Kilburn's Comment: Fear is What Keeps Us on the Plateau

At this point, you hit a plateau and the positive effects of your efforts─i.e. weight loss, greater muscle definition─start to taper off. In order to overcome this plateau, you have to make radical changes. So you do 20 push-ups instead of 10, 30 reps instead of 15, 10 miles instead of five. Or you do what I did last week and join a gym.

One of the best things about the gym is that it gives you a lot of time to think about tenuous connections. For example, in the market data world, I see a