The Architecture of Effort

Salvage Your Attention, Define Your Mission & Make It Happen

Today I weigh 199 lbs, the first time I have weighed under 200 lbs in about 8 years (and down from ~242 lbs at my “zenith”). This is not a victory lap, but proof that by cutting out the news cycle and focusing inward - on my mind, body, diet and skills - I am actually using my reclaimed attention to improve who I am. This is how.

Salvage Your Attention

Remember when you feel stirred to do or be more to double down on improving yourself, then your objectives will become clearer. Rather than mentally masturbate about striking gold, figure out how to eat more fiber first, you fucking crazy person!

- A kind message to myself, July 9th, 2025

Like many human beings, I like to be informed (I have particular interest in economics, geopolitics and military history). With today’s technology this has never been easier. Unfortunately, the topics that interest me are serious and involve life and death for millions of people, so there is plenty of motivation for players in various seats of power to control narrative. Often, my attempts to learn how the world works quickly derail into the mindless consumption of propagandized garbage.

Even if this were not the case and all information on the internet reflected objective truth, the dose still makes the poison. There is only so much coverage of war and creeping economic ruin one can ingest without developing palpitations. Worse yet, a lot of the watching, listening and reading I do is simply wasted effort. I might intend to anticipate risk and position my family for success by saturating myself with the news, but I don’t actually apply the information in my daily life. The news doesn’t help me lose weight. It doesn’t make me a better father. Endless consumption of the news leaves me anxious and ineffective.

But there is important work within my control that needs doing today, irrespective of whether China invades Taiwan. I’ll do my family little good, for example, if crisis hits and I’m too heavy to climb a flight of stairs without getting winded. Perhaps paradoxically given how much appears broken in the world, I turn inward - to fix myself.

Turning inward means turning away from the things that sap my attention. To extricate myself from the draw of social media and platforms like YouTube, I removed all social media (and finance apps, which also suck up my attention) from my phone. I discontinued Youtube Premium (judge me for having subscribed, I do). I turned on the “downtime” feature on my iPhone, which makes it so unpalatably frustrating to use from 2200 - 0600 that I barely look at it. I have devolved my phone into a device with fewer and fewer uses.

Hitting 199 lbs is proof that the attention I freed up in this way is attention better spent.

Define Your Mission

It can feel boring when your attention is not constantly occupied by screens. There were times when I felt frustrated at having newfound free time but no concrete plan to use it. This boredom was helpful, though, as it provided fertile ground for my thoughts to cultivate free from distraction. In short order, that boredom faded and my mission became clear.

I wrote to myself that morning:

My mission in life should be to ready myself for when it is time to say goodbye to my wife & children, & for my children to be resilient enough to withstand my loss.

Now that is a mission more worthy of my attention! I carried my sleeping 6-year-old daughter in from the car the other day and was shocked at our reflection in the front door. She was more than half my body length! What happened to my baby!? I am running out of time to express to her and her siblings how enamored I am with them; how impressed I am by them. I am running out of time to foster their resilience and strength for when it is their turn to set out on their own adventures. Once scattered thoughts scintillating in the background of my mind crystallized around this singular purpose, and the priorities that would take center stage in my new life took shape - mind, body, diet and skills.

Make It Happen

The Architecture of Effort

Imagine a pyramid of foundational attributes or abilities required to survive in bad times and thrive in good times.

Each layer of the pyramid builds from the one beneath it. A good diet fuels the mind and body. The mind drives the body, its efferent limb, to literally make real its designs. Skills are the specific means by which the body achieves the goals set forth by the mind. You can’t practice skills, say, like practicing emergency medicine, unless your body functions, your mind knows what its doing and you have the fuel to make all the upstream processes happen.

I chose to focus on these foundations in an effort to rebuild myself from the ground up. To intentionally bring myself closer in alignment with the type of human I want to be - strong, wise, magnanimous and kind.

Anyone can “level up” these foundations, and you might prioritize others I haven’t listed here. There is no real downside to improving any of them. Rather, I would argue that the longer you put off improving things like your diet, the sooner and swifter your debt to chronic disease or early death will have to be repaid.

But improving yourself in any aspect of life can be difficult. Old habits die hard, and it takes conscious energy, so often in short supply, to change. Specifically regarding losing weight, my journey often occurs in fits and starts. Sometimes I come out of the gate firing on all cylinders, only to get frustrated with slower-than-expected improvements. Life will inevitably get busy and I will let that be my excuse for slipping up on moving my body or logging calories.

The answer, I have found, with losing weight or reaching any new goal is 1) start and 2) don’t stop.

“This guy got into medical school and this is the shit he comes up with?” You rightly ask. “What a no brainer!”

But if starting and not-stopping were easy, there would be no distance between anyone and who they want to be! Everyone, everywhere would already be their self-actualized, perfected avatars. There must be ways to make starting and not-stopping more likely to happen. Here is what I have found to do just that in my own life.

