Why Are You Hacking the Most Important Parts of Your Life?

Nothing worth having comes easy

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

I have a confession to make. I hate the trend of hacking everything. Growth hacking. Life hacking. Brain hacking. Body hacking. Hacking the hack of hacking.

I’ve always had a very negative visceral reaction to this, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

I realized that I dislike it so much because it’s the usual bullshit of quick fix shortcuts. It’s a hack because we don’t have the patience for the sustainable path. It feeds our fascination with easy fixes to hard problems.

Pop some pills to boost your brain. Don’t worry about actually stretching your mind with logical discourse, reading, and learning.

Trick your body into fat loss. Don’t you dare change how you eat or dedicate time every single day to a real workout!

Trick your customers into spending more. Don’t bother with building real relationships or ever giving a crap about them.

There’s always a price

You would think that we would learn. There’s always a price to pay for the quick fix, the hack, and the easy path. Win today, but you will suffer tomorrow.

Cocaine used to be an acceptable wonder drug and was even added to popular drinks. In 1863, Parisian chemist Angelo Mariani combined coca and wine and started selling it. It became quite popular with authors of the time (Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, and Arthur Conan Doyle), and even Pope Leo XIII carried around a flask of it. Such an amazing hack to cure fatigue and stimulate your brain!

“I take very small doses of it regularly against depression and against indigestion and with the most brilliant of success.” - Dr. Sigmund Freud

The pharmaceutical company, Merck, began producing very small amounts of cocaine in the early 1860s, soda fountains at pharmacies were serving wonderful cocaine elixirs as a medicinal, and it took decades before people began discovering that maybe, just maybe, cocaine wasn’t so great for us after all. It wasn’t until 1914 that the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act officially made cocaine illegal. So much for that energy hack!

Will we ever learn?

Today, we laugh about this story. How could people believe that cocaine was some wonder drug with no risks? Yet, we continue to have our love affair with wonder drugs to this day, despite evidence that they might kill us.

Let’s not kid ourselves that we are somehow more enlightened now. It wasn’t that long ago that people were popping ephedra supplements for a quick weight loss solution. It only took many years of thousands of poisonings and deaths before they were banned in 2004. But, do a quick search for ephedra diet pills even today and you’ll find the next crop of fat burning weight loss hacks. We never learn.

Hacks aren’t sustainable in business either

As the internet became a real place to do business, the competition began in earnest. With the increasing competitive pressure came the desire for shortcuts to building an audience and customer base. We witnessed the birth of black hat SEO tricks, spammy email marketing, buying followers, and auto-DMs.

Did these hacks work? Sure, at first it looked that way. So, people scrambled to copy their unscrupulous competitors.

But, as with any hack, these techniques were not sustainable. They don’t work any longer. Eventually, the chickens come home to roost, you have to pay the piper, and you will give the devil his due. As quickly as you gained your so-called audience, they trickle away. The customers you trick into purchases and upsells eventually walk away into the arms of a more honest merchant.

You can hack the system and break the law to achieve growth, play dirty tricks on your competitors, steal ideas, but you will pay the price (Hello, Uber). But, eventually the people who win will be the ones who play the sustainable long game of being honest, ethical, and decent.

Seek sustainable habits, not hacks

Please, stop believing that we have achieved some ultimate plateau of enlightenment. Every generation views themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization and achievement. That’s the wonderful effect of hindsight.

Those people from the past?

Idiots. Fools. Can you believe they thought that was smart or safe?

We think we’re above all of that. We know that nootropics and biohacking are oh-so-clever advances. Now we know it’s really safe this time! Now we are certain that there will be no negative ripple effects down the road.

Please. Let’s stop fooling ourselves.

We do know what is required for healthy sustainable changes to our health, our minds, and our businesses. There are no secrets. We just may not want to admit or accept it.

Quite simply, it does require hard work, consistency, learning, adapting, and permanently changing some of your habits and behaviors. No hack will last.

If you would rather plan out a long-term, sustainable, and fulfilling career vs. hacking your current job, join me in my private Slack team. I’d love to talk more with you about it!