Let me tell you just a little about the obscure book I’m reading right now.
The title is Basic Problems of Phenomenology. This is a lecture course that Martin Heidegger gave in 1927 as a sort of sequel and follow-up to his best-known book, Being and Time.
Even among German philosophers Heidegger has a reputation as difficult and complicated.
He can be that, if you approach him in the wrong way, starting with the difficult and obscure works, and without any help getting your footing.
But really he’s not saying anything all that difficult, once you get to the heart of it.
Here’s a cheat-sheet for reading any difficult writer like this.
The trick to “getting” even as dense a writer as Heidegger is the same as any other philosopher and thinker.
Nearly all of them have one key idea that they approach from a few different angles.
Understand that key idea, and the moves that they use to explain it, and you’ve understood the thing.
Look beneath the complicated and confusing surface, and there’s only a few things to know to understand what is going on.
The biggest problem in understanding deep and profound ideas is not that the ideas are hard to get.
The problem is that readers allow themselves become intimidated and mystified by the irrelevant surface details.
With many philosophers, the intimidating details come in the form of bad writing full of jargon and abstract ideas that aren’t made clear and plain.
In the world of health, wellness, and fitness, it’s a bedazzling web of facts about human physiology, nutrition, and exercise.
I learned in grad school that if I want to understand obscure writers, I had to charge in, wade through the ugly prose, and pull out the meaning I could find underneath the complicated outer shell. Do that enough times and you learn to see through the fog of obscurity.
So it is with your own health and fitness goals.
If you pay attention to the “influencers”, even the ones with lots of credentials and letters after their names going on about evidence-based this and science that, you’d believe you had to treat your life like an industrial assembly line with 10,000 moving parts.
That’s how you “optimize” your life and your health, according to them.
Let me tell you what the drive to optimization does.
It scatters your attention.
It focuses your mind on the irrelevant surface details.
It leads you away from the main idea beneath the surface that really makes a difference.
The optimization trend in health and fitness is a cult of shiny baubles that appeals to minds obsessed with gadgetry and micro-management.
Optimization is a nice word for worrying about everything except what makes a difference.
It encourages shortcut thinking and distractions instead of getting down to the real business.
The bottom line is that so-called optimizing doesn’t make my day easier or my results any better.
It does the opposite, stressing me out over a dozen things that don’t make any difference to anything.
Do you want to be a bureaucrat with a spreadsheet, or do you want to have abs in your veins with a double body-weight squat while sleeping like a medicated baby each night after a fantastic meal and a couple beers?
I know what choice I’ve made. So do my clients.
We get results, instead of getting hung up on a million details that make you feel smart while never changing your body.
I help my clients simplify, streamline, and make big changes from small moves that barely feel like you’re doing anything different.
If you’re over 40 and working out isn’t working, I’m offering a 12-week guided tune-up to get yourself in gear.
We’ll work together on your obstacles and limitations, the ones in your head first and foremost, and get you moving toward where you want to be with a roadmap for your next three months along with my help.
If you’re interested, you’ll need to be on my email list:
Matt Perryman