You're not lazy, your systems are broken: Mr. Beast's $250,000 prize was irrelevant
He did something much more important for his friend's weight loss challenge.
Before we talk about AI, you have to see this GREAT example of personal structural change that came up in one of my feeds over the weekend.
Mr. Beast challenged a friend of his to lose 100 lbs in a year, with a $250,000 prize incentive. It was Mr. Beast, so it was all recorded for a social media reality video.
(Short version here. Full video here.)
That doesn’t really matter. The important thing for us, from a Human Loops perspective, is that what he did for his friend was all about STRUCTURE, which is the level of the framework we’ve been talking about for a few days.
The prize money and social media recording were good incentives but after watching what happened (his friend beat the goal in HALF the time, and now looks much fitter), I would argue they were only incidental.
What was the most interesting thing?
Beast totally reconfigured his friend’s structural and habit-forming environment, his actual physical surroundings, for the duration of the challenge, for as long as it took for him to get it right.
He set up a whole live-in home-gym for his friend to hit for lots of hours of exercise EVERY DAY. Go outside the big red line around the complex, you lose the whole challenge. Stay inside the new structure and just grind at the challenge, and you win.
But not only all of the gym machines and fitness equipment: unlimited quanties of HEALTHY FOOD to go along with all of that exercise, AND a personal trainer.
Mr. Beast didn't just offer motivation or advice; he fundamentally altered the normal structural and logistics constraints that almost everyone has when they normally try to lose weight.
Think about the usual structural issues you might face trying to lose 100 pounds in your ordinary modern life: you're battling against all sorts of things that compound to stop you.
Your own habits, your own long-term identity layers, your own previuos memories, maybe family food patterns, maybe a trauma or work stress, gym membership is expensive, gym gear is expensive, inflation has increased the price of healthy nutrition, and then you have to find time and energy to get past your daily distractions and into the gym before you even lift any weights!
All of that structural and logistic stuff often leads to it being easier to quit, again.
You are essentially alone and structurally undercapitalised, lacking logistics, in that struggle within your normal routine life.
The new Beast experiment brilliantly shows what can happen if someone with enough resources can redesign structures in the right way for the right end.
His friend wasn't exercising willpower within his existing system: he was operating within a reconstructed reality where success was structurally MUCH MORE LIKELY.
It also shows how far in the wrong direction we normally go with key life habits, improperly structuring things to accumulate the wrong results.
Sometimes, some companies and institutions get this right for some groups of people. Think about great summer camps for kids, or even military basic training (to obviously different ends), or some corporate cultures that are structurally and logistically abundant when they innovate and go to market.
Imagine how your life or business could improve if you first identified the stuctural and logistical issues causing repeated failures and then find ways to mitigate or overcome them. You could apply such analysis and description to health, to home, to income, to your next business project, to the the care of a relative, to any key habitual accumulative area of your life.
And then “suddenly” the same effort would be producing much better results.
Join Human Loops Premium
Every month, we look at a full Human Loops case study based on major events and situations so you understand how the whole framework fits together dynamically. Plus we do a group call where I walk you through the details and you can ask questions:
Full Human Loops systems case study
Live group case study call + Q&A with Matthew
Access to premium subscriber group chat