When I was young, especially in my adolescence, the advice I received about my physical health was spectacularly bad. Not because it told me to do bad things (although let’s not talk about the Food Pyramid…), but because it was always presented as a long-term thing. “You need to make these healthy choices in order to live a long life or avoid heart disease in your fifties,” things like that. That’s not especially compelling to a 15-year-old, and so it often got ignored.
I wish I knew then what I know now, which is that the actual impact of healthy choices is that they make you feel immediately better.
Like, try this: drink a big glass of water, do ten pushups, and then relax for ten minutes in the sun. That’s a total of 15 minutes, tops. You will feel absolutely amazing all day.
The long-term impact is just a bonus.
The Opportunity Machine 