Monthly Archives: July 2007

Round Wheels Work (4 of 5 Rules of Change)

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(4 of 5 Rules)

As a reminder, my goal is to get to 10-12% body fat by November 2007 (starting from around 20-23% in August of 2006). This series of articles talks about the approach I’m taking by turning some business management techniques onto myself. In prior posts about changing body fat, I talked about how I “learned what I was changing” and how I had early some success by remembering “less is more” and continued that success by realizing that evolution trumps revolution. But when you don’t know how to evolve…

Miss Scarlett, I Don’t Know Nothing About Skinnin’ No Cats!

When I’ve been faced with tackling a new problem I’ve never had to tackle before I often find out there are many ways to solve the problem. Worse, lots of people claim success at each approach I find, so it’s hard to decide what the right course of action is.

For example, recently I’ve had to figure out the following things: How to structure the legal framework for a startup company; how to track customer support issues for a new Internet product my company is building; and how to start training for a marathon. For legal structures for companies, people can use “partnerships”, “c corporations”, “limited liability corporations” and other forms. To keep track of support requests (e.g. why was I billed for this?) some people just use a simple spreadsheet and communicate via e-mail with customers (and swear by it); others buy software dedicated to tracking support. When training for a marathon, some people run a gazillion miles; some people slowly ramp up and never run more than 30 miles in a week, and some people train by carrying their wife on their back.

In other words, there always appear to be “many ways to skin a cat“.

Now, truth is I don’t know anything about skinning cats. I’ve never done it. I’ve never wanted to do it. So, where the hell do I start? Well…

Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits

…I did grow up on a farm in Ireland and we raised rabbits commercially for a few years. And it turns out I know quite a few things about rabbits:

  • If managed intensively, Rabbits can produce 12-18 offspring every 3 months.
  • Rabbits mature at about 6-months-old, and can then breed year round.
  • You don’t need many males (bucks) to maintain a high reproductive rate, so they are automatically used for meat (sorry guys, at least in rabbits, we’re expendable).
  • You can wean offspring (and slaughter for meat) after about 8 weeks.
  • That many rabbits produce quite a lot of poop (which I had to clean), fur (which I had to clean off of water pipes) and meat.
  • Every rabbit we killed for meat had to be skinned before delivered to its final consumer.

And so in my life I’ve skinned lots of rabbits. After doing that over and over, I’ve come to this conclusion:

While there may be “many ways to skin a rabbit”, there’s only one good way to skin a rabbit.

I won’t describe it directly here, but click the link if you really need to know. But, it’s the most economical way. It takes the least time. It causes the least mess. And over decades (maybe centuries) of rabbit farming, it’s used by all rabbit farmers.

What’s my point?

Well, disgusting as it is, if you’re thinking of getting into rabbit farming and want to figure out the best way to skin your rabbits, you’d be a fool not to ask a rabbit-farmer how they do it. If you don’t, you’ll waste money, you’ll waste time, and you’ll cause a big mess. Who wants that!

The same thing applies to anything you’re trying to change; if you don’t know how to evolve what exists today, you’d be a fool not to find the rabbit-farmers of that problem and ask them.

You Are Not Unique

And yet, very often when we’re trying to change, we don’t look for what other people do. We convince ourselves that we’re different than anyone else, we succumb to “not-invented-here” syndrome, and we forge ahead on our own. When you have direct experience this may make sense. Or if what you’re trying to change or create has to be different (like when you’re building a new technology) it may make sense not to look at what others do (but probably not).

But when you’re trying a change you’ve never done before, and it really doesn’t need to be different, it’s good to remember that you’re not as unique as you think you are. No matter what the challenge is, be it social, business or personal, chances are tens to millions of other folks have faced nearly the exact same challenge before. And if you look for those people, they can teach you real shortcuts that are much more likely to succeed that trying on your own. They’ve made millions of mistakes so that you don’t have to.

