others.
His STUDENTS were outperforming practically all of the other TEACHERS out there. I had been attempting to create a process based on very similar philosophies as Ido’s, but I couldn’t possibly ignore the evidence that he was MUCH further along in this process. Combined with my own experience and philosophies that aligned with his, the breadcrumbs of his practice and methods took me a long way.
But I was still making the extremist iceberg mistake. I was obsessed with chasing the summit that still had me mesmerized, yet I was only inconsistently (yet aggressively) dabbling with bottom-of-the-mountain practices that make it possible. But the further I progress, the more I’ve had to divert attention from the summit to the exact step I’m currently taking on the mountain.
The toughest part of focusing on the current step is being honest about where we truly are at any given time. This lesson has transformed not just my practice, but the way I share and teach it. For many years, I didn’t realize how much I was inhibiting the progress of my students by not having a more clearly defined (yet highly adaptable!) process. I had created processes that emphasized the mountaintop and processes that emphasized the current step… yet hadn’t quite managed to do both at the same time.
The Best of Both Worlds
Extremism and moderation each hint at half of the solution. But the reason they can’t co-exist and solve the problem together is because in reality they aren’t each half of the solution… they’re each half of the problem.
Extremism is impatient.
Moderation is indefinite.
Most people view themselves as either being extremist OR moderate. But the truth is most people are BOTH: extremist in their goals/dreams and moderate in their efforts to achieve them. Put another way, people tend to be both impatient and indefinite in their pursuits.
Obviously, then, the answer does not lie in being extreme AND moderate, but in being the solution to each of their weaknesses: patient and definite.
In short:
