Do your friends or parents truly have your best interest at heart?

We know from great books like Social by Dr. Matt Lieberman out of UCLA that human beings are inherently "social". In fact, he found that even when we are daydreaming, the default state of our brain is thinking about relationships with other people in our environment. (Interesting...so ask yourself next time you wander off...what/who was I just thinking about?)

How many people do you know, or maybe even yourself, went to college straight out of high school, graduated with a sea of debt, and are in a job they hate or that relates nothing to their field of study? Now why did all these people, myself included, willingly volunteer for this? The answer:

Low Litigation and High Scalability

I'm currently wrapping up a week long convention out in Las Vegas where the main topic is Social Dynamics. The most fascinating part so far is the topic of how an idea becomes mainstream. One of the key points on how to make something appeal to a lot of people is the principle of Low Litigation, High Scalability.

Low Litigation - You can't sue someone if you misinterpret the idea.

High Scalability - Simple enough that the average person can understand it.

These two factors affect every decision we make and has stronger implications on our lives than we realize. So let me ask you...

Is college good or bad?

You have a generation of people going to college for degrees where they could have got the same or better education both cheaper and quicker without the diploma. Now, I'm not saying don't go to college. If you want to be a Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, go to college or else you can't practice your craft the way our society is set up.

But maybe instead of the $100,000 you spend on your business degree, you take that $100,000 and invest in getting yourself in the room with people who have created multiple successful business.

You pay high level entrepreneurs/business owners to work for them so you can soak up all they know. Learn from someone actually running a specific business that interests you and not a professor who understands the concepts for businesses in general but maybe not real world implications for your ideal business. The problem...

That idea won't work for everyone.

Someone could take that $100,000 spend it on the wrong mentor or not be motivated enough to listen to that mentor and when they aren't successful they get pissed (Interestingly just like a lot of people are with their college degrees). It's unfortunate because it's is almost impossible for an idea like that to be mainstream even though that may have been the best path for YOU. I personally didn't even know that was an option. I thought after high school you go to college..its just what you do. But it doesn't stop there, another huge one is diet. If I tell you...

STOP COUNTING CALORIES!

That the type of calorie matter more than the amount. That for years I've eaten over 3,000 calories a day and only work out once a week and eat as much as I want and have actually lost fat and gained muscle. (I eat a mostly veggie, high quality fat, moderate protein diet but truly eat as much as I want). This idea can't survive at a mass level.

The mainstream cannot support an idea like this because some dummy will see "High Quality Fat" or "calories don't matter" and misinterpret it.

He'll start shoving Crisco and butter from conventionally fed cows down his gullet and gain weight and get heart disease. He will then sue the doctor who recommended the high quality fat diet (Low Litigation, High Scalability).

Your diet is more complicated than calories in/calories out...that's a fact. You have hormones like Ghrelin and Leptin that tell your brain you are full and these hormones are triggered by WHAT you eat not the amount of calories in the food (1000 calories of broccoli will do drastically different things to your body that 1000 calories of oreos)

I mean they didn't even start putting calories on labels til the mid 1900s. If thousands of generations of humans survived before calories was even on the radar....I think we'll be just fine eating real food and trusting our hunger.

Now let's even replace dumbed-down health ideas like "Vegan is best", "Paleo or die", or even "high quality fat is the only way" with....

"Eat natural organic foods, and trust your hunger"

The problem is that idea will not ever break into the mainstream because it's too complicated. It puts too much responsibility on the average person by making them think too much. People will see "trust your hunger" and eat based off of stressed based cravings (which is physiologically different than hunger)...they'll get sick and fat and die - then someone will get sued. But we know..

There is no one diet for everyone. There's no one diet for you.

What your body needs changes daily based on your stress levels, activity, gender, age, how of your brain you use to consciously think. If there was one best diet, don't you think human beings would have probably figured it out after thousands of years of eating? (Read Diet Cults for more on that)

The social pressure gets to us; we are looking for a simple solution and for someone to give us some direction.

We are all looking for guidance and as we saw from Dr. Lieberman the default is to look to the social group for what is acceptable. Which is OK until it isn't. Until the widely held belief doesn't work for us specifically.

If you walk down the street with a 32 oz soda and a bag of corn chips no one will bat an eye. Walk down that same street munching on a cucumber or celery stalk and people will look at you like you're an insane person. That's social pressure and that's real strange to me...but that's okay.

The mainstream isn't "bad". That idea would be just as simple as the dumb shit that is mainstream. Hell I love Game of Thrones, Amazon, and especially Ariana Grande (lol). It's not good or bad...its a tool. I like to think of it as more of a filter.

Or, even rather like an antibiotic; It kills the bad bacteria (mayhem people running around with no direction), and destroys all the good bacteria (people who don't fit the mold but are social pressured into it). The result is some watered down information that generally works for the average person, but not necessarily for you. So the solution...

Experiment.

Since there's no one right answer for everyone, or even for you, the only thing we can do is try a bunch of different stuff to see what works for us. You can't fuck up an experiment. It's just collecting data that either brings you closer to or further from your end goal.

With food, try one of the mainstream diets. You can get tons of positive social pressure to help you make the transition easier, and then see what does and doesn't work for you. It might be a little too late for some of us to hop off the ole college train, but maybe you can still sue our universities for making engineering majors take the History of Maine Geology for two semesters....brutal.

Thank you!

-Dylan

What widely held belief isn't working for you?

Please let me know what you think and leave a comment!