Gendernomics- Building Value Page 9

  This is an enabler that means he can walk to the gym and thus burn off extra calories

  Attention to detail

  His video game habit requires him to keep track of many small details to maximize his performance in-game

  Addictive personality

  His addiction to fast food, gaming and weed demonstrates that he has an addictive personality.

  Dave can leverage some of these enablers to his benefit, online gaming can be highly competitive and requires a lot of time, dedication, persistence and attention to detail in order to climb the competitive ladder, these are all traits Dave can apply in a more positive direction by focusing on using them to fix his problems.

  His ability to take in a lot of information rapidly demonstrated by his high school track record, but also his online gaming, can be positive if utilized to research solutions to his problems. Likewise, living with his parents while working a part time job gives him a chance to build his bank accounts and get out of debt, in the process building a financial foundation.

  His access to a free gym within walking distance of his house allows him to walk to the gym, which cuts down on both his time commuting and adds some extra cardio to his routine. In addition, it being free enables him to train at no cost, supporting his goal of building a financial foundation.

  His attention to detail and addictive personal works both as a barrier and an enabler, it has caused the negative present state as he has indulged in his vices with an addictive zeal that has taken his life all the way down to rock bottom, but if leveraged towards his goals it can serve as a major enabler. However, it may also be a barrier to his success if his addictions get the best of him. This is a very typical example of how a some things can be enablers if leveraged correctly and barriers if not controlled properly.

  Strategy Formulation

  The core of any good strategy formulation is the Vision, Mission and the associated measures. A strategy is inherently a plan for how to move from point A to point B.

  Dave’s mission statement is “To be a man with options” and his mission statement that makes the vision more concrete is “To be a man with options in the lifestyle, career, financial, sexual and physical realms”.

  Thus, we begin the strategy formulation process by outlining the major areas in which there are gaps between his present state and his future desired state, namely lifestyle, career, financial, sexual and physical.

  From the internal and external analysis, it was fairly clear that what Dave wants is a lifestyle with freedom in his lifestyle, career, financial life, sexual life and physical life. Freedom in the negative can be defined as “suffering from minimal constraints”, thus we can create a table like the one below, which consist of area, current constrains and a goal statement:

  Area

  Current Constraint (s)

  Goal Statement

  Lifestyle

  Location, physique, social skills, money.

  “To live in a location where I can have the lifestyle I desire by making myself worthy of it by improving my physique, career, finances and sex life”

  Career

  Lack of education and experience, few job opportunities

  “To become more sought after in the job market by developing skills and experience that make me sought after in the job market”

  “To gain more job opportunities by relocating to somewhere with a better job market.

  Financial life

  Little income, reliant on parents, few job opportunities

  “To improve personal finances and become independent from parents by improving skills and seeking out job opportunities while managing money better”

  Sexual life

  Lack of social skills, appearance, lack of a dating market in his location

  “To improve my sex life by improving my social skills, appearance eating better, sleeping more and working out.”

  “To gain more sexual opportunity by moving to a location with a larger pool of women”

  Physical life

  Overweight, anxious, weed addict, food addiction

  “To improve my physical life by quitting weed, gaming, exercising more and eating better”

  If we evaluate each of his goal statements, we can break these down into specific tasks. I prefer doing this in a holistic manner for a case such as this where a person’s life is a complete train wreck. There are two things that are repeated in most of the areas that Dave wants to improve:

  His physique, mentioned in “Physical life”, “Sexual life”, and “lifestyle”.

  Location, mentioned in “Lifestyle”, “Sexual Life”, “Financial life” and “Career”.

  These do not encompass the full strategy, but they are the two things that will require the most focus in order to realize the whole strategy. If he improves everything else except these two, it will have little effect because these two things are critical success factors and critical activities.

  The reasoning is quite simple. On point one, if he doesn’t improve his physique this will place a big limitation on his ability to have options in his physical and sexual life, which will further hamper his lifestyle. Merely partaking in normal daily life is difficult when a person is Dave’s size, in addition to the unnecessary difficulties it places on simple physical activity, it also comes with a range of health risks that could see his life ended much too early.

  On point two, his location is highly limited in opportunity for Dave’s career, sexual life and lifestyle, as it has few options that he can leverage to his advantage. While his location does present some positive sides, such as easy access to a cheap gym it also presents many difficulties in the job market, skill development area and availability of suitable candidates for romantic relationships.

  The physique transformation and relocation are Dave’s critical activities and critical success factors for this reason.

