When you are in the talons of anxiety, it may seem like there is no hope. You may feel like giving up or that nothing you could ever do would ever make life feel normal again.

I know this to be true because that’s how I felt for a long time. I felt like a victim of my circumstances. I didn’t seek out new methods of healing because I “just knew” they wouldn’t work for me.

This victimization and isolation that so often accompanies anxiety can be crippling and can prevent you from the life you desire. You can feel alone.

Like the problem you are facing has never been faced before or that there is nothing you could do to heal yourself.

Well, I have news for you, you are not alone.

Even if you wouldn’t categorize yourself as “anxious,” every person struggles with anxiety and fear throughout their lifetime. Without fear, our species would have died off thousands of years ago. Fear and anxiety are innate. We need them to survive, but when we adopt a meta-anxiety (anxiety about anxiety), our life can start to stagnate, and the fear can seem debilitating.

However, you have the ability to become aware of this meta-anxiety and choose to chart a different path forward. One in which you are not a victim of your thoughts and emotions.

Understanding this truth may bring you a sense of calm, but what do you do with that information? Knowing something and being something are entirely different things. This is why simply reading about healing your anxiety or watching the 18th Tony Robbins video on Youtube won’t bring you long lasting freedom. And after all, if you are an anxious one, freedom is the one thing you desire most.

Freedom to be. Freedom to do the things you want. Freedom to live.

Well to have the freedom to live your life again, you must be willing to put the theory into practice. You must take the inspiration from theory and put it into determined action in your own life.

There are many ways to practice this on a daily, but one of my favorites is a simple journal exercise, which I outline below. It may seem too simple, and you may find yourself doubting its validity.

Realize this as a thought, and just do it anyway. That voice has led you to where you are today; it’s time to start a new life. You have everything within you to heal; you just need to let that come to the surface.

Journaling to Heal Anxiety

The following journaling exercise is something that I took from Charlie Hoehn’s book Play it Away. If you haven’t read the book yet, I highly suggest you buy it now. Charlie, a former employee of Tim Ferriss, gives practical advice for healing anxiety by changing your relationship with it.

1. When you feel anxiety or stress coming up, get out a piece of paper and write down everything you are worried about. 3–5 words per item is fine. For instance, “I’m nervous about having a panic attack.”

2. Next, go back through the list and put a star next to your top source of stress.

3. Reframe it as a “How can I eliminate my ____ ?” question. In the example above, you’d write “How can I eliminate my panic attacks?” Might sound impossible, but bear with me…

4. Come up with 3 potential solutions that you could test for removing that source of stress (e.g. replace coffee with water, eliminate all sources of news, etc.).

5. Pick the simplest solution, then test it for a week. Assess after 7 days to see how you feel after that source of stress has been completely removed.

6. Finally, take the time to go back through your list and write 1 reason you are grateful for each source of anxiety. For example, “I am grateful for my fear of panic attacks because they alert me of something important that I need to pay attention to.”

As I said before, this exercise may seem overly simplistic, and you may be thinking that there is no way it will work for you. And that is okay. That is your anxiety and self-doubt coming in, which is entirely normal.

Don’t let it win. Give the exercise a try. Face your biggest worries head on and implement a strategy that will help you overcome them on a daily basis.
Stop waiting for someone else to heal you. Cease to be a victim. You have the power to heal yourself; you just need to start.

Since releasing my course, Productive Habits, I’ve been focusing on building more new habits. This year I’m focusing on habits to help me build new skills and look after my health.

One of these habits is to do push-ups every morning. I went from not doing push-ups at all, to doing them every single morning. As I write this, I’m on a streak of 45 days in a row. From zero to more than a month without stopping, here’s how I did it.

Start small

One of the techniques that I focus on in Productive Habits is starting small. I’m a huge proponent of this method, as are other experts in habit building and lifestyle change, like BJ Fogg, creator of Tiny Habits, and Leo Babauta, creator of zen habits.

The essence of starting small comes in two parts: making your habit so easy to do that you can’t say no, and focusing on consistency.

Let’s start with making it easy. Every morning I do 5 push-ups. That’s not many at all. It’s not what I’d call a full workout. It’s not enough to break a sweat. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s more than zero.

When you’re starting out with a new habit, you want to find the smallest possible amount of that habit you can do, and still feel something. I could have started with one push-up, but I don’t feel anything after one, or two. 5 push-ups is just enough to feel a little struggle, but not enough that it feels too hard to get started. It’s trivial to get down on the floor and do 5 push-ups, which is exactly what you want when you’re starting out: something so trivial, you can’t say no.

The second part of starting small is to focus on consistency. You want to aim for quantity, not quality. this isn’t about being about to do 50 push-ups in a row, or losing weight, or having a six pack. It’s about doing push-ups, no matter how many, every single day.

I recently started adding 5 squats after my push-ups. But after a few days I found I didn’t feel like doing squats every day. Sometimes I was rushing to get my push-ups done, so I would skip the squats.

And that’s okay. Because all I have to do to keep my streak going is 5 push-ups.

Only when I’m confident that I’ll do 5 push-ups every morning, without a reminder, no matter what, will I focus on doing more push-ups, or adding more exercises that become part of my no-excuses daily habit.

Keep it in focus

I always focus on building one new habit at a time. Any more than that and I forget some, or I struggle to keep them up every day because my attention is split.

To help me focus on the habit I’m currently building, I make a note of it in two places: my notebook and my task list.

I use a notebook to keep daily, weekly, and monthly to do lists. At the top of each daily list I write down the habit I’m working on. When I’ve completed my habit for the day, I cross it out. This is a helpful reminder throughout the day, whenever I look at my notebook, that I need to complete my habit if I haven’t already.

The other place I make a note of my habit is my task list. When I do my monthly review and choose a habit to work on for the month ahead, I make a task for the new habit with a due date of the last day of the month. I make sure this task stays visible every day in my main task list (you can do this in different ways depending on the app you use — for instance, using filters or saved searches, adding a star, high priority status, or setting a start date for the first day of the month).

Stack it

Apart from starting small, stacking habits is probably the most useful technique I’ve discovered for building brand new habits. Stacking habits means using an existing habit (even one you didn’t purposely build, like waking up, having a shower, or brushing your teeth) to act as a trigger for your new habit.

For push-ups, I use turning on the shower as my trigger. Every morning I get set up for my shower, turn on the water, then drop and do 5 push-ups while the water heats up. I’ll have to adjust this when I’m doing more push-ups so I don’t waste water, but for now I’m just making better use of the time when I normally stand around avoiding the cold water.

“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” —Amit Ray

I’ve been lifting weights for 5 years, which is half as long as I’ve been meditating. Exercise has changed me more than I would have thought when I started. I have become less anxious and less depressed. I am in better control of my habits. I am more confident. Physically, I am stronger and have more endurance. I can move really heavy things with ease and carry moderately heavy things a fair distance. My skin has improved, my sex life is better, etc, you get the idea. After a good workout, I feel less angry and my mind is sharper. I enjoy all of these benefits and have devoted much thought to why I enjoy them so much.

Mostly, exercise reconnects you with your body. Many people are disconnected from their bodies and so do not appreciate the other more nuanced benefits of keeping the body in top form. They do not recognize the relationship between mentality and physicality. Fine-tuning the body also sharpens the mind, which in turns enhances your relationship to the world around you. You see clearer, think clearer and feel more empowered to take risks and do things. Not only this, exercise influences your relationship with yourself. You become willing to suffer and work hard to both achieve and maintain results. Exercise is not masturbatory. Sitting on the couch and eating junk food while watching TV every day is masturbatory. Exercise is hard work! It doesn’t always feel good, and that’s when it’s most important to persevere.