They’ve invented a round wheel. You should use it.

(There is an exception to this rule: If the industry’s way of doing something is clearly standard, but you have an existing system you need to change that isn’t standard, you’ll likely have more success evolving the existing system towards the standard rather than just imposing what the industry thinks is best. If you don’t evolve the existing system, you’ll end up with the resistance and rebellion I spoke about last week.)

Which Wheel?

Great! So we should use round wheels. Yet I started this post talking about the many perfectly good solutions there are for different problems. How do you pick the right wheel? Simple:

Don’t look for the wheel; look for the wheel-maker.

Describe your problem and what’s important to you, ask yourself who has tried to solve similar problems, and ask them what they did. They’ll tell you their wheels.

Let me give three examples:

  1. How to legally structure a startup: First, ask yourself what’s important to the founders. In the Stolen Bases case, it’s good tax treatment during the investment stage, but legally structured in a standard way that minimizes tax headaches and makes it easy to add investors later. Once you have noted a few of your goals identify similar companies or people who have tried to achieve the same goals. And then, go ask them what they did. It turns out that folks love to give free advice J. We chose a Limited Liability Corporation.
  2. How to track customer support requests: First, ask yourself what’s important to you. Will you be immediately hit with a lot of customers requesting help, and how will they ask (by phone, e-mail, etc.)? Do you even know who your customers will be? If you’re like me in the early stages of a company, you can’t answer most of those questions. However, I can easily come up with companies that also could not answer those questions. So, I asked those companies (I know several founders in this situation, and there are online communities to post to as well). And our answer was obvious: research but don’t pre-buy or pre-install software. Instead start with a cheap spreadsheet or bug-tracking system, make sure I spend lots of time dealing with our initial customers, and then upgrade to a middle-tier solution with ticket tracking when we better understand our support patterns.
  3. How to run a marathon: First, ask yourself what’s important to you. I want to finish my marathon successfully, but I don’t care about my finishing time. I don’t (contrary to how it appears) want to spend a lot of time training for this. And I want to minimize my chances of injury. So, I looked for people who ran marathons with those criteria, and they suggested I run with a group like Team-In-Training or Team Continuum. So, that’s what I’m doing.

My Fat Loss Wheel

So, let’s bring this back to losing fat. I mentioned last week that I chose to eat 6-times a day as a change. How did I figure that out there? Well, I first asked what my goals were for how I lose fat:

  1. I want to lose fat (not necessarily weight), but more importantly I want to keep off any fat I lose. So whatever change I make has to last me a lifetime.
  2. I don’t want to diet – I think ‘diet’ is a four letter word. Instead, I want to change how I eat so that my normal mode of eating allows me to gain or lose weight with only minor changes.
  3. I do want to lose weight, but not at the expense of my health.

Then, I looked for people who had similar goals and visibly succeeded over long periods of time. I didn’t care about people who lost 20, 30, 100, or 300 pounds. I cared about people who lost mostly fat, and then kept it
off for more than 3 years (my wheel-makers). What did they those folks have in common?

Well, here’s a bunch of them: John Stone, Anthony Ellis, several stories at sites like this, and others.

There’s a lot of stuff in there (good and bad), but if you read through it and look for people who have lost a lot of weight and kept it off for 3+ years, you’ll see the following trends:

  1. All of them decided to make permanent changes in their lives, not just short-term diets.
  2. They measure what they weigh, and what they eat.
  3. They figure out how many calories they should consume a day to maintain their current weight, based on their basal metabolism rate (BMR) (which is how many calories their body expends based on normal activity).
  4. When losing weight, they try to never lose more than 0.5 to 1 pound a week. This means they try to eat 500 calories (about 1.25 Starbucks muffins) a day less than their BMR when losing weight, or 500 calories a day more when gaining. If they consistently lose more than a pound, they INCREASE what they eat!!!
  5. They eat 6 times a day, with small meals, making sure their body never feels hungry (and therefore never starts reducing metabolism to adjust to lower calorie intake).
  6. They drink lots of water, which helps the stomach stay full and hence feel less hungry.
  7. They all lift weights because that encourages the body to use any additional calories for muscle, and more muscle means a higher basal metabolism rate (and therefore more food you can eat without gaining weight).

