Most people want to be thin. And most people want to be rich.

It’s not like there aren’t new techniques, new recipes or formulas to do either of these things freely available and easily accessible on the internet today. So why don’t we do them? It’s not for lack of a secret technique that we haven’t achieved our greatest desires. Though it is very tempting to think this, which is why each year millions of dollars are spent by people who want to hear that the only reason they haven’t got what they wanted — why they haven’t gotten thin, or haven’t gotten rich — is because they didn’t have the right techniques. There is a persistent and very modern belief that there must be something more complex — a more sophisticated set of actions we could take — that could get us the result that eludes us.

The truth is that creating wealth is really very simple. But it’s really very simple in the way that losing weight is very simple: simple in theory. The steps you need to take are straightforward, but taking those steps is not. And like weight loss, we find it hard to believe that if the steps seem so easy, why haven’t we taken them? Why aren’t we rich?

We have lost the focus we once had on values and the power they can have over our actions, so we think that the reason we don’t succeed must be that there is a secret we are unaware of.

The Okinawans’ secret

The Okinawans of Japan have a culture that results in longevity. They have a set of values that turns on its head the way we think about food, eating and pleasure. As a culture, they put much prestige on living a long life; they value the 1000-year-old wisdom of Confucius and in doing so they end up valuing things we don’t. They value eating communally and they value eating ‘until you are eight parts out of ten full’ — a practice known as Hara Hachi Bu. What this means practically, is that they consume on average 1785 calories a day, compared with more than 2000 for the average Westerner. Their BMI measures between 18 and 22 compared to the average 26 or 27 of Westerners.

You can understand their success in two ways: from the bottom up — their culture promotes values that determine their beliefs and drive their actions — or from the top down: the thing that creates their extraordinary longevity is caloric restriction. It wasn’t until the 1930s that biochemists at Cornell University first observed that rats fed a restricted diet lived up to twice as long as those that were fed normally. Yet the Okinawans are the only human population to have a self-imposed habit of calorie restriction. So you can focus on techniques and count all your calories and weigh your food precisely; you can look up nutrient balancing charts, search out substitutes and so on. But the truth is, even with more sophisticated techniques than the ancient Okinawans ever had at their disposal, they still beat us hands down at actually ‘getting it done’. And that’s because we are hanging onto our values and trying to fight against them with more and more techniques. We are making a thousand hackings at the leaves when we could make one chop at the roots.

Sometimes we look inside ourselves for answers, asking, Maybe something inside me is holding me back, if I haven’t achieved what I want?

Although it’s a step in the right direction to look within for answers, our search is usually only cursory, as we tend to look to things that are readily accessible to our conscious minds. Things like, ‘The rich must have different beliefs from the poor and middle classes.’

Beliefs

You can believe that carbs will make you fat, and that the secret to losing weight is to eat a more natural diet. You can believe that exercising will give you energy and make you feel better, and eating rich foods will make you bloated and feel worse. Your beliefs may all be correct, but you are still not getting the result you want. Why?

Alternatively, you can harbour incorrect beliefs and still manage to get the result you want anyway. The best example I’ve seen of this is people who’ve attended a course, looking to improve their financial skills in a particular area so that they can be more prosperous. When asked, many will admit to the belief that they feel that the rich are ‘evil’. We certainly get that message loud and clear from our culture. Yet if you truly believe that, how can you want to become rich yourself? If it’s your beliefs that were holding you back from creating wealth, shouldn’t this particular belief hold you back from desiring to create wealth too?

Nobody wants to be evil. Not even Google.

So clearly there is something deeper that motivates us. A desire that is greater than your negative belief, which is pushing you forward despite what you believe. If you truly believe that someone is evil, yet you still greatly desire to be in their position, then desires can override beliefs. Nobody wants to be evil, but you clearly want to be rich — so much so that you are willing to make an exception to your beliefs if you achieve your goal: ‘I still believe that the rich are evil, but I’ll be different when I become rich.’

