Eating my mistakes.
How much will a mistake cost me when I make a typo? What's the difference with making a dietary mistake? Can one mistake in my diet undo a lot of good decisions in what I eat?
I bet there are actions that have vastly more impact on my health than others. I calculate this in with taking actions that don’t seem like much but accumulate fast.
With all the advice about what food is healthy and what food is not that can change next month or next week it seems impossible to do anything well but science has progressed much and the standards of food have risen as well over time.
These accumulative positive changes seem to outweigh the much smaller differences we are dealing with now.
Cultivating habits that accumulate positive effects over time can have great results on short time also but they not be as visible at first. Another consideration I make is that of consistency over time. How well can I maintain this on a regular basis? If it is difficult to implement on a regular basis the chances are slim it will stick.
Having fun with being creative and having fun in finding different solutions is part of the mentality that makes it easy to keep experimenting with what works and what not.
Even if half of the decisions you made have seemingly no visible effect immediately they may affect results later on. Even if half of it didn’t do anything the accumulative effect of the habit of cultivating accumulative positive changes outweighs the negative results it seems.
It seems that 20% of our actions lead to 80% of the good results but we often don’t know which 20% so the message is to keep sawing seed and wait till the harvest to see what can be reaped. Plant a thousand flowers and see how many will bloom.
Of these 20% actions, 10% of that may lead to 90% of results and so on. This can skew quite a lot.
How much of an angle do you need to change to put a golfball when you are off your mark? It can be that you only need to adjust your angle a fraction of an inch to score.
Superfoods seems to come and go and the effects for our health seem to be a bit exaggerated but we don’t need to know every detail of superfoods to understand if it is good for us or not. We don’t need to know how exactly it is good for us exactly as long as we understand the big strokes of it.
Even if you have 5 superfoods at home and only 3 do what all the hype is all about and 1 does only half what we think it does and 1 does barely anything more than decent food its still better than eating only decent food.
Understanding the asymmetry seems key here.
As long as the positive decisions skew way more than the negative decisions the overall accumulative results are great. Making mistakes and still making progress.
This approach helped me not to worry too much about making little mistakes and not to lose sight of the bigger results I can have by focussing on what works.
“Failing upwards,” I think people call it.
