Stop Trying Harder. Change Your Environment Instead.

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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We humans like to pretend that we're active drivers of these bodies, doing exactly what we want at any moment.

Except how many of you have eaten more than you wanted, went to sleep later than you planned, or procrastinated on an important task? We frequently take actions that look self-destructive if we objectively compare our behavior to our goals.

This is in part because we live our lives primarily in self-driving mode. We get up to the same alarm, get dressed in our normal way, commute the same way, and perform most work tasks in the way that feels natural and automatic.

Sure, every day is different, but a large percentage of our decisions are relatively automatic. Even if those automatic choices aren't the best for us.

I struggled with overeating my whole life. I tried various forms of dieting and exercise, and none stuck. Until things changed.

For me, the pivotal moment was moving to the Seattle area in 2007. You see, I'd grown up in the Midwest (Chicago suburbs). I love Chicago food. Italian beef sandwiches, deep-dish pizza, and hot dogs. Everything about those is tasty and addictive. And so I ate them often. Since running along Chicago suburb streets isn't exactly fun, most of my exercise was visiting local gyms. At least for a bit, because they never stuck.

I arrived in the Seattle area, and I think within the first week my co-workers invited me to go hiking with them as a team social event. This was apparently just what people did for fun out here. So I got myself some hiking boots and started going on hikes with people.

Then another co-worker invited me rock climbing, and I joined the climbing gym. And different co-workers invited me to CrossFit with them. Why not? I joined.

Within perhaps a month, I'd been invited to probably 5-6 physical activities, which was 5-6 more than I'd been invited in the approximately 10 years of working in Illinois.

The location also changed my relationship with food. Seattle has various tasty foods, but overeating pho is drastically different for your body than overeating deep dish pizza. I can eat 6k calories of deep dish pizza in a single meal. I'm suspicious I couldn't do that with pho.

Within 6 months, I'd lost around 40 pounds. I could do 15 pull-ups, and run miles. I looked like a stranger in the mirror.

For the sake of my ego, I'd love to claim that this was my iron-hard will. Except that I'd spent the previous ~15 years of my life wishing that I could be in better shape.

I think the key is the difference in approaches.

When I wanted to lose weight, I was focused on the output. How do you lose weight? You eat less, so I'd try to eat less. You exercise more, so I'd try to exercise more. Except the entire drive behind these changes was my interest in losing weight. It's incredibly difficult to make a lifestyle change on the back of wanting a different result. As many of you surely recognize.

When I moved to Seattle, I changed the inputs to my health. Instead of the default and convenient restaurants being pizza and Italian beef, they were Asian restaurants. And when my co-workers invited me out to lunch, we'd all get Pho. The change in location broke me out of my automatic food habits.

Similarly, I didn't have to struggle to build a fitness habit. My new social network was regularly hiking, rock climbing, and going to CrossFit. By simply going with the flow and giving in to social pressure, I built a pretty rigorous fitness routine.

I want to first say that not everyone will be as lucky as me. I know that my first team at Amazon was uniquely active, and I got lucky with the social connections I made. But the point of this article isn't that moving to Seattle will resolve your health problems.

Instead, my point is that I stopped trying to "get in shape" and instead changed my situation. My situation changed, which changed my eating and fitness patterns. Funny enough, this is the Situation → Behavior → Impact model that we frequently suggest when interviewing. Instead of trying to directly control behavior, the key is to change the situation.

The thing is that we believe so much in our personal control that it feels disheartening to fail in implementing that control.