Now, let’s return for a bit to Zen mind. No more of this results talk. No more ego talk. Meditation has the same effect on the mind as exercise has on the body. When you do resistance training, you work specific muscle groups really hard. They become exhausted and damaged from working so hard. When the fibers repair, they are stronger. You repeat this as much as you want to grow stronger, bigger, leaner, whatever your goals are. The process becomes more rewarding than the results. It is a meaningful ritual. This process requires patience. It requires commitment. It requires an ability to suffer through difficult sets, injuries and recovery times.

Anyone who has meditated for a while will tell you that this process applies to meditation in the mental realm. In the beginning, your mind is often very sore. It gets distracted. It fails to stay focused. It experiences intense emotions and thoughts. It loses its way. Sometimes it uncovers painful thoughts and memories that it wanted to hide. With all this suffering and difficulty comes progress, but only if we confront it and push through it. With this progress comes moments of pure bliss, moments of beauty and awakening. These moments are impossible without the struggle and the patience.

I view exercise and meditation as the two greatest practices in this world. I am so grateful I have them in my life. I don’t feel attached to them or compulsive. Every day when I meditate I am grateful to have the time and energy to do so. When I go to the gym, I savor every rep. I try to eat properly and recover properly. These are not activities that we do to get better at life; they are life. They are what our caveman ancestors did to stay alive. Running, climbing, lifting, jumping, dodging, hunting. Add mindful contemplation into the mix and you can really enhance your relationship with both yourself and the external world. Meditating and exercising with diligence and respecting the process provides us with a sense of deep meaning. The connection you develop with yourself— your body, your mind, etc— connects you with the whole world. It helps you recognize yourself as a part of the world rather than a mere individual.

I’ve been a marketing executive at a half dozen successful startups and I’ve been a consultant and advisor to dozens more. I’ve also worked with a handful of massive global companies. If you asked me to point out the most common problem I see, my answer would be the same, regardless of the size of the company. Every company I have ever worked with has struggled to make their awesomeness obvious.

I’ve watched startup founders, after working for weeks on a pitch, field a dozen variations on the question “So, how are you different from Company XYZ?”. I’ve seen teams at large companies build truly innovative new products that failed when customers simply couldn’t understand their value. Too often I see a massive disconnect between companies creating offerings that are important, world-changing, exceptional, AWESOME…and customers that fail to see anything interesting about them at all.

Deliberate positioning puts your strengths front and centre

The unique greatness of our offerings often feels obvious to folk inside the company. We have a ready answer to the question — “Why should a customer choose us?” Yet, if we ask customers the same question, they often find the differences between what we offer and what other companies offer hard to understand. This problem happens because we do not put our unique strengths at the centre of our positioning. Instead we position ourselves in the market we started in, even after our products have evolved well beyond that. We have failed to actively, deliberately position our offerings around our strengths, falling back on a “default” or “status quo” position that does nothing to help customers understand what sets us apart.

Here’s a simple example. I joined a startup early in my career that was founded by a team of database experts. They built an innovative database, one that could quickly analyze massive amounts of data in a fraction of the time that normal databases could do it. Interestingly when we tried to sell the solution most folks wouldn’t even take a meeting with us. “We don’t need a database, they explained, we have Oracle”. For them, “database” meant a lot more than just an ability to do a fast query — our unique value was sidelined by everything else they trusted Oracle to do.

We ultimately solved our problem by re-positioning ourselves as a Business Intelligence tool. The new positioning put our differentiator — fast data analysis on a large amount of data — at the centre of our positioning and got us away from the “So how are you better than Oracle” trap. (I’ve talked about other examples here and here)

Great positioning makes our strengths obvious. It provides context and a frame of reference that makes it easy for customers to understand why they should care about what we do. This post is going to teach you how to do that.

The Positioning Statement is Harmful and You Should Never Do One

Positioning, as a concept has been around for decades, however just because you know WHAT positioning is, doesn’t mean you understand HOW to do it.

The closest we have ever come to a template for creating positioning is The Positioning Statement. It’s a fill-in-the-blanks exercise where you create a single phrase that encapsulates what your offering is all about relative to your competition. The template usually looks something like this:

I’ve blogged about my deep hatred of this tool before so I won’t re-hash my case against it but here’s a summary of why you shouldn’t do one:

1/ This exercise assumes great positioning is magically locked inside your head and you simply have to write it down. The truth is that every product can be positioned in multiple different ways and which one you choose has a massive impact on your business. The positioning statement exercise encourages you to assume there is only one way to position your offering (a dangerous assumption).

2/ The output of this exercise is an awkward franken-statement of gobbledygook that cannot be easily shared, understood or remembered by the teams who need to use it. Like other totally useless business exercises — it is completed and never, ever referred to again. The exercise is, at best, a waste of time.

3/ Creating a positioning statement gives you the false sense that you are “done” doing positioning and you can move on to worrying about other things. Markets change as companies, technologies, and buyers change. Great positioning often becomes weak over time. Positioning cannot be a “one and done” exercise.

A Better Way to Do Positioning

What we want to do in a positioning exercise is examine what our unique strengths are and find a way to put those at the centre. The goal is to come up with a way to position our offerings that makes our awesomeness obvious. When I work with companies on positioning we do this in 5 steps. The steps are easy but the work is not.

Step 1: Let go of where you came from

Weak positioning is usually the result of hanging on to a “default” market position that is rooted in the history of the product idea.

Most product ideas come from a desire to stretch the capabilities of what exists today. “We want to build a CRM with special features for lawyers” or “We want to make an animation tool that kids can use” or “We want to build a training platform for gamers to improve their game skills”. What happens however is that often as you stretch that idea further and further out, it becomes something else completely, to the point where you aren’t in the market where you began.

Coming back to my “database” example from earlier. The company was founded by database experts with the goal of building a better database. We never considered that the solution we built could be anything BUT a database. However, when we tried to describe our value to prospects, they couldn’t understand why they would buy a “database” to do that. Not only that, they already had a database that did a lot of other things better than we did. Positioning ourselves in the database market highlighted what we couldn’t do, put us into direct competition with a very strong competitor, and made our critical value seem like an unimportant add-on. We had successfully built an awesome solution for analyzing a very large amount of data, but it was a kinda lousy database. We were hanging on to our own history so tightly we simply couldn’t see that.

Step 1 is about letting go of the original idea of what you set out to build. Letting go of that historical baggage will help you get clear on where you are right now, the value you deliver today and the best way to put that in the centre of your positioning.

Step 2 — Isolate your Uniqueness

The things that make you unique are the reason your offering deserves to exist in the first place.

You have features that no other solution has. You might have a business model, a set of supply chain relationships, a proprietary process or other intellectual property that you and you alone can deliver. This is what you want to capture.

In this step you should list everything you have that makes your offering unique. Don’t get too hung up on the value those features deliver — in this step we just want to list things that you have that nobody else has, regardless of who cares about it. For example I worked on a product ages ago at IBM where our key differentiator was that our product was highly customizable. You could argue that our key “feature” was a fault because it also made our product difficult to use for beginners. However, our customers valued flexibility and we won most deals where we were up against a more elegantly designed competitor. In this step you should focus on what you have that’s unique without trying to pass judgement on whether that uniqueness is a plus or a minus. Even “complexity” can have value in the right context.

Step 3 — Value: what can your uniqueness do for customers?

Customers don’t care about your unique features, they care what those features can do for them. Your positioning needs to be centred on the value that you alone can deliver for customers.

In this step you want to capture what value your unique attributes could enable for customers. For example, if your unique feature is “We have a patented way to quickly query a large amount of data”, the value of that could be “Companies can answer questions while a customer is on the phone instead of having to call them back the next day”. In the template below you can match up value with specific features but you can also capture the value that a combination of features delivers.

