In this episode, John discusses the popular fitness and mental toughness challenge, 75 Hard.
Topics include:
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In this episode, John discusses the popular fitness and mental toughness challenge, 75 Hard.
Topics include:
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome to today's very blustery, wintry episode. That's very fittingly my first episode of the year, which in the northern hemisphere is the worst time of year. It's getting pretty bad out there. Winter's been pretty chill so far, but it's about to get nasty. Speaking of which, I joined a new gym. You may have heard of it. It's called Planet Fitness. Yeah, I really like it so far. Planet fitness is different. There's a different vibe. It's a no judgement zone, but also there's just more like Russian women on the treadmills talking to their mother about how disappointed they are in their children. There are more, a lot more marijuana smoke wafting out of windows in the parking lot as you walk in. So yeah, it's definitely got a cool vibe. But yeah, it's actually pretty nice. I mean, honestly, like, the equipment is nicer than the gym I was going to. They have more of it. There's really only like 1 or 2 things that they don't have that the other gym did have, and it's not even that big of a deal.
Speaker 1 (00:00:56) - So yeah, trade off is huge and it's cheaper and yeah, it took me months to figure out you move from one part of town to another. You ever feel this way where you have a map in your head of what neighborhood you live in and what's available to you there, and then some. Somebody eventually points out to you that something is like five minutes away and you're like, how could it be? And like, you drive down the street and it's right there and you're like, oh my God, I have a PhD in geography. And I couldn't tell that this gym was seven minutes away by car. So yeah, I've been using my home gym mostly since I moved into this new place in the spring, but it is pretty cold out there and home gym is good. It's fun, but pretty limited in what I can do out there, so it's really nice to get in there and use some machines. Some people think that, oh, our machines better than free weights or Olympic barbell lifts.
Speaker 1 (00:01:48) - There really is no ideal. It depends on what you're doing. If you're trying to become the world's best power lifter, then yeah, you're going to need to do barbell exercises like squats and bench press and deadlift. But for general fitness, you can use body weight, you can use dumbbells, you can use barbells, you can use machines. Bodybuilders tend to really like machines because it can help them target and isolate certain muscles better than free weights. So yeah, everything has its uses just a little aside to encourage you to just have fun with whatever you think is interesting at the gym. If you're tiptoeing into those waters for the first time or first time in a while this time of year, in the past, I've encouraged people don't make New Year's resolutions because it feeds into this very limiting cycle where we put expectations on the new without really creating supports, and that just keeps us in a cycle of failure and shame. But there's nothing inherently wrong with New Year's resolutions. Yeah, it's an arbitrary human concept to decide that one month is the beginning and another month is the end of the year.
Speaker 1 (00:02:47) - We're humans. We make meaning. That's what we do. And so for a lot of people, the new year feels like an opportunity to maybe become something new. At the new Year, people give themselves permission to shed their old self in a way that they don't necessarily give themselves every other at any other point in the year, which is sad, but hey, we're here. People are looking to make changes in their life. And so today I want to talk about one of the key ways that people go about doing that. And again, not to Pooh Pooh anybody's efforts to improve their life and to use the new year as any sort of impetus for that. That's fine. Like I it's almost like you can't help it. It's like part of the holidays is the the post-holiday promise that I'm going to be a better person this time of year. There are a lot of fitness related challenges, whether it's challenges that people are putting on themselves or popular challenges that people are engaging in, things that get popular on social media.
Speaker 1 (00:03:41) - One of these is called 75 hard, 75 hard. I've known it's been around for probably 5 or 6, seven years. I think I was pretty much on the front end of people like finding out about it, and I had friends do it. I wasn't doing it at the time because I was. When I first heard about it, I was £423 and bedridden with PTSD, and by the time I was interested in doing fitness stuff, I was doing my own thing. Turned out it was very similar to 75 heart. I just did it for two years straight. I'll get back to that. I remember talking to a friend named Nate, and Nate was always a jock growing up, and so the first batch of people who got really into 75 hard was mainly jocks, and Nate did it, and he really liked it. Less demanding that the trick was 75 hard is that you have to work out twice a day for 45 minutes. One of those workouts has to be outside. You have to pick a diet and stick with it.
Speaker 1 (00:04:38) - I don't think it specifies that you have to be in a calorie deficit or losing weight. You just need to be like on an eating regimen where you are ostensibly putting your health first. You have to drink a gallon of water a day and you have to read for ten minutes. You have to read a book for ten minutes a day. Obviously, this is a jock challenge because you're expected to work out for 90 minutes. But reading. Oh, geez. Whoa! Settle down. Good lord. I wouldn't want you to pull something. Yes, that's. That was the first thing I noticed about 75 hard is that it's like we're hardcore when it comes to diet. Hardcore. Working out hardcore, hydration, reading. Take it easy. Don't don't hurt yourself. Pace yourself. Which is funny when you think about what the challenge is supposed to be. Why is it 75 hard? And the portion of the challenge is devoted specifically to personal development? Is so easy. Was it ten minutes or ten pages? Okay.