And here’s what they don’t do:

  1. None of them recommend going all protein all the time.
  2. Almost none of them went for crazy surgery, and those who did often gain weight back or get some additional health problems.
  3. None of them go on crash diets (at least not for long, and they all seem to regret it when they do).
  4. None of them sweat it if weight goes up one day, or if they pig out one day. But the next day, they get back on track and they look at long term trends.

(Note: Some recommend supplements or weight reduction pills; others say they’re extremely dangerous. I’m conservative, so I tend to be with the latter folks on this).

Big Wheel Keep On Turnin’; Body Fat Keep On Burnin’

So, I figured out my BMR (about 2,700 to 3,000 calories a day), subtracted 500 calories (my target zone is 2,200 to 2,500 a day), started counting what I ate, and ate six times a day (I was already lifting weights before I started this).

And I discovered a few things:

  • While I feel hungry when I stop eating my smaller meals, 10 minutes later I no longer feel hungry (it takes the brain time to catch up with the stomach).
  • In order to put together six meals that add up to 2,200 calories a day but also ensure my body never feels hungry, I have to eat more fruit and vegetables because they make me feel fuller throughout the day. And that’s good for many long-term health reasons.
  • I rediscovered cooking as a fun hobby again (and sites like this help me find meals that are really easy, tasty, and good for me).
  • I kept losing body fat (15.1% by June 24th).
  • And I discovered it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I feared it would be.

The question is can I keep doing this? Well, enter the last rule: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate.

(which I’ll continue next week …)

– Art

Help me raise over $5,000 $10,000 to help people suffering from cancer

Nude Numbers (#4)

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No changes to presentation this week. For reference, here’s last week’s data. As with last week, data is presented in SOAP Note format:

  1. I’m still lacking copies of the bike and running training plans (hence no gray areas).

Subjective Data

  1. Got eating back under control – targeted 2,500 to 2,750 calories a day.
  2. My right IT-Band has been acting up for 3 weeks now.
  3. Lower running mileage this week as per Team Continuum training plan – but much faster than normal.
  4. I didn’t get a long ride in on Sunday because… well, I didn’t get to bed on Saturday night until 4am. I had tons of fun, but I’m not young enough for that J
  5. No spinning on Thursday because I took my wife out to dinner instead.

Objective Data

Click here for a PDF version of my dashboard.

Assessment

Well, couple of observations:

  1. Good: weight-room work-outs were good this week. Core getting stronger.
  2. Good: put life ahead of training on Thursday and Saturday (biking mileage is down as a result, but “Happy Wife” == “Happy Life”) and this was good.
  3. Good: running speed continues to increase. I did the race part of my long run (8.6 miles) in 71 minutes, which is fast for me.
  4. Watch: Weight is up but body fat percentage is declining which suggests I’m adding more muscle than fat (but still need to watch here).
  5. Bad: My shoulder injury from some weeks ago is still there. My friend JK suggested I get my bike fitted, so I’m doing that this Thursday.
  6. Bad: My IT-Band on the right side is quite sore. I bought new shoes (3rd pair in 3 months) on Sunday to see if that helps. I’m also taking Monday off to let it rest.

Plan

  1. Keep constraints on eating, at the range to 2,500-2,750 calories per day. Keep body-fat at current % level or below, and focus on abs/core in weight room.
  2. Give IT-Band some time to heal, lightening up on running if necessary.
  3. Get at least one long bike ride in this week.
  4. Get copies of training plans so I can show targets for run and bike.
  5. Start taking photos to track progress (as per a few requests), and if I get brave enough, actually post them.

