Recently, I came across a discussion where experts found that among those who lose weight, about 30% - 50% will experience weight regain about a year after finishing their weight - loss journey, and within four years, the vast majority will return to their pre - weight - loss weight.

This reminds me of the view of anthropologist Herman Pontzer that I quoted when writing Open Your Mind. His research shows that when people trying to lose weight exercise, they do shed some pounds in the short term. However, when the time frame is extended, say over a year, most people's weights will bounce back, making the weight - loss effect almost zero.

Why does this happen? The reason is that these people have made a mistake: they treat "losing weight in a short period" as a task, attempting to complete it by reaching a goal.

To achieve this goal, they have to do many extra things. For example, they deliberately reduce their daily food intake, control themselves from eating even when they are hungry, force themselves to eat healthy but unappetizing food, and struggle to find time for exercise...

As a result, "losing weight" becomes an "abnormal state" in their lives. It turns into a task with a clear deadline and requirements, something you have to "persist with great effort" - rather than a daily, stable lifestyle.

So, what do many people do after achieving their goals? They relax and return to their previous lifestyle. Some even eat more than before to make up for the pain they endured.

How can the weight not bounce back?

I

Although the above discussion is about weight loss, this problem is very common and almost everyone has encountered it.

For instance:

• You want to improve your writing skills, so you force yourself to write a thousand words every day, even when you have no desire to express. Eventually, you end up giving up in pain.
• You want to strengthen your physique, so you require yourself to find time for exercise. But every time you have to fight with your inertia for a long time before going out, and you can't keep it up after a few days.
• You want to read more books, so you participate in various reading activities, diligently take notes and punch in. However, after the activity ends, you return to your old habits, and soon forget what you've read...

There are many similar examples, but the reason behind them is the same: they all treat the things they want to achieve and the habits they want to form as tasks with clear goals, which backfires.

We know that the brain has a very fundamental need for stability: it will firmly move along the "path of least resistance", which is our daily, habitual lifestyle.

Once you set a task for yourself, it means asking the brain to abandon the original path and move towards a new one. At this time, it creates resistance for the brain. To overcome this resistance, the brain needs to pay more costs. For example:

• You need to deliberately remind yourself to do this thing, otherwise, you will easily forget.
• You need to constantly persuade and push yourself, using "willpower" to keep going, otherwise, you will easily give up.
• You need to rearrange other things to make dedicated time for it, otherwise, it will gradually fade away.

In this process, the brain keeps investing resources, but at the same time, the feedback and benefits we get are few. So, one day, the motivation will run out, our lives will return to inertia, and the goals we pursue will end up in vain.

Why is the feedback so little? Because when we treat "change" as a task, we tend to over - focus on the goal rather than the process. For the brain, only "achieving the goal" counts as feedback. Once it takes too long to achieve the goal, it is very easy to fail halfway.

So, to sum it up in one sentence: Most things that require great effort to persist in will eventually fail.

II

Furthermore, once something becomes a task, we easily have an illusion: our quality of life depends on how many tasks we complete and how many goals we achieve.

But is the real world like this? No.

Activities like reading, losing weight, learning, and writing cannot be done well by "reaching a certain goal in a short period". Instead, they require long - term continuous efforts to see results.

However, once you turn them into tasks, it's easy to tell yourself after reaching the goal: "I've done it, I can move on to the next task." So, you put it down without a second thought and shift your attention to something else...

So, even if many people can persist, they often encounter the following situations:

• After achieving the weight - loss goal, they tell themselves: "I've succeeded, I can enjoy life now." Then they resume their previous diet and lifestyle, leading to weight regain.
• After finishing a course, they tell themselves: "I've done it, I can take a break." So, the knowledge they've learned gathers dust in their notes and is never touched again.
• After completing a project, they tell themselves: "I've completed it, I can do something else." Then they continue to look for new goals, letting the experience and skills they've accumulated gradually go to waste...

The root cause is this: Many people think that life is about completing one task after another. The more tasks they complete, the more their lives will change and the better they will become.

