I Wrote a Book! -- 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth

That's right! My first book in the the fitness or personal development space is available for purchase now.

In this episode I explain what my book is about, why I wrote it and what you can get from it.

Get your copy now and please leave me a review!
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Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
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Transcript

 Well, hello, everybody. It's my first time back in the podcast for a while, but it's for a very good reason. I've been very focused on a project, somewhat secret. I haven't talked a whole lot about it. I maybe mentioned it on this podcast multiple times before now that I think about it, but it is my new book, 75 easy.

And

so today I'm going to tell you a bit about this book, this project making it what it is, what it can do for you and what my hopes are for it in the future.

If you don't know, my name is John. I'm a weight loss coach. I specialize in helping people who have a lot of weight to lose. And there's a whole lot of strategy that goes into that. That's a different when you're trying to lose 50 to 300 pounds versus somebody who's trying to lose, you know, 20, 30 pounds, same fundamental biology at work, but It's a different scale, right?

It's more of a campaign rather than a battle.

But on top of that, people who have, you know, extreme weight issues, they have more going on mentally than other people who don't have those.

So I specialize in helping them get their mentality straight get rid of the limiting mindsets, the things that are just sort of endemic in our culture that we often don't see because no one shows it to us. But once you do see it, it's Pretty self explanatory. And you're like, Oh, that's silly. I'm going to stop believing that because it's as easy as seeing that the sky is blue.

And a lot of it is just pointing it out to people. So in that spirit, I wanted to come up with a. , personal development fitness challenge   the idea hit me on December 23rd, going for a morning walk, you know, a couple of days before Christmas. And I'm thinking about how everyone's going to be like gearing up for everyone's having fun during the holiday and then they're going to gear up for, you know, New Year's resolutions and how it kind of sets us up in this cycle of, well, I'll, I'll enjoy the holidays, but I'll only do it with shame that I know I will somehow alleviate through the punishment I will put myself through at the beginning of the year.

And we live in this cognitive dissonance where we feel like we deserve to celebrate, but also that we need to be punished for celebrating. And I think that that is unhealthy for a number of reasons. I won't get into it,

but I was thinking about, you know, the common ways that people go about their new year's resolutions. And on one hand, like I love a new year's resolution. I love arbitrary markers of time just as much as anybody, maybe more. Maybe that's why I'm so against it because I've seen, you know, how debilitating it can be when you're, when you get really into it.

And this is also debilitating when you see it taking forms when people don't want it to, let's say a birthday is coming up and, you know, people can get excited about the new year, like, Hey, new year, new me, but you know, you start to do that. And then all of a sudden, like a 35th, 40th, 50th birthday comes up and it has this huge meaning now, because you've been putting a bunch of meaning into these arbitrary markers of time.

So I would love for people to not do that. However, it's fun. It's, it's kind of a tradition in and of itself. And there's no point really trying to fight against it too hard. I'd rather if I can help people take that impulse and move it in a better direction. And I was thinking about what gave me the inspiration.

For my particular you know, personal development challenge that I wanted to create was a Challenge that epitomizes the hard way, you know, this is the easy way out podcast I'm all about doing things the easy way Not because I celebrate laziness or anything like that. Far from it. It's that if, when we want to make huge changes in our life or our behavior, we can do that so much more efficiently, quickly, and more powerfully when we take the easy way and the easy way doesn't make sense to a lot of people.

It's hard to explain, right? Because people think that easy means wrong. People think that the easy way means like taking a cheap shortcut. And that's not what it is at all. What it actually is, is avoiding the obstacles, unnecessary difficulties that our culture

has instilled in us to put in front of ourselves or that our brains just kind of have a a proclivity to, a bias that we have toward making these mistakes, making life harder than we need to be, making life harder than it needs to be.

And the epitome of this is the 75 hard challenge. This challenge has been around for quite a few years. I've known about it for at least, I want to say, 7 or 8 years. I feel like I heard about it more toward the beginning of it catching on. And I've seen it grow steadily in popularity especially taking a spike in the last 2 or 3 years. So I I knew that a bunch of people were going to, I knew that a record number of people were going to embark on it come the new year.

