What if the challenges in your business and your life aren’t caused by bad things, but rather by the wrong application of good things?
What if you’ve done a good job of screening out negative influences, only to be blindsided by the good ones?This is a difficult topic since it requires some humility and self-examination, but it could also explain some of the mysteries and frustrations that are holding you back.

The 16th century physician Paracelsus said
Alle Ding sind Gift und nichts ohn’ Gift, allein die Dosis macht, das ein Ding kein Gift ist.”
which translates to
“Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison.
The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.”

Or more simply:
“The dose makes the poison.”

You’ve probably observed this for yourself.
Alcohol (while technically a poison) is fine in moderation, in some situations an enhancement, but for some people it becomes a health risk and an addiction.
Placing a bet can be fun on occasion (I had a great in Las Vegas), but can also ruin people’s lives.
Instagram is a wonderful platform for sharing your life with people you love, but for some it is a source of obsession and inadequacy.
If you post a photo of your friends drinking Champagne and holding a Melbourne Cup sweep, you’re unlikely to have anyone hold an intervention.
If you’re unhappy while gambling, drinking or scrolling, then something has to change, no matter how justifiable it might be.

The same goes for ideas and philosophies.
Having a strong work ethic is praised as a virtue, yet we also have workaholics and people who post quotes about “hustling” and glamourising 80-hour work weeks.
Caring about people and the environment is a strength, until it dominates your conversations to the point where alienate and shame your friends, as well as feeling guilty for any money you spend on yourself.
The substance is good, but the dosage is a problem.

The pattern that emerges here is simple and confronting:
Each thing is defensible, we are the problem.
Our desires are what drive us to improper doses.
We rationalise and justify our way into unhealthy positions, unable to see how a good thing could ever be the source of our issues.
Let’s look at four common patterns; overdoing it, underdoing it, modifying the recipe and mixing two good things together.

Overdoing It
A friend of mine wanted to lose weight quickly, so he had a gym trainer write him up a program.
He then decided to “accelerate the results” by going to the gym twice a day, seven days a week.
Guess who hurt themselves?
The program was fine, it was the impatience that caused the injury.
This is a common pattern amongst anyone who tries to shortcut the learning curve.
They tell themselves that they know better than everyone else, and can skip straight to the results.
A mixture of greed, impatience and ego set an unrealistic timeline, forcing you to up the dosage.

Underdoing It
There’s a reason why your local gym won’t be as busy today as it was on January 2nd.
Within two weeks, there will have been a wave of people come through who followed the instructions half-heartedly, didn’t notice a result in the mirror, and told themselves that the process won’t work for them.
The same goes for people who ran one Facebook ad, briefly downloaded Duolingo, held a few team meetings, or who invested a small amount of money.
They tried something that works, but in such a small dose that it was never going to succeed.
Good things requires a generous timeline, permission to fail and learn from feedback, some skin in the game and a decent incentive.
If you approach new ideas with tokenism, fear and stinginess, they are guaranteed to disappoint you.
Not because they’re flawed, but because you’re taking an impossibly small dose.

Modifying The Recipe
Advice is like a recipe: take these ingredients, perform these actions, wait a certain length of time, enjoy the results.
There’s something so arrogant about modifying a recipe before you’ve tried it; saying that your wild guess is obviously smarter than the tried-and-tested method.

Seth Godin wrote:
“I followed the recipe exactly, and it failed.”
That’s how many reviews of online recipes begin.
Then the poster explains that he replaced the sour cream with yogurt (it’s what he had in the fridge), that he replaced the wheat flour with rice flour (it’s gluten-free) and he used the toaster oven instead of a real oven…
Once you are deep into a project, it’s yours.
It’s underway.
You have heart and soul and pride invested in it.
In the face of helpful advice, it’s easy to say, “sure, that’s what I’m already doing,” and then torture your description of the current project to make it sort of, almost, sound like you’re following the suggested new approach.
But you’re not.
You’re merely wasting time and effort pretending you’re embracing this new way of doing something.
What if, just for a week or even a day, you acted as if?
What if you re-did your plan, or your perceptions of the world or your approach in a totally new way, the way that respects and embraces the thing you just learned.
What if you followed the recipe by following the recipe, simply to learn the technique…
After that, after you’ve seen what it can do, then go ahead and see what happens when you re-adopt the cruft that had you looking for a new recipe in the first place.
In the age of unlimited access to recipes, the hard part about getting good advice isn’t getting it.
It’s following it.
And then you might be able to turn the recipe into insight.

Seth’s description is beautiful and confronting.
Following the recipe might not be ‘optimal’ but it will probably effective.

Mixing Two Good Things Together
The tragedy of Heath Ledger’s passing came about from an accidental overdose – a combination of safe medicines that turned out to be fatal.
Sometimes you can have two things that are beneficial, but they clash with each other in a way that creates unintended side effects or a great deal of stress.
If you move to a new city, it’s probably not the time to try and save lots of money.
If you have a new baby, it’s probably not the time to take up golf or the drums.
If you need to cut gluten from your diet, it’s probably not a good idea to also try veganism.
If you buy in an inner city apartment, it’s probably not a good idea to get a German Shepard.
If you want to reshape the culture in your business, it’s probably not the time to hire lots of new people.

It can be hard to see how two new decisions will affect each other, usually due to a lack of forethought or a greedy desire for faster results.

Solutions
The solution here isn’t to demonise or glorify each substance, but to look at your motives.
Is there a pattern in your mistakes?

Do you tend to run into the same sorts of problems?

What might be the underlying cause?

Why don’t you want to follow the recommended dosage?

What these questions do is identify the root cause of your frustrations – looking for painless solutions, avoiding risk, maintaining your outward appearance, the need to feel superior to others, an impatience for results.
Naming them is the first step towards healing, but there’s probably a lot of steps still to go.

Another solution is to accept your tendencies as a limitation.
My grandfather never touched alcohol, stating that he knew how easily he became addicted to other things (sugar was a weakness) and figured that zero alcohol was a far more feasible option than moderation.
The same thing leads people to delete apps and set restrictions on their devices, completely cutting out things like social media, gambling, games or pornography.
Each of these have people campaigning to make them illegal, and while I may agree that they’re harmful, if people are determined to get them then a law won’t stop them
If you recognise a slippery slope in your behaviour, fencing it off might be a wise move.

It’s also worth observing the dosages in case studies.
When you see someone with an impressive skillset, item or hobby, see if you can work out how much time, energy, money and trade-offs went into it.
What you may find is that they needed a small dose over a long time, or a surprisingly large dose that you would find prohibitive.
A lot of people want to look like Gerard Butler in 300, not many people want to do the workout from 300.
Generally speaking, a lot of great things in life and business stem from specialisation and dedication, and a half-measure doesn’t give you half the benefit.

Finally, have a look for indirect substitutes – things that look different but give you the same underlying result.
There are plenty of ways to trick your brain into releasing dopamine, plenty of ways to grow your business, plenty of ways to improve yourself.
It’s better to be honest about what you’re looking for, rather than taking unhealthy doses of good things.