I used to love the show Entourage. If it came out today I probably wouldn’t give it a second watch, but it existed at the perfect time when I could perfectly relate to young Vincent Chase who was doing very well in his mid-twenties and bringing all his close friends along for the ride. Anyway there was one character played by Martin Landau who would always say “What if I told you (insert exaggerated promise), is that something you might be interested in?” To this day I think of it every time I’m explaining or proposing something that’s a “good deal” and it makes me laugh.

For example:

So what if I told you that you could, for a relatively small but set fee, gain the right to purchase a house at a pre-determined price. You could then, for example, wait until the price of the house goes up, exercise your right to purchase the house, and then sell it immediately for a profit. If the price of the house goes down you would only lose your initial fee.

Is that something you’d be interested in?

What I’ve described is the essence of an option.

The right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell (or utilize, which is going to make more sense in our case) the underlying asset. In a more traditional but maybe slightly less tangible example to most people a stock option is the right to buy or sell a stock at a given price. Employees are often granted options as a form of compensation that allows them to buy their company’s stock at a price under market value, thus capturing the difference between their exercise price and the market value. If the stock goes down instead of up (or vise-versa for a sell option), you only lose the value of the option.

With options your “losses” are always fixed, but your gains can be unlimited. This is a crucial point.

What the shit does this have to do with me, you say?

I mentioned last week that options and leverage are two core concepts by which I live my life. Here is an example:

What if I told you that for the set investment of ~3 hours per week of training time (fixed loss) you could exercise your right to do nearly anything physical with your body without limitation (unlimited gain)?

Is that something you might be interested in?

I thought so. The spending of your time capital in set increments in advance gives you the ability and option in the future to exercise that right. You can hike, canoe, bike, move furniture, carry, or do any other number of things that you might not otherwise be able to do without having invested in that option.

I love options. I want all the options! Of course you can’t always have ALL the options, but to the greatest extent that I can I want to maximize my options because it maximizes my quality of life. As another example, I don’t know that Jen and I will ever own our primary residence again. After taking almost 2 years to sell our house in Minnesota when we had already decided to move, we felt very trapped. Owning your home can be very much an obligation without rights to options. Renting where you live gives you the right, but not the obligation to live there. You can pretty much pack up and leave any time. On the other hand, owning rental property of your own, flips the rights and obligations and gives you the right to rent to someone else OR you could just live in it yourself. You’ve got options.

Need another example? Sometimes I don’t know if people love or hate that my examples span domains and applications. There are whole nutrition ideologies out there that are predicated on the elimination of certain foods. Now I’m all for eliminating foods that objectively make you feel terrible. If you’ve done your experiments and empirically determined that flour tortillas make you feel like garbage then you should probably not eat flour tortillas. But if you’re just eliminating foods because of ideology then you are in a very real way limiting your options. I have heard countless stories of people with ideological (or even simply lack of variety due to habits and laziness) dietary limitations having vacations ruined because they couldn’t handle an unexpected food change.

So what I want you to start thinking about is what options you are creating for yourself. Where are you limiting your options? Where could you create an option? What would you have to spend to make a new option? What might you be willing to give up or trade for unlimited benefit?

Quick basic physics lessons in case you forgot since school. A lever is a simple machine consisting of a beam pivoting on a fulcrum. If the lengths of the beam on each side of the fulcrum are equal you translate equal force, so pushing down with 10lbs would lift up 10lbs on the other end. But by lengthening the lever on one side, you can multiply the force many times. Pushing down with 10lbs of force on a long lever could lift up 100lbs on the other side.

Archimedes famously said, “Give me a lever that is long enough, and fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

In finance leverage borrows this idea of multiplication of force but the application is slightly different. Leverage is essentially using debt to increase returns. So for example if with $100 you can borrow $1000 and double your money by investing it, you walk away with $1000, or a 10X return after you’ve paid back the $1000 you borrowed. Using leverage you turned a 2X return into a 10X return. Of course, if you lose the money you’re still on the hook, so leverage is very dangerous.

Leverage, along with optionality which I will discuss another time, is one of the core concepts I live my life by and I want to explain to you how it applies to life and why I think it’s so important to you.

A big picture way to think about leverage is in terms of how much force or energy you need to apply to effect a change. High leverage requires low energy input. Keep this in mind.

Making changes to the way we think is an extremely low leverage pursuit. Think about the years of therapy required to rewire the brain from trauma or to change deeply ingrained behavioral patterns with cognitive or psychotherapy approaches. It’s a slow process because we have very little leverage over the way we think.

This is where physical culture comes in. The leverage you have over your physical vessel is massive, direct, and concrete. If you dedicate an hour three times a week to physical training you will see changes. If you work on getting stronger, you will get stronger. You can exert massive leverage with relatively minimal effort. (With apologies to anyone who may not have full ability to affect their physical vessel.)

You may not be able to easily change your brain directly, but you can definitely change your body directly.

And by changing the body, you change the brain. And the leverage is multiplied even further.

Being physically stronger enables you to be mentally or psychologically stronger, not least because the body and mind is the same thing.

You know what one of the absolute most common things I hear from clients and gym members is? Some variation of “I never knew how much getting stronger would change the way I feel and show up in the world.” And then they go on to make other changes they were formerly unable to make for years upon years.

Leverage is why physical culture is the starting point, the very foundation of self improvement. This isn’t some meathead pursuit that is about vanity and bigger muscles or bragging about strength personal records. This is very literally the highest leverage thing you can do with your time to improve your life.

My question to you is, where else do you see leverage?

At a recent workshop someone asked me a good question that got me thinking about this topic and this is one of those things where the specific example is important, but not nearly as important as the bigger picture.

The question was, how do you cue someone to deadlift who is maybe afraid of bending at the hips due to a back issue.

And the answer, my friend, is not to cue them at all.

We have this obsession with cueing in physical training, as if it’s the only way to get the outcome we’re looking for. “Push your knees out, spread the floor, break the bar” and so on.

But as good and useful and double plus good that cues can be, ultimately you are still using a cognitive tool to address something that’s not very cognitive at all.

Instead of cueing, a better approach is to simply change the environment so that the only outcome you can get is the one you’re looking for.

In our example if someone is afraid to deadlift, or even more pertinent they literally CAN’T bend enough to deadlift, then we create an environment where they CAN deadift. Maybe instead of a bar we use a single kettlebell, and instead of coming from the floor we elevate it so that it’s just a few inches below their hand, and instead of breaking completely at the hips as in an ideal deadlift we bend a bit more at the knees.

Is this not a deadlift? It is by my definition.

Can we not lower the kettelbell over the weeks and months? Can we not switch from one bell to two, from two bells to a bar?

Of course we can.

No cueing involved. Just changing the environment so that you can only get one outcome. There’s also no effort involved, by the way. Cueing can take a lot of time, a lot of effort, and only be moderately effect. Making changes like this is literally an instant fix.

To change the frame a little, think about this in terms of nutrition. Getting ourselves or someone else to make nutrition changes when decisions and choices are involved can be really hard.

But if I cleaned out your cupboards of junk and provided you with a chef that would prepare anything you wanted fresh from primary ingredients, don’t you think it would be pretty easy to only eat really good food?

Of course it would be.

Quit training to brain-wrestle when you can just change the environment.