Why Streaks and Badges Don’t Help You Lose Fat (And What Does) | Ep 449

How many times have you hit your macros for two or three weeks,

missed a day and felt like all progress was gone.

The way most people structure hitting their nutrition targets

is designed after gamification,

which actually doesn't work as well as you think.

Today I'm showing you a different approach,

borrowed from video games and RPGs,

but not quite the same as gamification,

where progress is much more permanent

and you never have to start over.

Welcome to Wits and Wates,

the show that puts a popular piece of fitness advice

under the microscope,

finds the hidden reason it doesn't work

and gives you the deceptively simple fix that does.

I'm your host Certified Nutrition Coach,

Philip Pape,

and if you've ever tried to build a consistent nutrition habit

and found yourself doing really well for a few weeks

and then falling off and then starting over from scratch

and then falling off,

today is going to explain why that keeps happening

and we always come back to this,

but it's not because you simply lack discipline.

The problem is systemic, it is structural.

It's the system that you are using

to set and progress against those targets.

Now I'm going to warn you today,

I'm going to get a little nerdy

and talk about some video games

and if you've ever played RPGs like Diablo

or Path of Exile or even old school Final Fantasy or Zelda,

you already understand the mechanic

that I'm going to describe.

If you haven't, don't worry.

The concept is simple, the psychology behind it applies

to everyone you don't have to know video games.

That's just my thing.

All right, and then stick around to the very end

because I'm going to give you a three question test

to find out whether your current macro targets

are in that sweet spot where progress can actually happen

or whether they're in a zone that's more or less guaranteed

to make you frustrated and quit

and it takes about 30 seconds.

All right, today you're going to learn about three things.

First, why the type of gamification most people use

actively undermines the motivation

truly needed for long-term adherence, right?

Sustainability.

Second, the specific psychological mechanism

that makes RPG style leveling so effective.

So, getting leveling up, okay?

When we talk about RPGs and video games in this context,

I'm just talking about making progress and leveling up

and then we're going to look at why it maps directly

to your nutrition behavior.

And then third, I'm going to give you a method

that you can apply this week to your own macro targets

to turn this more abstract goal of, say, hit my protein

into a concrete progressive system

where you're always building and never starting over.

So, let's get into it and talk about the,

what is the popular advice and what's wrong with it?

We've heard of gamification.

I love the concept of gamifying your nutrition

of making it fun.

You know, close the rings on your watch.

Hit the streak, earn the badge, get the check marks.

And you see this in apps.

You hear this from coaches, from influencers.

You see it in challenges.

Plenty of tools are built around it.

You see in communities.

You know, my own community has a leaderboard.

I don't even use it only because I know

it actually doesn't work.

Part of what we're talking about today.

It sounds like it should work, right?

Who doesn't want to make a healthy behavior

and feel like a game?

Especially something people don't often like to do.

And there is a grain of truth there

because games are motivating, right?

We've all experienced just chilling on the couch,

getting lost in a game for hours.

Well, maybe not all of us, but I have many times

and you're voluntarily doing,

I'll call them hard things, right?

They're not hard in the IRL, right?

Real life context.

But games tend to challenge you

and get harder as you go through them, right?

Whether it's a shooter or an RPG or a simulation, whatever.

And so there's this feedback loop and it feels really good

and it hits the dopamine center.

And so the impulse is to borrow that type of energy

and say, how do we apply that to other things like nutrition?

And it makes sense on the surface.

But the problem with these systems

is they borrow the wrong parts of the games.

What they borrow are extrinsic motivators,

things like points, badges, leaderboards, streaks.

And these are these surface elements,

the shiny objects.

And when you look at behavioral research about them,

it's not great.

These things actually don't work too well.

So I'll give you a couple of examples.

A little over 10 years ago,

Hannes and Fox 2015 ran a study

at Indiana University,

which by the way is one of my own modders.

I got my MBA there.

And I know they won the National Chabb Chip this year

in football, which disappointed me because I'm actually

Miami Hurricanes fan.

But it kind of cool that this study is from there.

They took a college course

and they added gamification.

So they added leaderboards, badges, and points for participation.

The control group got the same course,

but none of that stuff.

The gamified group had all that.

And guess what?

They ended up less motivated, more anxious.

They scored lower on the exams.

They reported lower satisfaction.

So they were more gamification elements, but worse outcomes.

Now, why is that?

