We’ve been doing this topic for three weeks. We made a very big promise. We basically promised we were going to solve every problem you ever had or at least one of the biggest problems that human beings have. And we’re going to. As you know, it is my firmly held belief that all of the wisdom of the world was provided for human beings by eighties movies. And baseball analogies. So, we’re gonna do both today. So whether it was Miyagi talking about balance, or Maverick talking about the importance of your wing man, all the wisdom of the world was distilled to us from 1980s era movies. Nobody could have survived before that.
In 1984, there was a movie called The Natural and it’s a baseball movie.
It starred Robert Redford. And he played a baseball player who was basically the greatest player ever. And an interesting scene in the movie was when he was injured, and he really wanted to get back in the game, even though it would potentially risk his life. So someone asked him why it was so important to him. And he said, ‘you know, when I walk down the street, I want people to look at me and say, there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was at this game.’ Now, as you well know, he did not say that. He was not the first person to say that – that was however taken from a real life incident.
That line was borrowed from a baseball player named Ted Williams. It was actually paraphrased. Have you ever heard of Ted Williams? Well, you’re gonna learn today about a famous player. We will get to where it comes to people’s problems and how they can be solved.
So, Ted Williams was a great baseball player. To understand how great he was, we have to talk about Mickey Mantle.
So, Mickey Mantle was one of the greatest players ever. He was actually brought up by his father to be the greatest player ever. His father used to pitch for him, pitched him for hours on end, and made him into a switch hitter. He was only a righty, and his father said, no, you have to learn how to hit lefty.
He was so good he was brought up to the Major leagues when he was 19, and his coach was saying he’s going to be a combination of Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio. That’s how good he was. So he was brought up to Major Leagues at 19, and he was very good from the very beginning, but he wasn’t yet great until in 1956, at the age of 25, I believe, he put it all together and he won the Triple Crown. That’s like the best award you could get in baseball. It’s not an award per se, although he did win the MVP, the most valuable player. So he won this triple crown. The triple crown is when you lead the league in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in.
It’s an accomplishment. It’s not gifted to you in the same way that an MVP award is, like people don’t vote on it. It’s just you, you lead in all those things. So he won the Triple Crown and he also won the MVP award the next year. He arguably had a better year. He hit for the highest average of his career. He hit 365.
Now, this is important stuff. So the next year in 1957, he hit 365. That was the highest average of his career. Now, just so you know, if a baseball player hits 300, that means he gets a hit three times out of every 10 times at bat? That is an all-star level player. That’s the standard.
Mickey hit 365 and he was 25 years old. But it took six years to get to this point. He was always great. But he got into his prime in these two years. ‘56 and ‘57. He was absolutely phenomenal. One of the old time great players. So again, he hit 365 at the age of 25. This is not a math thing, but I want you to understand. 365 at the age of 25. This happened in 1957. Now, most people don’t know this. That same year Ted Williams hit 388. He was 38 years old. He was not in his physical prime. He hit 388 at the age of 38, when most guys are really starting to stink. And that was before the age of steroids, because Barry Bonds was amazing in his forties, but, well you know the story. So I’m telling you this story to explain to you how great Ted Williams was. He almost hit 400. If he had six more hits, he would hit 400. 400 By the way, Ted Williams was the last guy to ever hit 400. In 1941, he hit 400. So he hit safely four times out of every 10 times at bat. He was the last guy to do it.
And that’s why he said his goal in life was to be the greatest hitter ever. Like this is all he wanted. And he arguably was.
What’s crazier? Ted Williams lost five and a half years of his career in his prime because he went to war. He went to World War II and served again in the Korean War. Now, the thing is, when he went to war, he became a fighter pilot. He was John Glenn’s wingman. But could you imagine, just all the most popular people in history from all different walks are all just one group of friends. Like, is that even normal? Things like that do happen. You get those kinds of convergences, you know, it does happen. It’s like a joke. It’s like, “three men walk into a bar”. It’s like the three most famous individuals in history are all best friends.
So it does happen. Right? So, here’s the thing. Ted Williams became one of the greatest pilots in the world. So he was arguably the greatest hitter ever. He was certainly one of them. And he became one of the best pilots in the world. This is all in the course of his career in his twenties. We’re not done though. When he retired, he became the best fisherman in the world.
This guy, he was actually in two fishing halls of fame and he was considered as good a fisherman as he was a baseball player. So he went from being one of the greatest baseball players to one of the best fighter pilots, to one of the greatest fishermen ever.
