Dan Heath’s book Reset – How To Change What’s Not Working is written with a business lens yet its core message applies to anyone feeling stuck.
Heath covers why change is hard, how leaders can remove wasteful activities, why a team’s motivation fades and how to avoid that, and why inefficiency can sometimes accelerate progress.
The first section focuses on leverage points, which are things you should do to improve a situation. To access leverage points, you need resources like time, money, enthusiasm, and systems.
The second section introduces the idea of “restacking resources” by going through an intense and focused period of work. Part of that work includes going through a “do less, do more” grid, which consists of four quadrants: more, less, start, stop.
In this chapter, Heath says “Change is not AND, it’s INSTEAD OF.” This is a brilliantly simple and impactful statement, and it’s this week’s quote above our gym door entrance.
This framework parallels our approach to health and fitness. It forces you to assess which habits move you toward your goals and which habits pull you further away.
As Heath points out, the hardest categories to examine are LESS and STOP. When we think of improving our health or fitness, our instinct is usually to add more: more training sessions, more supplements, more reminders. But often, the breakthroughs come from doing less of the wrong things.
Below is a simple example of how you might apply each quadrant in your own health and fitness journey.
Stop
- Ordering DoorDash multiple times a week.
- Doom scrolling on social media before bed.
- Cancelling sessions because you’re “not feeling it.”
- Burpees. Period.
Start
- Meal prepping once or twice a week.
- Calling one friend to check in and talk. (Social connection is a recovery tool.)
- Setting out your training gear the night before.
Less
- Alcohol.
- Skipping your warm up.
- Sitting throughout the day.
- Comparing yourself to others.
More
- Eating more protein.
- Walking more.
- Spending more time being intentional with your warm up.
- Drinking water throughout the day.
- Celebrating your small, daily wins.
Improving your health isn’t always about stacking more habits on top of an already overloaded and overwhelming schedule. It’s about clarity and choosing the right things for you instead of everything or the wrong things.
When you identify what to stop, what to start, what to do more of, and what to do less of, you create a clearer path that restores your time, recharges your energy, and creates momentum.
Sometimes it’s not about doing more. Sometimes it’s about doing less, or doing things differently.