This is the cool thing.

This is where it gets important.

So there's something called self-determination theory.

And it's a great framework

where humans have three core psychological needs

when it comes to sustained motivation.

Those three things are autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Extrinsic rewards, like streaks and badges,

they tend to erode your autonomy or your agency.

And the behavior then shifts from, hey, I'm doing this

because I want to get better to, I'm doing this

to keep my streak alive.

And then when the streak breaks,

you've lost the only thing that was motivating.

It kind of makes sense, right?

There was a meta-analysis by Kim and Castelli

that looked at gamification across health and fitness context.

And they found a pattern where short-term engagement

tends to go up, but long-term adherence doesn't.

And the average dropout rate for gamified health apps

is around 75% within the first 90 days.

So we've got this popular approach,

gamifier nutrition that produces this dopamine-fueled

honeymoon phase followed by a crash.

And if it sounds familiar to you, if you've had that experience of,

hey, I'm really into tracking for the first three or four weeks,

and then I have a bad day or something comes up

and it destroys the whole thing,

it's because the system isn't designed optimally.

And this streak-based thinking, specifically,

creates a psychological trap.

Researchers call it the, what the hell effect?

And that's just putting it nicely because I don't swear on this show.

So that's as bad as it gets.

Polyvian Herman documented this across decades of dieting research

that when someone is trying to maintain a perfect record,

a single slip-up, it doesn't just feel like a slip-up,

it feels like total utter failure.

Like, hey, I already broke the streak.

What the hell might as well eat, whatever I want today, right?

That's the older nothing thinking.

The older nothing frame baked into that streak model,

and it creates a binary that causes this whole collapse.

There's like, oh my God, I just missed my streak.

It's all over.

And I've actually felt that myself when it comes to step-counting.

I actually lowered my step count target in the app I was using

because I kind of felt that phenomenon as well.

I was like, oh my gosh, I just broke a streak.

It just kind of disappointed me, right?

So here's where we are.

Gamification is popular.

The type that people are using though,

with these extrinsic word systems,

undermines intrinsic motivation over time.

And it sets you up for all or nothing thinking.

And then that derails a longer term process,

like fat loss, muscle building,

all the things that we are trying to do.

Okay, so if badges and streaks take from the wrong parts of games,

what are the right parts?

Think about how a role-playing game works.

And I'll explain it.

If you've never heard it before, most people do.

You start with a character.

And the character has a set of skills.

And each skill has a level.

Okay, forget classes.

Forget all the sub-elements of RPGs.

We're going to keep it simple.

So you might have strength, for example,

and it's at a level three, intelligence at a level five.

Maybe you can distribute your skill points at the beginning,

but you have a finite amount of skills.

And that's where you start.

And you usually start as this lowly character

with a wooden sword or something, right?

Or a club or something like that,

with barely any clothes if at all.

And then when you earn experience by, say, killing mobsters,

or mobsters, monsters, mobs of monsters,

I guess killing mobsters in some games, right?

Then you get skill points.

You get experience points.

And then you can invest those points every time you level up

into the skills that you want to develop.

Simple as that, right?

Now, two things are happening in that model

that actually apply to behavior change in real life.

First is that the bar is always rising, right?

The bar is always rising, but it rises incrementally.

Going from level three to four is a meaningful improvement

and it's also achievable.

You don't just jump from level three to level 15.

The game doesn't let you do it unless you're hacking it

or using a mod and your brain doesn't expect that to happen either,

even in real life, right?

You don't expect to go from a complete beginner

to completely advance, for example.

Each level, therefore, is the small win

that unlocks the next level.

And this maps directly to some pretty old research now

back in 1981, Albert Bandura.

He studied proximal versus distal goals.

So that's just short term versus long term goals.

And he gave students the same math curriculum.

One group got a single end of semester target.

The other group got weekly targets

that built toward that same endpoint.

And the weekly target group outperformed on all the measures.

Speed, accuracy, confidence.

So the destinations the same, but the path structure

to get there was different in the incremental path.

One, Teresa Amobil did research on what's called the progress principle.

And it reinforces this from a little bit of a different angle.

Her team analyzed over 12,000 diary entries from professionals

and found that the single strongest predictor of sustained motivation

was the feeling of making progress on meaningful work.

Not the rewards, not the recognition,

but actually the progress itself.

Small, visible, regular progress.

