Scott H Young

Sweet, greasy and delicious, empty calories are filler food that keep you feeling full while offering little nutritional value. In the short term, these empty calories are great. They let you feel good and are easy to swallow. But their glory is short lived when they leave you with disease and obesity.

Empty calories aren’t just in our food, they are in our lives. Empty calories are all those tasks that make you feel productive even though you aren’t contributing any value. Empty calories are those hours in front of the television to let you feel entertained, even though you are watching reruns. Empty calories are in the running shoes you buy instead of jogging and the investment books you read instead of saving. Empty calories give you the feeling, but not the nutrition.

Our bodies were designed before McDonalds. Designed tens of thousands of years before agriculture and mass production, the human body is easily tricked by a french fry. It has fats and carbohydrates galore, satiating hunger without mentioning that it has very little else. Tastes good now, but can you stomach the results?

The Broken Counter

The problem with empty calories is we have a broken counter. Our body counts the empty calories the same as the nutritious ones. Donut or broccoli, the counting works the same.

Broken counters happen in all areas of life. Some people count anything they do at the job as work. Their counter goes up whether they sit around and push papers or finish their project. Some people count reading about public speaking with the same weight as getting in front of an audience.

The counters aren’t broken so much as they are too simplistic. Nutrition, productivity, and growth are such fuzzy concepts that they are too difficult to really measure. So, we count other things instead. Time spent on the job, widgets produced and books read. The counter is easy to use, but it lets the empty calories slip by.

More Work = Less Value

Empty calories tend to travel in groups. The more calories you manage to consume, the higher proportion of empty ones get thrown in. Your cola doesn’t just have more empty calories it has more calories in total. Trying to eat more calories to cover the empty ones will just leave you fat.

When work slides, instead of cutting down on empty calories, people just try to consume more. Spend more time at the office, more time working on your goals. Work harder and harder. More calories, less value and eventually burnout.

The way to be healthier is not to eat more calories to make up for the empty ones but to eat better foods. Effectiveness at anything doesn’t just mean doing it more, but doing it better. Cutting the calories that really don’t matter.

Examining Your Diet

The most dangerous empty calories aren’t the soft drinks and burgers that you willingly consume, they are the ones that trick you into believing they are healthy. They are the breakfast muffins and processed granola bars that look healthy but are mostly empty. You don’t even feel guilty eating them.

Take a look at everything you are doing towards your goals. Don’t guess about what is making a difference and figure out what actually is. A successful article on this blog can gather in thousands of new readers. An average one is lucky to garner a single comment.

It took me a lot of time before I realized that volume is good, but quality is crucial. This isn’t just common sense. Other blogs live and die by the volume of their content. I actually had to pour through the numbers on mine to realize that this wasn’t true for me. Volume could keep me where I was but only very high quality could take me where I needed to go. This meant shifting time from writing to more time developing ideas.

The empty calories that are going to kill you won’t come with a nutritional information box. These calories are often hidden and wasting your time. The only way you can uncover them is not to guess but to actually look. Pull up the results, run an experiment, test your idea.

Most people already eat the amount of calories they need. Nutrition isn’t eating more it is eating healthier. Productivity doesn’t mean working more, it means working smarter. It is a strategy of cutting those empty calories and trading them for the work that really matters. Sometimes it might surprise you.

Image courtesy of flickr

Like my article on speed reading, it seems that my article on holistic learning has brought a fair bit of confusion and controversy even for a large amount of coverage. Given the immense amount of feedback I received about this post I think it is only fair that I go into a little more depth to answer some of the comments based on the ideas I present in the article and to respond to some of the criticisms.

For those of you who missed my article How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying, the basic point is that you should learn holistically by continually interlinking ideas and information so that pieces of knowledge are individual units but part of a greater whole. Instead of just learning each formula or historical figure as another data point, you consciously relate this point to anything that strikes similarities. I related this idea of holistic learning to the notion of a web, in which each idea is linked to hundreds of others.

What Exactly is Holistic Learning?

This concept of holistic learning came to me by trying to note the differences that people like myself who study little and learn fast have between people who are otherwise really hardworking and study a lot but can’t seem to learn rapidly. I’m certainly not unique by any standard. I mentioned that I was the second highest graded graduating student from my high-school class.

One of my best friends was in first. Talking with him also reveals that he doesn’t study a whole lot and learns rapidly. I’m sure many of my readers learn a lot faster than myself, and there are people who blow me away with how fast they can learn. Holistic learning is my attempt to point out the major difference in strategy that until now has been a gift at birth that others can’t replicate.

The point of my article wasn’t to boast. Anyone who is good at school can tell you from an early age they start to downplay their abilities when talking with others to fit in, in a way that those who excel in social skills or athletics almost never do. I gave examples of my success so that I could demonstrate a new model for learning that might help others replicate my results. I firmly believe that most talents simply don’t apply if you can really figure out the other persons strategy for success.

If you talk to anyone that really understands a subject, they have a very densely interlinked web in that area. People who really understand a particular field don’t just see equations, dates and concepts, they see how they work together into an intricate whole. The point of my article was to explain what is happening differently in people who really “get” a subject and those that struggle hard just to remember all the formulas.

Almost everyone here is a genius, at least at basic arithmetic. Most of us simply “get” how to add and subtract numbers from one to ten. If I asked you what seven minus four is, you wouldn’t have to go back to your hands and start counting down fingers, the answer three would be immediate. The reason basic arithmetic is so easy for you is simply because it is so densely interwoven into your web of knowledge.

People who learn really easily seem to have a gift, but what they are really doing whether they consciously realize it, is fitting each piece of info into frameworks for things they already understand. They have practiced using visualizations, metaphors and kinesthetic learning aids so deeply that they find it easy to relate new information to a different subject. This explanation of intelligence as a talent is a little hard to utilize, but the concept of linking up information is usable.

Is learning holistically something that can help you on your exams next week? No. It is a skill that takes a lot of time to practice. A few of you criticized me because holistic learning isn’t a quick solution which perhaps the somewhat exaggerated title of my post led you to believe. Unfortunately I don’t offer any quick solutions. I’ve written frequently that I don’t believe in revolutionary change. If you expected quick answers you aren’t going to find them here.

The Purpose of Studying

What about studying? My article suggests that you should do away with studying entirely. I believe the real situation is that you should do away with how most people study. Most people study by cramming information into their brain and hoping it will stick. Reviewing material so you can more effectively interlink it into your web is a smart idea.

If your spending hours reviewing a subject then you simply don’t “get” it. This isn’t a crime, and without a better strategy, studying hard is the best tool you have available to pass your exams. What I suggest is that you focus your energy on using the various tools I suggested in the article to link up each idea to your web. I do this pretty much automatically so extensive studying has become unnecessary, but for people who want to learn this skill, it is more important to change the way you study than to eliminate it immediately.

I still believe studying is valuable as a pretest. I usually do a quick review of all my notes before a test, not to cram or learn the information but to ensure that every idea I come across seems intuitive and obvious — heavily interlinked in my web. If it isn’t, then I hastily try to insert it. But a lot of people come across tons of ideas that aren’t interlinked well, but by this time they are screwed. Studying is like a warm-up jog not the extensive training session before a marathon.

I built this website on the fundamental idea that we can improve ourselves. I also believe that you can accomplish a lot more than you believe if you are given the right strategy or concept. Holistic learning is my attempt to explain what the difference is between those who immediately understand and those who struggle. I also tried to add some suggestions for how you might be able to incorporate this strategy for learning into your own life. Holistic learning isn’t about passing exams, but being able to learn anything. A skill that is also needed by people outside the classroom.