In the prior lesson [1], I gave a brief review of what foundations are, why they matter and how we can strengthen them.
One of the things I discussed in that lesson was that, because foundations are unavoidable, the quality of your life is determined more by your weakest foundations than your strongest. Having lots of money doesn’t mean much if your relationships or health are failing you. Similarly, even with a great career and family, you can still feel awful if you aren’t sleeping enough.
A corollary of this is that, for foundations, mediocrity matters more than mastery. While your career or hobbies may benefit from specialization, for your foundations “good enough” is more important than greatness.
The benefits from putting more effort into a foundation aren’t linear. Instead, they form a classic diminishing return curve:
As you can see in the diagram, the benefits are steepest when going from zero to good enough, compared to going from good to spectacular.
For some foundations, we have good data on the shape of this curve [2]. One major benefit of regular exercise is that it reduces your chance of dying prematurely. Going from zero to 75 minutes of exercise each week, half of the standard recommendation of 150 minutes, reduces that chance by 20%. In contrast, getting 150 to 300 minutes of exercise each week only results in an extra 10% reduction (a 30% reduction in total), and there are basically no additional benefits by this measure to exercising more than five times the standard amount, which would be 12.5 hours of weekly exercise, or nearly two hours daily.
In other words, if you care about your health, getting *some* exercise relatively consistently is much more important than crushing your personal bests at the gym.
But another thing you’ll notice is that the shape of the curve is smooth. It’s not as if meeting the guidelines is the “correct” amount. You could, if you were so inclined, do about three times the recommended amount and still see additional benefits. Alternatively, you could take the opposite approach and do half as much as recommended, and you’d still be getting 2/3rds of the benefits as someone who followed the guidelines exactly.1 [3]
Given this, how much is actually “good enough”?
Feeling Out Your “Good Enough”
Trade-offs exist, so figuring out what’s “good enough” for you is an important part of the puzzle of living well.
For starters, there’s the obvious: different people have different costs for different foundations. An able-bodied twenty-year-old may have no difficulty fitting in two-hour workouts every day, but a busy working parent might struggle to find fifteen minutes.
Second, even within one person’s life, we need to consider the trade-off between different foundations. Should you exercise more if it means waking up early and losing some sleep? Should you spend the evening reading a book or socializing with friends? Should you save your money or spend it on a family vacation?
If we were the kind of mathematically-inclined robots imagined by economists, we could solve this problem simply by continuing to invest more into a practice until the incremental benefits of the behavior equaled its incremental costs. So, starting with zero exercise, you’d keep adding five minutes a day until the added five minutes gave you fewer benefits than they cost you.
In practice, however, the actual shape of this curve is not always known. Even for well-studied subjects like fitness, we have good data on mortality, but it’s harder to account for subjective benefits like improved mood and energy. Even if we did know them, the costs themselves are also subjective—how much do you value an extra five minutes of sleeping in, or an extra five minutes spent with your kids?
Instead, we have to weigh these tradeoffs more by feel than by numbers. The “good enough” threshold for a foundation for you is the point where you feel like any more wouldn’t be worth it, compared to what you’d have to give up elsewhere in your life.
While feeling things out is inexact, it’s not impossible. There are even some good arguments that something like the algorithm these imaginary, mathematically-inclined robots run is actually used by parts of the brain [4] when making choices.2 [5]
Instead, the problem we run into isn’t subjectivity, but the fact that costs aren’t constant.
Leveling Up Your “Good Enough”
Exercise is a perfect example here. While many people make a big deal of not having enough time to exercise, time alone is not a good explanation for why we don’t move enough. As many time-use surveys show [6], we spend enough time on television, podcasts or other activities that—even for quite busy people—thirty minutes a day can usually be found.
Instead, the reason we don’t exercise is simpler: exercising is hard and unpleasant, particularly when you’re out of shape. In other words, it’s not the time that prevents us from doing it, but the fact that exercising seems to require so much willpower and energy. At the end of an exhausting day, we’d rather just relax.
However, if you exercise more, it becomes more enjoyable. Your body is in better shape, so you feel better about exercising. You regularly assign time for it, so there are fewer ad-hoc difficulties with scheduling. You may even get involved in a sport or social activity that makes exercise more than just moving your muscles.
I think this explains why, despite the truth that weaker foundations impact our lives more, we often get stuck making minor tweaks to our strongest ones. The costs of investing more go down as we gain more confidence and experience, so we’re more inclined to make these easier investments, even if they result in smaller and smaller benefits.
This is also an argument for committing yourself to some mandatory maintenance for all of your foundations, even the ones you normally avoid. Because if you can lower their ongoing costs, you might find that you’re able reach a much higher level without a lot of extra pain and effort.
What’s Your “Good Enough”?
I’m curious about where you draw the line for “good enough” across foundations in your own life. What is one foundation where you’ve maintained a high standard for a long time? What is one where you feel like you’ve had a hard time reaching the minimum? Comment below and let me know!
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On Friday, I’ll be announcing the next session of Foundations [7] and giving an overview of the twelve-month curriculum, including what I recommend for capturing the lion’s share of the benefits from each foundation in your life.
Footnotes
- Interestingly enough, when you ask people whether they’re meeting recommended guidelines, a majority of adults say they are. However, when activity was actually tracked, fewer than 10% met the guideline [8]. We often deceive ourselves as to how strong our foundations actually are.
- Of course, our neural circuitry can’t easily consider long-range benefits, which is why foundations whose benefits are largely in the future are often neglected. [9]