  Now that the two critical success factors have been identified, one can start to formulate a plan. Which one of the two should be his priority to fix first? From the external analysis taken with barriers and enablers, the major barriers to changing location is Dave’s finances and lack of training. He is currently broke and thus he cannot finance a move or get his own place to live. However, he lives close to a gym, and he can start controlling his diet, thus in the present state, he has opportunities to execute 1, but not 2.

  Thus, goal 1 improving his physique is the first priority goal, goal 2 changing his location is the second priority goal.

  Goal 1 – Physique

  Dave’s major problem in this area is that he has neglected his physique and health for quite a few years, and he has ballooned up to 300 lbs due to a diet of Mountain Dew and fast food. There is no denying that his size weighs heavily on him.

  A strategy contains two things, a goal and a way to get to that goal. The normal approach at this point would be to do research on how to best structure activities to move from point A to point B and then formulate a rough idea of where one wants to go. The next graph contains a rough progression chart for this section.

  Figure 3 Process for formulating a plan

  As I do have some experience in this area, I’m going to forego the research and move directly to identifying the solution. Dave needs to lose some weight and gain some muscle. The simplest way to do this is a caloric deficit maintained over a period of time.

  The maximum recommended weight loss per week is 2 lbs, Dave has at least 100 lbs to lose most likely more. Thus, if he loses weight at an average rate of 2 lbs per week for a year he will be 196 lbs. This is his first goal, to lose 100 lbs. Our running indicator is going to be his scale weight, measured every day and averaged out every 3 days to remove fluctuations such as water weight. This will give us an approximate metric to track his progression for the year.

  However, we do not want Dave to lose weight, Dave needs to lose fat, not muscle. To maintain his muscle mass and ensure maximal fat loss, he also needs to do resistance training to prevent loss of- an
d ideally increase his muscle mass. Thus, we need to track a second metric, namely Dave’s body composition. In order to do this, Dave can employ a simple waist measurement, neck measurement and then plot that into one of the many body fat calculators that exist online.

  These are our two major progression measurements for Dave’s first goal, his physique. In addition, Dave will track his calories every day, this is his major running indicator, calories taken in, while weight and body composition are trailing indicators.

  The good news is that improving his physique is something he has some enablers for, namely persistence, access to a gym and that he can get out and walk. However, there are also some significant barriers to his success, namely his food addiction, his sedentary habits, the easy access to foods that are counter-productive and finally his mental issues.

  Thus, how does one leverage his enablers and manage his barriers? This was already in part outlined in the chapter on barriers and enablers, however to recap, he needs to set tracking metrics for walking, and be mindful of walking instead of using the car. If he walks to the location where he buys his convenience foods he will at least off-set some of the calories taken in, if he should also be very aware of his choices. The simplest way to begin is for Dave to only eat the 3 home-cooked meals his mother serves him every day.

  He should start seeing someone for his mental issues, so that he has support and it would probably be useful to speak to his parents about it. Locking down the internet connection on his computer except for a couple of hours each day, will help with reducing the mindless clicking around the web or online gaming he utilizes as an escape from reality.

  Goal 2: Location

  The location change hinges on Dave getting control over his finances first and foremost. His current situation is that he spends what little money he has on convenience foods, fast foods and weed. He also has nothing saved despite living rent free for about a decade.

  The major enablers in this case is the fact that he has a job and lives with his parents, which puts him in a good position to save up some money to serve as the initial investment into his new life. The major barriers is his habit of spending a lot of money on weed and food. He also has an addictive personality that leads to him not being discerning when it comes to how he spends his income.

  The tracking metrics for Dave are going to be his income, and his savings account. He needs to open up an additional account with an auto-draw that pulls a given sum out of his account every month. Dave wants to move in 12 months, so a good start is to do the math on how much money he needs to save up to finance the move.

  An important second factor is to identify where he wants to move to and work out the logistics of that move. This is the groundwork for his success, and the planning follows the same process model as for goal one, however, both of Dave’s goals have a follow-up sequence once he arrives at the end of the execution phase. At this point, he will have to go into a maintenance phase, where he maintains or ideally improves on the status at the end of the execution phase.

  It’s all too common for men to finish their execution phase, get complacent and then end up regressing into their previous state. This is why I designed a repeating process below for maintaining and ideally improving on the results from the execution phase.

  Figure 4 Maintain and Improve

  The key to this process is that it recognizes that lives are not static. When Dave reaches his financial goal and moves, he will be in a new location and he will want to add new things to his lifestyle. When he moves, he will have to start paying for a place to live, with the associated costs,

  Critical Success Factors

  When we ask the 3 questions from the Critical Success Factors chapter, what answers to we get? :

  What things have to be done to realize the strategy?