At this stage don’t worry too much about which customers might perceive this value. Like in the previous step, keep an open mind and focus on the value your unique features might have to any audience.

Step 4 — Who Cares?

Many kinds of prospects care about what you deliver but only some of them REALLY care. Understanding how to find those prospects is the key to maximizing revenue return on your marketing/sales efforts.

Now that you have captured what you have and can uniquely deliver for customers, the next step is to figure out who cares a lot about that value. What makes a prospect particularly interested in the value that you deliver? How can you identify a target customer that is very, very likely to love your offering?

For startups this is critical. You have scarce resources to market and sell your products. Customers that are well suited for your offering will easily understand your value, will purchase faster, and are much less likely to ask for discounts. The best way to maximize the revenue you get from a puny budget is to focus on prospects that are easy to sell to.

When defining “Who cares” in this exercise, you will want to list the characteristics that you use to identify a good target prospect. This includes obvious things like industry, location, and company size. But to really nail this you have to get more specific about which prospects within that group are your best target. It isn’t enough to say “We sell to small businesses” — there are millions of those and they are all different. Which small businesses? What is it about the ones that love you the most?

Coming back to my database example, we originally thought about our target market as “Any company with a very, very large amount of data”. But that isn’t specific enough — loads of companies with a large amount of data only store it for backup and don’t care about fast queries. When we asked ourselves who cares a lot about getting answers quickly from a large amount of data, we started to get more specific. Banks and security companies cared a lot because they were looking for data breaches. Companies in the online ad business needed to analyze data for customers. The common thread was companies that needed to analyze a massive amount of machine-generated data for either security or customer service reasons, cared a lot about what we did. This specificity allowed us to get really targeted in our positioning.

The goal of Step 4 is to help you more narrowly define who should be in your target market. You could think about it this way — if the future of your product depended on you selling as much as you could this month, who would you focus on and why? How would you make a list of top priority prospects?

Step 5 — Choose your best market frame of reference

Now you know what makes you awesome and who cares the most. You need to choose a market frame of reference that makes your awesomeness completely obvious.

Now we are getting to the hard part. What is the market frame of reference that makes your unique value utterly obvious to your best prospects? Interestingly, it often isn’t the market you started with when you first thought up the idea for your product. For mature products, it may not be the market that you have always positioned yourself in.

The point of this exercise is to help you break free of your old thinking and so you can put your unique differentiated value right in the centre of your positioning. When you declare what market you are in, you set context for your prospects that should help them understand what you do. If you say my product is a type of CRM or a database or a game or a training tool, your prospects immediately place you in that market. They will make assumptions about your value, your competitors, your key features, even your pricing, based on what they already know about that market.

In my database example we chose the database market as our frame of reference and that proved to be a terrible choice. It put us in direct competition with Oracle, a large and very established company. Our core value “fast analysis of a very large amount of data” wasn’t what most companies were buying databases for. Our best target customers (folks analyzing machine generated data) had already given up on trying to solve their problems with traditional databases. Using “database” as our market frame of reference only left our prospects confused and unsure of our value.

Business intelligence was an obviously better frame for us to use because the value we delivered was just like the value that was central to most BI tools — data analysis. While it was true we weren’t a perfect BI tool for everyone, we were an AWESOME BI tool for folks with a large amount of machine-generated data. In the database market frame of reference we had one good feature, but we were still a lousy database, even if you had loads of data.

Startups often mess this up by thinking that they simply have no other option than to stay in the market they started with. This is never true. You could put any product in front of me and I could position it in a dozen different markets. Hand me a screw driver and I could easily make the case that it is, in fact a paint can opener. Every B2C startup I come across I can instantly re-position as a something valuable for businesses. The biggest mistake you can make is to think your offering could only be positioned in one market. There are always multiple possible markets, some of which will make your value more obvious than others. I’ve talked about other startup examples here and here.

Companies with more established products get into trouble by not being diligent about monitoring their market landscape. Often the market shifts slowly over time and an offering which once had a very strong, clearly differentiated position will have its position weakened as features that were once unique become table stakes. Sometimes the markets that products are established in shift or new ones will overlap, making a previously strong position, weak.

There are different styles of how you position in a market category. You can try to win an existing market by taking on the leaders head to head, by splitting off a sub-segment you can own, or by using your unique innovation to change the way people think about the entire market category. You can also create a completely new market category (this is the most difficult option). I’ve written about Styles of Positioning before — you can take a deep dive on that in this post.

Implementation — A bigger deal than you think

A change in positioning is a fundamental change in your business. If you change the market that you operate in, the expectations of your prospects will fundamentally shift. The competitive comparisons shift. Expectations around pricing and sales channels will shift. Prospects will make assumptions about sales channels and partnerships that you will have to meet.

Internally a shift in positioning generally results in a massive shift as well. Given our new position, what should our roadmap look like? What skills are we expected to have to help customers succeed? Do we have the partnerships and sales channels our customers would expect? A change in positioning can have a dramatically positive impact on a business, but only if the company internalizes it and ensures that everything — marketing, sales, development, business development, support — aligns with the strategic shift.

Bringing it together — a positioning template

Once you have all the pieces together, you will want to write it down. Writing it down is good for two reasons:

1/ You have a record of the agreed upon positioning, in a form that makes it easy to understand why the positioning is what it is.

2/ The document is dated so you can track when the positioning was last reviewed.

So if you want to capture positioning so you can review it and share it, here’s a template I use:

Testing and Iteration

So now you have your best guess at how you would position your offering with your strengths at the centre. You will next have to test it and see if your positioning works with customers the way you think it should. Here are some symptoms and causes of weak positioning:

Positioning is NOT messaging

The positioning template should not be a way of documenting your value proposition or approved messaging around features or value. Once you have your positioning figured out, this becomes a set of inputs to your messaging. I usually build a messaging document that references the positioning template. The messaging document goes a level deeper into approved messaging for value statements for different buyer personas and provides boilerplate messaging that can be used as a starting point for marketing and sales materials.

Is your awesomeness obvious?

The point of this exercise is to get your special unique value into the centre of your positioning so that it is obvious to customers. Done properly, this positioning should centre your customers on your strengths so that they can quickly understand what you do and why they should care.

I read Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton, and it changed me. I truly learned its lessons, not just consumed its pages. This is how I did it…

Step 1: Start with a great book

Read a book with meaning, something that explores questions of the mind, heart, and soul. For this exercise, you will want content you can mentally wrestle with for hours without getting bored.

Here are some of the questions in my soul that led me to Status Anxiety: Why do I want other people to like me? Why do I always want to be more, have more, and accomplish more? Why does chasing success leave me unfulfilled, whether I win or lose?

Once you have your book, you need to read it differently.

Step 2: Read to learn

Reading can be a superpower. It is most similar to power absorption, a power some superheroes posses that enables them to assume the powers of other superheroes and use those powers themselves. Rogue, the X-men mutant from Marvel Comics, has this ability.

When we read, we can absorb the knowledge another human gained after a lifetime of experiences. We can mentally and emotionally walk in someone else’s shoes as the author shares their perspective of the world, challenges they faced, and lessons they learned.

How can we get the most from our reading? Make reading a learning process rather than just passively consuming information. Think while you read. Don’t just turn the pages. Stop. Make connections with other ideas and information. If you want an equation for innovation and creativity, here it is:

what you know + something new you learn = a new idea

Here’s a tip from Keith Holyoak, a UCLA professor focused on this type of creative thinking. As you read ask yourself, “what else does this remind me of?” and “why does it remind me of that?”

