Becoming Adaptable Changes Everything
Read on kevferrell.com
Welcome to Rewire | Reboot, a weekly newsletter where I share reflections from my ongoing personal growth journey and provide tested ideas, frameworks, tools and practices to help you create the life you want.
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In this issue:
- Adaptability is a superpower
- Adaptation through training
- Flow - "don’t type, just speak"
Rewire - Idea I'm Exploring
Adaptability is a Superpower
Last week, I wrote about consistency. How progress comes from showing up repeatedly, not from chasing perfection. The Drift Principle was about staying within shooting distance and not letting small misses turn into long detours.
Adjacent to that idea - and arguably even more important - is adaptability.
This trait matters everywhere - in work, health, relationships and investing. Because everything changes. The only real constant is that things won’t stay the same.
No matter how carefully you plan your day, life runs on a different schedule. Meetings spill over. Kids get sick. Energy dips. Priorities shift. Change is constant. I’ve written before about planning with optimism and preparing for chaos, especially in (always) uncertain times. Adaptability is the skill underneath all of it.
Those who can tolerate the most uncertainty get ahead.
Part of developing consistency is learning how to adapt when things don’t go according to plan. When life throws you a curve, how do you respond? What’s the next right move? Do you throw your hands up and quit on yourself? Or do you figure out how to pivot and still get your shit done?
Maybe today doesn’t allow for your ideal effort. Maybe the 30-minute workout becomes five minutes. Maybe the page you planned to write becomes a sentence. The bigger task turns into a smaller one. That’s not failure. That’s showing up.
Anything is always infinitely better than nothing.
Taking what the day gives you and turning it into something useful keeps the habit alive. Don’t use disruption as an excuse to skip. Use it as an opportunity to prove to yourself that you can still show up in some way, even when things are hard.
In pondering this idea, I was reminded of a job interview I had in my twenties. I was asked what a perfect day at work looked like. I said something like: setting out with a to-do list and checking everything off by the end of the day. Sounds reasonable, right? But happens almost never.
The interviewer followed up with: “And what about when that doesn’t happen - when other things pop up and get in the way?” Which happens almost always. I don’t remember my exact answer - but I didn’t get the job. In hindsight, it was a blessing. What I believe that interviewer was testing me on with that line of questioning was my adaptability.
Things will get in the way of your plans today. Good goal-setting includes anticipating obstacles and deciding how you’ll respond to overcome them. But you can’t foresee everything. It’s when the unexpected shows up that adaptability matters most.
Life changes. So do you.
Adaptability is the willingness to adjust your strategy without losing sight of who you’re becoming. Sometimes that means letting go of habits that aren’t working and reshaping them so they actually fit your life. That’s not quitting. That’s evolving. Just don’t quit on yourself.
I used to believe that if I couldn’t give something my all, it wasn’t worth doing. If a workout didn’t go exactly as planned, I’d write it off entirely. That mindset is backwards. The correct one is that I still showed up because I’m a person who doesn’t miss workouts. The habits that stick aren’t about perfect execution - they’re about identity.
The habits you're able to build and maintain need to be about who you want to become, not what you want to achieve.
That may at times require reassessing goals, changing tactics, or doing things differently than you always have. Successful people don’t cling to “the way it’s always been done.” They look for better ways forward.
Change is uncomfortable. It’s also inevitable.
If you can’t adapt to change, life becomes a constant struggle - everything feels harder than it needs to be. But if you can roll with the punches and respond to what comes at you, life tends to move with more flow and less friction.
This year will bring more change than most. AI will reshape how we work. Life will continue to throw curveballs.
Those who adapt will ride the change and thrive. Those who resist will feel friction.
As my wife recently said to me, “When life gives you lemons, go bake a cake.” Now that's not exactly how the more popular quote goes, but this one is authentically hers and I love it.
Adapt. Pivot. Keep showing up.
Reboot - Health & Longevity
Adaptation Through Training
Adaptability isn’t just a mindset. It’s physical.
At its core, exercise is the process of creating adaptations in your body. You apply a stimulus. Your body responds. It gets stronger, more efficient, more resilient. That’s the whole game.
But here’s the part people often miss: adaptation only happens when the stimulus is sufficient.
Simply going through the motions - doing the same workout, at the same pace, with the same weights, week after week - might maintain where you are, but it won’t move you forward. Your body is remarkably good at adapting, and once it has, it needs a new reason to change.
This might sound contradictory to the idea that something is always better than nothing. It’s not. On your worst days, showing up at all still matters. That’s how you protect the habit. But on the majority of days you need to strive for doing a little bit more - or something different - than last time. That’s where growth comes from.
Once you’ve established a baseline, progress comes from pulling different levers:
- Adding minutes
- Changing intensity
- More weight or more reps at the same weight
- Switching between bilateral and unilateral movements
- Changing the exercise variation - back squats to front squats, split squats or hack squats
So that the body has to solve a new problem. It has to adapt.
In resistance training, this is known as the progressive overload principle. It’s the idea that adaptation requires gradually increasing demands over time. Without that progression, there’s no reason for your muscles, tendons or nervous system to change.
What’s most exciting is that these physical adaptations are tangible. You feel yourself getting stronger. You see changes in your physique. Your cardiovascular fitness improves - you’re not winded walking up the stairs. These signals are powerful. They reinforce the behavior. They give you the motivation to keep going.
Different types of training drive different adaptations - all of which are important for both healthspan and lifespan:
- High-intensity or VO₂ max work improves peak cardiovascular performance and oxygen utilization - extremely important for long-term health and resilience.
- Sustained, moderate Zone 2 exercise improves mitochondrial efficiency and fat oxidation, a key to metabolic health and longevity.
- Resistance training creates adaptations in muscle size, strength and bone density. And, just as importantly, improves insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility.
- Tendons and ligaments adapt too. With appropriate loading, they become stiffer and stronger, improving force transfer and reducing injury risk over time.
These adaptations don’t happen overnight. They’re the result of repeated, intentional stress followed by recovery.
You’re training your body how to respond to stress, how to recover and how to come back stronger.
The best part? The lessons carry over into all areas of your life. When you see yourself adapting physically through consistent effort, it becomes easier to trust that you can adapt everywhere else too.
That’s the work. And it compounds.
Toolkit - Something I'm Using
Flow - "Don’t Type, Just Speak"
Here’s a tool I’m using to adapt my workflow. I've been using the voice-to-text app Flow by Wispr more and more every day. I’ve tried dictation tools in the past and never found one that really worked for me - my voice isn’t easily understood by humans or AI. Siri has been endlessly frustrating on mobile and I have never found a desktop option I liked. Until Flow.
It has a mobile app that syncs seamlessly with desktop and works across all applications. It’s been a game changer for capturing ideas on the fly before they disappear and for the speed and efficiency of speaking emails and documents instead of typing them out. What’s most impressive is how well it learns your writing and punctuation style, turning raw speech into more polished writing so you have less editing. It also learns non-standard terms and abbreviations, which means far less time fighting autocorrect.
It’s better than anything else I’ve tried. There is a free Basic version. But I liked it so much I upgraded to the Pro version. You can get a free month of Pro using this referral link.
Transparency: I have no affiliation with or sponsorship from this company. Just referral links as a paying customer. I only recommend products I'm actually using and paying for because they work for me.
Inspirational Quote
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
— Charles Darwin
One Action
Embrace Change
Identify one area you’ve been fighting change. Consider letting go of that resistance and trying something different. Adapt. Embrace the change and see where it leads you.
Let me know how it goes - just reply to this email.
Reader's Corner
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Until next week,
Kevin
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