What’s the Common Denominator for Success?
What’s the one common denominator? He’s the best at everything he does. He’s dedicated. This is the guy. He was so incredibly dedicated, so focused, that whatever he did, he was great at it.
That’s impressive. I actually have one very good friend now, and the funny part is, she does so many things and she’s accomplished so much by 39 years old. And it’s so like, “eh, you know, it’s no big deal”,, and she doesn’t talk about it. She doesn’t. “Oh, thank you so much. No, I just feel like I’m just doing the right thing”. But everything she does… I am in awe of her.
And she started very late too. So culturally, she was not allowed to be active in sports growing up. And so when she got into college, that gave her the opportunity. First hand in, she was varsity, literally captain of every sport. She played multi-sport, phenomenal at school. Like just everything, you know? She went into the military. She’s just, everything she does is just perfect.
Well, you have people like this. And, and here’s what’s interesting about them and people at the highest level of every profession, they are basically nerds. Now, I wanna talk about nerds. Nerds get an unfair shake, because how would you define nerd? Most people would define ’em as little skinny guys with glasses who get, you know, put into lockers and have pocket protectors and things like that? That’s how most people would describe nerds, yet I’m telling you, Ted Williams was a nerd. But Michael Jordan was a nerd. Aaron Judge is a nerd. I mean, these are all nerds. So how would you define nerds?
I mean, textbook nerd, based upon people like this with extreme success. I used to feel like they had that natural ability. Like they are definitely 10 steps ahead where they level up. They see it, they embrace it full on, they kind of dive right in. There’s, there’s no thinking, there’s no work to be done. They just naturally roll with it. Like, this is what I want to do.
Well, there IS thinking and there IS a lot of work. So I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of native ability. Obviously to hit a baseball, you have to have native ability. But Ted Williams hit more baseballs when he was young than anyone in the world. That’s according to him. He used to hire the kids.
Nerds Run the World
Let me give you my definition of what a nerd is. And this is why I have so much admiration for nerds, and this is why nerds run the world, which they literally do. I mean, yeah, there might be some, you know, old banking families, but nerds run the world these days. Okay. My definition of a nerd is someone who can stay interested over a long period of time.
Everyone else is becoming disinterested, and they are going off and doing something else. The nerd can stay interested, and the nerd stays interested in the right things. Let me tell you what I mean by that.
We have a client on the program right now. So she’s doing the program, and she’s doing very well. She’s losing weight. She loses weight, I get a happy emoji. She doesn’t lose weight one day, I get a crying emoji. I’m, “there’s no crying in weight loss, you know”. And, she was bored by the details, like the parts of the program. You have to do the process.
So I started telling her the correct attitude is you need to be bored by the scale, and super interested in the process, to stay motivated.
How Do You Get Results in Weight Loss?
It is not even about motivation ultimately, if you want to be good at something, no matter what that thing is, the focus has to be on what you’re doing. It has to be on the process and on the details. If you can stay interested in that, the results will come. And that’s what Ted Williams was able to do. And that’s what Michael Jordan was able to imagine, being Michael Jordan.
A good example of this was brought up by one of my staff, thinking of her daughter. If students are studying to pass an exam, then they are studying for the result only, a passed exam. The process is studying to learn, to understand, to be able to apply what you are studying and be able to produce results with it. There must be an interest in the subject and in truly understanding and evaluating the information. A student who can memorize names, dates or latin terms can pass lots of exams, but would probably be a lousy surgeon or lawyer or anything else. No understanding, no interest. It would be like working for a paycheck with no interest in the job whatsoever. Result oriented, no interest in the process.
So I feel like this is something that we see with our clients a lot, right? The interest is on the wrong thing. The interest is on the scale, and the interest needs to be on the process. Because what happens over time when your interest is on the scale or on the scoreboard? And the same thing occurs when it comes to weight loss. I mean, you just get bored. You get bored, your interest wanes.
It’s just the same routine every day, right? You almost start to anticipate the results before you get on, and you almost talk yourself out of it before doing anything. So you then start to sometimes step backwards.
There’s another aspect. When the focus, when that interest/ boredom thing is upside down, there is more interest in the scale than on the process. You should be relatively bored with the scale. When it comes to weight loss, you should be. I say relatively because you can’t be completely bored, right? If it’s the end of the game and you’re down by four points, you need to know that. And you need to up your efforts. But you should be relatively bored. So in the case of that client of ours you know, she started texting me like, oh, I’m, I’m down a pound and a half today. And I’m like, “Great. Boring”.