Speaker 1 (00:05:33) - Sorry. It's ten pages still. Of a non-fiction personal development focused. So a couple of years after my friend Nate did it the first time, I was now well into my recovery. I'm still not doing great, but I was starting to lose weight on my own. I was talking to Nate and he said, ah, yeah, I've been really fallen off. I gotta get back to 75 hard. And I said, what if the problem is that you are always looking toward very extreme solutions when you are falling off, and that's why you end up falling off. And the phone line went dead for a second, and then he was like, that's a really good point. And I was like, yeah, why don't you just work out a little bit and then start working out more and just do something reasonable and then just get into the flow of it? And yeah, he, he was like, yeah, that probably is more what I need because I tend to bounce from extremes and I talk about jocks.
Speaker 1 (00:06:28) - But like I was one, I was just a nerd jock. I had a leather jacket for a sport, thank you very much. $300 jacket that I wore like twice. Leather jackets. People don't do that anymore, do they? It's probably for the best. Those things. We're kind of dorky. We should bring starter starter jackets back. Starter jackets were red. But when you go from being in team sports quite often and then you go to college and maybe you play in college after that, you're definitely done. A vast majority of people are not going on to play professionally or even semi professionally. 99% of high school and college athletes end up going into their working lives, and it's without that structure. They struggle to work out and to exercise, because exercise doesn't really feel like a sport necessarily. And some people fell in love with CrossFit. I think CrossFit really took in a lot of these kinds of folks. Even though CrossFit is insane in its own right, it gave those kinds of people a home where they could go to a place, have a structure, follow a work, and feel like they're part of a community.
Speaker 1 (00:07:38) - And it's actually a similar thing that happens to high achievers who really do well in the academic world. And then you leave school and you can lose a sense of belonging and structure in a very similar way. It that brings itself out more in how you work and how you how you relate to yourself, but I digress. So yeah, 75 hard really appealed to a lot of people off the bat. And at first it was jocks who wanted structure. But then as it got to be more popular, I saw more and more types of people getting into it. I saw people who were very obese getting into it, looking to, you know, shake themselves out of the lifestyle that they had been living in. I saw moms do it. I saw, you know, some biker dude I knew do it like I saw hippies doing it. Like it started to have more of a broader appeal. And this was not too surprising to me, but I never thought about why. And now that I'm in this role, you know, spreading this message about the easy way, I'm taking a bit of a closer look at this challenge.
Speaker 1 (00:08:41) - And I think it was the day after Christmas. I was walking along and thinking through my head about how so many people were going to start doing 75 hard, and they're going to just trash themselves for 75 days, either mentally and physically, emotionally. Most people are going to come out of it worse than when they started, and the very few people who finish it are going to feel good for a minute. But then what's going to happen? And in my mind, my prediction is that for most of those people who finish the total experience, the cumulative effect both during and after is going to end up being a net negative. So I want to talk about 75 hard today because 75 hard is beautiful in that it I think perfectly sums up our our culture's attitude towards self-improvement. And so for that reason, I do think that it's beautiful in the sense of it's elegant. It is a they it's something I can explain in two minutes. I can list it out for you and five bullet points or whatever they do.
Speaker 1 (00:09:44) - You don't need to buy into a whole dogma because you've already bought into the dogma. This challenge is really just leaning on the dogmatic beliefs that have already been instilled inside of you. This is why it does such a good job of challenging people, because it hits buttons that have been programmed or conditioned into us our entire lives. And when I say conditioned, I don't mean like that. This happens intentionally or that conditioning is always bad. That sorry, if you hear the wind outside, there's nothing I can do about it. I mean, everybody is acculturated. It's just part of growing up in whatever culture you're in. You're going to be conditioned by that culture. It's just part of being human. There's no way around it. None of us reach maturity without being impacted by a number of different forms of conditioning. Parenting itself is a form of conditioning, right? Conditioning isn't bad. It's not. I'm not saying there's a conspiracy theory or anything like that. But it's important that we do appreciate the role of conditioning in mental health, because much of the keys to to escaping the prison created by unhealthy mindsets self-hatred, lack of self-trust, lack of self-love, self-worth, compulsive behavior, disconnection from your name, motivation and desires, shame, fear, failure.
