Fascinating New York Times blog post on exercising. Turns out perfectionism is a barrier to many people’s getting in shape.

Specifically:

“One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing something really strenuous.” That’s textbook perfectionism: setting unachievable goals.

“I think a lot of people look to exercise to help them lose weight, and when they don’t lose weight immediately with exercise, they quit.” That’s three perfectionist symptoms right there: short term thinking, over-focus on product over process, and over-focus on external rewards.

The interviewee, Gretchen Reynolds, has just published a book “The First 20 Minutes,” the title referencing scientific data that shows that, if someone is out of shape, just 20 minutes of exercise can yield huge health benefits. Perfectionists may well be suspicious of this advice, however, because they tend to be suspicious of success when it comes too easily. They expect everything to be a hard struggle, and are caught off guard when something isn’t.

I’m not surprised that perfectionism is a barrier to fitness because if you’ve got perfectionist tendencies they’re probably going to crop up in many of your important endeavors.

The article reaches a nice compassionate conclusion:

“The human body is a really excellent coach. If you listen to it, it will tell you if you’re going hard enough, if you’re going too hard. If it starts to hurt, then you back off. It should just feel good, because we really are built to move, and not moving is so unnatural. Just move, because it really can be so easy, and it really can change your life.”

Listening to, and trusting, yourself – that’s the opposite of perfectionism.

Excerpts:

“The human brain handles negative and positive input differently, psychologists say, which is why memories of unpleasant experiences seem indelible…”

“If managers or bosses know this, then they should be acutely aware of the impact they have when they fail to recognize the importance to workers of making progress on meaningful work, criticize, take credit for their employees’ work, pass on negative information from on top without filtering and don’t listen when employees try to express grievances.”

Of course, many bosses/teachers/mentors/etc. who deliver harsh criticism are are all too likely to blame the recipients of their harshness for the consequent underproductivity.

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“They’re quite joyous occasions,” she said. “It’s very liberating, not using money.” At one market, she said, she approached a woman who had come along with three large trays of homemade cakes and was selling them for a unit a cake. “I asked her: ‘Do you think that’s enough? After all, you had the cost of the ingredients, the electricity to cook …’

“She replied: ‘Wait until the market is over’, and at the end she had three different kinds of fruit, two one-litre bottles of olive oil, soaps, beans, a dozen eggs and a whole lot of yoghurt. ‘If I had bought all this at the supermarket,’ she said, ‘it would have cost me a great deal more than what it cost to make these cakes.’”

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Most people, though, take too long to quit–and many take way too long.

One question to ask yourself: while you ponder or ruminate about the quit, are you inventing reasons for staying put, or reasons for leaving. If you’re expending a lot of energy trying to convince yourself to stay, that’s probably a sign you should go.

Excerpted from Gulati’s article:

You’ve been conditioned. Scientists know that the best way to train someone to perform a behavior is to reward them for doing so at random intervals….If you look closely enough, you’ll find that the corporate world is littered with hundreds of these variable reinforcement schedules.

Your losses are more visible than ever. Ubiquitous connectivity plus social media equals high virality. In other words, news now travels fast. So when your early-stage venture fails, your friends are going to know about it.

You suffer from premature optimization….This strong human bias toward accumulating small wins is what we call progress, but paradoxically, it seems to be inhibiting many individuals from reaching their true potential.

Personally I don’t think I’m prey to the first two, much–but then I read the third and I thought oy vey. Something to think about.

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This is a crucial topic because without rewards you’ll probably get miserable, run down, deprived, and then burn out. Rewards refuel you and really are one of the key engines of productivity and nonperfectionism. (Perfectionism will always despise your need for rewards, but you NEVER listen to the voice of perfectionism.)

Here’s what I wrote her:

“You ask “what else can I do?” and I reply “more rewards!” I mean it. It makes perfect sense that if your big reward after a hard month’s work was a day trip and the trip was so disappointing that it would demotivate you. You need *lots* of rewards, constant rewards, many little *and* big ones. You need it because you’re under constant pressure, but also because you need an excess in case a reward goes bust. Don’t starve yourself of rewards. (That’s why the cliche is “work hard/play hard” not “work hard/play a bit”)

“I think you’re probably also being perfectionist about rewards. A cup of nice teeccino, a little walk, some playtime with Nat, those are all rewards. Plus the big ones, the day trips and week trips. Recognize and embrace the tiny rewards and the bigger ones should come more easily.

“Constant rewards! And you should reward any tiny victory because the big ones are really composed of tiny ones. As I teach the writers, Tolstoy didn’t write War and Peace, he wrote a whole series of chapters, pages, paragraphs, and sentences that added up to War and Peace. And I’m pretty sure he rewarded himself for each one, if only with a moment’s pride, pleasure, reflection, and satisfaction.

“And that’s what fuels big work.

“Lots of work/lots of fun.”

I’m hearing from readers in the U.S., Canada, England, Poland, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere!

Read sample chapters here and buy from my shop here. $24.95 + s&h for paperback and ecopy bundle; $3.95 just for ecopy. Ecopy purchasers get a Zip file with 3 formats: MOBI (Kindle), ePUB (Nook, Reader), and PDF.

Regardless of where you bought your copy, if you would leave a review on the book’s Amazon page that would be great!

Per Vegan Outreach, even the meat industry sees the vegan writing on the wall and is pondering ways to switch to fake meat. They excerpt an article from the Meat and Poultry trade journal:

“Who better to make meat analogs than meat processors themselves?”

[I]nnovative meat analog products keep entering the marketplace and are something to take note of….
These are just a few meat analog products on the market and they are impressive….

[T]here are an increasing number of consumers seeking convenient, value-added products they perceive as being healthier alternatives, as well as being better for the environment. And of course, animal activists and vegetarians, in particular, love the fact that such products contain no animal protein.

And here are data showing that meat consumption is declining in the U.S. per capita. Even the meat industries no longer claim it’s simply the recession.

Both links from the indispensable Vegan.com blog.

“Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.”