The technique that school music teachers use to motivate budding instrumentalists, and what I was doing with my gold stars when returning to the craft, share commonalities with other practices like journals, diaries, logs, lists, and report cards. They make what we’re doing concrete and apparent, and create a visual manifestation of our otherwise haphazard pursuits. Notating our personal data makes us responsible to ourselves and our aspirations. By materializing our progress, we become our own accountant.
Automating the Accounting
Even economists at times need help with accounting, or at least this form of it. About ten years after he earned his degree in economics from Yale, Mike Lee was planning his wedding. He and his fiancée set their sights on a beautiful beach celebration, and both felt that being in better shape would complete their picture-perfect day. Lee went to a trainer, who handed him a book listing the nutritional values of about three thousand foods and a small pad of paper to write down what he ate each day. Perhaps this trainer had followed the scientific breakthroughs made by a team at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. Doctors recommended to a group of 1,700 individuals at risk for or experiencing diabetes and hypertension to follow a diet rich in fruits and vegetables and low-fat dairy products. The subjects exercised as prescribed, pushing themselves to moderate levels of exertion for at least thirty minutes a day. After six months, the average person had lost about thirteen pounds. A pretty remarkable feat. But those who also kept daily records of how much food they ate lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records. To Lee, though, the effort required to look up food values and do the math to determine the caloric value of what he was eating seemed tedious and impractical. So he did it one better. He created a Web application that would allow him to track his calories automatically online. This was the beginning of the wildly popular app MyFitnessPal.
Drawing from the largest nutrition database in existence, MyFitnessPal allows users to create an electronic food journal. By its ninth birthday, MyFitnessPal had amassed more than 80 million registered users who, combined, had lost more than 100 million pounds. In 2015, Under Armour purchased MyFitnessPal for $475 million. In the next three years, membership grew to 150 million in what Under Armour described as the “largest digital health and fitness community in the world.”
And, from what I read, Lee and his wife had a pretty great wedding.
Unfortunately, just like the organizational state of the toys in my bedroom growing up could illustrate, my gold-star system wasn’t working as well as desired. But I didn’t think that somehow devising a more technologically sophisticated star system (à la MyFitnessPal) was the answer. With the flip of a page from one month to the next, the ratio of days to stickers grew. The stars weren’t sustaining the motivation, and to be honest I had no idea whether I was getting any better on the drums. The key to practicing more often and more effectively, I was realizing, was not just in materializing whether an effort was made that day. There was more to the secret recipe than that—but what was the special ingredient?
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Nathan DeWall is particularly remarkable at materializing his way to success. He started training for his first marathon when he was four years old. His father planned to run one in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, later that year, and DeWall wanted to follow in his footsteps, literally and figuratively. His dad got him his first pair of running shoes and a green T-shirt imprinted with the word JOCK. They ran together for two- and three-mile stretches at a time, talking about life, and likely about Sesame Street, with each passing stride. Of course, DeWall didn’t actually run a marathon as a child, but the itch started then.
By the time he hit middle school, DeWall had switched out his sneakers for cleats. Like many boys growing up in Nebraska, he decided that he wanted to be a football player, an All-American on the university team like one of his uncles had been. A few years in, DeWall was on his way, playing on his high school football team. But that dream quickly turned into a nightmare. In one game, DeWall cracked a vertebra in his neck. The paralysis was instant and fierce. For forty-five minutes, DeWall couldn’t feel or move any part of his body below his neck. He was certain he would be in a wheelchair the rest of his life.
Thankfully, he recovered. But his athletic aspirations took a back seat to more creative, mental, and artistic ones thereafter. At Saint Olaf College in Minnesota, he was accepted into the choir, the top a capella ensemble in the United States. Later, while working on his PhD, he focused on scientific writing. By the time he got his first job as a university psychology professor, he had published more articles than most people with twice his experience in the field. By all accounts, DeWall was well under way, charting his new career. Each aspect of his life seemed to be going well. Every goal he set out to accomplish, he did.
One day, for no reason other than to be supportive, he joined his wife, Alice, on a visit to a weight-loss clinic. Sitting in a private room with his wife, a nurse, a scale, and a chart, he started thinking about his own health profile. The nurse said, “Nathan, do you want get on the scale?” “Sure,” he said. He stepped on. The nurse looked at the numbers, then at the chart, then at him. “Well, you’re obese.” “No, I’m tall,” DeWall replied. “How tall?” the nurse asked. “Six feet, two inches.” The nurse put her finger on the chart at the mark for his height. She slid it over to DeWall’s weight and replied, “You’re tall. And obese.”
Before that day, DeWall had not thought of himself as overweight or even out of shape. But seeing where he placed on that chart shook him, and awoke a determination to lose the pounds. A new goal took hold.
He started to walk. He was mindful about his eating, following the mantra “If I bite it, I write it,” and he kept food logs. A few months later, Alice said she was going out for a run and asked him to join her. He said he couldn’t because of his bad knees. She called him on the excuse, reminding him he’d never had bad knees, and they likely hadn’t turned bad that very day. He laced up his shoes and joined her for a two-mile run. Three-quarters of the way through, Alice turned to DeWall and said, “What’s the matter with you? You look and sound like you’re about to die.” “Thank you,” DeWall replied sarcastically.
But within a year, running from his house to the gas station was no longer a near-death experience. DeWall ran his first fifty-mile ultramarathon in Missouri less than twelve months into his new lifestyle. It was rough, he acknowledges. Counterintuitively, he gained ten pounds training for the race. After crossing the finish line, he looked down. His feet had swollen so much that his ankles had disappeared. From the waist down, he looked pregnant. But he kept at his running, learning the chemistry of his own body and how to balance the calories he ate versus what he burned off.
Four months later, DeWall ran his first 100-mile race. Soon after that, he ran another. And another. He ran 75 miles from Lexington to Lousiville. Then he ran 378 miles from the northern end of North Carolina to the southernmost tip. On foot, DeWall crossed the state of Tennessee in six days, running 314 miles. Nonstop. I asked him, “What does ‘nonstop’ even mean, Nathan?” He explained that in the first twenty-four hours, he ran 77 miles. Then he lay down on the side of the road and slept for two hours, before getting up and running another 60 miles. He found a hotel and slept for three hours in a bed. Left. And ran another 50 miles. “You get the picture,” he said. No. No I do not, I thought to myself.