Speaker 1 (00:10:59) - False obligations put on you from illegitimate sources. As we try to extricate ourselves from these things, we find ourselves running into cultural ideas, things that are not part of the makeup of the natural world. Water rolls downhill, birds going to fly, fish going to swim. There are certain ideas that are programmed into our brains that are subjective, and they were the subjective creation of cultures that preceded us. And in that time, those ideas served. Those ideas form the basis of a cultural view of the world cultural pattern of reacting to the world that tended to keep most people safe, fed, and whatnot. But also in every culture, there are powerful people who benefit from certain cultural attitudes more than others, and they will use their influence on culture the same way that they would use their influence on, you know, their personal security or their their financial ability to sway politics, to go their way. This is just the nature of reality. Again, not some big conspiracy theory, just the way things are.
Speaker 1 (00:12:06) - So we're in a time when technology has changed so rapidly that it's exposing places where our culture just doesn't really make a lot of sense anymore. It did at some point, or it did make a lot more sense at some point, but either were blatantly seeing how it was upholding an imbalance of power, uh, and a lack of justice, a lack of equality. We're also just seeing lots of ways where the culture just does more harm than good. And if the culture tries to force you to do things that you already would have done anyways, and it makes you take up an adversarial role to certain parts of being an adult, even though you have expressed them naturally. If nobody had tried to force you into it. Oftentimes things like exercise, eating rights, being a good parent, right? Moms get it big time. Moms get just massively shit on when it comes to the they have the kid, they give birth, and then society tends to have a lot more expectations on them than on the dads.
Speaker 1 (00:13:07) - Not in the weight of the expectation, because the weight of expectations on dads is huge. But the expectations for moms is so much more detailed. It's enumerated in ways that it's like dads. It's be their be. You gotta be the rock, right? That's what a society believes or expects dads to do. But for moms, it gets a lot more specific. And so that's just one example of how people are waking up to the fact that, wow, we have a lot of these unspoken and loudly spoken rules about motherhood and the way babies need to be reared, many of which conflict the same way we have conflicting and wide ranging ideas about fitness, weight loss, clean living. In the last few decades, as as we've struggled to figure out which parts of culture are appropriate and which ones need to be jettisoned, we end up considering a lot of different angles, and this creates a lot more confusion because now it's we don't know, and now we have far more options. So it's harder to know what's right.
Speaker 1 (00:14:09) - And in the midst of this, nobody's really teaching people to trust themselves because we don't trust other people. So we want them to trust themselves. So society's general lack of trust in you is a big reason why you don't feel permitted to trust you. So that's an element of your social conditioning that you need to face down the fact that society is scared of you, acting in ways that would be selfish and harmful to other people. So it says, you know, it'd probably be best if you just if everybody just agreed to these certain standards and rules, and we all held ourselves to them and nobody deviated for the sake of individuality. That way nobody ends up being selfish. Meanwhile, people who are going to be selfish are going to do what they're going to do anyways, so they aren't tethered by those social rules, the unspoken rules, good people who wouldn't be out there to hurt people if they were just expressing the truth of who they are, they end up getting pressed when we actually need those people to be more expressive of who they really are, because they have a lot of goodness to offer the world.
Speaker 1 (00:15:14) - A lot of creativity, a lot of innovation. So 75 hard just is a great little snapshot of where our culture has been, where it's at and where it's digging in its heels. As far as the nature, what makes good, what makes us useful, what makes us successful. So let's look at this challenge. And see what ways it mimics our culture's ideas. The first thing I notice is that this challenge is it claims to not be about fitness, but about mental toughness. Okay, so my next question is what about this challenge makes somebody mentally tough? And we have this idea that people so-and-so's mentally tough. What does that mean. Okay. The challenge kind of gives us a clue for most people. Are they currently working out twice a day for 45 minutes. One of those workouts being outside? No. Why? Because they don't want to. Okay, here we go. So if I complete this challenge by doing a bunch of workouts I don't want to do, I am now, in the eyes of the challenge, tough.
Speaker 1 (00:16:21) - And this is supposed to bring me all sorts of self-confidence and self-esteem. So does doing things you don't want to do really make you tough? On one of my news letters this week, I made the example that if I want to be a pro baseball player and I hate jalapenos, if I go eat a bunch of jalapenos, that's not going to get me to the major leagues, right? So you can't just do things you don't want to do and be called tough, right? Because if you just smack yourself in the face with a hammer, other people are going to be like, that's stupid. But if you run 30 miles and break your whole shit, society's going to be like, wow, you're hardcore. So clearly there are parameters. There are certain actions which make you tough, and there are other actions which make you an idiot. And this divide has everything to do with what our culture values. For instance, if you work out so much that you alienate your family, people are going to be like, wow, that's hardcore.
Speaker 1 (00:17:18) - If you work so much that you alienate your family and friends, people are gonna be like, wow, you're so hardcore. If you diet so hard that you that you just have to be a hermit and you lose sight of the important things in life, people are going to be like, wow, you're so hardcore, so 75 hard. Assume that the things it's telling you to do are the things that make you good and worthy and tough. So reading ten pages a self-development book makes you tough. Drinking a gallon of water a day makes you tough. Being on a diet, picking a diet plan, and being on it, staying on it makes you tough. Working out more than you want to makes you tough. Okay, so I've got to do things I don't want to do, but they've got to be the right things. Okay, so now we have we can draw a grid and put four different boxes in that grid. And we have two columns. The columns read want to do, don't want to do.