So that's kind of the first concept of the short term,

step-by-step, you know, micro goals and progress.

The second thing, and this is the part a lot of people miss

like when you're comparing it to a gamification of an RPG.

You don't ever lose your levels.

You never go backward.

You might have a bad session.

You might get killed and die and lose some gold.

Or, you know, in a soul-like game for those of you into that,

which are super frustrating to me.

And I don't have the time.

In a soul-like game, you might lose a ton of your progress

from the last point, but you don't go past before that point.

Your skill points remain.

The things you've invested in so far are permanent

because you've achieved that level.

Now, if you compare that to a streak, a streak is more binary.

You're either maintaining it or you've lost it, right?

When the streak breaks, you're back to zero psychologically,

even if nothing about your body or your behavior has changed.

Whereas a skill level, it's more cumulative.

Progress is always banked.

All right, so now this brings me to the research about flow

and flow states, which are absolutely loved

because there's an overlap with positive psychology.

So when we look at flow,

it is that state of complete absorption

where your effort feels almost automatic.

And it occurs when the challenge of what you're doing

is slightly beyond your current ability to do it.

Just slightly.

I've used other frameworks like Expanding your comfort zone.

So that's flow.

It's like the challenge, it's challenging,

and it's slightly beyond your current ability.

If something's too easy, you're going to get bored.

If something's too hard, you get anxious

because you get frustrated, right?

Maybe that's why I don't like souls like games.

But other RPGs that have a leveling system,

it naturally keeps you in that flow

because each new level is one increment above

where you proved you could perform.

And there's debates about whether video games can even

be something considered a flow state.

That's a separate argument.

All right, then there's the third piece of psychology here

that's worth calling out.

And that is goal setting theory,

where goals have to be specific and difficult,

but within reach to optimize your performance.

So a vague goal, like I need to eat better

or hit my macros, it doesn't produce the same behavior.

When somebody responds to me to an email and they're like,

hey, like what I heard, you know,

I've been trying to watch my food and alcohol.

And that's the way they frame out.

I'm trying to watch my food and alcohol.

And my brain immediately goes to, okay, how are you watching?

Is this a specific way of tracking blah, blah, blah?

Because I know that person is not going to succeed long term

with that as their goal,

whereas increase my protein from, you know,

80 to 90 grams this week is a lot more specific,

something you can track objectively,

something that's achievable,

and you could look back and say that you won that.

And the RPG model forces that kind of specificity, right?

Because think about it in a video game,

you can't invest a skill point in everything.

I mean, you might get five points and distribute one to each,

but you can't invest as many as you want in everything.

You have to pick a skill and increase it by one increment,

hold on to it, move to the next, you know, incrementally.

So the model looks like this.

Instead of tracking streaks or closing your rings on your Apple Watch,

you define your nutrition targets as like skills on a character sheet,

where, say, protein is a skill, calories are a skill, steps are a skill.

It's up to you to decide what those are.

And of course, we help our clients and members come up with

those, the things that you want to track.

And then each week you evaluate which skills ready

for a level up.

You add just the one increment.

And then you hold on to it because you've built that skill.

Now, there's some timing involved like how long it takes to do some of these

in the real world.

There are different models.

I like the roughly 45 day model.

Like once you've held a skill for 45 days, then it's locked in.

So it's not like in a game where you could just blow through it in a few hours.

But it's a very important thing.

And then you add the next point in the next skill.

Now, if you're hearing this and you're thinking, all right, this makes sense.

How do I actually build this kind of progressive system for myself?

How do I know where to start?

How fast to progress when to hold steady?

That is exactly what eat more lift heavy is built around.

That's right.

Eat more lift heavy.

It's a 26 week coaching program.

So 26 weeks is six months.

But notice 26 weeks.

It's individual weeks that each help you build these skills.

And it involves both training and nutrition progressing together

over three phases in the 26 weeks.

Phase one is stop guessing where the first eight weeks we establish your baseline.

We figure out where you actually are, not where you think you should be.

And we build that skill floor.

Phase two, the eat more lift heavy phase, weeks 9 through 18.

That's where the bar starts to rise.

And you really start to see massive progress.

And then phase three, trust yourself, is the final weeks 19 through 26

where you internalize the system.

So it's intrinsically motivated.

So you can run it without us or without the need for this education or push or accountability if you want.

And the whole structure mirrors what we've been talking about today.

