Simple Aint Easy

March 8th, 2006 at 1AM, Central time was my last cigarette. For most of the five years before that, I was a 2-pack-a-day smoker. While in retrospect, I think I might have chosen a time other than writing my senior thesis at the University of Chicago to break the habit, but this isn’t a piece on judgment.

On January 1st, 2014, I began my New Year’s resolution to a healthier year. At my low point during this year, I was 35 pounds lighter (I have since changed from weight loss to strength gaining, and so my ‘True North’ metric for measuring success has changed throughout the year).

I would cite these two examples as my most significant personal achievements and I look to them as examples and sources of encouragement as I ponder my resolutions for the coming year. As I reflect on why these particular goals were important to me and why I think I was successful in achieving them, I thought I would share my thoughts. I hope that in so doing I will sharpen them for myself, thereby crafting good and achievable goals for 2015 and beyond, and perhaps share some scant wisdom with anybody contemplating similar ambitions in the new year.

Upon explaining how I achieved these goals, I immediately find myself explaining the distinction I make in the title of this post: “simple” and “easy” are not the same thing. Inspired by the myth of Sisyphus, I typically cite for my befuddled interlocutors the example of rolling a one million ton rock up a hill. It is plainly not an easy task, but it is a simple one – just roll it, end over end.

Both of these goals of mine were simple: the first one, no more smoking, is fairly obvious; the second contained two parts: eat more slowly, and go to the gym every day, seven days each week, without exception. Almost painfully simple. But easy? Not on your life, as I’m sure any former smokers will wholeheartedly attest.

I’ve advocated the pursuit of simple – but not necessarily easy – goals. Simple and easy are likely the low-hanging fruit that we have or are poised to achieve. As a result, it’s a fair guess that any goals we set for ourselves in 2015 will be difficult and so perhaps some additional guidance or mental scaffolding would be helpful. My personal “framework” – which I thought of afterwards as a description of how I achieved these goals – consists of three parts: Decide; Commit; Execute.

In some ways, the deciding phase is the most complicated and also quite difficult. The number of things we could do with ourselves is endless, and the number of ways we can finally prioritize any short list is also factorially large. Luckily for me, deciding to improve my health by cutting out cancer and augmenting my overall fitness level were not terribly difficult top priorities to come by.

The commitment phase is a simple one but perhaps the most difficult. It is simple precisely because it is just an irreversible binary operation: you move from no contract with yourself to an unbreakable one. Still, the exact method by which this change manifests itself is not something I understand about myself. I still do not know what led me to strike these bargains with myself at all, let alone at precisely those times.

Finally, we reach the execution stage, which I find to be the simplest and least difficult (though I expect many to meet this statement skeptically and ultimately reject it). If we’ve already decided and committed, I feel like step three flows almost naturally. Once I’ve made the irrevocable deal with myself, I simply don’t acknowledge abstention as an option. It’s 5AM – go to the gym. I want a cigarette – I will not have one.

I feel like this has been somewhat stream of consciousness as I’ve tried to gather my own thoughts, so please permit me to wrap up what I think are the major points that I’ve been toying with as I’ve tried to put pen to paper.

1. Choose simple goals. It is difficult enough for us to achieve the simple ones. Complex ones rarely stand a chance.
2. The mysterious crux of it all is to strike the unbreakable deal and bend yourself to your own will.
3. Don’t negotiate with yourself – you will lose, every time.

Happy New Year and here’s to a prosperous 2015!