Speaker 1 (00:18:16) - And then we have two rows. And those rows are the right thing and the wrong thing. So we're going to have four quadrants. We're going to have I want to do the right thing. I want to do the wrong thing. I don't want to do the right thing. I don't want to do the wrong thing. And instead of saying, hey, what's in that quadrant where I want to do the right thing, we go, let's look at that quadrant where I don't want to do the right thing, because that's going to make me tough. What good is it to do things that I want to do? Who's going to be impressed by it? What does that prove? So you can see that by ignoring the quadrant labeled I want to do good things. It begs the question, why would we ignore the the quadrant where there seems to be an alignment between what I want and doing good things? This is the question because what is it about things you don't want to do that makes you tough? I mean, it makes you compliant, right? At the end of the day, if you finish 75 hard, you have complied with the rules of the challenge and you have done so consistently.
Speaker 1 (00:19:18) - That's not toughness, that's consistency. That's compliance. If somebody says to me, listen, if you do this for 75 days, I'll give you $1 million and I complete it. Would you say that I was tough or would you say that I was shrewd? Self-interested, right. You wouldn't say tough, right? If I had to crawl over ten miles of broken glass to get $1 million, you'd probably be like, that's pretty tough. There's nothing about this challenge that makes you better than anyone else. It just means you're good at the challenge. It means you were capable and willing to prioritize these tasks, and you had the motivation and willingness to actually do them to execute. So that's my next big point, is that 75 hard doesn't actually create toughness. It just it's just a test. It's just a hurdle. It says if you can jump over this hurdle, I'm going to say that you're tough. If you can jump over this hurdle, I'm going to give you the gold star. You can't.
Speaker 1 (00:20:18) - I'm not going to give you the gold star. You don't get to have the gold star. So who succeeds at 75 hard? The people who are going to succeed at it, who fails? The people who are going to fail at it. Because to succeed at 75 hard, you have to use characteristics, virtues, strengths that you. Already have, right? There's nothing about doing something repeatedly that cultivates capacity that you don't already have. If you have the capacity now to do this thing consistently for 75 days, then doing it for 75 days doesn't change your capacity. Sure, if you have the capacity to be good at music and then you practice for 75 days and you're better at music. Yes, it's true, you have improved, but has your worth improved? But are you tougher? No. You're at music. The only thing that doing something for 75 days is going to get you is greater amount of skill at whatever you are doing for 75 days. There is no mechanism by which toughness is created.
Speaker 1 (00:21:19) - Toughness. If you look it up in the dictionary, Oxford Languages says toughness is the state of being strong enough to withstand adverse conditions or rough handling, i.e. the toughness of steel or to the ability to deal with hardship or to cope in difficult situations, i.e. they showed great mental toughness to keep going. Here we have this idea of persistence. If you are, if you're in a hardship and in difficult situations, your ability to keep going is mental toughness. Okay, but keep going with what the right things and what kinds of right things. The kinds of right things you don't want to do. Because if you're doing right things that you want to do, you don't get the toughness badge right. Toughness is only earned in hardship. Toughness is only earned in adversity. Implied in 75 hard and in our culture is that success emanates from toughness and toughness emanates from adversity. Therefore, you need to create adversity. You need to find it or you need to create it. And for 75 hard it is explicitly saying create your own adversity.
Speaker 1 (00:22:23) - That's the challenge. Create adversity for yourself so that you can overcome it. Therefore, you will be tough. Okay, so we're creating self-imposed adversity. We are challenging ourselves to meet it. Doing a certain subset of things which have been deemed right and which we must not want to do at any point in this. We can't want to do it because then we're not forging toughness. So what we're doing is we're seeking the hard way, doing things the right way, not our way. And we are disliking what we're doing. The more we dislike it, the better. Now, what do you gain personally from doing things that you dislike in ways that you don't want to do it against hardships that are fabricated, self-imposed? You get nothing. You get mental illness. You get failure. You do not get success. These are patterns that we see in people who were traumatized early in life, people who have developed any number of disorders, people who go out of their way to make their lives harder than they need to be, are or, I think, expressing the definition of mental illness by John.
