One of the best skills you can build on your way to becoming healthier and fitter has nothing to do with macros, programming, or willpower.

It’s the skill of moving on quickly.

Here’s why it matters so much.

You are going to start hot right out of the gate. You’ll be consistent. You’ll nail your macros. You’ll hit your calorie deficit. You’ll get to the gym four or five days a week and feel like you finally cracked the code.

And then you will slip up.

I said when, not if, on purpose. It’s coming for all of us.

You’ll overeat your deficit. You’ll miss a few workouts. You’ll blow past a week without touching your step goal. And what happens next is the part that actually determines whether this works for you long term.

Because the longer you spend doing mental gymnastics about a slip-up, spiraling over how much you regret missing the mark, sitting in what I can only describe as purgatory of the mind, the more consumed you become with being a perfectionist. And perfectionism is what ends most people’s progress. Not the slip-up itself.

Moving on quickly does not mean you stop caring

I want to be clear about this, because people hear “move on” and assume I’m telling them to shrug it off and pretend nothing happened.

That’s not what this is.

Moving on quickly means you look at what happened, you take the one piece of information you need from it, and you go right back to the plan you already had.

Here’s what that looks like in real life.

You go out to eat on a Friday night and you end up 1,200 calories over your deficit.

Moving on quickly looks like eating your breakfast Saturday morning exactly the way you planned to eat it before Friday night ever happened. Same breakfast. Same macros. You don’t skip it to “save” calories. You don’t tack on an extra hour of cardio to earn it back. You go back to the plan.

That’s the skill.

Treat the slip-up as an event, not a character trait

There’s a second piece to this, and it’s the language you use with yourself afterward.

Instead of viewing the situation as evidence of who you are, view it as an action you wish you had done differently.

“I overate my calories by quite a bit last night.”

That’s an event. That’s something that happened.

“I can never stick to anything.”

That’s a character trait. That’s who you are.

When you see what happened as an event, you detach from it much faster. When you see it as a character trait, you carry it into Saturday, Sunday, and the rest of the week.

If you can isolate that one day and get back to your routine the very next day, that one day is far more inconsequential than you think it is.

You need something to measure yourself against

If you want to get better at this, you need something concrete to compare yourself to.

Set a small list of non-negotiable rules for yourself. These are input goals, and they should be goals you already know you can hit.

That small set of rules gives you a measuring stick. At the end of the week you can’t say “nothing is working” if you weren’t checking those boxes consistently.

It also gives you a built-in way to move on, because the very next day is another chance to check those same boxes.

At the end of the week, you can look at a compliance percentage for yourself. You can see the days you hit your rules and the days you didn’t. And on the days you missed, you can look at what happened next. Did you miss one day and hit them the next? Or did one day turn into four? That tells you whether you’re as consistent as you thought you were.

Consistently good beats occasionally great every single time. That line is in the intro of my podcast, and it’s a Nick Bare quote. I can’t take credit for it.

The gap between making the mistake and getting back on the horse is the thing that matters most. That timeline is everything. The quicker you can close it, the more successful you’ll be at losing the weight, keeping it off, and having a fit lifestyle become your normal lifestyle.

Where I first heard this

In June of last year I listened to one of the most impactful Mind Pump episodes I’ve ever listened to. It was with a guy named Jamie Selzler, who lost 300 pounds without any organized form of cardio in his regimen.

Listen to the episode here.

He’s the person I first heard say that moving on quickly is a skill. I know it’s a simple phrase, but it stuck with me.

Moving on quickly is a skill. And a skill is something you can get better at. Something you can refine over time.

There are a lot of nuggets in that episode, but the one that stuck with me the most was his focus on input goals over output goals.

Inputs you control, outputs you don’t

Input goals are the things you have direct control over:

• The calories you consume
• How many grams of protein you eat
• How many hours of sleep you get
• Hitting your step goal
• The workouts you complete each week

Output goals are the things you don’t:

• How much you weigh
• Your body measurements
• How your clothes fit
• Body fat percentage
• Sleep quality
• Strength PRs

Those outputs become possible because of the intentionality around your inputs. But you cannot force any of them to go exactly according to plan.

I still encourage clients to go after a goal weight if they have one. Just understand that you can’t force the scale to hit that number. You can only control the input effort that gets you there.

You can nail your calories. You can get in bed at a decent hour so you actually get enough sleep. You can hit your steps. You can hit your workouts.

That’s where your goals should live.

If you’re happy with the inputs, you can’t get mad at the outputs

This is the part that ties it all together.

If you’re happy with your effort for the day, and you hit every goal you set for yourself, the outputs stop having the same power over you. They’re out of your control, so they can’t wreck your week.

The longer you stack good days, the more you see that scale fluctuations and gym performance can ebb and flow while you’re still slowly chipping away at your goal.

So when you nail your deficit on Tuesday and wake up Wednesday to a higher number on the scale, you can look at it, say “cool,” step off, and go about your day.

You know the scale might not be reflecting what’s happening behind the scenes. You’ve seen what consistent input effort does over time, so one high reading is just an off number. It isn’t a reflection of your effort or the direction you’re actually headed.

You move on quickly because you’ve seen this play out before.

Moving on quickly is a skill.

And it’s a skill you have a 100% likelihood of mastering.