Your so-called common sense might tell you that fixing lateness in another person or even in yourself should be easy. In practice, it might be one of the hardest traits to rewire. I’ve described some low-effort hacks that might help. What have you got to lose?
Acts of Kindness
A quote of mine on kindness from years ago recently went viral. It, too, is a reframe: “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”
Usual Frame: Small acts of kindness are good.
Reframe: There are no small acts of kindness.
When I was fourteen years old, my neighbor—who used to overpay me for shoveling the snow off his sidewalk and driveway—showed me a small act of kindness with some life advice and a delicious Greek pastry. It took about a minute. That was fifty-one years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. The gentleman passed away decades ago. But he will not be forgotten as long as I’m still around.
In my early thirties, I wrote a letter to a professional cartoonist, Jack Cassady, to ask his advice on how to break into the cartooning business. Jack’s advice—which arrived in two separate letters—probably took him less than an hour in all to put together. It changed my life forever.
Some years after Dilbert became a huge hit, I was invited to lunch by a young lawyer who had just launched his own comic strip and wanted some advice on making it successful. At the time, his comic only ran on one website, and I don’t think there was much, if any, money involved. I spent ninety minutes of my life dispensing my best advice as he took notes between bites of lunch. That young man was (and still is) Stephan Pastis, creator of the hugely successful comic strip Pearls Before Swine and creator of Timmy Failure, a successful series of books for kids. Has Pastis paid forward my act of kindness by advising other young cartoonists?
Of course he has.
There are no small acts of kindness.
Chapter 5
Physical Health Reframes
I often hear from people on social media that one or more of my reframes on diet and exercise helped them lose massive amounts of weight, often 40 to 80 pounds or more. This outcome is perhaps the most surprising part of my career, and I don’t expect you to believe it’s real until you finish this section of the book. I think you will see the potential right away, and you will know if it works in only a week or two. It won’t cost you a penny. All you need to do is think about diet and fitness in a new way that I’ll describe here.
Diet and Weight Management
Words matter, even when you’re talking to yourself. Every word is like a package of programming code that alters your brain circuitry. But some words are weak, and some have more energy. Here’s a perfect example.
Usual Frame: When I am hungry, I eat food.
Reframe: Some food is fuel. Some food is entertainment.
If everything you eat when you are hungry is “food,” that makes junk food and healthy food accidental equals—not in a logical sense but in a word category sense. That’s unhelpful programming.
If instead you make a habit of sorting all your eating options into fuel versus entertainment, making the right decisions becomes easier. That’s because “nutrition” is a low-energy word compared to fuel or entertainment. No one thinks, mm-mmm . . . nutrition. Compare that to the word fuel, which is literally a substitute word for energy, and of course entertainment is something we naturally crave. The words have a natural persuasion in this situation because humans are drawn to energy and fun, and we’re bored by the topic of nutrition despite knowing its importance.
Is candy fuel or entertainment? If you are hungry, entertainment isn’t what you need. And if you want entertainment, you can probably find a better option. It might seem counterintuitive that you can manipulate yourself with words you chose on your own. But that’s how words work. Words are the building blocks of sentences, of course, but many words carry a little package of power that influences you independently from the context of the sentence. You have a lifetime of putting food in your mouth, but if I said you were putting entertainment in your mouth, it would disrupt your automatic process and make you think about your eating decision.
Yes, you can manipulate yourself with words that help you manage what you eat the same way politicians manipulate others with words. I first learned about the power of individual words when I studied to be a hypnotist. And as a writer, I have three decades of experience picking the right-powered words. Being good at selecting words is the difference between being persuasive and being annoying.
To pick the most powerful words for controlling your diet choices, pay attention to how words feel in each context. Here are some questions I ask myself:
What does the word remind me of? And is that thing compatible with the message I mean to send?
Is the word specific enough? Too specific?
Does the word sound compatible with my intention when I hear the word aloud?
Does the word automatically drag a distracting thought—often a naughty one—into the conversation?
Does it rhyme? Rhymes are sticky and persuasive.
Is it fun to say the word aloud?
Is the word overused and worn out?
Will the word trigger someone?
I might be leaving out some questions, but you get the idea. Before selecting the right-powered word, I put it through a lot of filters. Only one of those filters involves the definition of the word. The rest are about how the word feels and what power it carries with it, either accidental or earned.
You saw the power of word substitution in this earlier reframe: Alcohol is poison. Substituting one word is the easiest type of reframe. You’ll see numerous opportunities for such reframes over the course of your life. Which brings us to this one-word reframe.
Usual Frame: Overeating is a willpower problem.
Reframe: Overeating is a knowledge problem.
If you think a lack of willpower is why you make bad eating choices, you won’t have any tools for fixing your situation because willpower isn’t real. What can you do to increase your willpower—grimace harder? We have no mechanism for adjusting our willpower because willpower is an imaginary concept. What we have instead of willpower is competing preferences, nothing more. If you prefer delicious food today over having a healthy weight tomorrow, you will eat that delicious food. Willpower never comes into play. It’s simply how we describe events after the fact. An empty concept.
Unlike willpower, knowledge is not meaningless. We all know what it takes to increase our knowledge. My proposition to you is that learning how to find and prepare food that is both convenient and healthy is something anyone can do by making continuous small improvements. The more you experiment with healthy food choices, the more equipped you will be to offer yourself a good option when you get hungry. If you’re hungry when the only convenient food is unhealthy stuff, you will eat that unhealthy food. But if you’re hungry and only have healthy food in your home that also tastes great, you will probably do well in controlling your weight. So-called “willpower” has nothing to do with it.
Here’s another reframe you might find useful for maintaining a healthy weight.
Usual Frame: I eat too much of the wrong food.
Reframe: I spend too much time with the wrong people.
You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said. I don’t know about you, but the people with whom I spend the most time are also the people with whom I most often dine. And if one of those friends has a hankering for some fast food, I’m likely to get some french fries while we’re there. I don’t think the people I spend time with necessarily influence my beliefs and attitudes about eating since most of them are red meat eaters and I am not. But they do influence what types of food are convenient for me. Your influencers might be members of your household who buy groceries that get added to your household temptations. It’s hard to avoid the food-related influence of family and friends, especially when it puts you in the proximity of delicious yet unhealthy food.