Why Beginners Have a Hard Time With Simple Advice
How to start as a beginner?
This is arguably the most important question of all in any domain, including fitness and the Zettelkasten Method.
The typical and best approach is to start with simple explanations and instructions. In fitness, you begin by incorporating regular movement and small diet changes. Assuming that a fictional client doesn’t exercise and has an average diet, the following two changes will melt quite a lot of belly fat:
- A daily walk for 20 minutes. If you do it first thing in the morning, you get a chance to postpone screen exposure for added mental health.
- Eat one serving of vegetables or salad at the beginning of every meal. To accelerate your progress, drink a protein shake before breakfast.
Pretty simple, and it is working. You know what is even simpler? Taking a pill of your life-saving medicine. And just half of the patients are actually doing this. So, if merely half of the people are committing to something as simple as taking a pill, how many are committing to these two simple habit changes? It is even less. I spare you the doom-and-gloom health statistics.
But why? To understand this problem, you have to dig deeper than merely stating that people are idiots.
The answer is that it is a problem of implementation. Here are two examples:
- If you have a heart problem and your doctor has prescribed you a pill, the act of taking the pill might activate the memory of the shocking revelation that you might get a heart attack. Each instance of seeing the pill in the hand brings you back to this memory, relives the shock, and negatively conditions (punishes) this action. It may seem to you that you just forgot, but it might very well be that you avoid it.
- If you are obese, chances are that food is comfort. Eating a family-sized portion of fast food might not just be gluttony; it might be self-medication for serious issues. Stopping to eat fast food might not only be a daunting task. To you, it might bring you into a situation in which you have to confront a trauma that you are desperately trying to suppress.
As a coach, I am always in awe that some people become healthy and fit because they make a decision, while others can’t even act on the simplest advice. The task of a coach is then to dig as deep as possible.
To help a female client with weight loss, I had to explain to her the mechanics of how agreements in a partnership work and that she can’t expect her husband to respect an agreement that would give her the space for health habits if she actively breaks them, even with good intentions. To reach her goal of losing a bit of fat, she had to make big changes.
Another client just got a workout plan, completely transformed his body, and then, later, driven by the momentum of progress, reengaged with his family to become the father he was meant to be.
The same dynamic plays out in the world of the Zettelkasten Method, as part of the broader worlds of productivity and knowledge.
I saw many people adopting the method with little detailed instructions. One forum member, even following instinctively, is doing pretty advanced stuff. The fitness equivalent are people who just pick up exercising and become fit almost effortlessly. If you ask them for advice, they tell you, “It is simple, start slow and small, then just build your regimen. This isn’t complicated.”
But sometimes, you run into deeper issues. Nori, for example, is hardworking, smart, and (I mean that as a compliment!) a bit nerdy. Still, she ran into problems making sense of the scattered content, even after reading the then-available books on the method.
We had three sessions to clear up some of her issues. Nothing about these sessions was about me saying to her, “Nori, the method is simple. Don’t overcomplicate stuff.” Instead, I coached her to the necessary depth, where her issues were.
What’s the verdict then? There are countless examples of people who can quickly advance to a high level of development by following simple advice. They have a solid foundation that is often hidden and overlooked, even by themselves. Advice like “To lose weight, you just eat less and move more!” works – for those who have no other issues. But many struggle with such advice because their issues reside deeper.
The other side of the coin is that simple advice is not enough for people who want to achieve way more than to lose some weight. A complex and hard task warrants more powerful tools.
The same is true for the Zettelkasten Method. The Zettelkasten Method is a powerful tool to meet a hard challenge. This is why I provide maps of depth like the Zettelkasten Iceberg, or I throw 2 weeks of my life at a comprehensive guide to atomicity. The Zettelkasten Iceberg is a challenge to look beyond the surface of note-taking and presents a diagnostic tool for problems of externalised thinking. The Guide to Atomicity provides a solution for making going to the essence of an idea a habit and marrying it to your note-taking practice.
In health and fitness, the struggle some face to achieve what the more well-off do easily is real and well established. In the world of knowledge work, knowledge about this is still rare.