  Dave has to lose a lot of weight and be able to fix his finances. This means that he has to stick with his diet and workout program, and keep maintain strict control of his spending.

  Do I have to do this to realize the strategy?

  Yes, if Dave does not lose the weight, he cannot be a man with options in his physical life nor his sex life. If he does not improve his finances, he will not be able to move.

  If I don’t do it, can I still realize the strategy?

  No

  Thus, to formulate Dave’s critical success factors into two statemets:

  Goal 1: Dave has to lose weight and get in better shape.

  Goal 2: Dave has to gain control of his personal finances.

  Critical Activities

  Now that we know the two critical success factors in Dave’s strategy, we can further break them down into activities that he has to do, in order to fulfill them. There are countless ways of listing these, but I find that bullet point lists work as well as any.

  Goal 1: Dave has to lose weight and get in better shape:

  - Stop over-eating and track calories.

  - Improve dietary choices.

  - Get to the gym at least 3 times a week and lift weights.

  - Walk 10.000 steps per day

  Goal 2: Dave has to gain control of his personal finances

  - Track expenditures

  - Auto-transfer money into savings account save for a small allowance

  - Attempt to take on more shifts

  Now that we have a bullet point list of critical activities for each critical success factor, we can move on to creating systems, and processes to guide Dave in the right direction.

  Designs, Systems and Processes

  For the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on designing a system and processes for goal 1, as outlined in the previous chapter. The methodology is generic enough that the steps can easily be applied in other domains.

  Goal 1: Dave has to lose weight and get in better shape:

  - Stop over-eating and track calories.

  - Improve dietary choices.

  - Get to the gym at least 3 times a week and lift weights.

  - Walk 10.000 steps per day

  First, Dave has to create tracking metrics for his critical success factor, there are two elements to this goal, losing weight and getting in better shape. The scale is the obvious way of measuring progress when it comes to weight, but in order to be more accurate, Dave will take progress pictures every month and measure his waistline every month, he will write down the measurements in a notebook. He will also record his weight every single day throughout the process.

  The system design for this critical success factor is to not eat any food except what his mother prepares for him, do not keep snacks in the house and lock up his credit cards during the period where he is most likely to order food, namely at night. He will be given a limited allowance every week as part of goal 2, in cash only. Dave will also hire a personal trainer to come to his house and get him every training day.

  Secondly, we must create metrics for each of the critical activities. The first bullet point can all be tackled using an app, the goal is to track every meal for the first 30 days. Dave is only going to eat 3 meals every day, this means he will track 90 meals in total throughout that first month.

  Improving dietary choices means eating less processed foods and more whole foods. The goal is to eat at least 3 servings of vegetables every day, at least a hand-sized portion of protein with each meal, and to avoid fast foods in general. By recording this in the app, he will be able to keep track of this as well.

  The first 4 weeks of the program has a total of 12 gym sessions, the goal is to attend at least 10 of them, which will be tracked in the app as well. This is also the case for the 10.000 steps every day. Expecting 100% compliance is unrealistic, however 80% compliance is within reach and allows for some slack for unforeseen events, or if he’s simply feeling down for a day or two.

  Thus, we set the compliance ratio for each sub-goal to 80%, which is a large enough compliance margin to gain progress, but with enough leeway not to lock himself into the “I must be perfect” mindset. One finds the comp
liance ratio by taking actual compliance number/maximum compliance number.

  For gym sessions this is

  Actual sessions attended/planned sessions

  For meals this is:

  Actual meals tracked/total meals

  For steps its

  Avg. actual steps/planned steps.

  Tracking these 3 metrics allows Dave to troubleshoot his progress if it is less than planned. If he was planning on losing 1 lb per week, which requires a calorie deficit of roughly 3400 calories, but only lost 0.8 lbs, He now has the ability to go back, read through his logs and figure out what is going wrong.

  Summary and Conclusion

  The story of Dave is a short illustration of how one can apply the principles and methods outlined in this book to improve various parts of one’s life. I took care to make this methodology as generic as possible in order to make sure that it can be applied to most of the areas that a man may want to work on.

  It’s important that you tailor this methodology to your specific goal, both in terms of duration, effort and key performance indicators in order that you get something that is effective. The goal of the process isn’t the process but the desired outcome that you identified in the early chapters.

  Description of Techniques

  Throughout this book I’ve suggested some potential techniques men can use when they are building their self-improvement strategy. Most of these are standard fare in business schools, corporations and governments throughout the world. Many of you may be familiar with them already. However, for the sake of saving you some Google searches, I’ve included some short descriptions here.

  SWOT Analysis