Never take a day off

Day 30 / 366

I have been doing daily challenges for as long as I can remember. The best way I have found to develop a new habit is just by forcing yourself to make the conscious choice of doing it repeatedly.

The toughest part about trying to build a daily habit is how to handle days when you just can’t meet your goals. After all, we are all humans, and we fuck up. Sometimes, things are just out of our control. In the past days like these, I just counted as an off day. I was not going to meet my goals anyway, so might as well have rest, and start fresh the next day.

I saw Tanmay Bhat say something in an interview that changed my perspective on this. He was talking about his weight loss journey and the diet and exercise schedule he needed to follow. On weeks that he was not able to do it completely, because he had other commitments or he was traveling, instead of just writing these days off, he still tracked his meals and his progress. He tried to do the best he could.

While in a perfect week, he might have lost say 1 kg. In an “off” week, if he still tried to do the best he could, he would see that he still lost around 500 gms. This gave him confidence that even if things happen that are out of his control, he can keep moving slowly towards his goal.

In the last week, the circumstances were not ideal for me to continue these blogs and the other daily goals that I am working towards. And I was tempted to just take a few days off and start again. But I decided to change my mindset, and just force myself to put out blogs, no matter what. The quality was not good, but it’s still better than having no blogs. And I am glad that I was able to keep the streak going.