“What would this look like if it was easy?” - Tim Ferriss
Four weeks ago, I changed the way I think about fitness. I’ve seen more health improvements in these past four weeks than the previous several years combined.
The big change wasn’t some new diet fad. The best way to describe the change I made was that I dumbed my fitness way, way down.
Health, for me, was always something complex. It required a hundred individual daily decisions.
Don’t eat that cookie. Do go for a walk. Don’t eat that chip. Okay, you ate the chip—don’t eat the whole bag of chips. Do go to the gym. Don’t order the fried chicken. Do order the grilled one.
Every decision was a potential point of failure.
Recently, something clicked. I started thinking about my health differently. I made two interconnected fitness changes:
I’m focusing on strength training instead of losing weight.
To get the most out of weight training, I’m focusing on eating a lot of protein.
Almost instantly, living healthily became easy. The big change, I only discovered in retrospect, was that second part. Focus on protein.
This simple food shift eliminated nearly all the small health decisions I make each day.
Focusing on eating protein means that I don’t fear snacking. When I feel peckish, I make some grilled chicken in the air fryer, eat a protein bar, or snack on beef jerky.
Eating more protein not only made snacking more healthy, it also made it less relevant. Eating more protein made me feel more full. Cravings almost entirely disappeared.
Eating more protein instilled an internal sense of not wanting to “waste” the protein I consume. I’m motivated to lift more consistently. The more I lift, the more I want protein. It’s a reinforcing cycle.
The result? I’m losing body fat. I feel myself getting stronger. My mind feels sharp. There is a sense of momentum to living healthy now, which makes me crave the healthy choice over the less healthy one.
One simple change—focusing on eating more protein—is what you could call a “waterfall habit” or “waterfall decision.” One simple change creates a cascading force that improves multiple areas of your life.
The best part about waterfall habits is this: Once you see them, you realize they’re everywhere.
The waterfall habit that changed my career: Just write
The first time I noticed the power of a waterfall habit was when I read two books back to back: Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. I had been running my writing business for three or four years by then. Reading these books upended how I thought about my work and business.
Like with fitness, being a freelance writer went from a million individual tactics and responsibilities… to just one:
Make as much time to write as possible. Everything else will work itself out.
Here’s how I thought about it:
Clients pay me to write. The more time I spend writing, the faster I can deliver work (and get paid).
The more I write, the more I will improve my writing.
As I improve, I can charge more.
As I improve, more editors and businesses will find my work and choose to work with me.
The more I write for myself, the more readers will discover my writing.
As my writing is discovered, more opportunities will find their way to me.
The more opportunities that find me, the more I’ll know what to write about (because of the feedback loop).
The list could go on.
The point was this: By getting serious about my writing habit, above everything else, my business would improve in almost every conceivable way. Writing was the single business habit that eliminated dozens of little “hacks” for growing and improving my business.
It worked. That was a turning point in my business. A few months from that realization, my marketing became fully passive. I no longer had to pitch clients or compete on job boards. All my clients came to me—because of writing.
Conquer goals, big and small
When you see life through waterfall habits and decisions, you feel like you’ve discovered a real-life cheat code. You look for them everywhere. At this point, I’m convinced that anything worth doing consistently in life can be distilled down to one or two waterfall habits.
Waterfall habits work for major life changes like health, your career, and finances. They also work for small things in life like becoming more fashionable or overcoming procrastination.
Five years ago, I learned from Ramit Sethi that the easiest way to save and invest for the future is to automate it. Never give yourself the choice not to invest. Set up a simple automated payment at the beginning of the month and forget that automation exists. This simple money adjustment has changed our financial life.
A few weeks ago, one of the big recurring problems in my ghostwriting business was processing long call transcripts. I procrastinated this part of my work because I hated reading transcripts on a computer screen.
I solved the problem by buying myself a Kindle. Now, I process transcripts from the comfort of an armchair. It’s relaxing. I look forward to work I used to avoid.
Think in experiments. Believe in growth.
It’s easy to think finding a waterfall habit will come to you as a random epiphany. A thought occurs to you in the shower, and suddenly your life is changed. Really, these waterfall moments have almost always arrived for me during a season of searching and experimentation.
Sure, the realization arrives as an epiphany. But it’s an epiphany that arrives on the other side of curiosity.
The older I get, the more I realize that a lot of people don’t look at the world as something that can be changed. If something is a problem for you today, it will remain a problem for you in the future, and so on. Challenges are wholly fixed.
I believe the exact opposite. I’ve watched friends change their careers, health, and finances in a single decision. Sarabeth and I have changed our own lives several times over. We continue to change.
All of these changes require effort. They also require some amount of belief that change is possible. People who don’t believe things can change don’t try to begin with.
Your results match your beliefs. That’s not a philosophical statement, but a practical one: To make the steps required for change, you first believe progress is possible. Otherwise, you won’t take the steps.
Waterfall habits don’t begin with an empty epiphany. They begin with an effortful one.
Another way to say this is that waterfall habits come to those willing to experiment.
You must have enough belief in your own ability to change and grow that you’re willing to try new things.
The good news is, momentum kicks in. Once you find one waterfall habit, you start collecting them. The impact compounds. Suddenly, you enjoy your work, have some money in the bank, feel healthier than ever, and no challenge in front of you seems impossible.
Waterfall habits don’t make life easy. But in my own experience they can make life simple.
A simple life sounds better to me than an easy one, anyway.
