Last Sunday I ran in my local 5k race. The organiser is a family friend, so we like to support him, and it’s a fun event that fills the village high street.

I started running at 38, after dicovering that I had high blood pressure - a gift from my dad’s family, made worse by poor lifestyle choices.

I asked a work colleague (who had been a semi-professional long distance runner all his life) for advice on exercise. His recommendation - ‘Just start walking. At some point, walking won’t feel like it’s enough and you’ll want to run.’

So I did. 3 miles every day, then 5. I wore through a pair of Merrels in a couple of months, replaced them with running shoes and started dropping short intervals of jogging into the routine. 6 months after that, I ran my first half marathon, and 6 months after that, a full marathon.

I read no books. I followed no plan, physical or dietary. I just ran. To make an obvious quote - “…from that day on, if I was going somewhere, I was running…”

Now that I’m past 50, the impact of lifestyle becomes much more apparent. It’s not that physical aches and low energy are inevitable, it’s just that I have to work much harder to offset them. If I don’t run regularly, my joints ache. If I eat meat, my insides complain. We make our own bread because, well, gluten; and rarely drink anymore.

I feel quite privileged to have got my arse into gear before I hit 50. To be fair, I had a lot of motivational help from my late 30’s health crisis, and the fact that both my parents died at around 60, which remains a constant reality check.

After my father died, my mother struggled to re-build a life, and on one occasion decided that she was going to start anew, move to Borneo, and work with an Orangutan charity in the forest. For my mum, who had only ever left the UK once, it was an attempt at positive, cathartic metamorphosis. Of course, it never happened. What my mum really wanted was for everything to go back to how it was - to not be faced with a new normal that required her to change. By setting a colossal, unachieveable goal, she was able to pretend to herself that she was planning a new life whilst providing herself with valid excuses for not making progress.

As my contemporaries and I pass the event horizon of middle age, I see the same behaviour patterns emerge, albeit on a smaller scale - life is asking us to change our ‘normal’, and we don’t want to, so to avoid them, we engineer elaborate diet and exercise regimes that are (ironically) bigger lifestyle changes than the ones we actually need.

The majority of these plans never come to pass. Expensive equipment or subscriptions get bought, used once or twice, then abandoned under the inertia of habits that have probably been with us most of our adult lives, often with a mantra of “I just need to buy a recipe book/ find a space for the cross trainer/ go to the gym on my way home”.

By setting relatively complex, time consuming or expensive fitness and lifestyle goals, there’s a higher chance that they won’t get reached, and a real danger that we convince ourselves that physical and mental decline is an inevitable part of ageing.

I look at myself and consider my lifestyle. Physical wellbeing is vital, but its part of a balanced life. I’m not a fitness fanatic - I’m a busy freelancer with 2 kids. Reading Kilian Jornet might be inspiring, but it’s out of context. I don’t need to set the goal of running up a mountain, I need motivation to drop a quick 5k between cooking 2 separate, specific dinners (thanks, kids), homework, laundry and cubs drop-off. With a lot of effort, I’ve embedded enough changes into my everyday life, to make the benefits amanifest.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a martyr to imposter syndrome and self doubt, but the flip side is that I don’t get competitive or envious. I’m happy with making small gains for their own sake, and that makes it much easier to embed behaviour changes.

As the profound Peter Hall Jones said to me once, …”the problem isn’t that you need to go to the gym more, it’s that you need to want to go to the gym more”. Change starts with a desire to change, not with an end goal. I changed my lifestyle because I got fed up with who I was. Change came with a desire to move away from something, rather than toward something, and I think that’s important.

A thousand mile journey might start with one step, but it’s easier to make that step if there’s an angry bear behind you.

As always, I try to think about these things in terms of design.

With AI simply not going away, we’re seeing some crazy changes in the way that creative output is viewed. When we talk about the quality of AI generated design (or video, now), we’re talking about realised decoration - an end result, rather than a journey.

An AI generated image can instantly convey the most meticulous airbrushing or inking style that would take hours to replicate by hand. Creatives are chasing this end result because its become the benchmark of a successful output. The mechanics of ‘perfection’ have become democratised, and this poses a threat to our young designers. By setting polished visuals as the only benchmark, aspiring artists and designers are pushed to bypass incremental changes and improvements (which in my day were called ‘experience’), and instead set goals that they don’t have the discipline to reach. They’re all ‘moving to Borneo’….I might start using that as a euphemism.

Sturgeon’s law of creative thought postulates that only 10% of any creative activity is actually successful, but that the remaining 90% is the bedrock upon which that success is built.

Just like embedded lifestyle changes for the middle aged, meaningful and sustainable outcomes start with small steps away from an undesirable status quo, rather than toward a nebulous goal.

I’m not advocating short term thinking, or suggesting that ambitious dreams are a waste of time, but if you find yourself failing to initiate, or maintain, behaviour changes in your work, then it might be useful to ask yourself what you’re moving away from, rather than towards.

Start by looking at what you do, deciding what you don’t like about it, and making a small step away from that. Be happy with the small wins - they’re more likely to stay embedded in your life, and the journey will evolve into your personal style and narrative, which is the thing that separates humans from AI, and therefore good design from bad.

“It’s not our abilities that show who we are Harry, it’s our choices…”

“The more it stays the same, the less it changes.”

“You’re holding it wrong.”