The Harajuku Moment

You Don t Need More How-To Advice — You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning 104 comments I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. For most of us, the how-to books on our shelves represent a growing to-do list, not advice we’ve followed. Several of the better-known tech CEOs in San Francisco have asked me at different times for an identical favor: an index card with bullet-point instructions for losing abdominal fat. Each of them made it clear: “Just tell me exactly what to do and I’ll do it.” I gave them all of the necessary tactical advice on one 3×5 card, knowing in advance what the outcome would be. The success rate was impressive 0%. People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are often terrible. There are at least two reasons: 1. Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. There has been no “Harajuku Moment.” 2. There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers. But what is this all-important “Harajuku Moment”? It’s an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have. It applies to fat loss, to getting your finances in order, to getting your relationships in order, and to getting your life in order. No matter how many bullet points and recipes experts provide, most folks will need a Harajuku Moment to fuel the change itself. Chad is a General Partner and CTO at BlueYard Capital. He was also co-organizer of the annual RubyConf and RailsConf conferences, where I first met him. Our second meeting was in Boulder, Colorado, where he used his natural language experience with Hindi to teach a knuckle-dragger (me) the primitive basics of Ruby. Chad is an incredible teacher, gifted with analogies, but I was distracted in our session by something he mentioned in passing. He’d recently lost 70+ pounds in less than 12 months. It wasn’t the amount of weight that I found fascinating. It was the timing. He’d been obese for more than a decade, and the change seemed to come out of nowhere. Upon landing back in San Francisco, I sent him one question via email: What were the tipping points, the moments and insights that led you to lose the 70 lbs.? I wanted to know what the defining moment was, the conversation or realization that made him pull the trigger after 10 years of business as usual. Even if you have no interest in fat-loss, the key insights (partial completeness, data, and oversimplification among them) will help you get closer to nearly any physical goal—lift 500 pounds, run 50 kilometers, gain 50 pounds, etc. —and it applies to much more in life. But let’s talk about one apparent contradiction upfront: calorie counting. I regularly thrash calorie counting, and I’m including Chad’s calorie-based approach to prove a point. The 4-Hour Body didn’t exist when Chad lost his weight, and there are far better things to track than calories. But would I recommend tracking calories as an alternative to tracking nothing? You bet. Tracking anything is better than tracking nothing. The Hawthorne effect can be applied to yourself. If you are very overweight, very weak, very inflexible, or very anything negative, tracking even a mediocre variable will help you develop awareness that leads to better behavioral changes. This underscores an encouraging lesson: you don’t have to get it all right. You just have to be crystal clear on a few concepts. Results follow. Much of the bolding in Chad s story is mine. Why had I gone 10 years getting more and more out of shape (starting off pretty unhealthy in the first place) only to finally fix it now? I actually remember the exact moment I decided to do something. I was in Tokyo with a group of friends. We all went down to Harajuku to see if we could see some artistically dressed youngsters and also to shop for fabulous clothing, which the area is famous for. A couple of the people with us were pretty fashionable dressers and had some specific things in mind they wanted to buy. After walking into shops several times and leaving without seriously considering buying anything, one of my friends and I gave up and just waited outside while the others continued shopping. We both lamented how unfashionable we were. I then found myself saying the following to him: For me, it doesn’t even matter what I wear; I’m not going to look good anyway. I think he agreed with me. I can’t remember, but that’s not the point. The point was that, as I said those words, they hung in the air like when you say something super-embarrassing in a loud room but ha

The Harajuku Moment

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