Before talking about the main subject let me first give 2 examples of a ROI meaning Return On Investment analysis.
1- Let’s say you have 2 investment options, A and B. Option A costs you 10 dollars and option B costs 20 dollars. You are sure that both of them, after the same amount of time, will have a return of 40 dollars. With that in mind what investment would you choose if you could only choose one? Option A of course. Maybe if you had 30 dollars to invest you would choose both, because both give you a good return, but if you had to choose just one it would be option A.
2- Let’s say you are the in charge of a team of software engineers developing an app. And you have a decision to make for next week: develop feature A or develop feature B. After consulting with your team you think that both of those features will take more or less the same amount of time and resources to develop. However, feature A was requested by 1000 users and feature B was only requested by 500 users. Which feature would you choose to develop knowing you could only choose one (at least for next week)? You would probably choose feature A (assuming that both features would have the same level of satisfaction to each user) .
With both of these examples you are choosing to focus your time and resources on the things that bring the biggest return.
And it’s not a question of choosing between doing things that are hurtful vs good for you. It’s about prioritizing what gives the most bang for you buck.
It’s important to do an ROI analysis because you have limited resources
Of course that it depends on what exactly do you define as the return. Taking the 2 examples before:
If you are working on a open source project in a non profit team, them the return would be just user satisfaction for example. But if you are working in a for profit software company then maybe you would define the return as money generated by the feature.
You choose, depending on the situation, what you define as the return.
Maybe the return of going to the gym for you is having better health. Or you don’t really care about that and your return is to be more aesthetic so you can get more dates.
In the case that you are trying to be more confident in social situations and more aesthetic I would argue that…
The ROI of body transformation vs taking good photos is in favour of taking good photos
Both can have amazing returns but taking good photos takes much less investment.
If you consider that is takes you months of going to the gym and having a proper diet to see significant visual progress and that just taking even just 50 photos may help you to substitute your old photos for much better ones ( and therefore increase your appearance online by a lot) then you reach the conclusion that if you are trying to optimize your appearance online you need to start with photos, not with body transformation. The same can be said about…
The ROI of body transformation vs style update is in favour of a style update
Again the same thing, changing your style can be done much quicker and has an immediate return.
You don’t need to spend months changing your style. In just one day if you buy a shirt that fits you better than the shirts you already have in your wardrobe, it makes an immediate impact. And depending on whether how bad your shirts were before, it can make a big difference. Especially in situations where your appearance does the talking, such as online dating.
Hidden ROI hypothesis
Let’s give one more technical example of a ROI analysis.
Imagine that you are the CEO of a software company that as two options: Option A is invest in a new security system that involves new software and maybe hiring a outside consultant to audit the security of the company. Option B is doing a marketing campaign with targeted advertising that will bring new costumers and therefore increase revenue. Which option would you choose?
It’s a difficult decision because when it comes to security you can’t “see” the return of that investment. Maybe you can do a statistical analysis of the costs that companies similar to yours have when they suffer a hack and try to see if the security investment is worth it or not. But you can’t really tell. What about the loss of confidence from your costumers that would result after a hack?
On the other hand, in the marketing campaign, you would more or less know how many costumers it would likely bring and how much money it would generate, thus knowing more precisely the return.
My point with this example is even thou you might not see the results of a certain investment it does not mean that you should not do it.
Even thou you may not see the results of a body transformation for months I still think it is necessary to have a great physique.
Having a great physique is like security in the software company example: it is the foundation on what all the other stuff is built on. Even thou it may have a lower ROI or even hidden/unknown ROI when compared to good photos and good style it is still a necessary investment.
If you have a great physique it becomes easier to take rejection. If your girlfriend breaks up without you do you think you would be worse of if you were fat or were in great shape? It would harder for you to think in a situation like that “oh who would want me now?” if you were in great shape then if you were fat. Being in good shape gives you security, it gives you confidence in yourself regardless of the outside.
Conclusion
If your objective is to be more confident, or be better in social situations, or get more dates, your initial focus should be on taking good photos and having good style, because that’s the fastest and easiest way to improve your appearance.
However it is still necessary, in my opinion, to built a great physique because that is the foundation to having better photos, having better style and being more confident in yourself.