She got it. And she was like “ yes. I’m bored with that”. And I tried to impart that to some of our clients, you need to be interested in the process.
I think I actually had that moment the first time I did the program where it was like, I saw the results, I felt great and everything. I was excited about it. And then midway through, maybe closer to day 25, 26 ish, around there, all of a sudden it became such a tremendous difference that my focus did shift. Where I was like, “oh, I forgot to weigh myself today”. I forgot to because now I became so interested in all of the other things that were happening. I didn’t even think about the scale.
Before that, it was my safety net. You know? I felt like, “oh, if it’s not on the scale, that means it’s not working. If my numbers are not up, it’s not working”. And then, because it was working anyway, I shifted gears and I was really interested in everything else it was doing for me.
And meanwhile, who’s to say it’s not working? Often there’s not enough of an understanding to know if it’s working or not. Because the expectation is that it’s going to be linear. You can lose the same amount every day. It’s gonna be very consistent. That doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t work that way. So that’s not understanding. That’s something else that these nerds understand. They’re focused on the process and they understand. If Ted Williams was about, “okay if I had two homers yesterday, if I don’t hit three homers today, then I’m giving up”.
Sustain Interest to Get Results! The Focus Needs to Be On The Process.
What tends to interest people? The process doesn’t interest them, necessarily. Results! Results are interesting to people. Results. So again, you don’t always get immediate results. So it’s hard to sustain that. And a nerd is able to sustain interest.
I think also when we say results, like from a weight loss perspective, if you start to stagger or you’re flat, it’s difficult, knowing how much hardship it was to get to that point. It’s also hard for them to keep interest because they still don’t believe it. They tell me “the process, it’s a struggle”. So it’s a struggle for people. Not a struggle for everybody. For the people with the right focus, it’s not a struggle.
So getting to that point for them to actually feel successful, and that they are losing the weight and gonna keep it off, once it starts to slow down, they lose it. They’ll start “alright, I’m slow. Well, no, that means I’m gonna go backwards. That’s it. This is all I’m doing.” And then it kind of scares them a little, not that they’re losing interest, but the fear sets in and it’s that, “oh, no, now what, now I’m flat now, now nothing works. All this work”. And they start to spiral out of control.
But again, that does have to do with interest in a sense, because there’s so much invested in the result. Instead of being relatively bored with the result on a day-to-day basis. And so that’s where it’s a wrong focus. The focus needs to be on the process. So here’s what interests people. Results interest people, novelty interests people. If we were to plot people’s interest in the program from the beginning, right to the end, we would probably see it go down. Because then it becomes a typical day-to-day thing.
It’s also the anticipation, I feel, because there is a guarantee with our results. So you also anticipate that. And when you come to that point where you’re losing and you’re just about there, or not just there yet, and there’s more to still come, there’s that waiting period where people don’t know. They almost don’t know how to react. It could go either way. There are people that won’t complete, it’s like, “oh, I hit it. That’s it. I feel great. This is the best I’ve felt”. And then they end up reversing all their good.
So you’re not interested in your life, you’re bored with your life. It’s the same thing every day, right? It feels like a lot of effort. It feels like a struggle and whatever, one day there’s a fire in your house, suddenly you’re really interested. The danger is real, and you should be, right? I mean, you have to handle the fire, but that danger is really interesting. It’s not interesting when things are going along at a normal clip the way it’s supposed to. But it’s very interesting when something is out of the norm, when something is an extreme situation. So I feel like as a result of that, what people tend to do is to focus so much on danger that they create danger over and over. Like I say this to our clients, sometimes the ones who go up and down with their weight, the problem is, that we’re half arsonists and half firemen.
Start the fire, and then put it out, over and over again. Right? Like, you’re not interested in the process of building health. You are interested in certain, you know, pleasures, sensory pleasures, eating and drinking, whatever. And then as a result, the weight goes up and it goes up and it goes up, and then it gets to a point where it’s like, Danger! and there’s a flashing red light and “I don’t fit into my clothes”.
And now all of a sudden there’s a ton of interest. And so you put out the fire, our program is great at doing that. A person puts out the fire. Fire’s out, interest dies, and now all of a sudden, that whole thing starts over again. So we’re half firemen, and half arsonists. We keep starting those fires and then having to put them out. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re managing dangers as opposed to living in a more ideal way and being interested in the process.
