The Biggest Myth of Change and What to Do About It

One year ago at Paleo f(X), most of the speakers and attendees didn’t know us. The first question was always, “What do you do?” It was a vastly different experience compared to this year.

You see, a year ago Jordan and I both still had day jobs, we were just starting our full consulting practice. Not to mention, we didn’t have any staff in the business as we had to lay all of them off at the end of 2012.

This year, I didn’t need business cards. We were speaking on stage, and we were on a first-name basis with most of the presenters. Our new staff held down the business for us so we could be away.

What a Difference a Year Can Make

One year of action can entirely change your life. I know this because I’ve done it over and over again.

For the past three years, my life has completely changed each year in almost every area (and for the better). Would you like…

• • higher quality relationships with friends, families and lovers?
  • more money and less debt?
  • a job you love?
  • more joy and less sadness?
  • better health?

By following the formula below, I’ve made consistent progress and gains in those areas and more. In one year, I believe you can achieve any and all of those things. (Especially if you just pick one and focus on only that.)

The #1 Myth of Change

The biggest myth that’s spread around, like poison-candy, is that change takes a lot of time. People routinely lose 30 pounds in a month, pay off their debt in a year, double their salary in 3 months, stop all their complex health symptoms in 8 weeks and begin feeling amazing.

Is that really a big amount of time?

It’s not in my eyes. If everything you wanted to change changed in one year, would you really say that it was too much time?

We all roughly get about 80 years on this planet. Is 1/80 of your lifetime, or 1.25% of your life, too long or too much time to struggle, change, grow and expand?

As someone who’s thick in the forest of massive changes, I get it. It’s very easy to take your eye off your yearly or quarterly focus when the day-to-day duties come calling, so my suggestion is to concentrate less on the daily grind and spread it out over the week.

Focus on Getting 1% Better Every Week

By all means, get 1% better every day if you can. You’ll gain 365% growth in one year! But if you get 1% better every week you’ll be at least 52% better by the end of the year.

In other words, if you want to be off all your medications and be a pinnacle of health and fitness, you’ll at least be turning the corner from restoring your health to maximizing it. If you’re $100K in debt, you could get that down to $50K.

But if I can’t achieve my goal in a year why do it? Because chances are you will silly. Achieving a lot of our goals, like finding the love of our life or the best job for our mission and skills, seems like an IMPOSSIBLE task.

And that alone stops many people from taking action  So, if you can chunk the goal down to something you actually believe in, you’ll get there.

The best thing about tracking weekly progress is that there is less pressure. You can have several bad days and still make the weekly goal.

You Don’t Have to Be Perfect

Seriously, you don’t have to make progress every day, and actually it’s quite unrealistic to think that you would.

While tracking weekly progress, there are some weeks you’ll gain multiple percentage points and other weeks you’ll have none. Change isn’t linear. Even though the 1% IDEA of change itself is linear, the results end up being exponential. It’s like compounding interest.

What that means, for any of you non-math geeks, is that if you focus on step-by-step progress, the results you experience will seem to happen as if you were skipping steps.

The key here is to focus on weekly growth; 9 times out of 10 you’ll hit your goal because of the compounding growth that happens during the year of action.

“But… I Don’t Know How!”

I tell people about this idea all the time and the #1 objection is that they don’t know how to do it or where to begin.

Just beneath the surface is the truth, they’re scared or they’re uncomfortable (many times both). If you REALLY want something, you’ll do whatever that something takes to get it.

Doing that something is called taking action.

Even if that action blows up in your face, it’s still the right thing to do.

Because change isn’t always pretty. It’s not always forward progress. It goes sideways, backwards and then leaps forward again.

The only way to get the change you’re looking for is to do something different than what you’ve been doing.

Anytime someone says, “I don’t know how,” it means they don’t really want it as bad as they want something else.

Look, I get it; I’m scared all the time. I too like comfort. It’s uncomfortable to produce new products every few months, hire doctors to work in your company, or manage a team that’s doubling annually.

Last week I thought my responsibilities were going to crush me (emails, interviews, meetings, presentations, travel and writing a talk for Paleo f(X)). But I made it through and this week I’m feeling more in control.

In the face of fear and discomfort, what must remain constant is decision making and taking action. Researching, testing, reading, asking questions, making mistakes, or even failing…

Just keep taking action and you will get what you’re after. Something can be learned from every decision we make.

And if you’re new to this blog and don’t know how to get started healing your digestion, get our eBook. In it, we’ll hold your hand, step-by-step, as you take action and execute the very process above.

Grab a copy of the eBook here.

For the rest of you: stay tuned as we’re working on big projects that scare me every week. (And there will be some big announcements in the coming weeks about them.)

In the meantime, don’t stop taking action. It is the way forward. It is the way to the results you want.

-Steve