Evolution, Not Revolution (3 of 5 Rules of Change)

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(3 of 5 Rules)

As a reminder, my goal is to get to 10-12% body fat by November 2007 (starting from around 20-23% in August of 2006). This series of articles talks about the approach I’m taking by turning some business management techniques onto myself. In prior posts about changing body fat, I talked about how I “learned what I was changing” and how I had early some success by remembering “less is more“. Those two techniques help you successfully make an individual change. The next 2 articles will talk about how to choose specific changes. The last will talk about how to make a habit of it.

Che and the Art of Revolution Management

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A new executive gets hired into an existing company with a mandate to drastically change how the company does business. She’s awesome. She’s just had amazing success at FoodleWoodleBoodle.com where she grew revenue from nothing to a gazillion dollars. And, she has big dreams for how the company will change the world.

She’s smart: She knows it’s important to know what she changes, and that less is more. So she’s clearly defined goals for the team and is focused on only one first step! But it’s a big step: she’s going to introduce a brand new product built in a brand new way! She can’t wait to start and her team can’t wait to start…

Fast forward six months, and our intrepid new executive is at odds with all other folks on the executive team, her team is demoralized, no one knows how to get even the simplest stuff done, and all our heroine wants to do is skulk out the door before 4pm and hope no one notices.

What happened? Well, most likely our failed executive tried to implement her revolutionary ends with revolutionary means, and the thing she was trying to change rebelled (a counter-revolution). Like Che Guevara in Cuba in the 1960’s, she tried a change that frightened those who needed to change, and the establishment bucked her. And it’s a very common story…

You Say You Want A Revolution?

This is a blog about change, and it would be foolish of me to dismiss revolutionary means as a way to achieve revolutionary ends – so I won’t. Some truly spectacular things have been achieved with revolutionary means:

  • The American Revolution put in place the world’s most successful representative democracy;
  • Einstein’s sharp break with classical physics allowed us to enter the nuclear age;
  • And Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the antibiotic effects of penicillin changed medicine overnight.

Revolutionary means are exciting; they stir men’s soul; they inspire poetry; they are the means humans remember most in history; Revolutionary tactics are just plain sexy!

But there is a hard truth about revolutions that is rarely publicized:

Revolutionary ends through revolutionary means almost always fail.

Want examples? Well, how about: all the violent revolutions that ended up on the bin heap of history (I’m Irish and our story is littered with them); all the superior technologies that failed to get traction in the marketplace; all the products that have been labeled revolutionary initially that never caught on (Segway anyone?). And I’m not even going to bring up communism.

Why? As mentioned before, everything resists change. And the bigger the change, the bigger the resistance. Revolutionary goals involve change so large it was previously unimaginable. If you try to bring about these goals by making one or two really large changes (revolutionary means), every conscious and unconscious form of resistance will crop up, because (although we won’t admit it) we like the status quo.

For example, if you try to change how a group of people work or interact in some large new way, some people will openly and actively resist your revolutionary change – and these are the easy folks. Worse, others will give lip-service to believing in your change, but continue doing things the old way intentionally. Worst of all, some people will actually believe in your change, but continue doing things the old way anyway because they’re scared. Without near infinite energy and drive to keep pushing against the passive resisters, the revolutionary means will falter. And the revolutionary ends will fail.

It’s not that resisters are bad or evil people; they’re just human. While people can accept and even thrive with small changes, we all get insecure and frightened when the rug is pulled out from under us. Intellectually we may think the change is a good idea, but emotionally we feel threatened.

I want to achieve revolutionary ends, but I don’t have limitless energy or drive and I prefer my attempts at change to have higher odds of success. Fortunately there is another way to succeed…

Vive Le Evolution!

