PoH Pt VIII: Complexity

The Solution to Complexity Is Simplicity — Decide What You Want

Life is complexity. Science likes to pretend it can isolate one variable, but I've never seen a single-variable experiment in real life. People are different — genetically, phenotypically, contextually — and yet most of us still want the lazy answer: what's going to work for me? Modern evidence-based medicine responds by comparing you to the average. The problem is the average doesn't exist.

One of the biggest distinctions you can draw in life is what's actually within your control and what isn't. There's a real list on each side. Some scientists, like Robert Sapolsky in Determined, argue you don't have free will at all. I'll leave that debate to the philosophers. For practical purposes, you have to act as if you do.

Part of life is realizing you're playing a game with rules already written. In America, that means a democratic republic, a mostly capitalist economy, and a heavy layer of legal and regulatory intervention on top. Most of us treat our local experience as universal. We rarely have any real sense of what life looks like in another part of the country, let alone another part of the world. The game is bigger than you, and you don't get to redesign the board.

Most People Have No Idea What They Want

When you don't know what you want, you have no north star. Nothing's ever enough. There's no goal, no direction, just a low background hum of I'm not where I should be. That would be fine if people genuinely had no opinion about their situation — but they do. The game they're actually playing is based on their perception of how everyone else is doing, and people are not honest or transparent about how they're actually doing.

When what you want shifts based on social comparison, life gets more complex and you lose control of more of it. Nothing has structure. Nothing has consistency. Everything sits at a superficial level.

Complexity costs you focus, and focus is what gets you to the finish line — especially because we have a hard constraint called time. When people don't know what they want, they're easily pulled by other people's opinions. They drift on wouldn't that be nice.

A recent example from clinic: a woman was comparing her arms to another woman in the gym and asked the gym owner what it would take to look like that. The owner told her: 2.5 hours a day in the gym and a religiously strict diet, for years. The patient's response was immediate — not worth it. That's the right answer for her. Making a hundred million dollars is hard. Making a billion is much harder. The difference between great and elite is enormous, and the juice often isn't worth the squeeze when you stack it against your actual goals. Most people don't need either number.

Without clearly defined goals, you're stuck in chronic discontent for the simple reason that you don't know what you want. Step one is figuring it out. Step two is making a plan. As you stack on more wants, you start running into trade-offs. The more you add to one column, the more you take from another — until you reach the point of enough of enough across the categories that matter.

The 5/2 Model — How to Actually Decide

Dan John, a strength coach, has a tool called the 5/2s: 20 years, 2 years, 2 months, tomorrow, today. I like the structure but I've recalibrated the timelines. Call it the Uncle Dan modification: 20 years, 5 years, 1 year, 2 months, today.

The 20-year horizon does something important — it removes the anxiety about time. You can do almost anything from a 20-year vantage point. Most barriers fall away. In 5 years, you can finish big projects. In 1 year, you can make serious progress. Two months is enough to run a real program. Today tells you the minimum effective dose to keep the long-term plan moving.

You start at 20 years across the major categories of life and just say what you want. For older patients, the answer is often simple: be alive. Maintain independence. Stay married. Then you reverse-engineer it down. By the time you get to today, the work should feel achievable on a consistent basis. Over time it compounds. Read 25 pages a day on one topic and seven years later you're a world expert. That's not exaggeration — it's just math.

5_2 - Uncle Dan Version.xlsx

Download XLSX • 10KB

Why This Matters

Once you know what you want, the complexity drops. People will do what they do and you stop caring. Good for them — that's what they want. There's no urge to compete in a game you don't actually want to play. Your goals match your life, not someone else's. This is probably the only path to enough, because you're only competing with yourself. You're the only person who understands the nuance and context of your own life.

Get Feedback From the Right People

Sharing goals can be a useful strategy if you share them with the right people. Health goals go to your doctor. Financial goals go to your financial advisor. Relationship goals go to your partner. These people are on your personal board. Their job is to help you tighten the steps from point A to point B.

The hard part of goal setting is that at some point you make trade-offs. Semi-elite performance in one category usually means closing a door in another. People who grew up being told you can do anything tend to struggle with this. So do people with false attribution bias — I'm smart, I can do more than the average person. You probably can do more, and you probably have more options. But if you never commit, you end up average. That's what never committing gets you.

Regret Is Part of It

Sometimes you make a decision, get a bad outcome, and don't like the trade-offs in hindsight. That's normal. Hindsight is always 20/20. You can only decide based on what you knew at the time. Black swan events happen. Plans never execute at 100%. You can't predict everything.

Healthy people get in accidents. Small mistakes have major consequences. Major mistakes occasionally have none. So is life.

The solution to complexity is simplicity, and in this context simplicity means making decisions and making plans. The solution to too much simplicity is some complexity and spontaneity back in the system. Either way, the work is the same: review periodically, make sure the life you're living today is pointing at the life you actually want.

3-Point Summary

• The average doesn't exist — modern medicine and modern culture both compare you to a reference point that isn't real, which keeps you chasing other people's goals instead of your own.

• Complexity is what you get when you don't know what you want — without a clearly defined target, social comparison fills the vacuum and you drift in whatever direction the current is moving.

• The 5/2 model collapses big goals into today's minimum effective dose — 20 years removes the time anxiety, and the daily action tells you exactly what to do; consistency over years is what actually compounds.

3 Practical Takeaways

1. Define what you want at the 20-year horizon, then reverse-engineer it. Pick the major categories of your life — health, relationships, finances, work — and write down what you want each to look like in 20 years. Then work backwards: 5 years, 1 year, 2 months, today. The 20-year frame removes most barriers around time and makes your daily action obvious.

2. Audit your goals for whose they actually are. If your target is based on what someone else is doing or has, it's not yours. Ask whether the trade-offs required to get there are ones you'd actually accept. The juice usually isn't worth the squeeze when the goal isn't yours in the first place.

3. Share the right goals with the right people. Your doctor for health, your financial advisor for money, your partner for relationships. These people are on your personal board. They help you tighten the path from where you are to where you want to be — and they'll catch the blind spots you can't see on your own.