As you make connections or learn new ideas, write them down! Create an index within the book itself where you can record page numbers and corresponding ideas, thoughts, and quotes so you can easily access them later. This is a picture of 2 of my 5 index pages in Status Anxiety. If you want to learn more about taking notes, Tim Ferriss has a great post on this here. Also, Ryan Holiday goes into even more depth on a 3×5 notecard system here (I just started testing this system).

Step 3: Edit like a master

There is a foundational skill necessary in order to read, learn, and apply information: editing.

Our lives are a series of decisions made with imperfect information. We either have too much information and need to filter out the meaningless to find what really matters, or we don’t have enough information. In either case, we have to decide what information is most important and then act on it. How do we get better at editing? Like anything else in life, we practice!

Jason Fried said we need a class just on this, and he’d like to teach it. His idea is to give students a topic and have them practice editing by writing 3 pages, then 1 page, then 3 paragraphs, then 1 paragraph, then 1 sentence all on the same topic. By doing this, students would learn to think about what matters most and then effectively distill and communicate that information. Jason is a master editor, just look at how he communicated this entire idea in a simple illustration:

I want to be a master editor, so I decided to put myself through my own variation of Jason’s theoretical class. Below is my “coursework”, a summary of Alain de Botton’s book Status Anxiety. For each section of the book I include a 3 paragraph, 3 sentence, and 1 sentence summary.

I spent over an hour going through this editing exercise for the book as a whole and then each individual chapter, 11+ hours of just editing! At each stage of the editing process I had to rethink what information was really most important. I identified the core message and tried to communicate it simply and clearly. It was hard work, but it forced me to think deeply and really learn what De Botton had to say.

Try this exercise on just one chapter of the next great book you read.

Happy learning!

p.s. you do not need to read my exhaustive summary of Status Anxiety below, but read at least one section to understand how this editing exercise works.

Book summary

Status anxiety is the worry we constantly feel about what others think about us and our importance in their eyes. Status anxiety has five primary causes:

1. Seeking the love of others in order to love ourselves.
2. Not meeting our own expectations of achievement and status.
3. Living in a meritocratic society makes us fear poverty and its shame.
4. Being surrounded by snobs who only value power and influence.
5. Knowing worldly success is not completely in our control.

Solutions exist to help us combat our unquenchable need for status:

1. Philosophy teaches us to base our self-worth on what we know to be true through reason, not what other people think of us.
2. Art helps us see ourselves and others for who we truly are.
3. Politics can change what society values; wealth is not universally important across time and cultures.
4. Religion reminds us that attaining worldly status is not the purpose of our existence.
5. Bohemia shows us we can disregard public opinion and succeed at life in our own way.

Understanding why we are obsessed with status, and the solutions that can help, is the first step to relieving status anxiety. We will continue to worry about our own status, but we can choose the type of status we care about and succeed at life in our own way.

We constantly worry about what the world thinks of us. Our worth in the eyes of current public opinion is based on how much wealth and power we attain. But we can choose other values and succeed at life in our own way.

You can spend your entire life worrying about what other people think of you, or you can choose what matters most to you and succeed at life in your own way.

Chapter summaries

Lovelessness

We seek two types of love: 1) sexual love and 2) love from the world. This book is about our pursuit of the world’s love. We want power, fame, and money for what they represent, attention from others. And why do we want this attention from others so much? Because deep down we are unsure of our own worth, so we let the opinions of others determine how we see ourselves.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t care so much? Whether nobody noticed us or everybody noticed us, we knew our own worth. It’s a beautiful fairytale, but we do notice. We do care. We see both the good and bad in ourselves, and we look to others’ opinions to decide how we will see ourselves.

Attention or neglect from others has incredible power over us. It is terrifying and eye opening to realize just how susceptible our mood is to others’ behavior. We ride the rollercoaster of emotions to the peak of euphoria with one kind word and the next moment free fall to the pit of despair with a sideways glance. We constantly worry about our place in the world.

We chase after money, power, and fame in order to feel loved and respected by the world. We are insecure and unsure of our own self-worth, so we look to the opinions of other people to decide how we feel about ourselves. As a result of worrying about our place in the world and how other people see us, we unintentionally give other people power over us.

In order to love ourselves we need to feel loved by the world, so we chase the things we think the world values and it destroys our life.

Expectation

The average person hasn’t always believed they could do more, be more, have more. These are new ideas. Before the industrial revolution in the 18th century, the majority of the population was peasants struggling to stay alive and dying before they were forty. They may not have been particularly happy with their lot in life, but they didn’t believe they could become king. They couldn’t do anything to earn more status because status was given by God. Their lot was their lot.

Technological innovations of the last few centuries led to rapid material progress and increases in the standard of living for all people, not just kings and aristocrats. Revolutionary political and social ideas became reality and began to spread after 1776. Suddenly, your status wasn’t determined by who you were at birth, but by what you achieved in life (mostly measured financially).

As our ability to advance materially increased, so did our ability to feel terrible about not having “enough”. If everyone is “equal”, then you could theoretically have whatever your neighbor has. But if you don’t reach that level of achievement or wealth, you feel hatred for yourself and those who have more than you. We can have so much more than our ancestors had, but the tradeoff is that we constantly feel anxious we aren’t everything we could be.

We haven’t always believed we could gain more status through our own efforts. Technological, political, and social progress over the past three centuries have empowered us to expect more of ourselves. We have limitless potential to increase our wealth and status, but we also have limitless potential to compare ourselves with others and feel inferior.

We are blessed and cursed to live on the earth right now, you can both expect to achieve anything and despair because you haven’t achieved everything.

Meritocracy

Few people like being poor, but the way poverty impacts your self-esteem depends on how your community views poverty. For most of the past two thousand years, poor people had three comforting stories to explain their poverty.

1. God made clergy, nobility, and peasantry, and there was mutual respect between the classes because each class knew they needed the others.
2. Low status does not equal moral worth, and the poor will eventually make it to heaven and inherit the earth.
3. The rich were evil thieves and not worth honoring, and they would eventually suffer the consequences of their evil ways.

Starting in the middle of the eighteenth century, three new stories began to emerge to explain poverty. These stories made poverty more difficult to experience and worry about.

1. The rich contribute the most to society, not the poor. Greedy rich people led by the invisible hand create more prosperity for all, but the poor are a drain on society’s resources.
2. Wealth and morality are connected. In a society where everyone has access to opportunities, those who succeed and achieve wealth do so because of their character not their bloodline or inheritance. Wealthy people are better, and conversely poor people are worse and deserve their poverty.
3. The poor are genetically and mentally inferior. Social Darwinism said being rich or poor was the result of our biology, and helping the poor with welfare was pointless because the poor couldn’t change.

As if the struggles of poverty weren’t bad enough, in a meritocracy poor people also feel shame for being poor.

Being poor is more or less tolerable depending on the story you and your community believe about what causes poverty. For nearly two thousand years, being poor did not necessarily reflect poorly on your character or self-worth. Meritocratic societies created opportunity for all, but they also introduced the idea that poor people were inferior and their poverty was their own fault.

Society used to feel compassion for the poor, but in a meritocratic society the poor are viewed as inferior and feel shame for being poor.

Snobbery

We come into the world as helpless babies, and we are loved unconditionally just for being ourselves. But this doesn’t last. As we age, we enter a world full of snobs: people who seek power and give their attention and love only to those with high worldly status. Snobs don’t care who we are deep down, only what we do and what we have.

Newspapers and gossip make the problem worse. Snobs struggle to think for themselves and instead look to the opinions of important people to guide their own thinking. The press is obsessed with wealth, power, influence, and beauty, not who people really are or the significance of ordinary life. People are afraid of their own insignificance and feel the need to belittle others.

