Another 3am night. Can’t sleep. On July 1, 2018 I started a journey to reset my life. The 18 months prior to that had been extremely tough. I was struggling, but I kept it from everyone else. Only my wife knew, and her sacrifice was bigger.
My strategy to get things on the right track was to replace bad habits with good ones. I took pains to track the habit changes as best as I can. It went well for the first four months. As the initial positivity boost wore off, it got harder to stick to the new routines. The low-hanging fruit was gone. It was getting harder to see the effects of my efforts.
As I tackled the harder obstacles we were facing, I could see the bad habits relapsing. Data doesn’t lie. I continued to track every day. Patterns of habit relapse correlated with general challenge indicators.
November was the least successful month in habit building. I had to work through many challenges, both in business and in personal life. My wife is also my business partner, so it’s clear to me that there is a chain-link relationship between the two. But I don’t know which came first. Personal problems spillover into business side of things? Or the other way round? In any case, habit-building got harder still.
Blogging has been the hardest habit to keep on track. I’ve hit my target of four posts a month for the first three months but only managed around 50% for the last two months. Part of the reason is a lot of my reflections are in my bullet journal. Now that’s a habit that has stuck. I started Bullet Journaling in July 2016 and I am still at it.
Did the increased challenges in the last two months make it harder to stick to good habits? Or did relapsing bad habits made me perceive bigger challenges?
It’s an interesting experiment, one with high stakes. I don’t have a backup plan if this fails. There is a Chinese saying “It is easier to move mountains and rivers, than to change a person’s character”. Well, that’s a pessimistic viewpoint if there ever was one.
One thing I keep telling my wife is that there is a concept of “The Wall” in a marathon. Somewhere in the mid-30s km, you hit The Wall and it looks like you can’t continue. But if you can somehow push through the wall, the finish line beckons.
The Wall has its basis in science. Your body has depleted its glycogen stores, so you feel tired. You will have to rely on willpower to push through The Wall.
“The Wall” applies to entrepreneurship too. It sure as hell seems like I’m facing a giant wall right now. It feels like we are on the cusp of breakthrough. But it has been like that for the longest time. If the marathon analogy applies, we’ll hit the finish line soon if we can get through this wall.
We’ll know in three weeks, when the year ends. As luck (or habit) would have it, our fate once again lies on a few big deals that could go either way. If we get at least one of the deals, we hit a breakthrough. We’ll pull ahead of my 18-month plan. Or we’ll get none of it, and the road to recovery will seem further away. And that’s life.