The Best Way to do Anything

For some reason, people ask me for advice on certain subjects.

Subjects they think I know about, but in reality, I am not an authority on.

To be fair, I probably know more about the subject than the person asking it, but I’m certainly no expert. I can say that confidently because I’m not an expert at anything. I’m mediocre or outright useless at most things, and slightly above average at some things.

Anyway, you would think that not knowing about a subject, whatever that subject is, would mean that I am in no position to give advice about how to go about doing it.

And that would be 100 percent true if I were to give specific advice, such as which stocks to invest in, which exercises will make your posture better, or how to make your car go faster.

But there is one blanket piece of advice I love to give that pretty much works for any subject when someone asks ‘What is the best way to do it?’ and that advice is…

“The best thing to do is the thing you will actually do.”

I know that is a bit of a cryptic answer, and it may seem like a bit of a cop-out, so allow me to defend it with three real-life examples.

The first example is related to social media marketing. A subject I know more than the average person about, but am at the bottom of the barrel in comparison to anyone in that field as a profession.

The question was actually a barrage of questions along the lines of “what is the best way to do social media marketing? Which is the best platform, what is the best video length, when should I post, and so on.”

And the answer was,

“The best thing to do is the thing you will actually do.”

Meaning, set yourself a daily goal that is easy for you to accomplish so you will actually stick to it.

It may be as simple as one 30-second reel a day, or perhaps write one blog post per week.

As a second example, let’s apply this to exercise. The person basically asked me for my exercise routine, which I happily ranted about for 20 or so minutes. After the rant, he said “that’s a lot,” and although 30 to 60 minutes a day is actually not much, for someone that does nothing, it can seem daunting.

For some reason, many people automatically think you need to go from zero to one hundred. They have an all-or-nothing mentality. But that is ridiculous. My follow-up advice was to just do something that raises your heart rate and makes you sweat for 30 minutes a day, no matter what that is.

You like team sports, awesome. Prefer to lift weights, excellent. Want to swim, perfect. It all counts. Once you have that in your regular routine, then you can go for optimization.

And it is all relative to your starting point. If you are obese and walking ten minutes raises your heart rate, then just start with that!

My final example is finance focused, but before we get into it, let me state that this is not financial advice in any way.

Anyway, someone asked me and another friend about investing. I am a novice when it comes to investing, but my friend started spewing information and going into great detail on all the different types of investing.

My head was spinning, so I could only imagine what the other person was thinking.

Probably something along the lines of “this is way too hard. I'll just keep my money in the bank.”

So what’s the minimum friction alternative?

My advice was to do what I do. Put 30 percent of your take-home income into index funds once a month and forget that it’s there for at least 10 years. Preferably much longer.

This is super easy to do, relatively safe, and will give better than bank returns.