In a world of snobs, people seek luxury and status as symbols of importance. Not having these symbols means we are poor materially, but it also leads to emotional abuse through neglect and sideways glances from snobs.

We want to be loved for who we are inside, not what we do or have. But we live in a world of snobbery where love and attention is given to those with power, influence, and status. Snobs emotionally punish those with low status through neglect and shame.

We want to be loved for who we are, but we live in a world of snobs who only value influence.

Dependence

In the past, gaining status was nearly impossible, but so was losing it. If you were born a noble you would always be a noble. You didn’t have to worry about losing your place in society, and modern societies have fought to reverse this. Status is no longer given at birth, but instead earned by your performance in a fast moving and constantly changing economy. However, we are not in complete control of our performance or our ability to acquire and hold onto status. This makes us anxious.

Our success and self-esteem depend on 5 unpredictable things:

1. Fickle talent. We can’t direct our talent as we please. Sometimes we are talented and succeed, and other times apparently talentless and fail.
2. Dependence on luck. Whether you believe in luck or not, being in the right place at the right time matters. In the past, luck was an acceptable answer for success and failure, now we believe we are in control and discount the impact of luck.
3. Dependence on an employer. Will I lose my job? Will I get the promotion? The answers are often out of our control, regardless of our performance.
4. Dependence on an employer’s profitability. Our performance can be amazing, and our employer can still struggle. The market changes fast, and it’s difficult for companies to sustain their success.
5. Dependence on the global economy. The economy cycles through booms and busts, regardless of your performance.

Our status at work is never guaranteed, it depends on our performance and the health of the organization. This causes anxiety. In addition, our work is how we gain status and respect from others, it is what we “do”. This causes even more anxiety. We have less control than we lead ourselves to believe over the primary source of our worldly status.

Anyone can gain status through their own performance and success. However, we have less control over our performance and success than we think we do. The source of our status, our employment, can vanish instantly regardless of our performance and this makes us anxious.

We want to believe we have complete control over our ability to earn status through hard work, but much of what leads to success is out of our control.

Philosophy

Most people care deeply about how they are viewed by the world. Historically, people cared so much that they were willing to die in a duel just to defend their honor. We do not duel to the death today, but needing to be liked by others may still be our first priority. There is a group of people who refuse to see themselves through the opinion of others, philosophers.

Ancient Greek philosophers did not base their self-worth on the opinions of others, but on their own behavior and logically tested opinions of themselves. They resisted status anxiety with reason asking themselves questions like “Is what I want really what I need?” and “Is what I fear truly what there is to fear?”.

Philosophy doesn’t value public opinion because it is based on intuition, emotion, and custom rather than reason. Practicing philosophy may leave us without friends as we dismiss others’ opinions, but it can help us base our own worth on reason and logic instead of another person’s opinion. We will care less about what random people think of us, and more about who we know ourselves to be.

Ancient philosophers resisted the temptation to care about what others thought of them by using reason and logic to test the opinions of others. If someone else has a negative opinion of us, then we should care only if that opinion is true. Who we know ourselves to be is what matters, not what other random people think of us.

Philosophy teaches us to base our self-worth on what we know to be true through reason, not what other people think of us.

Art

Art helps explain the human condition to us, it is the criticism of life. Many artists have used novels, poems, plays, paintings, and film to challenge society and the way it rewards status. Great artists help us see the destructive path of snobbery and force us to reevaluate which qualities and values have real worth.

Our fear of failure is so great, in large part, because we worry what others will think of us if we fail. Tragedy as an art form helps us look at failure with more understanding and empathy. Tragedies teach us that people are complex, they make mistakes, and sometimes they are just unlucky. We don’t finish a tragedy judging the lead character, we feel for the character. Tragedies remind us that humanity connects us all, and that we too could have the same tragic end.

Comedy effectively masks criticism and important lessons inside entertainment. Great comedians force us to confront our deep vulnerabilities, especially anxiety about our own status. A great joke leaves us feeling awkward that the comedian knew so much about us, and comforted that we are not alone in our insecurities.

Art is an effective tool to relieve the pressure of status anxiety. Art gives us a fresh and liberating perspective on ourselves, status, failure, and the human condition. A tragedy reminds us that status is fleeting, and a comedy forces us to face our own vulnerability.

Great art helps us see ourselves and others for who we truly are and the resulting tears of joy and sadness soften our anxiety.

Politics

How status is given in a society changes, just look at what was most valued in different historical eras: Sparta valued jocks who could kill, 8th century Europe prized Christian saints, 12th century Europe honored knights in castles, and 19th century Britain lauded noble gentleman. “The ruling ideas of every age are always the ideas of the ruling class.” Politics is the way people and societies change what they value, or which characteristics and ideals are worthy of high status.

Today status is awarded to people with money. We believe money represents the moral worth of a person and that money brings happiness, but this isn’t true. Native Americans lived a materially modest life, but they enjoyed high levels of contentment. Then, European traders taught indians to want material wealth. Afterwards, the Native American status system quickly shifted from attaining wisdom to collecting things, and these things did not make them happy.

We are led to believe through a barrage of ideology that the communities we live in and their rules, values, and institutions are, somehow, natural. They are not. Societies constantly change, and changes that are impossible to imagine can happen in only a few generations. For example, look at the progress women have made socially, politically, and economically in the 20th century alone. Having a political perspective means understanding the ideologies of our society, and understanding is the first step to creating change.

Societies determine what people value and who receives status, but this changes over time through politics. Today, society values money and uses ideology to convince us that this is the natural order of things. But prizing money is not natural, and understanding this is the first step towards change.

Society changes what it values most based on who is in charge; today society values wealth, but politics can change this too.

Religion

Thinking about our own death helps us live a more authentic and meaningful life now. And from the perspective of death, religious and secular ideas of what matters in life are very similar: love, relationships, and charity. Religion encourages faithful followers to worry about their status in the eyes of God, not what the world thinks of them.

Consider how finite your existence is relative to the infinite. Visit ancient ruins and appreciate vast natural landscapes, we are all small and insignificant by comparison. Seeing the enormous difference between our mortal selves and the infinite makes it easy to overlook the minor differences between ourselves and other humans. We are more similar to the rest of humanity than we like to admit, but embracing community can relieve our status anxiety.

Religion teaches us that there are two different types of status we can attain: worldly and spiritual. Worldly status is based on power, wealth, and what other people think of us. Spiritual status depends on humility, love, and serving others. In the past, religion successfully used art, music, and architecture to honor the spiritual attributes and keep them ever present in the sight and mind of people.

Contemplating our own death can help us live a more meaningful life now. Worrying about the differences between people is pointless, we are all small and insignificant compared to infinite time and space. Religion has helped people worry less about getting money and power and more about giving love and service.

We worry less about what the world thinks of us when we contemplate our own death, the relative insignificance of all people, and God’s opinion of us.

Bohemia

Choosing to live your life your own way can reduce your status anxiety, and we have the Bohemians to thank for legitimizing this idea. Bohemians prize art and feeling, not wealth and worldly status. Thoreau gives voice to this Bohemian ideal in Walden saying, “Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without.”

It is difficult to challenge the ideas, culture, and values of the public and live life your own way. It is especially difficult to do this if you maintain friendships and associations with people who primarily value money and power. Bohemians choose their friends carefully and cluster with other Bohemians to avoid the peer pressure of worldly status seekers.

We can’t completely escape our need for status, but we can choose how we satisfy that need. We can actively choose the values that matter most in our life instead of blindly accepting the materialistic values of public opinion. There is more than one way to succeed at life.