You may not know this, but Malcom McLean has had a big impact on your life. McLean initiated one of the most revolutionary changes of the 20th century – a change that enabled a scale of globalization that was hereto unimaginable. This change has allowed us to get access to goods from far away countries and prices that would shock and astound our grandparents. And what did McLean do? He built a ship that took trailers directly from trucks and stored them directly in its cargo area without requiring the trailer to be opened and repacked.

This one change has directly led to the cost of shipping via the ocean to drop from over $5/ton in the 1950’s to less than $0.20/ton today.

McLean dreamt big and always meant to revolutionize the shipping industry. He first had his big idea of loading ships directly from trucks in 1937, but at the time this idea would have required rail car infrastructure to change, truck beds to standardize, and mechanization to take hold in docks (a place where the Longshoremen ruled) – or put another way, achieving his revolutionary ends would have required truly revolutionary means. He didn’t even attempt it. But over the next 20 years, thanks in large part to World War II, the rail industry developed box cars that loaded directly from trucks. Forms of truck-standardization begin to appear (large boxes). And dock owners were open to mechanization technology to recover margins that had been falling since the war ended. In 1956, the year McLean’s first container ship sailed, his revolutionary change required only one evolutionary idea: load the trailers directly, and therefore don’t require the truck containers to be opened.

McLean is a good example of revolutionary ends achieved through evolutionary means. But it’s not the only one. Property law evolved slowly over centuries in Anglo-Saxon law, but has revolutionized how humans live. The Internet revolution has been achieved through thousands of small evolutions including networking protocols (TCP/IP), cabling innovations (Ethernet), and programs that parse simple text protocols (web browsers).

In fact, look closer at the examples I gave of “revolutionary ends achieved through revolution means” and you’ll see something interesting. While we’re taught the sexy story that they happened overnight, in fact they did not – they evolved:

  • The creation of the US representative democracy experiment started well before the start of the Revolutionary War (you can see it stirring in writings well before 1776), and continues to evolve to this day;
  • Einstein’s big breakthrough of special relativity built heavily on papers published just before Einstein’s (as Newton before him, Einstein saw far because he stood on the shoulders of giants);
  • And Fleming’s “overnight success” with penicillin actually took over 20 years and an entire team of talented scientists making small evolutionary changes.

In all the cases cited above, the drivers of the change had revolutionary ends in mind… they just used a series of smaller evolutionary steps to get there.

Put another way, Evolution, not Revolution.

Fight the Revolution; Accept the Evolution

We’re odd creatures. We’re inspired by revolutionary ends and ideals (the stuff of dreams) but actively resist and fight revolutionary means.

So what’s the key so succeeding at bring about big change? Well, first, it’s always good to have a revolutionary end in mind — the dream is powerful, absolutely required and must be shared by everyone involved in the change.

But in the early stages of change, when you’re trying to get a team to see the goal can be achieved, try to start by evolving from existing systems, people or processes.

People (even good people) will fight a revolutionary step that forces them to move too far out of their comfort zone, but most people (even bad people) will acquiesce to an evolutionary step that moves closer to a revolutionary goal. And after several successful evolutionary steps, while your team may think the next step is yet another evolutionary step, to the outside world you’re a team of revolutionary guerillas successfully installing a new regime (think of this as Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity for Guerillas).

In a more real world example, it’s easy for someone to resist a totally new system, but hard for someone to resist a 20% improvement in an existing system. And once that’s successful, how hard is it to improve another 20% on top of that, especially when your team has seen they could do it once? Before you know it, by making steps that are no more than a 20% change, you’ve made revolutionary change (think of compound interest: 20% growth over 10 years will turn $100 into $620).

Lastly, I’ll admit there are some times where evolution is not the way to go, and you’ve got to make big change (I can’t recommend evolving the Bush cabinet, but that’s OK, because I know George Bush doesn’t believe in evolution either). But these circumstances are rarer than you think they are – we often think it’s the only option because we’re attracted to the concept of revolution. Beware that siren call — you take a big risk by not starting with evolution.

Person, Evolve Thyself!

