Sometimes the secret to doing something is just doing it

Just do the thing!

We potty-trained our first two children pretty much by the age of two; we’re currently in the process of training #3 before #4 arrives next year, God be with us. Many people are often surprised to learn how young our kids are when they’re trained. The multinational diaper conglomerate Pull-Ups suggests that parents “start having potty conversations” with their children “between 24 and 36 months.” This is just laughably transparent—it’s a diaper racket, nothing more. It can be done much, much earlier than that. “How do you do it?” we’ve been asked. The answer is simplicity itself: We just do it. That’s really it. We just do it.

One of the principle vices of modern 21st century living is overthinking stuff. People love to do this. Overthought drives entire industries. I mean, there’s hundreds of books out there—maybe thousands!—that purport to teach you how to teach your child to use the toilet. Countless different systems with as many different methodologies, hundreds of pages in every book representing thousands of man-hours of research, writing, editing, publication. This is quack stuff. It is simply not that difficult. Just put your kid on the potty several time throughout the day; don’t force him to do it if he’s miserable in any one instance, but don’t stop doing it every day; make an oversized, comically happy deal out of it when he finally goes; keep doing that and it’ll click. In all but a few exceptions, this will work. No books required

No.

But people are convinced that it needs to be more complicated than this. As with getting your kid to eat dinner, many people tend to greatly stress themselves out over what are in the end very simple and easily understood tasks and processes. Things like weight loss and healthy eating are also in this category. There’s maybe no self-help topic with more books and more methodology attached to it than weight loss; it drives a huge portion of our economy, consumes entire wings of bookstores, and occupies massive mental real estate in the minds of millions and millions of Americans. Everybody’s got a trick, a system, an approach; everybody swears by the whatever-it-is they do. And yet the solution to weight loss for 99% of people simply could not be simpler: Eat less and/or exercise more. That’s it. No, I didn’t leave anything out. Fewer calories every day: boom, weight loss. More exercise: again, weight loss. Both at the same time? Even more weight loss! It could not be simpler, it is essentially a base-level mathematical formula that has been true for literally the past two million years. All it takes is you just doing it. You just do the thing, and the thing happens. And yet people pretend as if it’s genuinely as difficult and as complex as colonizing Mars.

Again, no.

This genre of lifestyle—the self-help systems, the books with the empty journal pages in back, the brands with the numbers and/or alliteration in the titles (“5 Steps to Mental Freedom,” “14 Habits of Moneymaking Millionaires,” “the Six-Second Weight Loss Whackadoodle”)—is, I think, both a cause and a symptom of what is at bottom the main problem in most people’s lives: a lack of willpower. People mainly just don’t want to get up and do the thing. Maybe it feels overwhelming, confusing, scary; maybe they’re just lazy. But in the main people just seem unwilling to do the thing, which is why you have a $200 billion self-help industry of books that purport to mediate between you and the thing. The dirty secret is that these schemes and formulas don’t really get you any closer to the thing; they get you closer to the schemes and the formulas. The end goal of this stuff isn’t to get the thing done; it’s to get you done.

I mean, is anyone under the allusion that these books and self-help systems actually do anything at scale? I should think if they did we would be a society of glistening, healthy, athletic, sexually potent millionaires with enough highly effective habits to choke a rhino. And yet we’re not. So something isn’t working here.

Note that this isn’t an argument against, you know, actually learning stuff. If you’re a carpenter you need to learn how to measure, to cut, to build stuff that doesn’t fall over; if you want to cook you have to learn about world cuisines, about spices, about cooking principles; if you want chiseled abs you have to learn the best exercises for getting those; and so forth. Learning a technical thing is fine; being endlessly educated about how to motivate yourself to do the technical thing is a grift. And there are many things—like eating less, say, or plopping your kid on the training potty and sitting there with him—that aren’t even technical at all and that you don’t really need anyone to tell you how to do.

Here is your Piedmont homework for the week: Think of a thing you’ve been meaning to do for a long time—something that you’ve told yourself you need to do but you’ve also convinced yourself is too much of a hassle or too difficult—and go do it. Just do the thing. Well or poorly, happily or with irritation, once or many times—it doesn’t matter. Just pick a thing and then do it. See if you feel any different about the thing once you’re done with it. And afterwards, consider saying to yourself: “That wasn’t so hard!” Because in most cases it isn’t. Happy doing!