Bohemians popularized the idea that you can live life your own way and choose your own values. But choosing not to value money and power is hard if you continue to associate with people who value money and power. We will continue to care about our own status, but we can choose the type of status we will care about and succeed at life in our own way.

It’s not easy, but you can go against public opinion, choose the values you will live by, and succeed at life in your own way.

While a logo might be the most recognizable manifestation of a brand, it’s only one of many. Brands cut across media, and present themselves in colors, shapes, words, sounds, and even smells. That’s because a brand, at it’s core, is immaterial. It’s about abstract attributes and values which present themselves in concrete ways:

• Virgin America is about quality, fun, innovation, challenging assumptions. You can see it in purple aircraft lighting and quirky safety videos.
• Honda is about affordable quality and trust. You can see it in reliable, albeit generic-looking vehicles, and simple and approachable visual design.
• Ikea is about cost-consciousness, simplicity and togetherness. You can see it in incredibly affordable furniture, family-oriented stores, and approachable visual design.

Building a brand is a long-term commitment which results from thousands of interactions between a customer and the brand’s touch points over time.

“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.”
– Roy E. Disney

Startups lack the time to develop this relationship: it’s a race against the clock, and every dollar spent needs to bring the company closer to validation and traction. But users impressions — especially first impressions — matter greatly. How can a startup make the most of its branding efforts for the best results?

Here I describe a simple branding exercise I’ve used and evolved with the companies at Expa with success. It can help your team get into alignment and articulate the core attributes of your brand. The output will enable designers to define how it looks, writers to how it speaks, and for any vendor or team member to make coherent decisions by themselves. And it won’t cost you more than two 90-minute sessions and a few dozen sticky-notes.

The Basic Idea

This exercise has four phases:

1. Brainstorm possible values and attributes for your brand
2. Separate those into what belongs and doesn’t belong to it
3. Group the ones which belong into abstracted groups
4. Distill them into values, key attributes and analogies

Every brand stakeholder in your company should take part, so if your team fits in a room, get them of all in there. If it’s larger, get the people who’d be expressing the brand day-to-day: designers, marketers, executives, salespeople, recruiters. You can also bring whoever demonstrates interest — you want motivated people brainstorming. In any case, just don’t do this by yourself: you’ll end up with a limited perspective.

Once you’ve listed the participants, schedule a 90-minute block for the first session in a room with whiteboards or foam boards. Get plenty of colorful sticky-notes (at least 40 per person) and Sharpies for everyone. Don’t use fine point pens so ideas can later be read from a distance. Snacks could be handy too.

1. Brainstorming Attributes

For starters, keep in mind (and reinforce with the group) the basic rules of brainstorming: there are no bad ideas, and be additive to other’s ideas. Set a timer for 10 minutes to instill some urgency.

Start writing out random adjectives on stickies, words (simple, exclusive) or short expressions (gender neutral, on your terms) which could be used to describe your brand. As people write down each idea, they should say it out loud and place the sticky on the table, so others can hear it. This lets participants build on each other’s ideas.

People will be tempted to stick to “good” adjectives — like smart, professional, etc. Those can be acceptable, but also tend to be generic, which isn’t helpful in differentiating a brand. So try to include controversial or even silly ideas, just to get the discussion going. A few of my favorites are complex, hard, expensive, aggressive, powerful, for dummies, rough. They often cause people to write down the opposing notion — or something in between — , which leads to interesting discussions later on.

Throughout this brainstorm, make sure to keep people generative and on topic — no discussion about what works or doesn’t should happen yet.

After about 10 minutes, the popcorn might stop popping — ideas might start slowing down. If not, do another 10-minute round. Avoid stopping until after 2 minutes have gone by with no new ideas (the silence can be helpful sometimes).

2. Yeses and Nos

Next, write on opposite sides of the whiteboard, the words Yes and No. As a group, go take every single sticky note and agree on where it should go. yes means “this word could be used to describe our brand”, and no means, uh, no. Since you’re the facilitator, you might want to stand up and do the actual moving of stickies, but everyone’s participation is encouraged.

The discussions which happen during this step are the most important part of the process. There will be plenty of disagreement, which is healthy, but which needs to be sorted out. Some stickies might actually start on one side and move to the other (that’s why we’re using them!). When you hit a wall, try to deconstruct the meaning of the word in question. A few tactics I use:

• Try to find a close synonym. Sometimes a specific word carries implicit meaning to some people, and replacing it with an equivalent can filter it out.
• Use an antonym. If it’s clear the opposite of the original word belongs under yes or no, then it’s easier to place the original.
• Separate the brand from the product. A product might be easy to use, but it doesn’t mean the brand should make ease one of its core values.
• Separate the brand from the customer. Your product might cost $5,000/seat, but it doesn’t mean the company should be perceived as exclusive.
• Skip it and come back to it later. A word you discuss later might clarify the disagreement about the current one.

This process will take quite some time, and you should use all the remaining time in this session to finish this sorting. A few disagreements might remain unresolved, and that’s OK (up to about 5 or 6 adjectives — if you have a large “maybe” group, you probably haven’t gotten to the bottom of it).

You should be exhausted at this point, so call it a day. Document your board (photos are great, transcribing each word is ideal) and feel free take down all the stickies, but keep yes and no separate!

3. Surfacing Patterns

For the second session, get back to that same room and bring the yes stickies from before. This should also take 90 minutes, but it’s often done in less time.

This step is about organizing ideas in groups of emerging patterns, a process also known as clustering or affinity mapping. To get started, spread out all the yes stickies on a table.

Start picking stickies at random, and placing them on the board, grouping related adjectives close to each other. This might feel awkward in the beginning, but after 3 to 5 minutes the team will start to spot similarities, and tight groupings will emerge. You will probably see groups like these three:

• Presentation. Visual ideas about style, color, light, polish, etc.
• Tone. Communication-related adjectives such as voice, authoritativeness, friendliness, etc.
• Personality. Human-like attributes, such as being expert-like, teacher-like, childlike, etc.

As well as other groups, mainly about values: abstract, almost philosophical notions — transparent, affordable, innovative, etc. These will probably be unique to your company’s mission or offering.

Try to organize all stickies on the board in up to 60 minutes. As groups become clear, write a descriptive name for it on the board (or on a different color sticky), above the adjectives. Once you’re done, your board should look somewhat like this, and you’ll be ready for the last step.

4. Distilling into Values

This is the last step, and the most analytical. Going through each of the groupings, transpose them to a hierarchical list in a text document, including titles and content. You can work off this template if you want. Example:

Visual

• Clean
• Bright
• Colorful
• Handmade
• etc

Tone

• Funny
• Colloquial
• Deferent
• etc

If any of the groups doesn’t feel unique to your brand, ignore it. If it seems to be about abstract values, put it under a Values header, with all adjectives in a single line. Then, with the team, try to sum up what that group of values encompasses. Example:

Values

• Safe, Secure, Trustworthy → Secure
• Easy, Empowering, Low Barrier To Entry → Easy
• etc

Then take another pass at the resulting list and, try to coalesce each group further. Aim to limit each header to 4 items, to ensure the result is actionable.

These attributes by themselves can still be a bit ambiguous. That’s when brand comparisons can be helpful.

Use the remaining 10 minutes of your session to add to the document a “Brand Comparisons” header. Under it, list at least 10 sentences using the format “More like ___ than ___”. You should fill in the blanks with other brands. But brands in the broadest sense possible: well known public entities about which there’s consistent perception between people. They should ideally not be in your industry, and can include celebrities, cities, typical dishes, etc. This part usually leads to fun discussions. Examples:

• More like Google than Apple
• More like Toyota than BMW
• More like Tag Heuer than Swatch
• More like Sketch than Photoshop
• More like George Clooney than Ryan Gosling
• More like burgers than sushi
• etc

Try to get at least 15 of these; 30 if possible.

