The Power of Observation

Quick Summary of Today’s Post

• Dr. Kashey shares an brilliantly sensical and effective path to improvement.
• He’s used it to help people lose weight and keep it off, win Olympic gold medals, double the revenue of their businesses, and increase their productive output at work.

Quick Housekeeping

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Now let’s get into it …

At the end of 2023, the 2% community voted on what we wanted to see on 2%.

One outcome of that voting: You wanted more posts with Dr. Trevor Kashey.

For the unfamiliar, Dr. Kashey is the super genius from chapter 14 of The Comfort Crisis. He’s a great friend and someone I go to for all sorts of life advice and great conversations.

Dr. Kashey and I recently hung out in Las Vegas.

We were at a Denny’s just off The Strip, drinking coffee and eating pancakes. Casino workers were filing in after their shifts, looking tired and smelling like second-hand smoke.

We were talking about life and living it—and what it takes to live it better. This is when Dr. Kashey dropped one of the more insightful things he’s told me.

We tend to approach life-improvement like this:

• Step One: We realize we’re dissatisfied with some part of our life.
  Maybe we think we need to lose weight. Or improve our fitness. Or boost our work productivity.
• Step Two: We set a big goal.
  We determine where we want to go—point B. For example, want to lose 50 pounds, take one minute off a 5K, or increase sales by 10 percent.
• Step Three: To reach that goal, point B, we adopt a big new behavior change.
  We commit to a giant overhaul. For example, when people want to lose weight, they try a new diet. To improve their fitness, they might adopt an 8-week marathon training plan. To improve their business, they hire more people or invest in some special software.

In other words, we determine point B and think getting there requires diving into big, radical changes that upend our life and normal routine.

But this process rarely works. For example, people fail to reach goals more than 4 out of 5 times. Some goals, like diets, fail 95 percent of the time.

Dr. Kashey told me about a far more effective method.

It helps people reach their goal without really trying to reach them. It’s almost like they reach their goals on accident. The method also saves resources like time, energy, and money along the way.

It’s helped his clients:

• Lose a collective hundreds of thousands of pounds and keep it off.
• Shift their work tactics in a way that doubled company revenue.
• Win gold medals.

Dr. Kashey has reams of data showing that the method works. It’s also backed by decades of behavioral psychology. It’s worked on me and it’ll work on you.

Find Point A

Section summary

To reach point B, first find point A.

The details

Recall from above how people set a goal. They select point B and then dive into some significant new change they think will get them there.

But this skips the most important part of getting anywhere. As Dr. Kashey explained, “If you want to want to get to a destination—point B—you need to find out where you are—point A.”

Most times we have no clue where point A is. That is to say, we’re not aware of our current behavior.

So how do you find point A? Simple.