But this is not the case. What our lives are like does not depend on "which goals we've reached", but on what we are doing every day, every moment, every second.

Only by internalizing your ideal lifestyle into your life and making it the norm of your life can your life become more ideal.

Change never lies in a single endpoint; change is on the way.

III

So, what is a more effective way? It is to ask yourself these three questions:

• What is my ideal, better lifestyle like?
• What things do I need to do to achieve this state?
• What do I need to change to keep doing these things?

The focus is not on achieving a certain goal in a short period, but on how to internalize the things you want to do into your life more permanently and make it the "new norm" of your life.

Take a simple example: You often stay up late and want to go to bed earlier, but you often return to your previous state after a few attempts at going to bed early and find it hard to stick to it in the long run.

Why? Because you're not sleepy, so going to bed early is a torture for you, and the longer you lie in bed, the harder it is to fall asleep. So, to make yourself sleepy earlier, what you actually need to do is not go to bed early but get up early.

If you want to fall asleep an hour earlier, you have to get up an hour earlier and stick to it for a while.

Furthermore, if you don't know what to do after getting up an hour earlier, why not go for a morning run? It can wake up your body and strengthen your physique.

Slowly, you'll find that getting up an hour earlier every day for a morning run not only improves your physical condition but also makes it easier for you to fall asleep at night and enhances your sleep quality. You'll no longer have the problems of staying up late and insomnia.

Even when running in the morning, you can listen to podcasts and news... Over time, your way of receiving information will also change. You'll start to like getting up early because it brings you more new stimuli.

You see, the problem we want to solve is "how to go to bed early", but what we ultimately change is the whole lifestyle, including getting up early, morning running, and listening to the news. We can say that our living habits have been completely changed.

This is the inner logic of this method: Our life is a complete system with self - repair ability.

If you only change one element, the whole system will generate a force that resists this change, and this force will eventually offset the change you've made, making the system return to its previous norm.

Only when you optimize the whole system, adjust different elements and their relationships, let the system gradually adapt to the new way of operation, and internalize this way as the new norm can the change you've made exist stably.

IV

Let me give another example.

I have a friend who is an excellent manager. She once came to me and said she wanted to write articles regularly like me to systematically organize her thoughts and experiences.

However, on the one hand, she didn't have much time and couldn't spare a few hours to concentrate on thinking and writing. On the other hand, she didn't have the habit of writing and found it difficult to write long articles of thousands of words at once.

So, she asked me: Would taking a writing course help? Or are there any training methods to improve writing efficiency and results?

I told her that her problem might not be solved by taking a writing course or training. A better way might be to start from the whole lifestyle and work mode and make some brand - new adjustments.

My advice to her was as follows: First, change her work habits. Use the breaks in her daily work to record her thoughts and ideas with a voice tool, which could be a few sentences to a few minutes each time, as first - hand materials. Then, regularly (e.g., weekly) collect the recorded content, convert it into text, and use AI or ask an assistant to help organize it into a structured document.

In this way, she can not only organize her thoughts and experiences into articles but also leave review materials for her work, making it convenient for her to query and review her thoughts at that time and find room for optimization.

In this example, is the problem she wants to solve "how to improve writing skills"? Actually, no. It's about how to naturally produce more thinking results by changing the overall lifestyle and work mode.

Many times, if you take a longer - term view, instead of just focusing on specific goals and tasks, and think about "how can I change the whole lifestyle so that this task naturally becomes a norm", the effect might be better.

V

Let's go back to the initial example.

If you want to lose weight, what's the most effective way? It's not to force yourself to diet and exercise but to find a healthier and more comfortable lifestyle to replace your old, unhealthy one and make the new one the norm.

For example:

• Replace high - sugar and high - fat foods in your daily diet with lighter ones, and at the same time, find ways to make them more delicious so that you can enjoy the food instead of forcing yourself to eat.
• Reduce the time spent on transportation during your daily commute and walk more. Develop the habit of going for a walk during your lunch break and on weekends, so that your brain gradually regards "moving your body" as the norm.
• Make some friends who like sports and play ball games. Go out and exercise with them when you're free. This can not only strengthen friendship and promote social interaction but also effectively keep you fit...