Speaker 1 (00:23:28) - What's wrong with giving yourself a challenge? If you're giving yourself a challenge to meet someone else's ideals for your life, you're not really in alignment with your true self, right? So if I challenge myself to be perfect at some culturally valued thing, when that's not a reflection of who I am, then am I really moving into a place of power? No, because I'm just being compliant with something somebody else wants me to do. Is that me expressing my power or me expressing their power? When you are blindly following the dictates of anybody else, especially some widely accepted thing in your culture, you are not expressing your personal power. You are expressing the power of the thing that's pushing you. You're expressing the power of this structure that you're adhering to, and you will be celebrated for that. In the same way that an animal is celebrated for obeying its master. Just because you're compliant doesn't mean you're doing the right things. And just because you're in adversity doesn't mean you're facing the adversities that you're meant to.
Speaker 1 (00:24:32) - And just because you're in pain doesn't mean you're tough. So often these are self-inflicted unnest misery challenges, unnecessary pains that keep us occupied and keep us distracted from the path that we're really too afraid to walk. Yes, these challenges, these self-imposed hardships, can be used psychologically to keep us blind and to keep us distracted from the things that really scare us, which for most people, that is following their heart, doing what they actually want. Because sure, I want to be seen as tough. If people saw me as weak, that would be bad. But when I think about following my dreams, taking a chance and doing something that's outside of the norm, that's outside of what I'll be pat on the back for, that carries a higher risk of exclusion from the group that carries a higher risk of shame, punishment of some kind following the beat of your own drum, following your own North Star. Always more risky than following somebody else's. Idea for your life. At least it feels that way. Because when we're following other people's dictates for our lives, we feel like we're embracing a structure made by people.
Speaker 1 (00:25:44) - Therefore, when we embrace structure or embrace culture, we're embracing safety. And that makes sense because that's what people were doing all throughout human history. You know, you embrace the culture that was handed down from you to you by your predecessors because they're like, hey, this is how we survive out here on the planet of the Serengeti. This is how we survive out here in the jungle or the desert or in the mountains. And then as lifeways transition, people were still not very socially mobile. So if you grew up as a sheepherder, you were probably going to teach your kids how to be sheepherders. If you grew up maybe a few century later as a tailor, your kids were going to be tailors. So we have this bias psychologically toward being like other people, which makes sense because humans are most powerful in their formed into communities, and those communities are working together. Back to 75. Hart. The takeaway here is that just because you're doing something that's difficult doesn't mean it's something you're really supposed to be doing with your life.
Speaker 1 (00:26:39) - It doesn't mean that pain is helping you or making you better in any way. You could just be slogging up a hill, gritting through pain for no good reason at all. And that is the essence of the hard way, right? And all all the while thinking that you have to do it. Thinking that if you don't do it, something bad is going to happen. This is the essence of the hard way. What else is not enviable about 75 hard. It explicitly is not sustained. It basically says, hey, do this for 75 days because the challenge isn't do this the rest of your life. Why? Because that's not reasonable. That's not tenable. It probably wouldn't even be healthy. So even the creators of 75 hard, they didn't make it, you know, 10,000 heart live the next 30 years of your life this way, they said. Yeah. Two and a half months. It's a tuneup because it would be crazy for you to not, like, go out with your friends and celebrate a birthday party or enjoy the holidays, or they aren't suggesting it as a lifestyle change.
Speaker 1 (00:27:38) - They're suggesting it as a challenge for you to somehow accrue a personal virtue or strength that you can then carry into your self-directed life. And if I haven't said it already, I'll say it now. I think that the goals of 75 hard are admirable. I think that a lot of what our culture wants for people is good. It's just that the way it goes about it is non-functional. It's not very helpful. So yeah, 75 hard is unsustainable. It's not a lifestyle that you can carry into the rest of your life. Not everything that you do for a short period of time is only useful if you can do it for the rest of your life. Weight loss itself. As you've heard me say before, weight loss is temporary, right? If you were to just lose weight 75 days at a time and then pull back and go back to maintenance, that would probably be the healthiest way to do it. Not going more than 12 to 16 weeks. 75 days is, yeah, ten weeks and five days.
Speaker 1 (00:28:32) - That's a little under 11 weeks, which is pretty perfect, long enough to really make a dent in the weight you're trying to lose. Not so long that you're going to overly tax your body, overly stress, your hormones and other body systems and your psychology and whatnot. So doing something for 75 days and then stopping is not inherently wrong. And something you do for those 75 days can be helpful. If you change something about your life that you can carry forward. Right. So in 75 days of weight loss, you would lose weight and now you would be a lighter person. And that's going to make the rest of life more enjoyable and make you more effective at everything you're trying to do, unless what you're trying to do is break chairs. But with 75 hard, it's the only thing you really take away from it is the skill of doing things you don't want to do, and the skill of creating, quote unquote, false adversity so that you feel like your engines are running so that you feel like you're living when you're really living according to somebody else's template.