START

Start with small goals

Start with laughably, embarrassingly small goals and treat them like big deals. You don’t have to tell anyone (though it helps to have an accountability partner).

I absolutely hate logging calories. It takes minimal effort, but I just can’t stand doing it. But when I do it, I lose weight. When I decided that it was time to refocus on losing weight, I promised myself that I would redownload the Weight Watchers app and put it on my home screen. That was it.

It sat there for weeks before I opened it. I have an irrational dislike for this, as you can tell. Eventually, though, I opened it. My next goal was to log for one day, which wasn’t as painful as I expected, and I scaled up from there.

This is a much more accessible goal than “lose 15 lbs,” and is therefore much more likely to be completed. Once you get enough completions under your belt, newer goals, though more challenging, are more likely to be completed, and success snowballs.

Pair new behaviors with old ones

Think of all the mindless automatisms you already perform daily. I wrote some of mine down:

Brush teeth, shower, get dressed, go to the bathroom, make coffee, eat, use phone, drive, etc.

Now, attach a new behavior to one you do all the time. A few weeks ago I started doing push ups, crunches and squats before getting in the shower. I didn’t want to waste water and knowing the shower was running motivated me to get the reps in ASAP. The whole routine got done in a few minutes. I would add a rep to each movement weekly.

Make goals specific

“Be more patient” is a fine goal to have, but what does it actually mean?

I like the way Alex Hormozi frames qualities. He unpacks them as collections of behaviors that can be learned.

Being patient is a collection of learnable behaviors. It might look like someone who takes a breath before responding to a stressful situation. It might look like getting other tasks done while awaiting completion of another that is out of your hands. It might be someone deliberately choosing not to perseverate while awaiting pay day or receipt of a package.

For me, being patient means not expressing frustration in front of my kids when they all ask for different things at the same time. I defined the specific situation in which I would like to handle things better and how I will respond, so there is no guesswork in ascertaining whether I am meeting the mark.

Reduce friction

Make it easier to do desirable behaviors and harder to do undesirable ones.

I mentioned before how I reclaimed my attention by making my phone more difficult to use. As a result I have become relatively disinterested in using it all! This phenomenal piece of technology has been rendered obstructive and boring. This frees up my attention to do more desirable activities than scrolling, like reading (I put the Libby app on my home screen and it is one of few apps that I am “allowed” to use any time of day). This helps me improve the “mind” foundation, by making time and space to read philosophy.

DON’T STOP

Track progress

There are innumerable ways to track your progress depending on who you are what your goal is. My brother uses a habit tracker. I use my journal and google sheets for things like weight lifting. The specific method doesn’t matter. All that matters is that tracking facilitates the new behavior. When you invariably hit a snag in your progress it helps to see just how far you have come and prevents you from wanting to give up entirely.

Create accountability

An accountability partner is someone who helps you stay committed to your goals by regularly checking in with you and holding you responsible for your progress.

One of my best physician friends and I recently decided to become accountability partners. He wanted to eat more fruits and vegetables and I wanted to improve my behavior in front of my kids. Every day I tortured him via text until he would send me a photo of him holding a strawberry or an apple (they looked like ransom photos). Every time I got frustrated over something little with my kids I would Venmo him $5. He ate more fresh foods and made a lot of money.

Fail and then get over it

You will fail. You will fail more than once. Maybe often.

The difference between someone who gets things done and one who doesn’t is that the productive one recovers quickly from failure and gets back on track. He experiences the failure, learns from it and gets back to work. He does not “suffer twice” by self-immolating unnecessarily when he fails to meet his own expectations.

This past weekend my 10 day streak of logging on Weight Watchers burned up in the atmosphere when I took the kids to a local water park. They wanted hamburgers and ice cream for lunch and I, “the big softie” got it for them (mostly to eat their leftovers). I was too embarrassed to plug in my fall from grace onto the weight watchers app. But because I tracked my progress (see above), I saw that I had already lost 4 lbs in the previous 10 days. No sense in throwing the baby out with the bathwater here! I restarted logging the next day.

Get Better At “Getting Better”

You have come so far.

Focus on improving your mind, diet and & “getting in shape for your next birthday.” Once you get that straightened out (mind, body, diet), your priorities will become clear. You already have everything you need [to start].

You know that getting your arms around these goals will be hard in the beginning, until they come naturally. Between you & [your Wife] your family is safe. You can afford to table money/professional/external project goals for 6 months until you assume a more desirable shape. So plan on chiseling away at getting better until the “getting better” process feels natural.

If you made it this far and are not bored to tears, then I’m impressed. This is a deep, not necessarily useful window into my mind and how I think. I hope sharing my thought process in my own redevelopment might be useful for you. I will be writing in detail about the foundations I am trying to develop in future posts. Godspeed in your own endeavors.