If You're Under 30, I'll Gently Plead With You

For most of my life, I never had to think about my weight. I was naturally fit, always running around playing sport, and for years it simply wasn't an issue. I was one of those infuriating people who could party late, eat whatever I wanted, and never watch the kilograms add up.

The last couple of years put a stop to that. I started noticing it in photographs. It was obvious from my belts. My family noticed too, and though I told myself it was just age, the truth is I'd begun to feel embarrassed about how I looked, and quietly jealous of people my own age who seemed to have found a way to stop the creep I couldn't.

So I asked them how they did it. They'd tell me, always with a smile, that it came down to willpower, grit, and determination. For one, it was banting, for another, a protein routine, for another, fasting, for another, simply halving their portions.

I listened hard and lost nothing.

If anything, it got worse.

The weekly injection nobody mentions

Six months ago I found the thing that actually worked for me, and it was not willpower. A weekly injection, one of the new GLP-1 drugs, quietly switched off the hunger I'd been white-knuckling for years. Twelve kilograms later, I can tell you that, for me at least, it has been astonishingly easy.

And that journey showed me something less comfortable. Because when I asked others who were visibly shrinking how they'd managed it, nine times out of 10, it had nothing to do with an injection. I got the old script. Grit. Sacrifice. The willpower to forgo the sugar and the fat, and how much happier they were for it. I'm no scientist, but it's reasonable to assume a fair number of them were lying.

Success stories get edited the same way

For me, this maps almost exactly onto trying to learn from successful business leaders.

Read their stories and they sound like the weight-loss ones. Hard. Relentless. A lonely swim against the current. But very few will admit to their equivalent of the injection. That they were born into the right family, with the right name. The right race. The right sex. That they were lucky. I recently interviewed someone I hope will become a friend, who was refreshingly candid that his success rested, in large part, on a history he had no hand in choosing.

Purpose, not willpower, is the real engine

So, what am I saying? That if you weren't born into it, you can't succeed? That without a shortcut, you'll never reach the room you want to be seen in? Not at all. The people I respect most are the ones who genuinely tried, whether or not it worked out.

What I am saying is this. The ones who keep going when everyone else folds are rarely doing it to lose weight, or to be successful. They are doing it for something underneath.

In health, that something is rarely the weight itself. It's wanting to run a marathon. To outlast a diagnosis. To still be standing beside your grandchildren in 20 years. The weight is only the symptom. Aim at the deeper thing, and the symptom takes care of itself.

Business is no different. I know very few people who built something real simply because they wanted to be rich or admired. But I know plenty who found the stubbornness to keep going because they had locked on to a problem that mattered to them. They had purpose. And purpose let them do the one thing money can't buy at the start: tell a story compelling enough that people worked for almost nothing, and investors risked real capital, to help them chase it.

Can You Just Copy the Steps of Successful People?

No, and that is the plea. If you're under 30, and reading this, I'll gently plead with you. Actually, if you're under 50, the plea still stands. Don't be fooled into thinking you can copy the steps of the successful and arrive where they did. The real engine was almost always something deeper.

What Should You Chase Instead of Success?

If the easy path is open to you, by all means, take it. And if it isn't, that changes nothing about what's possible.

Because chasing success will get you nowhere. Finding a purpose bigger than yourself, something that drags you out of bed and refuses to let you quit, is the only thing I've ever seen give anyone the motivation needed to achieve anything significant at all.