Speaker 1 (00:29:27) - And truly living really means following your own compass, getting out into the unknown, seeing what's around the next bend, taking chances, measured chances, educated chances, but still chances. One of the last things I'll mention about 75 hard is that it's meant for most people to lose, right? It's set up to be something that most people will fail at. So when we look at this at the individual level, every individual takes on the challenge, really believing that they can do it. People know that they can do it. Everybody who starts the challenge is, yeah, I can see myself doing this, at least the highest version of me. I can see myself doing this. But when we look at it from the public health perspective, we take we put on our sociologist hat and look at it as, okay, we have 300,000 people in America starting 75 hard this month. That's just the number I'm pulling out. How many of them are going to succeed if, generally speaking, things like this, the success rates are usually in the single digits.
Speaker 1 (00:30:25) - But let's just say for sake of argument that it was 8020, let's be very generous and say 20% of people finish 75 heart, which I would eat my hat. I'm feeling it's more like 3 or 4%, let's say 20%. Okay, so that's 60,000 people out of 300,000. That leaves 240,000 people who did not complete it. How do those people feel about themselves after starting and failing a challenge? Do they feel better? Probably not. Those negative beliefs inside their head that kept them from working out and eating healthy to begin with? Are those stronger or weaker? They're stronger, right? The negative stories, the beliefs, all the limiting infrastructure of their mind has only been strengthened by coming up against the task that was made to cause most people to fail at it. Right. The bar was set at. Listen, anybody under this bar of excellence is is not going to pass. It's a challenge of attrition. It's an attritional challenge, not nutritional attritional meaning the challenge is there to weed people out.
Speaker 1 (00:31:30) - And again, the one thing 75 hard does with, like most fitness challenges or even just our general constant cultural push to lose the weight, get fit all these things, it doesn't create great people, it doesn't create strong people. It simply reveals who currently has access to the strength to do it. Now I said access, not possession, because a lot of people have the strength to to do 75 hard and they know it. That's why they started, right. It's a matter of permission. It's the matter of permission to believe that you can do it. And 80% of people don't have that permission to believe that they can do it. Why? Because of all sorts of other forms of cultural conditioning and conditioning, from the events of their life that have convinced them that displaying that kind of strength is dangerous. So really, all we do is pour gasoline on the fire. All we really do is just pour more bullets and tanks into the inner war, and we just escalate violence for a time. The actual title of of the website is the 75 Day Tactical Guide to Winning the War with yourself.
Speaker 1 (00:32:40) - So. It explicitly says that it wants you to engage in a war with yourself, and to win it again feeds into this cultural idea that there's a bad part of you and a good part of you. And if you're successful in life, it's because the good part is winning. And if you're not successful in life, it's because the bad part is winning. Let's just point out that 75 Harvard wants you to go to war with yourself. And what it fails to to show is that anybody who's at war with themselves is losing. You never win a war with yourself, right? Because here's the thing a self shouldn't be divided to begin with. If there's a division in the self where there's one will that wants one thing and another will that wants another thing, the question isn't how do we help one of these win over the other? The question is how did the split happen and how can we heal it? If you come up to somebody and the leg is broken, you wouldn't immediately go, okay, which part of the bone do you think we should help win? You wouldn't ask that.
Speaker 1 (00:33:41) - You also wouldn't walk up to the bone and say, okay, which one of these bone shards is good and which one's bad? I need to know. That would be insanity. And yet that is exactly how we treat ourselves on the inside. Whenever there's an inner tension, we assume that one is good and one is bad. And a lot of it has to do with, again, cultural programming, that we are either good or bad, that we exist in this binary. And that large part culture tells us that our baseline is bad. So just assume that you're bad and that that anything good about you is some sort of aberration. And we want to hold on to that. We want to white knuckle that puppy and yank it as hard as we can out of the badness into the light, when really that's not what's happening. So this isn't an encouragement for people to not examine their lives. It's actually an encouragement for people to examine their lives. Don't just mark off a huge part of the map as this is the Badlands, right? Go there, find out what's there.
Speaker 1 (00:34:38) - There are a lot of useful things there. There are a lot of helpful things there and there. The rest is stuff that just isn't true. You're going to find lies so often. A lot of our a lot of our black and white thinking when it comes to mental health does unfortunately come from the sphere of religion, which ostensibly is supposed to be a a boon to mental health. I think largely in its pure forms it is. We can see how much in Christianity, at least the the devil, quote unquote, is referred to as a deceiver, a father of lies. That deception is what is that's the preferred tool of this great force of evil. And I think that's accurate. I think that there's a real devil or not, or if we're making up something, a literary device, to embody this aspect of humanity, calling it a deceiver, and that its methods are effectively deception is accurate. Because if I take a country and I start telling stories that, hey, there's a, there's an A and B, and honestly, the A should go kill the B, right? I have deceived these people.