During this process, your weight may not drop rapidly and may fluctuate, but it doesn't matter. Because our ultimate goal is not to lose weight but to make ourselves healthier.

Similarly, if you want to learn more, a more effective method might not be to force yourself to read a certain number of pages of books or listen to a certain number of minutes of courses every day. Instead, it's to find a new lifestyle habit that makes reading and learning a natural thing and a part of your life.

For example, you can share your insights on social platforms and answer others' questions. Observe what common problems and shared needs people have, and use them as clues for thematic learning. In this way, you can use output to stimulate your input.

On the one hand, the approval and gratitude you get from others for your output can provide you with sufficient feedback and motivation. On the other hand, they can also provide you with phased directions and guidance, helping you avoid blind learning and learn purposefully.

During this process, you may gradually find the fun in learning and outputting. Then, to make more time for learning, you may try to improve your work efficiency, compress your work time, get rid of meaningless trivial matters and unhealthy lifestyle habits, and make your every day more fulfilling and rich...

In this way, learning is no longer a difficult task that requires "gritting your teeth and persevering" - it will gradually become a part of your life, and you'll feel uncomfortable if you don't learn for a few days.

This is the most ideal state: Let the life system run naturally and produce the results we need.

VI

In short, what's the most effective way to change your life and become a better version of yourself?

It must not be to set one goal and task after another for yourself, striving to achieve and conquer them one by one. This way, you'll either find it hard to persist or easily return to your old ways.

Instead, regard life as an overall system, find a better mode to replace the old, less - than - perfect one, and then fine - tune and optimize this system so that it can operate normally under the new mode and turn the things you want to do into the "new norm" of your life.

Specifically, you can refer to the following steps and tips to better put it into practice.

1. Minimum Step

Start with this question: If you were to do one simplest thing to get closer to your "ideal state", what would it be? Don't set tasks like "achieving a certain goal within a few months" - it doesn't make much sense. What you need to consider is: If I simplify all the changes into one thing that I can keep doing in the long run, what is it? Find it and "insert" it into your life, and do it for a while.

2. Establish Feedback

After you've been doing it for a while, you need to think about: How can this thing bring you feedback? It could be a sense of achievement, pleasure, or gain... You must be able to feel it clearly so that you can continue. This feedback can come from the outside or the inside. The former includes the affirmation and praise from others, while the latter includes the effects it has on you, such as the improvement of your abilities, the change of your state, and the satisfaction of your needs... The key to getting things done lies in getting feedback from the process, not just focusing on the goal.

3. Optimize the System

Once you've established feedback and made it run on its own, the next step is to find a way to expand it, add more elements to it, and make it occupy a larger proportion in your life until it meets your expectations. In this process, you definitely need to adjust other things to make room for it. So, how to rearrange your time? How to get rid of unimportant and unnecessary things? How to integrate fragmented time to have more disposable time? These are the things you need to think about and try at this stage.

4. Calibrate the Direction

Finally, in these steps, you need to constantly remind yourself to pay attention: Am I on the right track? It should be noted that you'd better take a longer - term view and not over - focus on the short - term changes in a certain indicator. Instead, look at your life comprehensively: Is it getting better? For example:

• My weight may not change significantly in the short term, but my lifestyle is becoming healthier.
• I may not write many articles in the short term, but my knowledge system and thinking are becoming more complete.
• I may not learn a certain skill or field quickly, but I'm becoming more fulfilled and productive every day...

What we should pursue is never to reach a static goal but to make our life have a better "norm".

Conclusion

Of course, not all things are unsuitable to be treated as tasks. Some things that need to be completed in a short period and have clear measurement criteria, such as passing an exam within a few months, are very suitable to be handled as tasks. However, if it involves lifelong growth and aspects related to life, you may refer to this article to better put it into practice.