Guy Reams (00:00.942)
This is Day 94, Simple Usually Wins. Yesterday I wrote about one of the accountability mechanisms I commonly use, streak accounting. Tracking a streak is a simple way for me to hold myself accountable for things that no one else notices. A few people asked me about my current streaks. Regrettably, I have not maintained all of the streaks that I have started. For now, my biggest streak is the number of days that I have written a blog article in a row.
Today will be the 3,000th blog post in a row that I've written since I first started several years ago. Currently I'm on day 94 of a streak that I started at the beginning of this latest 365 commitment. That streak is effectively doing plus one push-ups, sit-ups, and squats and then a small run. So this morning I ran around my neighborhood and along the way I stopped to do 20 push-ups, sit-ups, and squats. I did that a total of four times with the fifth stop totalling 14.
This method of going out my door and running around with periodic pauses for my routine has proven to be effective. A routine such as this is not complicated, requires very little equipment, does not require any memberships, and I can do it in the morning, afternoon, or the evening, whenever I can fit it in. I can go long or short depending on the duration. Currently, the minimum time commitment is about 30 minutes, which is a solid exercise interval.
I've noticed that lately I'm going for more prolonged orations just because I like listening to things while I'm doing it. And at times I listen to nothing and just think. What I find interesting is that out of all the exercise routines that I've had in my life, all the memberships, all the subscriptions, all the equipment, the books, the trainers, the thing that I have settled on is a simple path around my neighborhood. There are several small
small parks roughly a half a mile apart and they serve as the perfect stopping points for a short routine. One of them even has a pull-up bar, which this morning I was able to do five pull-ups. Embarrassing, but in maybe 100 to 200 days from now I can get back up to a respectable number of repetitions. The fact that I've settled on this solution after 50 years is why we should listen to people who have experience more often.
Guy Reams (02:20.28)
Commonly they will have gone through the various machinations of trying to figure out the perfect system and they will have ultimately landed on the brilliantly simple solution that accomplishes the maximum amount for the least amount of expenditure resources. This is my working definition of simplicity. The solution that achieves the most with the least expenditure. Simplicity is not a concept but rather an equation.
The idea that the simple usually wins applies to far more than exercise routines. In every walk of life, the simple always wins. Take for example, my system of managing household bills. I hate, loathe this process. It is the bane of my existence. And over time, I've wrestled with the method of dealing with the snail mail that comes into the house. I've asked someone for advice on this, someone who had been dealing with it for a very long time, and she showed me her method.
which was actually really simple. The key principle was to touch something only once and redirect anything else to a key person for handling that particular job. I decided to invent my own version of this simple process and I may have discovered something that I will stick to, maybe this time. Turning my attention to business, I realized we are currently working to figure out how to take our new product to market. I have hundreds of young people, marketers mostly,
after me all the time trying to tell me that their product or service is the latest fancy way to accomplish this at a fraction of the price. I am pondering the idea that all these are just complicating a straightforward matter. Instead, I will find someone who has done this many times over in their career and have found the simple process that they settled on. I might accept at some point that the simple is usually the one that wins.