I was strongly and unduly influenced by a gang of dancing, cartoon raisins.
This was the 1980’s. There were only four television channels and nothing else to do.
So, roughly every 30 minutes, the same thirty second commercial would appear on the small screen. The second the first four instrumental bars of the Motown classic “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” played I’d stop trying to press my index finger into every last crumb of my recently devoured Little Debbie snack cake and turn my attention to the TV.
For the remaining 26 seconds the raisins, presented in a brand-new-to-me claymation style, would sing and dance around the screen and implore us all to enjoy California raisins as a snack.
I was not alone.
The California Raisins were an absolute pop culture sensation. There were action figures. Their faces adorned sweatshirts. They were essentially the Sabrina Carpenter of their day: small, cute, sparkly, ubiquitous and of questionable talent.
I could have watched those commercials and thought to myself, “I really enjoy soul music, maybe I’d like to play the bass,” or “This animation style is cool, I wonder how they do that!”
But, no, I decided that my enjoyment of a single half minute of entertainment could only mean one thing: I should go into advertising.
So I decided at roughly twelve years old that my career would revolve around making television commercials that, hopefully, lived up to the beloved raisins.
Listen, it could have been worse. The only other job options I saw for my future at that point were professional wrestler, piano player for the E Street Band or center for the New York Knicks.
But given that my mother wouldn’t even let me play football for risk of injury (this was way before this was common practice), I didn’t know how to play nor did I own a piano and I was, at the time, a five and half foot white Jewish kid living on Long Island, none of these other aspirations seemed attainable.
I’ve talked about my advertising career here many times. And for those of you who, very reasonably, do not remember those posts I will sum it up this way. It was fine.
I managed to stay employed for 14 years, was very well liked at the agencies I worked for and did absolutely nothing remarkable in my near decade and a half of serving the ad Gods.
Being successful at advertising takes a certain work ethic (of which I’m pretty sure I didn’t have) but it also takes a certain level of talent. A creativity in understanding and maximizing the form.
It also takes luck, managing office politics and navigating completely subjective rules that change based on your creative director, the client and the project you are working on at any given time.
Is Dan Weiden a genius for coming up with “Just Do It” for Nike? For sure.
Would he have been able to get it through if he was a junior copywriter and if Phil Knight, head of Nike, wasn’t receptive to a revolutionary idea? No.
I can promise you this, if I would have brought “Just Do It” to Bed Bath and Beyond they would have told me to cut out the pie-in-the-sky shit and write another 20% off coupon cause that’s what drives business.
You may be wondering at this point, kind of like you do at this point every week, what the hell this has to do with fitness.
Well, quite a bit.
Because while advertising relies on opportunity and timing and all the other celestial bodies aligning magic that I mentioned, fitness doesn’t rely on that at all.
Fitness is, in its own way, quite democratic. It can work for anyone who pursues it.
Before you quickly reach for your mouse to click the reply button and tell me how genetics and health and socio-economic status most certainly do influence and limit your level of fitness, I will start with this caveat: I agree with you.
Genetic limitations were certainly going to prevent me from my dream of being the heir apparent to Patrick Ewing as the center of the Knicks. And if you were born with or developed diseases such as cerebral palsy or leukemia you face very real challenges in your fitness pursuits. And eating well and having access to a gym or training may be beyond many people’s financial means.
All true.
But that is not what I am really talking about here. What I’m actually getting at is that fitness is one of the most linear effort-to-reward activities you could ever pursue.
Nearly all of us have the ability to get stronger and faster, move better and improve body composition from wherever we are right now.
It doesn’t take luck or being in the right place at the right time or your neighbor putting in a good word so you get the interview.
“So what does it take, Dan?”
Excellent question. Let me start with the simple stuff.
Getting stronger simply requires systematically lifting heavier weights over time. This will not be linear. You won’t just one rep max more and more weight every time you go to the gym. But with a basic understanding of training principles, if you simply focus on making things more challenging you will drive up your capabilities.
Similarly, getting faster requires a combination of simple training parameters (building an aerobic base, speed work, muscular endurance) that will build speed systematically.
Improving body composition is a matter of training regularly, sleeping well, ingesting the right number of calories and making sure enough of those calories are coming from protein.
Moving better may require mobility and flexibility work and performing exercises with great technique in a full range of motion.
Is this an oversimplification? Not really. You do have to understand how these things work and be able to apply them, but those basic principles still remain true.
So what is holding us back? If it’s all that simple, why aren’t we all doing it.
Well, because simple is not easy.
The truth is most people do not have an accurate representation of what it is they are doing. I mean, be honest with yourself. Do you really know exactly how many calories you’ve eaten every day for the last two days? How about two months or two years?
What did you back squat last week? What’s your all time best set of 5? When did you do it?
You don’t know what you are currently doing so you have no reference point on where you need to go.
Which leads me to my second point, you aren’t doing it for long enough.
For example, being in a caloric deficit kinda sucks. And most of us need to be in one for longer than we’d like to think to be satisfied with the outcomes.
The truth is, you probably gained or held onto that extra 40 pounds over the course of decades. It’s going to take more than three weeks in a deficit to unwind all that.
But being in a deficit for weeks or months at a time sucks. So we justify with cheat meals or we stop tracking and then claim that dieting doesn’t work for us.
Honestly, the fact that we can unwind years of not paying attention to our bodies in a matter of months is actually a bit of a miracle. Yet those months seem impossible to string together.
Are there exceptions? Of course. But I don’t even want to get into those. Because, somehow, nearly everyone believes that they are an outlier. That these democratic rules of fitness don’t apply to them. That they will only get bulky if they weight train. Or that caloric deficits don’t work on them.
But the truth almost always ends up being they just didn’t do it precisely enough for long enough.
It’s not the system that is flawed but the execution of that system.
I recently went back and watched the California raisins commercials I loved as a kid. And as the nostalgia washed over me I came to a startling revelation: I went into advertising because of this?!?!?
It was fine. Cute. Memorable, I guess. But revolutionary? Not even close.
Which is kind of the point.
Advertising works when the timing is right, the client says yes and the stars align. You can do everything right and still lose.
Fitness is the opposite.
It doesn’t care about timing. It doesn’t care about opinions. And it definitely doesn’t care about luck.
If you execute the basics with precision, and you do it long enough, your body has no choice but to respond.
No magic. No breakthrough moment.
Just work that adds up.