The other day I wrote about my own strategies for getting through the waves, dips, troughs, and crests of life.
Life has its ups and downs. Those natural ups and down, whether they be physical, psychological, individual, or for a group, make it harder to understand the effects of intervention.
One result of this is our current understanding of the placebo effect.
This effect is an attempt to explain a very common phenomenon: that intervening in a way that theoretically would have no effect, appears to have an actual effect.
So the theory behind the placebo effect is that our brains believe an effective intervention is happening, and that belief actually causes a change.
I.E. You take a sugar pill and get better.
Reversion to the Mean
But recent studies are pointing towards a different explanation for this phenomenon: reversion to the mean.
Which is just a fancy way of saying that life has its ups and down, but they revolve around an average.
So when you’re sick, or depressed, or otherwise suffering negatively in some way. You can take a sugar pill (or undergo some other “useless” intervention) and you’ll get better.
But not because the sugar pill helped. And not because you believed it would.
Just because you were going to get better anyway. You were coming out of a trough in life, physically, medically, psychologically.
It would have happened (and often does, without notice) even if no intervening action had been taken.
That’s reversion to the mean.
Moving the Mean
A much more interesting question is “how do I move the mean?”
Rather than worry about any specific crest or trough in your life, consider how you can move the mean, or the average, or the baseline, or whatever you want to call it.
If you can move the mean up, your highs will be higher, your triumphs greater; and your lows will be less challenging, and you’ll have more room to take greater risks.
Of course, moving the mean is much harder than just waiting to revert to it.
It’s lifting for months to create a new homeostasis for your body composition.
It’s building your skills for months or years to create new base income level. Or building a business for just as long to do the same thing.
It’s getting your nutrition right for months to not only re-compose your body, but to get comfortable and natural eating healthy, whole, real food.
It’s doing deep work on a relationship for months or years to change the dynamic to a positive one.
And until the mean changes, you’re taking yourself outside your comfort zone, over and over and over again. By definition.
It’s unavoidable that you’ll be uncomfortable if you want to move your comfort zone to a new place.
Because your comfort zone is just the “mean”.
The average.
What you’re used to.
Zero to One
The holy grail is getting system in place that lets you continuously “move the mean” for the better.
This is harder than it sounds.
This is a “zero to one” problem. If you can do this, then the rest of your life is a “1 to n” problem, where you already have something that works, and you just need to keep making improvements.
For me, it was daily planning.
A simple, daily habit that lets me build other habits. Adapt and grow. Follow through. Finish projects. Consolidate gains.
Move the mean.