So back to the goal here, getting to 10-12% body fat by November 2007. It turns out when changing something personal the same principle of Evolution, not Revolution applies.

If you have a revolutionary goal (let’s say run a marathon when you haven’t run more than 1 mile in 10 years), and you use revolutionary means (no training, but take lots of painkillers), you’ll likely fail.

But consistently making small steps that evolve from what you did the week before, you can achieve some spectacular results. For another good example, go read GNP3.0 and watch the revolutionary change that starts in early 2006 by taking small steps.

On my weight loss goals I decided to try to evolve. There are lots of revolutionary means out there; Atkins all-protein-all-the-time diet, Gastric Bypass, or my personal favorite, the Alli Fat pill (which apparently sells quite swell despite the following disclaimer: The treatment effects may include gas with oily spotting, loose stools, and more frequent stools that may be hard to control). All of them are effective in the short term, but people tend to gain the weight back pretty quickly. But for me, they would be huge changes in how I eat or live.

Last week I talked about how I made one small change – I measured what I ate. But with weight loss, your body adapts quickly, so you need to keep changing.

The next step I made was a small evolution on that: I set a target for how much I should eat, and then started eating 6 times a day (I’ll talk next week about why I picked that).

Eating 6 times a day was a very small change — I didn’t change what I ate, just when I ate it. All I had to do was eat half of what I normally ate at a meal (so I could still eat with others), and then eat the remaining bit 3 hours later.

The results: 1% of body fat lost (17.5% to 16.5%) between 4/24 and 5/15, which was right in line with my goals for rate of change. And I never struggled to make the change because it was so small.

Of course, sometimes it’s not obvious where to evolve to for that next 20% improvement. In that case, I’ll recommend — Rule #4: Round Wheels Work.

(which I’ll continue next week …)

– Art

Help me raise over $5,000 $10,000 to help people suffering from cancer

Nude Numbers (#3)

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Couple of changes to presentation this week. For reference, here’s last week’s data. As with last week, data is presented in SOAP Note format:

  1. I’ve added gray areas in the weekly graphs that show the target where the lines should be. I don’t have targets yet for bike and run, but hopefully will have them next week.

Subjective Data

  1. I really relaxed my eating this week (ate whatever I wanted) and my energy level was way higher. This is good, that said…
  2. I got very unrestricted later in the week, and averaged over 3,000 calories a day and body fat crept up slightly. I’m now in danger of missing my November 10-12% target, but…
  3. I used two other alternate measurements of body-fat this week. On the Tanita “Athlete” setting on my scale, I’m getting an 8% measurement. At the gym using the caliper method, I’m getting a 10% measurement. Lastly, using the “mirror” test, I’m happier with my overall fat composition, but my abs/core need work.
  4. My shoulder hampered me on my long ride on Sunday, so I cut it short from a 65-mile target to a 38-mile ride.

Objective Data

Click here for a PDF version of my dashboard.

Hit two personal bests this week. Longest run (Saturday): 10.18 miles. Fastest 4-mile run ever (Friday): 4 miles in 30’20” (with half-mile warm up and cool down).

Assessment

Well, couple of observations:

  1. Good: 2 personal bests! It appears that upping calories was a good call.
  2. Good: Back in weight room which was a miss last week, and abs / core are definitely getting stronger.
  3. Watch: Need to start watching calorie intake again, but increasing my target is the way to go.
  4. Bad: My shoulder injury from some weeks ago is still there. Not much I can do here except work on my core/abs to make sure I have good support during rides (keep shoulders relaxed), but this is an injury I’m just going to have to grit out.

Plan

  1. Put constraints back on eating, but up my calories officially from 2,000-2,250 range to 2,500-2,750 range.
  2. For now, keep body-fat at current level or below, and focus on training over body-fat for a few weeks to see if abs/core work gets me where I want anyway.
  3. Get copies of training plans so I can show targets for run and bike.