One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
Two University of Toronto psychologists, Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman, spent more than 40 years studying what happens when chronic dieters feel like they’ve blown the plan. Their best-known finding has a name you probably haven’t heard, but you’ve definitely lived: the “what-the-hell effect.”
Here’s what they found. In lab studies, when restrained eaters were made to believe they had broken their diet, even a little, they often ate more afterward. The researchers saw the same short-term pattern after other disruptions, including emotions, alcohol, distraction, and tempting food cues. Once the rule felt broken, the goal was abandoned. One cookie becomes ten. One bad lunch becomes a bad week. The problem isn’t the cookie. It’s the all-or-nothing standard that makes one miss feel like the whole thing is ruined.
Mike Fisher told me something on the podcast this week that made me think of this research immediately. Mike is the CEO of MyFitnessPal. Before that he was CTO of Etsy, where he scaled the company from $3 billion to $13 billion. Now he runs a health platform with more than 200 million users and 21 years of behavioral data on how people actually eat. When I asked him what surprised him most, he said he would have gotten precision completely wrong. He assumed the people who tracked everything with total accuracy would be the most successful. They aren’t. His words: “Consistency beats perfection.” Logging one meal a day, every day, beats logging everything on Monday and quitting by Wednesday. The people who give themselves a little room and keep showing up are the ones who actually change.
I think about this all the time outside of nutrition too. The founders I know who burn out are usually the ones who tried to do everything at an impossibly high standard from day one and collapsed under it. The gym, the business, the creative project, the relationships. The consistency is what makes all of it work, and perfectionism is usually what gets in the way of it. I think a lot of people would be further along right now if they just gave themselves permission to be a little worse at something every day instead of great at it once.
Quote
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle in The Story of Philosophy (1926).
People often attribute the line to Aristotle. Durant wrote it while summarizing Aristotle’s ethics. Either way, the idea holds: you are not your best day or your worst day. You are whatever you do most often.
Question
Where in your life is the pursuit of doing something perfectly keeping you from doing it at all?
Listen
Mike Fisher: The CEO of MyFitnessPal Says You’re Thinking About Health All Wrong. Mike is a West Point graduate and former Army helicopter pilot, and the way he talks about health borrows from how the military trains pilots to fly. He uses the “cross-check” from instrument flying: keep scanning every gauge instead of fixating on one. He applies the same idea to health, where people can obsess over the number on the scale while everything else slowly drifts. He also explains why decision fatigue leaves people wanting someone else to choose dinner by the end of the day. The number one question people ask MyFitnessPal’s AI coach is simple: “What should I eat tonight?”
Read
The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. McGonigal built the book from her popular Stanford course, “The Science of Willpower.” It covers the “what-the-hell effect” and the science behind why trying harder to control yourself can backfire. Her argument that self-forgiveness and self-compassion can strengthen self-control is the part that stuck with me. She arrived through psychology at the same place Mike reached through behavioral data from more than 200 million users.
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Scott