And, you know, I, I had this idea that maybe I could get something out before then it was originally going to be just a newsletter blog post, but then it turned into something more.

And, you know, it's kind of sad knowing the statistics, knowing the human psychology behind it, the cycles of failure and shame knowing that the 75 hard program is going to be so attractive, just moths to a flame for a lot of people who desperately want change, the 75 hard program is the epitome of the hard way.

And in that sense, it's beautiful because it is the perfect encapsulation of our culture beliefs about self improvement and fitness. And where it. Where our culture excels, and where it helps people excel, and there are places, this challenge excels, but where our culture has major blind spots, so does this challenge, and that's where a lot of people fall down.

So, all of a sudden it dawned on me, why can't we have a 75 easy? Not a challenge that is, Easy per se, but that's difficult in the sense of encouraging us to get out of our own way rather than trying to force change upon ourselves to beat it into us. So I've talked a little bit about this in a previous episode, but I'm going to go over the essential tenants of 75 hard, just so we know what we're talking about.

And again, part of what's great about it is that it is so simple. It's part of the reason why it's so popular. You're gonna for 75 days work out twice a day for 45 minutes. One of those has to be outside You're gonna drink a gallon of water a day. You're gonna pick a diet and you're gonna stay on that diet.

No deviations No cheats, no alcohol You're gonna read 10 minutes of a nonfiction Some sort of personal development type book or 10 pages You're gonna read 10 pages of a personal development nonfiction book every day. That's it Hydrate work out Eat healthy, read. And when you total up the time and energy that people are going to put into that, obviously it's the working out and eating right.

That's going to take up 95 percent of the energy level.

So it very clearly is a fitness challenge. However, the creator of 75 hard on the website that lays it all out says, I want to be very clear. This is not a fitness challenge. This is a, this is a mental toughness challenge, right? So 75 hard tries to present itself as different from the challenges that have come before.

And this is one of the first places where it doesn't do a very good job. It doesn't really differentiate itself from other challenges in its essential nature. It is just a more boiled down, simpler version. A more punishing neater, more concise version of other fitness challenges. And one thing it does right is tell people like, Hey, you pick the diet, which diet you pick, which workouts you pick.

And that's fantastic. And I think that's one of the reasons why it, why it's been successful for some people, because it does encourage them to take a self leadership role, which is essential in personal development. However, in so many other ways, it takes that self leadership away. And encourages people to approach personal development in kind of a rote

You know discipline heavy Repetitive fashion

And none of those things are wrong in and of themselves, but they don't present the best pathway for most people to find change so what ends up happening is that

This challenge creates a lot more failure than it does success. It creates a lot more losers than it does winners. And that's because it doesn't really have a mechanism to help people become more mentally tough. What do I mean by that? Well, if I tell you, Okay, you need to walk across this desert and not drink any water.

And this is going to make you mentally tough. Okay and I have a hundred people, right? And a hundred people walk across this desert. Let's say it's a hundred miles. It's going to take them about three or four days. And they can't drink any water. How many people are going to make it out of those hundred?

Probably single digits. Probably three or four if we're being generous. So, of those three or four people who finished, Did those people develop mental toughness out there in the desert? Probably not because walking across the desert doesn't make you tough. You would have toughened up in previous life events, right?

So what, so having this test, this This pass fail toughness challenge doesn't actually create toughness. It just shows us who has toughness and who doesn't. And this is one of the first philosophical issues with the 75 hard challenge is this idea that it could build toughness, mental toughness. When it's a test, and a test with a massive stakes of pass fail, all it can do is really show you where people are at currently. It doesn't actually help people grow. For people to grow from testing, they need to be able to test and fail and iterate and fail again. That freedom to fail is not part of 75 hard.