Speaker 1 (00:35:49) - I've deceived them into thinking that they are two entities when they are one, and I have received at least one of those entities into attacking the other. Convince them to do something on false premises. That's another way of looking at deception. And then now I've created a situation where B feels compelled to defend themselves against A, and is now going to buy into my narrative that A is bad. When you are the deceiver, you win by getting people to pick sides, and you don't have to pick sides because you win either way. You win when there's conflict, and the deception is the people involved in that conflict. Thinking that the end of the other party will result in the end of the conflict are going to happen. Because in a war inside yourself, you never win. You can't kill these things, you can't outrun them. They are part of. And we see this happen with people all the time. They try to outrun their quote unquote demons. The demons always catch up. They always catch up.
Speaker 1 (00:36:45) - But so often these demons are not actual spiritual entities that are hellbent on our destruction. They are pieces of us formed in the worst parts of our lives with survival strategies that were the best strategy possible at that time. From the point of view of the child, most likely the child who's creating it. Yeah, when people are scared and reactionary, would we say that they're acting mature or that they're acting immature? We say that they're being childish, right? They're being shortsighted because that's how children are. Isn't it funny that a lot of our survival mechanisms seem childish? Isn't it funny that a lot of our survival mechanisms seem immature? Yes, it's it shouldn't be surprising because our survival mechanisms so often were the creations of children, and our brains hold on to them. And because of this, we try to fight that we don't like it. We see that it causes problems and we resist it. And. All of culture for our entire lives says, yeah. Get that out of there. You got to get it.
Speaker 1 (00:37:48) - You got to beat that thing. You got to beat that thing. You've got to pound it into submission. You have to. You have to be perfect. You have to be stronger than this thing. You have to fight for control over the steering wheel and never let go. Fight, never let go. In this cultural context, where's peace? The nearest thing is perfection. The nearest thing is the delusion that you have at all in the bag. And what's so addictive? What's so intoxicating about this challenge? Even though it's a complete even though it's a complete farce, is that it takes all the weight of the inner turmoil that's been bubbling for decades. And it says if you just worked out twice a day for 75 days, you'd be free. You'd be good enough. 150 workouts, 150. Right. Is that toughness? No, it's actually us saying, geez, this punishing schedule actually sounds easy in comparison to what it would give me, which is other people are going to think I'm tough.
Speaker 1 (00:38:50) - I get to like myself again, and it's going to establish peace inside my mind. I'm going to be able to end the inner war by working out enough. It's literally what the challenge suggests. Work out enough and you won't have mental problems anymore. Work out enough and you, you won't have self-doubt and you won't lack confidence. Work out enough. Do enough things that you don't want to do. It's just all kinds of nonsense. When you really break these things down, they're paper thin, and even then it's like tissue paper. It's like tracing paper. To sum up, and again, I'm not picking on one fitness challenge or mental toughness challenge. The reason I think this challenge is awesome is so beautifully encompasses our cultural views towards success in fitness, career, relationships, whatever. It's work, work, work, never let go. It's win or lose, and you're either 100% winning or you're 100% losing. It engages black and white thinking. It reinforces this idea that there's a good, bad you, and that we need to keep those two aspects of you in conflict.
Speaker 1 (00:39:54) - It sets up a situation where 80 to 97% of people who engage in it are going to end up worse off. And I would argue that even the people who succeed, quote unquote, at the challenge are also worse off, because all the all they've done is feed into a delusion that they can outwork their stuff, that they can outwork something that needs to be healed. It's like saying, if you did 150 workouts on that broken leg, you wouldn't have a broken leg, would you? Oh you're right. If I did 150 workouts on this broken leg, it effectively wouldn't be an impediment to me doing anything. That's the logic. That's the logic. We're telling broken people to just ignore their brokenness. And then look, how broken are you if you can do all this stuff. Voila. So we're just going to pile a bunch of bullshit onto a wound and then call it a victory. That's not a victory. That's not making people better. And this is about our culture and our ingrained cultural belief that things have to be hard, and things you don't want to do for them to have any value.
Speaker 1 (00:40:57) - If you want to get the respect of other people, don't do things you want to do. Do things you don't want to do. Do things that are miserable, and make sure you're sharing about it on social media. Search hashtag 75 hard on any social media platform of your choice, and just watch what comes up and say. How many of these people are performing for me? How many of these people are doing this for them alone? How many of these people want need me to like and say, good job? Whoa, hardcore. Let's go grind on. Is this really about them becoming tough? Them gaining friends, them gaining respect? I think that what most people derive from 75 hard is a sense of community and potentially a sense of respect. At least that's what they think they're going to get. I think a community that accepts you only when you're perfect or accepts you only when you're striving for perfection is this community's go. Probably not all that valuable. Community evolved to be something where we have a shared vision and we're going to work equally hard to see that vision come true.