This graduated progression.

Never going backward.

Each week has one focus and one action item.

Of course, with a lot of resources behind it, tools, resources, modules.

And it is a coached process.

It's not a content library.

It's not a bunch of different courses.

It's one focus that takes you through the 26 weeks.

And it works for everyone because of how customized it is.

So if you are over 40, if you lift, you track, but you're not seeing the results you expect,

go to witsawates.com, slash eat more, and get on the wait list.

The program launches March 30 and the wait list is going to get early access and founders pricing.

This is a great pricing that will never be the same again.

And you're not going to find it discount like it in the future.

So witsawates.com slash eat more to get on the eat more, lift heavy, wait list.

Alright, let's keep going as I fumble my words here.

And I want to get specific about how you apply this gamification framework in the right way.

I want to walk you through the mechanics and then you can start doing it this week.

Again, if you want support doing it with over a six month period and really lock it in,

go to witsawates.com slash eat more.

But here's what you got to do.

Step one.

Alright, step one is to define your skills.

So for most people tracking macros, your skills are, let's say, protein, calories, and either fats and carbs,

or maybe a combination of those or whatever.

In other words, some people don't care about the fats, but they do care about the carbs.

Some people vice versa and some people like both.

The easiest thing is just do all the macros.

And then you can add maybe a fourth skill of daily steps or training sessions per week.

So I would keep the whole list to like three or four to start.

Otherwise, you're going to spread your skill points to thin.

Okay, step two is to find your level one, your level one.

Remember, we're going from level zero to one here.

Okay, you started the game and you're trying to get to level one.

Now, some games start at level one.

I get it.

But this is, we're going to start really low.

This is not your goal number.

Okay, I don't care.

We're not talking about weight loss or anything like that months down the road.

This is where you are right now consistently without stress that you can get to for the next level.

All right.

So if your ultimate protein target is 140 grams because you weigh 140 pounds,

and you've heard me say one gram per pound in that vicinity,

but you're actually averaging like 60 grams of protein right now,

then going from 60 to 140 is not your level one.

Your level one might be 75 or 90.

Right?

It's a small jump.

All right.

And I want to pause right here because this is where most people push back.

They resist.

They feel like a steady 90 grams of protein is 900 or aren't going backwards.

Not ambitious enough.

And I'm not hitting the target, right?

But that is the streak mentality that we're trying to avoid.

You are not lowering your standards here, right?

You're establishing a floor that you've proven you can hold,

which is your zero.

That's where you are now.

And then every level above that is progress.

Every level above that is something you earn and make progress that can stick.

And again, going back to the RPG analogy,

if you have a new character and, you know, the game said,

we're going to give you a starting strength of starting shape.

That's funny.

Starting skill where your strength is let's say eight instead of one.

You know, you wouldn't be upset about it.

You'd say, or let's say it's eight instead of 20.

You'd say, okay, cool.

That's where I'm starting.

I'm going to build from there, right?

I kind of butchered that analogy.

But you know what I mean.

All right, step three is to define your increments.

So this is the cool part where you do it like a game.

And you say, okay, I can increment either by day or by week,

whatever makes sense.

So like for protein, a reasonable increment might be 10 grams per day.

Like I'm going to increase my target by 10 grams per day.

Now you might be using an app like MacroFactor

and it has a target of 140 and you're currently hitting 80.

You can still like mentally or in a separate place document,

hey, I'm going to try to hit 90, then 100, then 110, then 120.

Whatever makes sense.

Okay, you could stick with the same target all week

and then go up the next week, whatever makes sense.

So for step count, it might be 500 steps per day increase, right?

Just a short walk or a few extra steps around the house, whatever.

They should be small enough that the effort required to hold a new level

feels barely noticeable and not overwhelming.

Just beyond your current ability.

Remember the flow state research we talked about.

So that's step three is to define those increments.

Step four is to level up when you're ready.

And here's the rule I have.

When you've held a level for five out of seven days for at least a week

and you haven't felt like it was a really hard thing to do

like you white knuckled it, you're ready for the next skill point.

Now notice I said five out of seven, not seven out of seven.

We're not going to build a streak.

We're building a pattern and average, a slight increase in our ability.

Okay, a pattern out of five out of five out of seven is a skill.

A streak of seven out of seven, but then you break it on day eight

because you can't sustain it.

That's the trap we talked about before.

All right, so level up when you're ready.