75 hard is very much against failure. If you screw up, you start over at day one. So it punishes failure. There are philosophical inconsistencies with it. And it limits self leadership. ,

so I went about trying to craft a challenge that would succeed in the places where 75 Hard falls down. And that's not to say that it's the right way for every person. 75 Hard is clearly, you know, good for some people, but the vast majority of people are going to fail at it. So from a public health perspective, this is not the intervention that we need.

It's a. It's sort of a ranking system. It's something that tells us who, who has it and who doesn't.

The thing about the easy way is that it is a path of growth and it's a path of growth that is incredibly challenging and it will draw things out of you. As you go down the path, but as you go down the path, it starts to. There's almost a gravitational pull to it that keeps pulling you further and further along. So you can get into this positive feedback loop of personal development, where you're slowly letting go of more and more things that aren't serving you.

And because of that, stepping into the unknown, taking on things outside of your comfort zone, and really growing as a human being.

So, I set out to write. What started out as a blog post, basically,

turned into a fairly short book. I think it takes about an hour or two to read. But I think it offers a major mentality shift when it comes to, okay, here's how I can challenge myself. Here's how I can start today and change my life, right? Whether it's a challenge or it's a New Year's thing, or it's just like, hey, it's Tuesday.

It's time. I'm sick of living this way. How, dear God, how could I change? This is basically what I would go back in time and give myself when I desperately needed to learn the easy way, and I needed to let go of the hard way, because the hard way was incredibly self defeating for me, and I talk a little bit about that in the book telling my own story of , seeing what happens when you take the hard way all the way to the end. And seeing how it just doesn't deliver on the promises that our culture says it will.

So I've been working my little booty off

to write this book, finish it, edit it, beta readers, all that stuff. And that can go a little bit faster for me because if you don't know I used to publish fiction as my, you know, kind of my full time gig. So this is my first self improvement, self help, personal development, fitness related book but it's not my first book per se.

It was a different process, don't get me wrong, but some of the mechanics were old hat. So I was able to Expedite the process especially when it came to, you know, like book formatting, publishing and things like that. That's all stuff I know how to do on my own.

So yeah, I finished the book. It's out. It's available in the Amazon store for Kindle. And if you don't have a Kindle e reader, you can just download the Kindle app onto your phone or tablet. You can read on any device nowadays and we'll have a, a paperback copy. Eventually it takes a little bit more work.

First off, I need to see if people even want the book at all. So if people aren't buying the digital copy, there's no point going to the work of making a paperback copy, but I have a feeling that people will, be interested in in this idea People might see the title and recognize. Oh, this is something that's diametrically opposed to 75 hard And it is and in some ways it has criticisms for 75 hard, but it's not to criticize 75 hard or the creator Anybody who does it?

I don't think 75 hard is bad. That's i'm not trying to get anybody to stop doing 75 hard I'm, just saying like hey, here's another avenue if you need it, and I think a lot of people do need it

So yeah, I've priced it really cheap. It's less than a cup of coffee. So go pick it up, snag it, read it. I really hope you enjoy it. I hope that it's transformative for you. I hope that it helps you change your mindset around self improvement, you know, weight loss, fitness. And I hope that it brings a more holistic view than maybe you've been taught to bring in the past, but that allows you to put it into a simple framework.

The same way that 75 hard does so well to where you wake up and it's like, listen, I know the exact four things I'm going to do today. Now we're not going to work out 90 minutes a day and pick a diet and stick to it and hydrate.

And read personal development stuff I have a slightly different take on those four pillars,

which I think will be very beneficial for a lot of people. So hopefully it offers a stripped down experience of the easy way. It's not the end all be all book on the easy way, that's still, you know, to come in the future.

This is a, yeah, boiled down

version of the easy way made into an experience that you can take. So if you're interested in the book there's a link in the show notes. You can check that out or you can just go onto Amazon and search 75 easy. If it doesn't pull up on its own, just search 75 easy John Oaks and that should pop it up. If you read it, I would really appreciate a review. Reviews are super important on Amazon, you know, kind words, five stars Goes a long way To helping other people find the book and you know this easy way Message is so I can't, I can't get it out there all on my own.