And that’s how these conversations started because we were talking about holism versus a medical approach, which treats symptoms. And we mentioned some of these drugs used in some programs. Which, by the way, our program does not use any drugs, while I haven’t seen the numbers on them, but I’m pretty sure that the numbers of people who do our program are better than the numbers from people who do those.
The Scale Vs. Building Health – What’s More Important to You?
It’s the same mechanics that we’re seeing over and over again. It’s because the interest is not in building health. The interest is only on that scale. And then, because there’s no interest in the process, inevitably they do worse. The lack of ability, or lack of desire to retain their interests in the process on a day-to-day basis, because it’s all about that final result. That’s all they want. The business people who are involved with weight loss, especially a medical type of weight loss, they know this, they prey on this. And, and I don’t even put it on them. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t sell, you know, those kinds of drug injections. I couldn’t do it. But I mean, how much can we blame them when it’s what the market is asking for?
It’s a business. Whether we can put our heads on a pillow at night and say “ okay, you know what? It’s okay. Ah, it’s all right. Well, I’m making a living and I’m giving them what they ask for”. Not everybody is built for that. There are a lot of things out there that should not be a resource. More than not. But because it’s so wide-stream and everyone is doing it, and it’s out there, it seems like,” it’s okay. It can’t be bad if everyone’s doing it. The doctor said it’s okay”.
It’s because entrepreneurship 101 is you find out what a person wants and you give it to them. Yeah, totally. Right? So a person wants to lose weight in a way that they don’t have to do anything. Yes. Okay, good. So you have this product now, it’s a medication. It’s not necessarily going to improve health. It might imperil health, but it’s what a person wants. They know that at some level. So you get it. So that’s entrepreneurship 101. But as a result, it creates the perception that that’s how you solve problems.
You solve problems with something like a medication that sort of hijacks your physiology. And so you have people that that’s what they do. They keep slamming their head against the wall in a sense, because instead of taking the right steps to create and build health, they keep doing the short term, putting out the fire solution. So I would submit that when I said earlier, that this is the biggest problem, or at least one of the biggest problems that human beings face, it’s in every aspect of life. It’s not only about weight loss. It’s not only about health. It’s in business, it’s in whatever, the inability to keep interest in the areas where the interest should be, but instead constantly creating the danger and then trying to put out the fire. This is how more people than not are navigating their lives.
Why Put the Effort Into Weight Loss? What’s the Value?
I think that a big takeaway from this is that regardless of health or any aspect of life, when you say interest, I also look at value. I mean, you have to see that in the effort of doing something, there is value in that. And it’s something that’s beneficial for you and your life and your future and your wellbeing. That should be enough to stay engaged and want to do more and do better. And some people tend to fall off because they don’t believe it anymore. And I think it’s because the market is so saturated with quick fixes. Because we live in a fast-paced world.
You know, it’s the quick fix for everything. It’s even as much as getting your gas by going to particular gas stations. Download the app, preset your gas, save 5% on everything, it’s quick and easy for everyone. And not to say that it’s not convenient, and it works. Sometimes it’s great for us, but, you know, it could be the new Starbucks. It’s a drive through. Like, it’s right here. I don’t have to cross over route nine.
So back to Ted Williams. He was able to become one of the world’s greatest ball players, fighter pilots and fishermen. Because of where his focus was, and he was able to maintain interest, this is what nerds do. We should all be nerds. Being a nerd should be considered a positive thing. It is not an insult. It is the highest thing you can aspire to, to be a nerd in today’s world. So I would encourage that for everybody. I would encourage people to, and I’m preaching to myself first of all, to try not to be so danger oriented. We’re all guilty of this. It’s that we’re constantly creating and putting out those fires. I cannot give people a three step plan on how to do this. I’m hoping that if people take on this understanding that they can come up with solutions for themselves. It’s so hard to change that focus that has been ingrained in us in every way since we were born into this world. But I would submit that it’s a necessary transformation. Get interested in the process. Do it because you WANT to, not because you HAVE to. And expand that interest. As opposed to just being a kind of paycheck-with-scoreboard player.
For more information on ThinTech’s programs please reach out to us at (908) 276-4393, or schedule a consultation online. Now is your chance to leave that behind and build a healthier, happier, more hopeful life.