Five out of seven days for a week.

You can come up with something similar.

If it's a longer time horizon, that's what like 80% consistency.

All right, step five.

And by the way, we have six steps in here.

Step five is to pick which skill gets the point.

Ah, okay, you don't level up everything at once.

In a given week, only one of your skills is going to get that increment.

All right, this is where the research on what's called endowed progress comes in

where people who feel like they've already started a task

are about 34% more likely to complete it.

And when you've already banked, say, three levels on your protein

and then you're holding steady there, then that momentum is going to carry over

when you decide to invest a point in something else instead.

So in other words, you're building up each of the anchors.

You're building up protein over here, maybe a couple of times,

and then you hold, then you build up calories over here,

then you hold, maybe you build up steps over here, then you hold, you get it.

So we're doing one at a time, and we're building it up incrementally.

You can go back and forth, but only do one at a time.

And then the final step is step six to keep the old levels.

So if life gets crazy, if travel interrupts your routine,

if you have a bad week, you're not going to reset to level one,

you're going to hold the last level that you proved to yourself that you could sustain.

Now, could you drop back to level one level temporarily? Sure.

But the overall architecture of your progress is there.

You've built the skills, you have the resilience, you know what that is.

A bad week doesn't delete them, so sometimes you are going to drop,

but you're going to come right back to it because that is your new baseline.

So do you notice the difference?

What separates this from a streak-based system,

where every day is like green or red?

There is no red day in this system.

There's, I'm holding my level, or I'm working back to my level,

and you're still playing the game. That's what that is.

All right, there's one more thing I want to address because I do see this all the time

with, for example, our clients and our members just talking to listeners as well.

Sometimes the reason that you don't hit your target is not about motivation.

It's logistical.

It's just logistical and about the environment or setup or something like that or the system.

And those two problems need different solutions.

A logistical problem is something like, hey, I can't figure out how to get 140 grams of protein

across the three meals that I have and stay within my calories.

I just don't know what to eat to make it work.

Like I'm either going over on one or the other or I'm coming under on protein or going over on calories.

That person doesn't have a problem with their mindset.

Like, it's not the psychology.

They just need someone to sit with them and show them the math, the numbers.

Like, guys, sometimes it's that simple.

Now, I'm an engineer talking here and sometimes very cool and calculated about these things.

But sometimes that's what you need.

Sometimes I need to give you some tough love and say, look, it's just numbers.

Let's just figure it out.

And that, it kind of takes a stress out in some ways.

Because then there's the trade-offs you can make and you don't get emotional about it.

And that's where things like example meals and protein-dense food options

and how to distribute your food and how many times that you eat and all that.

Those strategies can solve the math of it.

And you can solve it almost instantly.

Like, if I get my hands on that problem, I'm going to solve it in about five minutes for you.

And I have tools for this as well.

By the way, another plug for Eat More Lift Heavy.

In Eat More Lift Heavy, we're going to have like, I want to say about 10 really powerful automated tools

that I've worked to code up that will help solve a lot of these problems.

Like how to get all your protein and their tools that you can access over and over and over again

whenever you need them.

And you're going to have human coaches too.

But I think it's really powerful to have something you can go to right away.

That's not AI, by the way.

That's a pre-coded tool just for that problem.

So that's the math side of it.

That's like a logistical problem.

Whereas like a cognitive problem sounds different.

It sounds like, hey, I know I should be hitting my 140 grams.

And I was doing it for two weeks, but now I can't seem to make myself do it.

And I feel like I'm failing.

And that I see a lot too, right?

It's somebody who had gotten to the point, but now they're not.

And they may need to drop the target not because they're not capable of it.

But because, let's say, 140 was level 12.

And they were actually at level three.

And they skipped levels four through 11.

And so the gap between where they are and where they're trying to be is too large for that flow state.

And so instead, they're in the anxiety zone.

And what does anxiety do?

It produces avoidance.

You avoid things.

You give up.

You get to spawned in all of that.

So this RPG model handles both of these in a different way.

So for the logistics problem, you stay at your current level and you just fix the plan.

So you stay at your current level, right?

But you fix the plan.

It's just math.

It's just strategies.

For the cognitive problem, you're going to drop to where you can hit five out of seven days without stress.

And you're going to call that your current level and you're going to build from there.

And look, by definition, you're probably not going to go down a bunch of levels from your current capability.

