Here’s to grit, perseverance and restarting as many times as it takes in embarrassingly small ways.

In today’s perfect world of social media and surface interactions, we all get to curate our public personas and shape the narrative. When you are not close to someone, it’s so easy to sell them the tale you want to tell, not the tale of repeating patterns of insecurities and inadequacies that is, which they can only perceive within your words if they know you well. Even when we openly talk about failure and hardship, it’s often perfectly styled to contain just the right amount of vulnerability, misery, persistence and heroism to make people empathise and show us in a positive light. The tale is almost always about overcoming the challenge and recommending the perfect system of habits you’ve built that had finally worked, as if the system itself, not sticking to it, was the hard part.

I’ve come to believe that we only progress in upward spirals, not in neat linear lines as advertised

The spirals tend to go up and down and the lesson you need to learn will keep repeating in different ways until you fix the root cause, but understanding and mitigating the root cause is often the real lesson. Much like in engineering, first you need to understand the what, then the why and then finally, the how. There are so many ways to cope with the realities of life, but I believe there are only two things that really matter and work in all areas of life: having a system and consistency.

The first one is easy and we all probably intuitively do it this way: you realise you have a problem, you analyse the problem and decide what you will do differently to fix it. Common large and small personal examples in no particular order include fixing your food and exercise habits, setting educational or career goals, quitting cigarettes/sugar/alcohol/bad habits, improving skincare routines and your looks, wanting to be a better partner/friend/parent, finishing that one project you are always neglecting and so on. Then you probably do some research and set up a system of habits and goals, which is typically overengineered and entirely inappropriate for what you actually need, but that’s okay, because you can iterate and eventually get it right in a way that serves you. There’s a product development mantra by Addy Osmani I rather like: “First do it, then do it right, then do it better”.

However, even if you manage to avoid the perfectionism trap and break your new goal down into tiny, easily achievable milestone goals with a realistic plan instead of having a humongous, perfect, guaranteed-to-cause-extreme-pressure-and-fail goal with an unrealistic plan of a myriad of new daily habits, there is a second thing out to get you: consistency. We are taught that consistency means repeating the same action at pre-determined intervals, most often confused with doing it every day with an all-or-nothing mentality. Starting a new habit is almost always easy and you get a nice little dopamine hit when you do it right several consecutive times. However, as soon as you break the streak for the first time, your brain rebels against the idea of starting over – you’re suddenly a failure and you always have been, the system wasn’t right, the goal is too difficult, unachievable or not worthy enough and too trivial to bother; all of this even if you’ve previously started to see positive effects from the new habit.

The horrible truth is that life happens and no matter how motivated you are, you will always fail in your streak at least once. It’s easy to say to just make sure you don’t fail twice in a row, which can help, but considering the variability of our busy work and private life schedules, external factors, unexpected events and health-related issues, it is almost impossible not to fail. This is the part we don’t talk about enough – that you will fail, that it will take longer than you expected and that all of it is completely normal. This is also where our ingrained fear of failure often comes from, because we pit ourselves against unwritten social standards that only few people can actually measure up to, and even those that do only measure up in one or two areas at a time, whereas we always feel like we need to do it all, super fast, perfectly and all at once.

For example, I am no longer ashamed to admit that I’ve restarted this blog and my various exercise habits more times than I can count (the somewhat blurry cover photo is from my current and 4th attempt at properly restarting pole dancing within the last 15 years, taken at a class I wasn’t really feeling after a month’s break), that I had to develop chronic stomach issues before I managed to build up a serious meal prep and healthy eating habit, that I still struggle with regular sleeping time, my temper and so many habits that would make my life better. It feels like I’ve had to mentally restart working on my PhD thesis a hundred times and I can’t believe that it took me so many extra years to finish due to various reasons I don’t want to get into publicly (I had my preliminary defence this week and it’s now finally accepted by the committee and will all come to an end soon). The list goes on and at this point I am often more proud that I didn’t quit than of the results I have achieved.

It’s restarting that always causes the highest mental friction

A psychologist could tell you better than me what goes on in our brains, but I think restarting is where we hit the root cause point of our journeys. It’s the why that we need to understand and overcome to build true consistency, and then the how often evolves naturally. There’s a popular motivational slogan that says “your competition is not other people, it’s your ego and procrastination”, but I think the true wording should be “your competition is not other people, it’s your fear”, because fear is what usually stops us from (re)starting – the fear of disappointing others, and more importantly, ourselves, yet again. Procrastination and perfectionism come in many different flavours, but they are all just rebranded fear of failure, and so are nonchalance and cynicism, all of them designed by our brains to protect us from the harm of new, unknown circumstances. Unfortunately, the harm of being comfortably stuck is often greater than the harm of starting, let alone restarting when we’ve skipped a day (or a week or a month or a year – because yes, that happens and it is completely normal).

Change and uncertainty are the only constants in life and restarting is where we have to truly face up to our own bullshit and decide if we are already tired enough to change something, and why precisely that is what we need to change right then. It often turns out that this was not the right thing to try and change in that moment, that we were not ready for it. We are in fact, choosing what we are not changing, and that can be an extremely difficult thing to accept about ourselves, so it’s much easier to blame external circumstances and look for excuses. However, we cannot do everything at once and maybe we will never be ready to change certain things and that is okay, because we don’t owe it to anyone but ourselves. It’s sometimes even harder to accept that we are ready to change something and that we deserve to, which is where growth happens and the how starts to become clear.

Now, if getting to the why was difficult and required varying depths of introspection, the how is often even uglier and more embarrassing, because you actually have to do whatever works for you, repeatedly. Real life is messy and our fears don’t make sense and often force us into downright ridiculous coping mechanisms. Restarting the really hard things often means making complex trade agreements with your inner perfectionist that you’d never admit to anyone out loud. It’s pure grit and it often means doing almost nothing in the end, but that almost nothing feels like liberation anyway: a 3 minute workout on the bathroom floor before your evening shower that makes you feel like a queen; opening a hated document you need to work on just to look at it and make sure it didn’t bite you, then calling it a day in peace; humming while you open the latest message from a problematic person in your life that requires some kind of action that you’ve been neglecting and making a general plan for it; and of course the Internet-famous one – just getting out of bed on a bad day and feeling like you’ve climbed on top of the world.

The good news is that restarting actually gets easier with practice and that the effect is cumulative in all areas of your life. Once you understand the why, you can force yourself to be consistent with the how no matter how much you don’t feel like it or how stupid you may feel doing what needs to be done initally. The more you do the hard things (whatever that may be for you), the more you begin to believe that you can do hard things, and restarting anything is almost always a hard thing – it takes at least 2 months to build a habit, no matter how trivial it is. Now, you’ve heard me say that self-discipline is self-love, but what I think is crucial here is that self-discipline is not about being tough on yourself, it’s about being compassionate. It’s about knowing when it’s better to pause, postpone or restructure something that currently isn’t right for you instead of forcing it and it’s also about knowing when it’s time to restart again, from scratch and in the right way. Your whats, whys and hows will evolve through the years and it’s important to acknowledge that and let things go when they no longer serve you, but it’s equally important to remember that it’s never too late to restart something you’ve let go of – I think that neither of those means giving up.

True consistency isn’t all or nothing and it doesn’t have to mean every day; it’s doing the right things and restarting them after failure again and again, no matter how hard it may be. Personally I believe that is more impressive than an unbroken, perfect streak that has never been tested. What about you? Let me know in the comments below.

“Better to do a thing than live in the fear of it.”

Logen Ninefingers, one of my favourite morally grey fantasy characters from J. Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself