How long has it been?
You know that journal that you said that you were going to write in every morning or the meditation that you did for 11 days straight and then stopped.
The early nights or the exercise plan.
Or that resolution that really did feel different this time.
Somewhere back there,
It stopped.
You know roughly when.
And you've been not looking at it the way you'd not look at an unpaid bill ever since.
But there's a strange part,
Right?
By the way,
I relate to this.
I get it.
I'm not talking to you from a place of superiority.
I'm another human being just like you.
Who like to examine my own thoughts,
Intentions,
Actions,
Behaviors.
And I learn a lot about other people through myself.
And what I've noticed was that missing one day was nothing,
Right?
What did the damage was the day after,
When a voice said,
Well,
That's ruined now.
May as well start again Monday or in January when things calm back down.
This is not going to work.
It feels like honesty.
It feels almost like self-compassion.
It feels like honoring your emotions.
I think it's like respecting your resistance.
It feels like it's loving in a sort of way,
You know?
Like I've come to this deep realization that I am not really meant to be doing this at this time.
But most of the time I would say it's just arithmetic.
That's damned by shame.
The Stoics.
Who get sold to us as the sternest people in history.
Would have no patience with this at all.
So start with what they actually believed about perfection.
The Stoic idea is this sage,
This wise person,
The person of complete wisdom who never slips.
And their own tradition said,
Bluntly,
That this person is about as common as the Phoenix.
One every 500 years,
Maybe.
In other words,
It's not you,
It's not me,
It's not your teacher,
And it's not theirs.
We don't see any phoenixes around here.
Extremely rare.
Epictetus was once asked whether it's possible to be entirely without fault and his answer reported in the discourses was no.
It can't be done.
This from the man with the hardest reputation in the whole school.
So what was the practice for if nobody ever arrives at this fully perfected state?
Their word for the working state was Procopy.
Progress.
The person practicing wasn't called a sage,
They were called simply one making progress.
That was the entire job description.
Not clean records,
But just direction.
Appetitus.
Coaching an actual habit in the wording of Ward Farnsworth uses.
He says,
If you wish not to be quick to anger,
Don't feed your habit.
Don't throw it fodder on which to grow.
As a first step,
Keep quiet and count the days on which you didn't get angry.
Then he voices the count for you.
I used to get angry every day,
Then every other day,
Then every third day,
Then every fourth.
Every day,
Then every other day,
Then every third.
Do you hear what's inside that sentence?
Lapses.
The count he's recommending has failure built into it.
He isn't tracking a streak.
He's tracking a trend.
A streak dies as soon as you miss it.
I'm on a 95 day streak and on day 96 I missed it.
Done.
Streak's over.
Lots of shame.
You've messed up.
You may as well not try.
A trend absorbs the miss.
It's more of a shape,
A pattern,
An overall trend.
Their critics attack them on exactly this point.
If only the sage is wise then everyone else is equally lost and one ancient image put it best.
Pretty brutally.
A man an inch underwater is drowning just as surely as a man a fathom down.
So why bother swimming?
The stoic answer is the best thing I think they've ever said about habits.
Yes,
You're still underwater,
But an inch is not a fathom.
The distance to air is close.
It's real.
And closing it is the point.
It's what we're doing.
Seneca,
Who was rich,
Compromised,
Famously imperfect,
Said openly that he would never be a sage and that he'd be content to lessen his vices.
That's pretty honest,
I think.
And I think a lot of us could be more honest in our attempts at self-improvement.
That is self-improvement in action.
And this is thousands of years old.
So the day after you break any streak that you have,
There are two moves you can make.
The shame move?
Totals everything,
Destroys your progress.
It imagines the whole year of the habit,
All the days you now have to do again,
The person you were supposed to be by summer destroyed.
And because that total is crushing,
It files the whole project under someday,
Later.
Marcus Aurelius knew that this was a trap.
And in Farnsworth's reading,
He says,
Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.
The progress move does something almost insultingly small.
It asks,
What's the tiniest unit of the thing I dropped?
And it does that.
And it does that unit today.
Not to catch up.
Catching up is the shame arithmetic it can.
Just to re-enter.
A trend is rescued by the very next data point.
And the next data point is the only one you control.
Every long practice anyone admires is a graveyard of broken streaks with one habit of returning laid over the top.
I spoke to the ex-UFC heavyweight world champion Bas Rutten.
Recently and he was talking about his habits,
His discipline,
His training,
His prayer,
And he described his consistency as like 95%.
And that,
To me,
Indicates this kind of trend that we're talking about.
If you miss one day over the course of 10 years,
You barely took a dent in that 100% percentage.
You don't need 100%.
That's not realistic.
And it's probably not helpful to try and maintain that because life happens.
But to try and keep it as high as you can and keep building that percentage,
That makes more sense.
So we want to do something called same day return.
The moment you remember a dropped habit,
The flinch when it crosses your mind,
That's a starting gun rather than a verdict.
So the instruction,
Before you sleep tonight,
Do one tiny unit of the dropped thing.
One line in a journal,
Not a page.
Two minutes of sitting in meditation,
Not 20.
Ten lines on a piece of paper if you want to start that drawing habit again.
It's got to be small enough that you can't talk yourself out of it.
And it's very binary,
Right?
You either return today or you didn't.
And mark the return.
On whatever counter you keep,
Write a single letter R.
Not a tick for the habit,
An R for returned.
Over a year,
The thing worth counting was never your longest streak.
Doesn't matter.
It's how many times you came back and how quickly.
You will drop it again,
Whatever it is you're doing.
It's not pessimism.
That's the Phoenix.
The sage is not here.
It's not realistic.
Every practice you keep for life will be dropped and picked back up a hundred times.
And the picking up is the practice.
I like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
Every great Jiu Jitsu athlete has been injured or couldn't train for life circumstances at some point,
Sometimes for months.
But they don't give up.
You gotta keep going.
An inch under water is not a fathom.
Come back up today,
Even one line's worth.
Write the R on the calendar.