And that’s the end of the exercise, you should have now a document which looks roughly like this. It outlines your brand values, shows concrete ways those values present themselves, and anchors your brand relative to others in different spaces.

Conclusion

You could work with a branding agency for a richer — and more expensive — process, which could achieve more granular results. But you have little time and money to spend, and this will get you what you need to start establishing a brand.

Share that document with a graphic designer, and you can expect logo designs which fit your brand. Work from it with your marketing team, and it will be easy to define what language and tone to use.

Hopefully this exercise was useful. If you have any questions, please add them to the comments, or get in touch.

At this point we all know that exercise is good for us.

The health benefits of physical activity have been well-documented — including helping to control weight, strengthen the cardiovascular system, fortify bones, and reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

There is no doubt that the physical benefits of exercise are profound.

But the effects of exercise are perhaps most significant on the brain.

In fact, it is the mental benefits that have kept me running in the morning for over a decade now (the other health and fitness benefits are simply nice bonuses).

I swear by my morning run because it makes me sharper mentally all day long. And I am convinced that my morning running routine has changed my life and career more than any other habit.

The effects of exercise on my cognitive performance are so strong that I feel compelled to encourage others to take up a similar routine. But of course running isn’t for everyone, so I wanted to research the overall best types of exercise for the brain.

Fortunately, John Ratey M.D. is a leading expert in the space and wrote a best-selling book on the topic called Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

In the book, Ratey calls exercise “the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function.”

He points out that exercise has been proven to:

• Improve learning ability and grow brain cells
• Alleviate stress, anger, anxiety, and depression
• Increase focus, attention, and alertness
• Reduce the risk of age-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other forms of Dementia

And he details the best exercise regimen for optimal brain performance:

• At a minimum, we should be following the Public Heath recommendations which call for some type of moderate-intensity aerobic activity for 30 minutes at least 5 days a week.
• Going a step further, it is best to do some form of aerobic activity 6 days a week, for 45 minutes to 1 hour. Go on the longer side for 4 of the days at moderate intensity (65–75% of your maximum heart rate), and then 2 of the days should be on the shorter side at high intensity (75–90%). Make sure not to do the high-intensity days back-to-back in order to let your body and brain recover.
• For your aerobic exercise, activities like running, cycling, or swimming are great, but the best type of aerobic activity is really whatever you will truly be able to build into your lifestyle. If you haven’t been active in a while, the best way to begin is to start walking.
• On your shorter, high-intensity days, add some form of strength or resistance training to build muscles, strengthen bones, and protect joints (do 3 sets of your exercises at weights that allows you to do 10–15 repetitions in each set).
• Make efforts to mix in more complex activities that will build skills, challenge the brain, and help you stay agile — for example rock climbing, martial arts, gymnastics, dance, yoga, pilates, or balance drills. Racket sports are especially great because they simultaneously tax the cardiovascular system and the brain. According to Ratey, “The combination of challenging the brain and body has a greater positive impact than aerobic exercise alone.”
• Consider joining an exercise group to get going and keep you on track. Social interaction is great for health, reduces stress, and boosts motivation. “Exercise cues up the building blocks of learning, and social interaction cements them in place,” says Ratey.

Overall, Ratey’s advice for people is to “get fit and then continue challenging themselves.” He advises to do something almost every day, but keep your program flexible and keep adapting to try new things.

There is no doubt that exercise is incredibly powerful for both the mind and body.

We’re awake for at least 16 hours each day. Spending just one of those hours (or even half an hour) exercising will be the most important thing you do all day!

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The Low Fat Era

Several years back, the monumental task of recommending an optimal diet for type 2 diabetics was assigned to Dr. Richard Kahn, then the chief medical and scientific officer of the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Like any good scientist, he began by reviewing the available published data.

“When you look at the literature, whoa is it weak. It is so weak”, he said. But that was not an answer that the ADA could give. People demanded dietary advice. So, without any evidence to guide him one way or the other, Dr. Kahn went with the generic advice to eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet. This was the same general diet advice given to public at large.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s food pyramid would guide food choices. The foods that formed the base of the pyramid, the ones to be eaten preferentially were grains and other refined carbohydrates. These are the exact foods that caused the greatest increase in blood glucose. This was also the precise diet that failed to halt obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemics in generations of Americans.

Let’s juxtapose these two incontrovertible facts together.

1. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by high blood glucose.
2. Refined carbohydrates raise blood glucose the most.

Type 2 diabetics should eat the very foods that raise blood glucose the most? Illogical is the only word that comes to mind. This happened, not just in the United States, but around the world. The British Diabetes Association, European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), Canadian Diabetes Association, American Heart Association, National Cholesterol Education Panel recommend fairly similar diets keeping carbohydrates at 50–60% of total calories and dietary fat at less than thirty percent.

The 2008 American Diabetes Association position statement on nutrition advised that “Dietary strategies including reduced calories and reduced intake of dietary fat, can reduce the risk for developing diabetes and are therefore recommended”. The logic is hard to follow. Dietary fat does not raise blood glucose. Reducing fat to emphasize carbohydrates, known to raise blood glucose could protect against diabetes? How they believed that would work is unknown.

It further advised, against all common sense that “intake of sucrose and sucrose-containing foods by people with diabetes does not need to be restricted”. Eating sugar was OK for type 2 diabetics? This could not realistically be expected to lower blood glucose, and the proof came soon enough.

The 2012 Treatment Options for Type 2 Diabetes in Adolescents and Youths (TODAY) randomized study reduced caloric intake to a miniscule 1200–1500 calories per day of a low-fat diet. Despite this massive effort, blood glucose was not improved. This classic ‘Eat Less, Move More’ strategy failed yet again, continuing its perfect record, unblemished by success. That this diet would not work should have been fairly obvious from the beginning.

A comprehensive review in 2013 concluded that several different types of diets did in fact provide better glycemic control. Specifically, four were found beneficial — the low carbohydrate, low glycemic-index, Mediterranean and high protein diet. All four diets are bound by a single commonality — a reduction in dietary carbohydrates, and specifically, not a reduction in dietary fat, saturated or otherwise.

Low-fat diets were falsely believed to reduce cardiovascular disease. A recent review by Dr. Zoë Harcombe found no evidence to support this contention . Indeed, five separate prospective trials since the 1960s have failed to find any relationship between dietary fat and cardiovascular disease, including the Puerto Rico Heart Health Program and the Western Electric Study. The Nurse’s Health Study, once adjusted for trans-fats, found no relationship between dietary fat or dietary cholesterol and heart disease. Despite forty years of studies trying vainly to link dietary fat, dietary cholesterol and heart disease, still not a single shred of evidence could be found.

The final nail in the coffin was the 2006 Women’s Health Initiative, the largest randomized dietary study ever undertaken, which proved this notion false. Almost 50,000 women followed this low-fat, calorie-reduced diet for over 8 years. Daily caloric intake was reduced by over 350. Yet the rates of heart disease, stroke did not improve whatsoever. Neither did this calorie-reduced diet provide any weight loss. Despite good compliance, the weight difference at the end of the study was less than ¼ pounds despite years of caloric restriction. There were absolutely no tangible benefits to long-term compliance to a low-fat diet.

In diabetics, the story was the same. The Action for Health in Diabetes (LookAHEAD) studied the low fat diet in conjunction with increased exercise. Eating only 1200–1800 calories per day with less than 30% from fat, and 175 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity, this was the recommendation of every diabetes association in the world. Would it reduce heart disease as promised?

Hardly. In 2012, the trial was stopped early due to futility after 9.6 years of high hopes. There was no chance of showing cardiovascular benefits. The low-fat calorie-reduced diet had failed yet again.