You probably should get rid of that belief. The rich are neither inherently good, nor evil. Having superpowers doesn’t make you a superhero any more than a supervillain. And wealth is like a superpower, the power to do more with the precious little time we have. It can even give you the power to fly when, without it you’d have to walk or take the bus! In the world of comics how you use your power determines whether you are good or bad. In that world, powers come to people randomly, but in our world wealth can be earned, created, stolen or, like a mutation, just inherited. Which is why I think how the rich get wealthy is far more important in deciding whether they are good or evil than just the fact that they are wealthy, and it is even more important than what they do with their wealth.

So it could help to rid yourself of the belief that being rich is evil, just as having better knowledge and beliefs about food and exercise should surely help the person who desires to lose weight to more easily achieve their goal. But it’s not enough on its own — even with all the information that’s available we’re still fatter than ever before.

Values come before beliefs

Obviously we need to dig a little deeper. We need to understand what actually motivates us. In fact, understanding what motivates us — how to get the most out of ourselves — could be the most important skill to have in our modern world, which places more and more cognitive demands on us each year.

Subconscious desires — or ‘what we value’ — are what motivate us.

Values are literally the level where we choose between the things we want — that is, we choose which things we value more. Economists call these ‘revealed preferences’. Take service stations, for example. People say they wish they could go back to the days when you could pull into a service station and actually get service. Someone would come out and pump your petrol for you, clean your windscreen, the whole nine yards. But if you say to those people would they be willing to pay as little as one cent more per litre for that service, would they pay it? It turns out the answer is no. When faced with a competing value — the desire to save money — people would rather hang onto their money and fill their own tank.

What does it mean to say that you really value being thin, for example, provided of course that you can shed the kilos by clicking your fingers or doing one weird trick? In any given situation we face competing values.

We often say we value being healthy and eating right, but when it comes down to a choice between the salad and eating until we are only eight parts out of ten full, and filling up on the hot/sweet/salty alternative, you know what we choose. Our actions reveal our preferences; we value comfort from food more than we value health or quality of life. So it’s not just that values are more important than beliefs, or techniques, but which value is dominant, that is important. It’s not what we say we value, but what we really value — our subconscious desires — that determines our results.

It’s not what we say we value, but what we really value — our subconscious desires — that determines our results.

No matter how much you want to copy someone’s success by copying their techniques or their beliefs, you won’t succeed until you come to value what they value too.

What are values?

When I say ‘values’, that shouldn’t be mistaken for morals. When most people hear ‘values’, they either think conservative (‘old fashioned’ values) or progressive (tolerance, diversity etc.).

Your values are what you personally value in any situation. You could call them ‘what you desire’, but that doesn’t really cover it. People say they desire to be thin — but they value the comfort, taste, stress relief and so on that food brings more. So for me the word ‘desire’ tends to make people think about what they consciously desire. ‘Motivations’ — or ‘money motivations’ — could be another term, but I like to use motivation as an action word. Something either motivates you or it doesn’t, based on how much you desire, or value it.

If you value feeling light, if you value the feeling that you are doing something virtuous (like following the 1000-year-old teachings of a venerated wise man) then finishing a meal when you are only 80 per cent full (as the Okinawans do) may feel like success. But if you value comfort, the exact same thing (restricting your calories) will feel like a hardship, like you’ve missed out. In both cases it comes down to what we value feeling.

So what I call our ‘values’ are our subconscious desires about how we want to feel.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

Henry David Thoreau

Our emotions evolved before our forebrain. Our forebrain is the more recent part of our mind that we traditionally associate with making conscious and rational decisions, but a lot of research that has been conducted suggests that a large part of what our amazing forebrains do is to provide a narrative explanation — almost an excuse after the fact — for decisions and desires that well up from within us almost automatically, layering a perception of control and choice onto reality.