Like if other people don't help me do it I'm just out here, you know, a lunatic screaming in the dark. And this message is so not the norm and it's so drowned out just a billion to one by the hard way. So I, you know, this message needs all the help it can get. It needs people to champion it. And I believe that at some point it'll hit a critical mass and it'll take off like wildfire and it can help a lot of people extricate themselves from the stuck places where they've been their entire lives. So if you read the book and you enjoy it, you know, leaving a review is going to help other people find it and that could be life changing for them.

So please, if you can do that. If you're interested, there's a 75 easy community on Facebook. I've got some free, I'm going to have some free resources in there. I've already made like a little, you know, 75 easy chart where you can check off your key activities each day. Just very simple, something I made on Canva.

You could probably do a better job. In fact, I invite you to. I'm sure someone will.

Somebody with graphic design skills.

And just on a personal note, you know, this, getting this book out, it's not my magnum opus by any means but being able to put out any book for me personally is a huge achievement. Not because of the work involved in it, but in the fact that it's mentally a friggin minefield for me. So to get to the point where I can write a book, stamp my name on it kind of go out there in the public sphere and plant my flag and say, like, here's what I believe.

Knowing that I'm going to be drowned out completely by the hard way. And I might enter a lot of abuse for it. You know, being, being at a place where I'm totally comfortable with that. And I accept whatever's coming good or bad. Not that I expect some big backlash or anything like that,

but you know, the mind imagines things, but just getting here, being able to sit down, knock out a huge project like this. and do so without any major mental explosions you know, trauma type stuff getting in my way has been a huge achievement. It's one of the biggest achievements I think in my healing journey actually.

So celebrate that with me.

I hope this means good things for me in the future. I have more books. I already have a book written that I wrote earlier this year that I never finished because of those, you know, mental minefields that I just mentioned. And I'd like to get that out fairly soon. I'll probably start working on that pretty soon here.

Get that back into edits and see if I can get that moving maybe by, you know, April or so.

And then I have lots of ideas for other books I'd like to write. And maybe keep a consistent conveyor belt of books going, because I feel like books are this limitless platform. You know, it's very hard to sell books, but once they do start selling, they can kind of catch fire in a different way than, say, a viral video could.

They're more substantial. So when a book catches fire, it does a lot more than when a viral video takes. So it's going to add a new avenue for, for growth and for, you know, people to be able to find my coaching and my help and my resources that I have for them to be able to finally get free of weight issues and, you know, unhealed trauma and other, other mindset issues that are the result of cultural conditioning.

or poor parenting or just unfortunate life events that, you know, those can just cement some pretty messed up ideas in our heads as to the truth about who we are and the truth about what other people are and how the world works. And yeah, I just want to help as many people as possible iron that stuff out so they can be grounded in reality and get to know the truth of who they are and get to live in freedom.

So, Go grab the book. I hope you enjoy it. That's the main thing is, you know, I wrote it for you for people, especially for people, you know, who are still getting to know the easy way. It's partly a philosophical book, you know, like nothing too heavy, but just like, you know, breaking down the hard way versus the easy way.

What does that mean? What does it look like in practice? And then offering the 75 day challenge that could unlike 75 hard, The 75 easy challenge is something that you might not want to quit on day 76. It's sustainable in the sense that you could keep taking this approach toward growth for the rest of your life and see the fruit of it.

Whereas 75 hard it's not meant to be, you know, a lifestyle. It's meant to be a momentary intervention. There's nothing wrong with temporary interventions.

But wouldn't it be nice if you could apply yourself to something for 75 days that when you are done with it, kind of just continue to itself because it is so self propagating it, it does become its own positive feedback mechanism. So. Maybe in the future I'll talk more specifically about certain aspects of the challenge.

If you have any questions, if you read the book and have any, any comments anything to say, you know, maybe I'll share that in the podcast in future weeks. That's all for now. You can find the link in the show notes

and yeah, I hope you enjoy. Talk to you soon.