Exercise

Lifestyle interventions, typically a combination of diet and exercise, are universally acknowledged as the mainstay of type 2 diabetes treatments. These two stalwarts are often portrayed as equally beneficial and why not?

Exercise improves weight loss efforts, although its effects are much more modest than most assume. Nevertheless, physical inactivity is an independent risk factor for more than 25 chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Low levels of physical activity in obese subjects are a better predictor of death than cholesterol levels, smoking status or blood pressure. The benefits of exercise extend far beyond simple weight loss. Exercise programs improve blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose, insulin sensitivity, strength and balance.

Exercise enhances insulin sensitivity, without involving medications and their potential side effects. Exercise has the added benefit of being low-cost. Trained athletes have consistently lower insulin levels, and these benefits can be maintained for life as demonstrated by studies on Masters’ level athletes. Exercise programs have proven themselves in obese type 2 diabetics as well.

Yet results of both aerobic and resistance exercise studies in type 2 diabetes are varied. Some show benefit for A1C, but others do not. Meta-analysis shows significant reduction in A1C, but not in body mass, suggesting that exercise does not need to reduce body weight to have benefits.

Despite all the benefits of exercise, it may surprise you to learn that I think that this is not useful information. Why not? Because everybody already knows this. The benefits of exercise have been extolled relentlessly for the last forty years. I have yet to meet a single person who had not already understood that exercise might help type 2 diabetes and heart disease. If people already know its importance, then what is the point of telling them again?

The main problem has always non-compliance. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This is only more of the game of ‘Blame the Victim’. A myriad of issues may deter an exercise program. Obesity itself, joint pain, neuropathy, peripheral vascular disease, back pain, heart disease may all combine to make exercise difficult or even unsafe. Overall, I suspect the biggest issue is lack of results. The benefits are greatly overhyped and exercise doesn’t work nearly as well as advertised. Weight loss is often minimal. This lack of results, despite great effort is demoralizing.

Conceptually, exercise seems an ideal way to burn off the excess ingested calories of glucose. Standard recommendations are to exercise 30 minutes per day, five days per week or 150 minutes per week. At a modest pace, this may only result in daily 150–200 kcal of extra energy expenditure, or 700–1000 kcal per week. This pales in comparison to a total energy intake of 14,000 calories per week. A single day of fasting creates a 2000-calorie deficit, without doing anything!

There are other well-known limitations to exercise. In studies, all exercise programs produce substantially fewer benefits than expected. There are two main mechanisms. First, exercise is known to stimulate appetite. This tendency to eat more after exercise reduces expected weight loss and benefits become self-limiting. Secondly, a formal exercise program tends to decrease non-exercise activity. For example, if you have been doing hard physical labor all day, you are unlikely to come home and run ten kilometers for fun. On the other had, if you’ve been sitting in front of the computer all day, that ten kilometer run might start sounding pretty good. Compensation is a well-described phenomenon in exercise studies.

In the end, here’s the main problem. Type 2 diabetes is not a disease that is caused by lack of exercise. The underlying problem is excessive dietary glucose and fructose causing hyperinsulinemia, not lack of exercise. Exercise can only improve insulin resistance of the muscles. It does not improve insulin resistance in the liver at all. Reversing type 2 diabetes depends upon treating the root cause of the disease, which is dietary in nature.

Imagine that you turn on your bathroom faucet full blast. The sink starts to fill quickly, as the drain is small. Widening the drain slightly is not the solution, because it does not address the underlying problem. The obvious solution is to turn off the faucet.

In type 2 diabetes, a diet full of processed grains and sugar is filling our bodies quickly with glucose and fructose. Widening the ‘drain’ by exercise is minimally effective. The obvious solution is to turn off the faucet. If the underlying cause of the disease is not lack of exercise, increasing it will not address the actual cause of the problem and is only a Band-Aid solution at best.

“Remember, dreams without goals are just dreams and they ultimately fuel disappointment. Have dreams, but have goals, life goals, yearly goals, monthly goals, daily goals.” — Denzel Washington

There’s a very big difference between wanting something in a virtuous way, and pining for something that you’re not committed to achieving. The winning way of getting what you want is to practice visualizing your goal and walking through this step-by-step. Everything great begins with your imagination, which I encourage you to stretch and use as creatively as you can to think of exactly what your biggest dreams look like in practice.

Visualization is integral to starting the mental building process of putting ourselves in the position we desire to be — to live. You may say that you want to be a bestselling author, start your own marketing business or even learn how to play guitar. That’s great. I believe you should absolutely speak those things over your life. But what are you actually doing about in the meantime?

For most people, the next step is simply to take action. Fine. Seems like a good idea, right? The action most people miss out on — the necessary predecessor — is imagination and visualization. Set the bar high. Imagine yourself playing the guitar, mastering the basic chords and then performing at local clubs. Imagine yourself performing at Madison Square Garden.

If you’re trying to start your own business, not only do you need a plan, you need a clear vision as to what each step in the process looks like. Know this — nothing will ever go exactly according to plan, but your odds of reaching your goals and success dramatically improve once you put something to plan. The “planning” phase is not just the verbal and written accord. It’s the visualization, the mental walk-through of what you truly want.

Building Your Vision

Take this from Brian Scudamore who detailed his experience for Inc.com of how he built a $100 Million multinational company:

“People typically think about goal setting in one of two ways:

1. Fantasize about the future irrespective of their present reality.

2. Think about their current situation and project forward while giving consideration to their present limitations.

According to more than 200 scientific studies on visualization, the best way to achieve real results is to utilize both types of visualization. This tactic is known as mental contrasting. By following up your pie-in-the-sky Painted Picture with nuts-and-bolts strategic planning, you’ll have both the inspiration and the gameplan necessary to reach your desired destination.

As you use mental contrasting, it’s critical to do the visualization and strategic planning in different places as these two processes require completely different mindsets.”

Visualization feeds goal planning, which leads to action and a higher-level of commitment toward achieving your goals and dreams. Brian Scudamore was able to blend a dream — what seemed like a total pipe dream, might I add! — with clear vision that he articulated to his employees. He then crafted a game plan grounded in truths, business strategy and metrics. He found himself a winner.

We’ve seen an example from business — it’s even easier to see how powerful this is with sports. Athletes are infinitely more successful when they visualize themselves pouring in the game-winning bucket, scoring the goal — mentally envisioning the angles and speed — or how to properly execute a figure-skating jump.

As Christopher Bergland explains, visualization is critical for athletes in reducing the time for mastery of a highly complex skill. Seeing and visualizing BEFORE doing literally shaves off minutes, hours and months of time to help athletes compete at the level they desire. The great athletes, as a result, practice visualization because it helps them to be more efficient in every way.

“Now, researchers from the UK have identified that optimizing someone’s gaze is key to fine-tuning the mastery of complex motor skills during observation. Scientists at Brunel University London created a novel technique to identify how watching a video, which highlights crucial details of a golf swing — such as how golfers line up the ball, position their feet, and twist their hips — significantly reduces the time it takes to master this complex motor skill.” Source

Whether it’s sport, art, mastering business skills or parenting skills, observing others and visualizing ourselves doing it is a skill to master. We’re all crunched by a variety of factors — namely time and money. In the digital age in which we live, video, e-books and a plethora of resources are at our disposal to help us get to where we want to be faster and more effectively.

Speed is not the only name of the game. Proficiency is faster developed when we visualize what it is that we want. Take this into your professional approach with your job and all of your entrepreneurial pursuits. Nurture this thought in how you love and care for your family. Visualization — creative imagination — is the launching pad for living the life you desire. It starts with a dream.