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January 2016

How to Become a Luckier Person Overnight

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bike shadow

A few weeks ago, a neighbor I had not yet met knocked on my door to tell me that her storage locker in the basement had been broken into, and so had mine.

I went down there. The locker door was hanging open, and my bike was gone. They hadn’t cut the lock, but had instead crowbarred the hardware entirely off the plywood door, which building management had attached with four of the tiniest screws I’d ever seen.

My initial feeling was the rush of violation and dirtiness that everyone feels when they see the mess left by a thief. They touched my stuff, and now some of it is at their place.

But I ran out of indignation pretty quickly. The normal victim feelings gave way to a feeling of, “Wow, I’m really glad I’m me.”

I can afford a new bike. I’ve never felt a desire to steal from people. Aren’t I lucky that I don’t know what it’s like to enter a building illegally, and rifle through someone else’s belongings, hoping to find something I can sell for fifty bucks? I would rather lose all my possessions than be that guy. I’m also glad to know that the locker was so insecure before I put anything irreplaceable in there. Read More

by David Cain on January 24, 2016
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The Great Myth About Getting in Shape (and Every Other Goal)

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I wasn’t going to write about this topic this week but it could be somewhat urgent for some of you. Mid-January is a critical time for the fate of many annual goals, and I’m sure a lot of people are already making a particular mistake that kept me stumbling for years. In fact, I’m convinced most failed goals fail for this exact reason.

This time next week, 2016 will be 5% finished. So if you’ve got goals this year, you should be around one-twentieth done by then.

If your goal is to be a regular gym-goer, for example, then you’ll want to have two full weeks of gym-going under your belt. If it’s already a grind, then you’re probably not going to make it.

There’s an interesting paradox when it comes to fitness in America. There is a tremendous demand for this thing called fitness, and yet only a fairly slim minority end up actually making it a part of their lives. Visiting aliens would be confounded that we appear to worship this particular quality yet don’t usually embody it.

It’s not a matter of not knowing what to do. In the internet age, anyone can find, for free and in only a few minutes, dependable step-by-step instructions on how to get to whatever kind of fitness that’s humanly possible: marathon runner, bodybuilder, yoga adept, martial artist, or anything else. The same is true for all kinds of other goals: making more money, starting a website, learning French or piano or calligraphy.

What do you really have to do to get into shape? Join a gym, find a well-regarded program online, and do what the program says. We know what we have to do, and we want the rewards of doing it, so why don’t we just do it?

Often we begin well enough, but the different aspects of our lives have a way of competing with each other, and a month later we’re barely holding it together, and two months later we barely remember that we tried.

The typical refrain, from both the achievers and the non-achievers of a particular goal, is “You have to want it badly enough.”

We hear this message all the time. If you’re within a decade or so of my age you probably spent much of your schooling in classrooms whose walls were plastered with a certain kind of inspirational poster, often featuring cute animals or Einstein, and preaching about persistence and dedication. These might look familiar:  Read More

by David Cain on January 10, 2016
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