Speaker 1 (00:42:06) - And you do things for me in the service of that vision, and I'll do things for you in the service of that vision. And if things get really hard, we're going to come together. We're not going to separate, i.e. you can't fail out of community. So if you can fail out of your community that you're in, it's not much of a community in my opinion. I'm not talking about refusal to participate, because refusal to participate in the community is not being part of the community, right? I'm talking about performing in the community and your performance being deemed a failure. Hey, in this community, we're going to have a level of excellence. And if you don't meet that, we don't want to be associated with you. That's what I'm talking about. What is the alternative? By now, I think you've probably guessed where I'm going with this. Yes. 75. Easy. What if there were a challenge that responded to this perfect encapsulation of the hard way with a perfect encapsulation? I shouldn't say perfect.
Speaker 1 (00:43:03) - We're not trying to go for perfection. A quite good encapsulation of the easy way. What if there were a guide that could provide people very simple rules, very simple tasks, but teach them to structure it in a way to where not 4% of people are going to win, but where anybody who participates wins. Anybody who wants it gets it. Where we're not winning and losing based on performance. We're winning and losing based on our willingness to explore and take steps that maybe we haven't taken before. But with the understanding and the mindset behind us, that makes it all understandable. That helps us see why what we're doing is not at odds with who we are and what we want. It's actually deeply in line with those things. So I have written a book. It started on Christmas day or day after Christmas. I came home and I just started pounding away on the keyboard by, I think, the 28th or 29th. I had written the whole thing, and since then I've been in edits. I've been in editing mode, rewriting a couple key chapters.
Speaker 1 (00:44:08) - And in fact, the last chapter that I'm rewriting is the chapter that kind of covers what I talked about today. So I figured if I did a podcast on it, it would help me organize my thoughts that much better and be able to winnow down what I really want to say and then say it in a short, short and punchy of a chapter as I can. Because I want this to be a lean and mean guide on living the easy way, without anybody needing to really have a huge theoretical framework or mindset training to be able to start day one on the path toward an easier, better life, toward a more successful life, a path toward all the things that 75 hard in our culture are trying to get people who are resilient, who are able to meet adversity, but helping people do that through their strength rather than their servitude, to help people do that through their values rather than their performance, rather than their need for approval. To help people do that from a place of authenticity rather than a place of striving to one day be safe, or one day be loved enough.
Speaker 1 (00:45:12) - Because when when people are successful from a place of authenticity, those people are powerful. Those people are game changers. They're not people who are out there needing approval. They don't need permission. They are permission. They are approval. And those are the kinds of people who can't be stopped. Maybe next episode I will go through the easy way. I'll go through 75 easy, and I will line out exactly what it looks like, how I've set it up. One of my clients asked for some for advice on a certain topic, and I had just written that chapter, and so I sent it to her and she was like, this is like she called it revolutionary. At least that's one one person's view. That one chapter was quite helpful. So I think it's going to take a lot of self-growth, even like weight loss fitness type stuff and boil it down to such simple points and with such granular instruction on how to go about it, that it's hopefully going to empower people where 75 hard challenges people with expectation.
Speaker 1 (00:46:18) - 75 easy is going to empower you with connection to who you really are and what you already have inside of you. Where 75 hard wants you to earn self-respect 75 easy shows you how to respect yourself now before you accomplish anything, and that's going to make you more powerful in the long run. Because I ask you what's easier loving yourself when you've worked out perfectly for 75 days in a row, or loving yourself today before you've accomplished anything? What's harder? We all know the answer to that question. It's much harder to love yourself unconditionally than it is to love yourself conditionally. And the hard. Way is conditionality. The hard way is I get to be in community based on certain conditions. I get to be loved based on certain conditions. I get to be safe based on certain conditions. The easy way says I am loved. I am safe already. Now what do I want to do? What do I want to express? What do I want to channel? Coaching spots are open. I'd love to talk to you if you're interested in getting started with coaching, now would be a really good time.
Speaker 1 (00:47:21) - Actually, there's an energy right now that I don't think it has to do at the beginning of the year. I just feel like there's an energy right now around. Coaching is really powerful. And so if you're interested in learning more about coaching, just email me and I'll I'll give you the info and help you figure out if it's the right move for you. If not, help you figure out whatever else would be the best move for you. If you would like to be a beta reader for 75, easy. This book that I'm writing, you can email me at John at Oaks Weight Loss Comm. The. My email is in the show notes below. Yeah. Email me for coaching info or if you want to be a beta reader, or if you just want to say hi if you're a listener, there's not a ton of you. So that's pretty small community. Feel free to say hi. I really appreciate you listening. And. If you're new, go ahead and subscribe. Hit me with your questions, things you'd like me to talk about on a later podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:48:16) - And if you have questions I've already covered in a podcast, I can direct you to the specific podcasts that I think you need right now. Happy New Year, everyone! Hopefully we'll get back to a regular posting schedule every Tuesday. Be good to yourself. Always take the easy way out and we'll talk to you soon.