Trail Mix

Trail mix is what you eat on a trail. You take a little bag of food with you, and in the bag there is a mix of nuts and dried fruit. If you bought your trail mix last minute at the gas station, it will be overpriced, stale, and the ratio of cashews to peanuts will be insulting. If you bought it at a good supermarket, the mix could be less stale and the cashews could be better represented. If you buy a trail mix and a bag of cashews, you can make the ratios exactly the way you like. And if you go to a privilege store, buy dried fruit and nuts by weight, dump them all into a big bowl, mix for a minute, bag them, and store them in a cool dark place — you cornered the market. You used a bit of your time, a bit of your money, and a simple skill (mixing stuff in a bowl) to make your ideas come true, to get a better product than an industry can offer you.

But the most important part of this is that once you produce your trail mix, you might realize you actually don’t care for cashews and would rather have more hazelnuts in the mix. You are stepping onto the path of iterating on your ideas. Intimate feedback loops build more than just better taste and nutrition:

• They build confidence, because you remind yourself that you are in control.
• They build self-respect, because you notice that your opinion matters.
• They build attention, because you have no one else to blame.

Even more importantly: now, resting on the grass by the trail, munching on your mix, you have more jobs — more hats to wear. You are a taster, a logistics officer, a customer success specialist, a marketer. Your role is more than just “put food here, chew, swallow.” Your engagement with the trail mix is more creative. You are a student of your trail mix.

Yes, trail mix can teach you things. It can teach you the most basic concept of a diet: that you can eat pretty much anything you want most of the time, but you don’t have that much control over when you’ll get to that last piece of dried golden berry hidden in the corner of the box. What you control is the ratios — and you adjust the ratios the next time. Hence the mix.

Another thing the diet teaches you is hiding in the trail part of the name. A diet is about where you’re at, and naturally about the unique constraints and highlights of that place and that activity. (Easily digestible, highly nutritious food that doesn’t need refrigeration plays well on a trail.) If you take a little break from running the trails of your own life and think about your unique constraints, your unique highs and lows, you’ll be way ahead of the competition in constructing a diet that fits you like a glove — through the same intimate feedback loop:

Buy wisely → Mix briefly → Consume mindfully → Repeat thoughtfully.

Buy wisely

What keeps me sane when I enter a supermarket is a mental model of 0-1-2.

0

There are tens of thousands of different products for sale in a modern supermarket, so you are going to buy precisely zero from the vast majority of them. Just relax into this realization. You will let most of them go by untasted, just like the trail you travel leaves most of the land you pass through unexplored.

Let’s say you’re in a Whole Foods, or some other privilege store, and they’re offering fair-trade organic individually massaged lightly-hickory-smoked-while-dried Montessori goji berries you could add to your trail mix. The choice is yours: you can buy them one time, or zero times. They could yield a life-changing culinary experience. Or — likely — not. Zero describes the impact they’ll have on your diet, your day, your hike. In Mark Manson’s terms, it’s the number of f*cks you should give to everything in this category.

1

Then you have to decide what 1 is for the products you do buy. Take the trail mix: if I have a 6-liter bowl to mix in, and I want an easy time stirring everything together, I should buy no more than 3 liters total of dried fruit and nuts. That’s one constraint. Then I decide how many kinds of ingredients I’d like to have.

On one hand, I might want ALL kinds of dried fruit and ALL kinds of nuts. It might be super exciting the first time. But then the next batch is the same mix. And the next. And the next. Worse, the next time I go to make trail mix I’ll have only two choices: buy EVERYTHING again, or buy LESS THAN EVERYTHING — and I’d feel cursed either way. When constructing a trail mix (or a diet), always hold yourself back, lest you build a hedonic treadmill that bores you to death.

So you have to figure out what 1 is. And the temptation is to compute it.

(If formulas make your eyes glaze, skip the next block entirely — you lose nothing. If you love them, grab a bowl.)

Here is what 1 is not. Start with the bowl. Cut it in half, because the empty top half is what lets you actually stir. Now take that working volume and smear it evenly across every single variety the store carries — every nut, every dried fruit:

                         bowl volume ÷ 2
   amount of each kind = ──────────────────────────────────
                         (kinds of nuts) + (kinds of dried fruit)

Fill the bowl that way and you’ve built the maximum amount of the maximum number of things — a bowl that contains a little of literally everything. That is the recipe for a hedonic treadmill.

So that’s the trap. Step around it.

What 1 actually is is smaller and softer: “a sensible number of types of some nuts and some fruit that I feel like having over the next few months.” More intuitive to pick, easier to measure, more fun to iterate on.

And that’s how we get to the concept of a 2.

2

2 is the core of your shopping. The easiest way to explain it: imagine the second — or the twentieth — time you’re in your privilege store, shopping for freshly shelled macadamias and dried dragon fruit slices. You’ve picked the right ratios for the trail mix du jour, and then your inner child screams in your head, yanking you out of your zombie trance. “What about walnuts?” “Where are my raisins?”

There, there, little guy — let me show you the little system I built to organize our life and our diet. We had walnuts last time, so now it’s macadamia’s turn. And to that the inner kid replies: I don’t care about your systems. I want my walnuts.

Congratulations, my friend: you found a 2. A 2 is an ingredient that has to be in your trail mix because your inner kid says so. Or because your doctor says so. Or because your wallet says so. A 2 is something you’d better make more often than not, become an expert at preparing, read more about. That is a staple. And it will be the baseline of your trail mix, your diet, and your life.

This is the first of the 8 fundamental concepts you need to manage your diet. It won’t be the last time we talk about it — because each of the 8 works with the others, builds on the others, and makes the others better. We’re just getting started.