Continuity over perfection

#282

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle

For three months after I started CrossFit, I kept waiting for the right conditions before I'd go: eight hours of quality sleep, good hydration, zero excuses lined up. That combination hardly ever lined up, so I rarely showed up either. It was irregular, sometimes twice a week, sometimes four times a week to catch up then burning out and skipping a week, then vowing to thrice a week but going at different times of day anyway. The days I went half-baked with less than 6-7 hours of sleep, I realized my cortisol ends up resetting after a while. So now I go regardless. Tired, dehydrated, running on four hours, whatever the day handed me. On Saturdays, when I actually get to sleep in and catch up in the afternoon, all of me thanks me for having gone and showed up at least.

Blogging taught me the same lesson. I'd sit on a post for weeks trying to get a sentence exactly right, and by the time I published it, I'd lost momentum on the next four ideas sitting in my drafts folder. With this year's commitment to myself to uphold weekly publishing on self-care, a slightly clunky post that goes out on Wednesday afternoon beats a polished one that never leaves the folder.

The two versions of me

There's the version who's still negotiating with the conditions: waiting for the right amount of sleep, the right mood, the right stretch of free time to do it properly. And there's the version who just does the smaller, messier thing on schedule. Same person, same goals, and only one of them actually keeps a streak going.

I used to think the gap between those two was discipline. Gritting my teeth through mornings and grinding through. Turns out it's mostly just the size of the bar I'd set for what counted as showing up. Lower the bar enough and willpower has no room left to matter.

Falling to systems

"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." -James Clear

One aspect of James Clear's research on habits is all about how motivation is unreliable, so what works is building a habit that survives a bad day. He calls this identity-based, rooted in who you are rather than what you want, which is why skipping it feels like betraying yourself instead of just missing a goal.

The compounding part that small and consistent beats big and rare, every time, given enough weeks, might sound boring. But boring is exactly why it works. The only thing that survives "every single day, no exceptions" for me is a lowered bar.

The new bar

Now a workout counts if I show up to the gym and work out for an hour instead of 90 minutes, at 60% of my capacity. A post counts if it says the true thing plainly, even when the sentence isn't singing or the words haven't fully scratched the itch in my brain. Some days I still catch myself waiting for eight hours of sleep and perfect hydration before I'll commit to anything. I just don't wait as long as I used to, and on the mornings I go anyway, tired and unprepared, some part of me is always relieved by the afternoon. I also realized I tend to regret not doing something more than doing it and having to pay the price for it later, like being tired the rest of the day and having to push through because of the workout, because deep down, I convince my brain that my body's better off for having done it.