It's probably that you tried to jump up to many levels.

And you're just trying to find your true level right now.

And I know it's hard to hear.

I know it's hard to hear.

Nobody wants to drop their targets and feel like they're knitting.

It's not working and they're a failure and all this.

But if we reframe it, it's reallocating a skill point.

It's a strategy in and of itself.

It's saying, hey, this build, this character build I have, this character class, this build isn't working for my playstyle.

I can't be a rogue or a sorceress right now.

I have to be a barbarian.

I got to go with the brute force at a lower level.

Let me adjust my character.

Or you still have the character, but your build is changing.

And the game is still going and you're just optimizing your character.

All right, before we wrap up, remember, I promised you a three question test to find out if your macro targets are in the flow zone.

I'm going to share it in a second just after this.

But just another reminder, if the system I described today sounds like, yes, that's exactly what I've been missing.

Oh, my God, Phil, if you're talking, speaking my language of what's been going on in my head and I have been able to explain it.

Eat more, lift, heavy is the coached and tool based and automated altogether version of this.

Okay, it's my engineering brain put into a really excellently designed program for 26 weeks.

Training and nutrition, progressing together, you're not going to find this in the industry at this price point.

It gives you a lot week.

It not it.

I, I and coach Carol will give you a launch plan in your first week.

Built specifically for where you're starting, not where you wish you were, but where you're starting.

How you should train, how you should track your food.

Go to witsandweights.com slash eat more and get on the wait list.

And then you'll get early access.

You also get founders pricing.

There's no risk in doing that.

It's free to get on the list.

So go to witsandweights.com slash eat more.

All right, here's that test that I promised you.

And it's three questions and I want you to answer it honestly.

I know I'm giving you a lot of these.

So hopefully this one hits if you need it.

Question one.

Over the past seven days, did you hit your protein target at least five out of seven days?

If the answer's no, then your protein target is above your current level.

That's it.

I don't care what the excuse is, what the reason is.

Forget it all and just acknowledge and admit right now your protein target is too high.

Not oh, no, no, no, it's fine.

I just did this, this, this and that's why I didn't hit it.

No, no, no, no, your protein target is too high.

Drop it to wherever you were consistently hitting it before and call that your floor

to build the levels from there.

That's question one.

Question two.

When you think about tomorrow's meals, are you confident that you can hit your targets?

Or do you feel a darkness in your chest right now?

A little bit of anxiety and heat in your head.

Okay, confidence means you're in the flow zone.

Like yes, of course I'm confident.

I've been doing it.

I'm confident.

I've got my meals ready to go.

I know what I'm going to eat.

I hit up the grocery store.

Maybe I did my meal planning.

All that good stuff.

Maybe I've pre-logged.

Whatever it is for you, whatever your system is.

If you're confident, but if you're very tight, if you've got butterflies in your stomach,

if you're nervous or anxious, it means that that challenge of hitting your targets tomorrow

is too far above your skill level and you have to back it down one increment.

That's it.

Again, the levels.

Question three.

If you missed your target yesterday, did you feel like the whole day was blown?

Or did you think, okay, I'm going to get closer tomorrow.

I'm just going to start again tomorrow.

I'm going to get closer.

If you felt like the day was blown, you're still thinking in streaks in all or nothing land,

as opposed to levels.

And that's okay.

You've acknowledged it.

Right?

That's step one.

And now we want to reframe that, hey, yesterday was a four out of five day.

Your level is still your level.

Today is a new attempt at your same level.

You're not restarting.

You're not starting from zero.

You're just attempting again to the same level and you have fallback plans that we've talked

about in this episode if it continues to be a challenge.

Now, if you answered, yeah, confident.

And I use levels to all three of those questions.

Then your targets are in the flow zone.

Right?

You hit your protein targets most of the time.

You're confident about tomorrow's meals.

And even if you missed your target yesterday, if it was one of those two out of seven,

you reframe it and like, okay, today I'm going to do it again.

We're all good.

And then you build from there.

If not, you know what you need to adjust.

All right.

I hope that was helpful.

I hope it helped you reframe and think about levels and skill building.

Kind of the way I do.

I hope you take with it something valuable.

And until next time, keep using your wits, lifting those weights.

And remember, you don't build your best character starting at level 50.

You earn it one skill point at a time.

I'm Philip Payton.

I'll talk to you next time here on the wits and weights podcast.