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You Are What You Eat? No, You Are What You Think

YEC

By Andrew McConnell, Co-Founder and CEO of Rented.

Like most children, I frequently received the admonition from my mother: “You are what you eat!” As a former competitive swimmer who easily consumed more than 5,000 calories a day during training, I guess that large and far-ranging diet helped make me who I am today.

As I grow older and even better understand the importance of nutrition in my life, not to mention on my ever-slowing metabolism, I began to reflect on how this same concept might apply not just to the food I consume, but also to the ideas I metaphorically consume.

As a business founder and owner, my number one personal value is growth in furtherance of supporting and helping others. In my pursuit of living this value in practice, I constantly read books and articles, listen to interviews and podcasts and watch presentations and TED talks, all in a continued attempt to grow personally and help my business do the same.

Though this is a different sort of “eating” than what my mother was referring to in my childhood, I realized that all this invested effort and time was due to the belief that my mom was indeed correct all those years ago (no surprise there!). If all the ideas and teachings I “consumed” were of the best sort, then I, too, would get better. The right sort of books, articles and podcasts would be like the kale superfood salad, serving as sustained and sustainable fuel for my mind and my growth.

Likewise, if what I consumed was not of the best — even worse, if it was junk — it would the equivalent of polluting my mind with fast food burgers and fries. Not only would I be wasting my time by spending my mind and effort consuming “empty calories,” but even beyond their lack of benefits, this junk could have detrimental effects, as well.

What do you think?

Reading about a study by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer recently made me reassess all of this. In the referenced study, Langer and her colleagues split hotel cleaning staff into two groups. One group's members “were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle.” The control group was not given this information.

Four weeks later, Langer and her team found that simply telling hotel cleaning staff that the work they were already doing counted as exercise led to them having a “decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index” compared with the control group, though neither group changed their actual behavior.

We typically think of nutrition as a simple equation of calories in versus calories burned. Langer’s study, to the contrary, shows that what we think about both actually plays a role, as well. An even more recent study further drives this point home. In it, participants given the same milkshake had measurably different physiological responses to drinking that milkshake based on whether they were told it was an “indulgent” 620-calorie shake or a “sensible” 140-calorie one (in both cases it was actually 380-calories).

That being the case, I came to realize that it is not enough to consume great ideas and material, nor is it necessarily detrimental to consume material that is not the best. What and how we think about the ideas in question plays at least as critical a role. Or as Marcus Aurelius wrote long before my mother was advising me: “Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.” Or put another way, we are what we think.

For example, I could be reading a book or listening to a podcast filled with great ideas, but if my mind is constantly wandering while I read, or I am multitasking and not paying attention to what I am listening to, am I actually getting any real value from my consumption?

On the flip side, even ideas I come across that are actually erroneous need not be detrimental to me or to my business. On the contrary, if I am actively engaging my mind in the consumption of the wrong ideas, and working through how and why they are wrong, and what “right” would look like instead, I can actually come out on the other side even better than before.

None of this is meant to suggest that what you consume, whether it be nutritionally or intellectually, is of no importance. Quite the opposite: When given the choice in both realms, you, your waistline, your mind and your business are better served when you show the discipline of choosing the “healthy” option.

All of that being said, “good” consumption alone is not enough if the goal is to truly develop into something more and better. At the same time, “bad” consumption need not be the end of the world. In both cases, if, what and how you think about that consumption, as those hotel cleaners demonstrated, can and will make a big difference for better or worse.

Conclusion

Like so much else in my life, the older I get, the more I learn just how right my mom was all those years ago. She was trying to help me consume wisdom even then that would have served me well had I only truly listened and understood.

Or perhaps if she had added a little nuance it would have resonated with me better and sooner: You are what you eat, and you become what you think. Coming to that realization now, my goal in my business and in my life is to consume and think better going forward.