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Choosing Joyful Pursuits Can Transform Your Health and Goals

Yes, you can rely on something more profound than "I should."

Consistency is the key to lasting progress, so it's the FIRST topic covered in my 93-lesson program. It's more critical than perfect diets and best workouts (whatever that means). It's the key ingredient to lasting weight loss because it speaks to what you do every day.

The question then becomes, how do we show up day after day?

I propose a radically simple answer. Choose joyful pursuits.

You might long for transformation, to smash big goals, and imagine all that’s done by hitting hard at the immovable object (you).

The best approach is to ask yourself, "What can I do regularly and often?" Having a salad for dinner is good, but making healthy meals a part of your daily routine for years is better. That beneficial action becomes baked into your life and then produces the steady, desired results you’re looking for.

In this sense, you are what you repeatedly do. That’s already true. It’s just that what you’re repeatedly doing now might not be producing the outcomes you’d like.

Consistency is undervalued, even by those practicing it.

I had a friend who ran average distances consistently for years. He decided one day to train for and do a marathon. The work was grueling, but he pushed forward to race day and got it done. He took the next week off and then stopped running altogether.

Short, herculean efforts are only a test of will. They produce the knowledge that you can do a difficult thing for a limited period, but they don’t create the desired effect of keeping you doing it. Thinking and acting for the duration (or consistency) is how you progress on your health or any high-value outcome.

Acknowledging consistency forces a re-allocation of time and values in one elegant question:

What can and will I do each day?

What you can and will do daily adds to meaningful progress on what matters most to you.

This is important because we live in a world of 30-day challenges and clean slates as an answer to the problem of change. The question above neatly wipes away any thoughts that a swift and temporary effort is needed.

A high-value action, like exercising with regularity, doesn’t begin (but it can end) with intense efforts. It begins with small, quiet efforts that can build over time.

As Shane Parrish from The Knowledge Project says, “intensity adds, consistency multiplies.”

This is where our new-ish obsession with habits comes in.

The thinking goes, if we can figure out the source code of our daily actions, we can automate our behavior. But habits are already automated; your brain and body need more to do a thing and keep doing it.

It’s asking a lot of habit-trackers to string together somehow unpleasant things and expect that will keep you going day after day.

This seems so simple as to be ridiculous, but think about it for a moment. It’s not the norm that you should find joy in beneficial activities.

Exercise is expected to be inherently unpleasant, and therefore, you need motivation and challenges. I thought it had to be difficult, which kept me away for most of my adult life.

Until one day, I went for a walk. Nothing fancy, just a loop around my neighborhood. I breathed the air, looked at the birds, took in the trees, and went home to stretch and sleep. Then I did it again and again, twelve years and counting.

I feel such joy from moving my body in nature that I can’t do without it. Over time, I’ve structured the whole of my life to make sure I can do these joyful practices with ease. There isn’t a habit-tracker as powerful as joy pulling me out the door.

Joy is an approach to activities that nurture your spirit.

Making joy central to purpose means that each day, you tap into that internal reservoir. It becomes central to why you walk, prepare a nourishing meal, or even do hard things.

It makes you ask yourself the question, what will bring me joy? It forces you to acknowledge that this matters.

“Since life is so intrinsically confusing and precarious, joy is going to have to be found amid the confusion and precariousness”

In other words, joy is intentional. It’s an act that affirms what you most need: connection to others, yourself, and nature.

So tell me, how will you summon your joy?