100% Is Easier Than 98%

Maintaining a habit is easy and gets easier.

Stopping and starting is hard and gets harder.

If you do these things every day, they just become part of you. But if you skip a day, then every future day becomes optional. That means it becomes hard, because you go from "no decision" (just doing what you do) to making a decision every time.

We all have decision fatigue: we make decisions all day long and it gets harder and harder to choose the decision that will help us in the long-term over the choice that will feel good in the short-term. When you're tired from making decisions, you're more likely to make bad decisions. This is why you're more likely to stop at the drive-through after a crazy busy day at work: you're not more hungry, and you're not always even short on time. You feel mentally tired from making decisoins all day. Your guard is down, so you are more susceptible to making a bad short-term decision.

Instead of "it's 5:30am and time to write" you now say "it's 5:30am. Do I get up and journal, or not?"

Think about how hard you have to fight to get up and write at 5:30 when your bed is warm and you're tired and you don't know what to write about and you don't really want to. You probably had that experience on your first day of the challenge. Well, if you skip a day today, you're not just going to have that experience again tomorrow...it will actually be worse, because you've just missed today, so you have permission to miss another day. You might think, "well, I broke the streak yesterday...might as well not start the streak again until tomorrow. I've already failed. It's done. I'll start again when conditions are perfect.'

But conditions are never perfect on the first day. You go from simple habits to hard reps again. And the longer you leave it, the harder it will be to start.

Maintaining the habit is always more important than being a perfect eater or doing a perfect workout. Because there will always be imperfect conditions or reasons to break the habit.

Your fitness doesn't rise to the level of your inspiration or your energy on your best day. It falls to the level of your habits: what gets done, no matter what, even on your worst day?

That's what we're really building here.

100% is easier than 98%. Keep going.