The Problem With Wanting Results Yesterday

We are living through the age of the transformation...

Open your phone and somebody is becoming a new person in 30 days. Someone else has completely transformed their body in eight weeks, built a business in six months or discovered the morning routine that apparently changed their entire life.

Before. After | Then. Now.

The format is irresistible because humans love a result. We want to know whether something works before investing our time in it, and preferably we'd like that result delivered as quickly as possible.

The wellness industry understands this particularly well.

There are six-week challenges, 28-day plans, seven-day resets, rapid transformations and programmes promising visible results before your next holiday. Even the language we use around health has become impatient. We don't simply start exercising; we begin a transformation. We don't change a few eating habits; we reset. We don't gradually become stronger; we want to know exactly how many classes it'll take before we see a difference.

It makes sense commercially. "Do this consistently for the next three years and you'll probably feel significantly better" isn't much of an advertising campaign.

Unfortunately, it's often much closer to the truth.

We See The Result, Not The Repetition

Social media has compressed our understanding of time. We can watch somebody renovate a house in 45 seconds, build a company in a 90-second reel or transform their body through a sequence of photographs. Months and years disappear between two swipes of a finger.

What we don't see are the Tuesdays - The completely unremarkable days when nothing particularly exciting happened.

The workout when they didn't feel motivated. The meal that wasn't beautifully photographed. The business day spent answering emails rather than announcing a huge launch. The hundredth time somebody repeated exactly the same habit without knowing whether it was making any difference at all.. Yet those days are usually where the result came from.

We've become so conditioned to seeing dramatic progress that normal progress can feel disappointingly slow. And that's a problem, because normal progress is where most of us actually live.

The Before-And-After Problem

I understand why before-and-after photographs are powerful. They offer tangible evidence and, in some circumstances, can be genuinely motivating. But they also tell an incredibly narrow story. Take Pilates: someone could practice consistently for six months and look almost identical in two photographs, yet have a completely different relationship with their body.

They might be stronger. Their posture might have improved. They might sleep better. Perhaps they no longer experience the niggle that used to bother them every afternoon. Maybe they've found an hour in the week that belongs entirely to them, or made friends they wouldn't otherwise have met.

Where does that appear in the "after" photograph? ...It doesn't.

When the only progress we celebrate is visible progress, we risk overlooking some of the very reasons movement is worth doing in the first place. and the same applies far beyond fitness. A calmer mind isn't particularly photogenic. Neither is a healthier relationship with food, better boundaries, improved confidence or having enough energy to get through an afternoon without feeling completely depleted.

Not everything valuable produces a dramatic reveal.

Consistency Has A Marketing Problem

Consistency is probably one of the least glamorous concepts in wellness: there is no launch, no transformation day, no dramatic moment where everything suddenly changes. You just keep going.

Which is perhaps why we're constantly being sold novelty instead. New programme. New supplement. New routine. New challenge. Starting something gives us an immediate sense of momentum, whereas continuing something requires us to accept that progress can be almost imperceptible.

Think about learning to play an instrument or speak another language. Nobody expects to practice French twice and become fluent. Yet with our bodies, we're strangely comfortable expecting enormous changes after a handful of workouts and when they don't arrive quickly enough, we assume the method isn't working and start looking for something else.

The result is that we can spend years starting again.

There is a strange irony in constantly searching for the fastest route to progress when the search itself might be the thing slowing us down.

Not Everything Needs To Become A Challenge

I also think we've become slightly obsessed with turning ordinary healthy habits into challenges.

Walking becomes 10,000 steps, cold water becomes a 30-day cold-plunge challenge, exercise becomes a strict time or calorie goal, food becomes a reset.

There can be something genuinely motivating about setting yourself a target, particularly when you're trying to establish a new habit. But the interesting question is what happens on day 31.

If the behaviour disappears the moment the challenge ends, was the challenge successful? - maybe.

But perhaps the better outcome is finding something considerably less dramatic that you can still imagine doing next October.

This is one of the reasons I've become increasingly interested in sustainability when it comes to wellness. Not environmental sustainability - although that's important too, but whether our routines are sustainable within our actual lives.

Can you still do it when work gets busy, when it's raining, when you've slept badly, when you've been away? Because motivation always disappears eventually.

A routine built entirely around feeling motivated has a fairly obvious flaw.

The Boring Middle

There's a part of almost every worthwhile pursuit that nobody really talks about: The beginning is exciting. You've made the decision. Bought the kit. Booked the class. Created the plan...The result is exciting too but between them is the boring middle.

This is where the novelty has disappeared but the payoff hasn't fully arrived. You're doing the work without receiving much applause for it. Nothing feels particularly transformative. You're simply repeating something you said you wanted to do.

I think this is where most meaningful change is either made or abandoned.

And perhaps we need to get better at respecting it.

I've seen this building Radiant. There are exciting milestones people naturally see - opening studios, launching collections, announcing something new. But there are hundreds of hours between those moments that would make terrible Instagram content.

Spreadsheets, contracts, stock counts, recruitment, invoices, changing something, discovering it hasn't worked, and changing it again.

The visible moments are built on a huge amount of invisible repetition and health isn't particularly different.

Perhaps Slow Isn't The Problem

None of this means we shouldn't want results, of course we should.

Seeing yourself become stronger is motivating. Watching a business grow is exciting. Reaching a goal you've worked towards deserves celebrating.

But perhaps we've confused slow with unsuccessful.

Perhaps the goal isn't to find the quickest possible route to becoming a completely different version of ourselves. Perhaps it's to build a life containing habits we actually like enough to keep.

Because the most impressive transformation might not be what you can achieve in 30 days.

It might be what you're still doing 300 days later.