You Don’t Need More How-To Advice — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning

Chad Fowler, before and after his Harajuku Moment. (Photos: James Duncan Davidson)

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” — Bene Gesserit “Litany Against Fear” from Frank Herbert’s Dune

For most of us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice we’ve followed.

Several of the better-known tech CEOs in San Francisco have asked me at different times for an identical favor: an index card with bullet-point instructions for losing abdominal fat. Each of them made it clear: “Just tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it.”

I gave them all of the necessary tactical advice on one 3×5 card, knowing in advance what the outcome would be. The success rate was impressive… 0%.

People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are often terrible. There are at least two reasons:

1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no “Harajuku Moment.”

2. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.

But what is this all-important “Harajuku Moment”?

It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. It applies to fat loss, to getting your finances in order, to getting your relationships in order, and to getting your life in order. No matter how many bullet points and recipes experts provide, most folks will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself.

Chad Fowler knows this.

Chad is a General Partner and CTO at BlueYard Capital. He was also co-organizer of the annual RubyConf and RailsConf conferences, where I first met him.

Our second meeting was in Boulder, Colorado, where he used his natural language experience with Hindi to teach a knuckle-dragger (me) the primitive basics of Ruby.

Chad is an incredible teacher, gifted with analogies, but I was distracted in our session by something he mentioned in passing. He’d recently lost 70+ pounds in less than 12 months.

It wasn’t the amount of weight that I found fascinating. It was the timing. He’d been obese for more than a decade, and the change seemed to come out of nowhere. Upon landing back in San Francisco, I sent him one question via email:

What were the tipping points, the moments and insights that led you to lose the 70 lbs.?

I wanted to know what the defining moment was, the conversation or realization that made him pull the trigger after 10 years of business as usual.

His answer is contained in this post.

Even if you have no interest in fat-loss, the key insights (partial completeness, data, and oversimplification among them) will help you get closer to nearly any physical goal—lift 500 pounds, run 50 kilometers, gain 50 pounds, etc. —and it applies to much more in life.

But let’s talk about one apparent contradiction upfront: calorie counting. I regularly thrash calorie counting, and I’m including Chad’s calorie-based approach to prove a point. The 4-Hour Body didn’t exist when Chad lost his weight, and there are far better things to track than calories. But would I recommend tracking calories as an alternative to tracking nothing? You bet. Tracking anything is better than tracking nothing. The Hawthorne effect can be applied to yourself.

If you are very overweight, very weak, very inflexible, or very anything negative, tracking even a mediocre variable will help you develop awareness that leads to better behavioral changes.

This underscores an encouraging lesson: you don’t have to get it all right. You just have to be crystal clear on a few concepts. Results follow. Much of the bolding in Chad’s story is mine.

Enter Chad Fowler . . .

The Harajuku Moment

Why had I gone 10 years getting more and more out of shape (starting off pretty unhealthy in the first place) only to finally fix it now?

I actually remember the exact moment I decided to do something.

I was in Tokyo with a group of friends. We all went down to Harajuku to see if we could see some artistically dressed youngsters and also to shop for fabulous clothing, which the area is famous for. A couple of the people with us were pretty fashionable dressers and had some specific things in mind they wanted to buy. After walking into shops several times and leaving without seriously considering buying anything, one of my friends and I gave up and just waited outside while the others continued shopping.

We both lamented how unfashionable we were.

I then found myself saying the following to him: “For me, it doesn’t even matter what I wear; I’m not going to look good anyway.”

I think he agreed with me. I can’t remember, but that’s not the point. The point was that, as I said those words, they hung in the air like when you say something super-embarrassing in a loud room but happen to catch the one randomly occurring slice of silence that happens all night long. Everyone looks at you like you’re an idiot. But this time, it was me looking at myself critically. I heard myself say those words and I recognized them not for their content, but for their tone of helplessness. I am, in most of my endeavors, a solidly successful person. I decide I want things to be a certain way, and I make it happen. I’ve done it with my career, my learning of music, understanding of foreign languages, and basically everything I’ve tried to do.

For a long time, I’ve known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable.

If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply “go with the flow” and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something, most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for.  That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.

Yet here I was, talking about arguably the most important part of my life—my health—as if it was something I had no control over. I had been going with the flow for years.

Wishing for an outcome and waiting to see if it would come. I was the limp, powerless ego I detest in other people.

But somehow, as the school nerd who always got picked last for everything, I had allowed “not being good at sports” or “not being fit” to enter what I considered to be inherent attributes of myself. The net result is that I was left with an understanding of myself as an incomplete person. And though I had (perhaps) overcompensated for that incompleteness by kicking ass in every other way I could, I was still carrying this powerlessness around with me and it was very slowly and subtly gnawing away at me from the inside.

So, while it’s true that I wouldn’t have looked great in the fancy clothes, the seemingly superficial catalyst that drove me to finally do something wasn’t at all superficial. It actually pulled out a deep root that had been, I think, driving an important part of me for basically my entire life.

And now I recognize that this is a pattern. In the culture I run in (computer programmers and tech people), this partial-completeness is not just common but maybe even the norm. My life lately has taken on a new focus: digging up those bad roots; the holes I don’t notice in myself. And now I’m filling them one at a time.

Once I started the weight loss, the entire process was not only easy but enjoyable.

I started out easy. Just paying attention to food and doing relaxed cardio three to four times a week. This is when I started thinking in terms of making every day just slightly better than the day before. On day 1 it was easy. Any exercise was better than what I’d been doing.

If you ask the average obese person: “If you could work out for ONE year and be considered ‘in shape,’ would you do it?” I’d guess that just about every single one would emphatically say, “Hell, yes!” The problem is that for most normal people, there is no clear path from fat to okay in a year. For almost everyone, the path is there and obvious if you know what you’re doing, but it’s almost impossible to imagine an outcome like that so far in the distance.

The number-one realization that led me to be able to keep doing it and make the right decisions was to use data.

I learned about the basal metabolic rate (BMR), also called resting metabolic rate, and was amazed at how many calories I would have to eat in order to stay the same weight. It was huge. As I started looking at calorie content for food that wasn’t obviously bad, I felt like I’d have to just gluttonously eat all day long if I wanted to stay fat. The BMR showed me that (1) it wasn’t going to be hard to cut calories, and (2) I must have been making BIG mistakes before in order to consume those calories—not small ones. That’s good news. Big mistakes mean lots of low-hanging fruit.1

Next was learning that 4,000 calories equals about a pound of fat. I know that’s an oversimplification, but that’s okay. Oversimplifying is one of the next things I’ll mention as a tool. But if 4,000 is roughly a pound of fat, and my BMR makes it pretty easy to shave off some huge number of calories per day, it suddenly becomes very clear how to lose lots of weight without even doing any exercise. Add in some calculations on how many calories you burn doing, say, 30 minutes of exercise and you can pretty quickly come up with a formula that looks something like:

BMR = 2,900Actual intake = 1,800Deficit from diet = BMR – actual intake = 1,100Burned from 30 minutes cardio = 500Total deficit = deficit from diet (1,100) and burned from 30 minutes cardio (500) = 1,600

So that’s 1,600 calories saved in a day, or almost half a pound of bad weight I could lose in a single day. So for a big round number, I can lose 5 pounds in a week and a half without even working too hard. When you’re 50 pounds overweight, getting to 10% of your goal that fast is real.

An important thing I alluded to earlier is that all of these numbers are in some ways bullshit.