The most problematic habit you will form is the ability to incrementally improve something every day without finishing it. This is the skill that I am working on now. I have done a decent job of picking up habits that require me to do something every day. For example, yesterday, I wrote about my habit of running every day. That is hard to do, but it is easy to make a habit out of it. If I just keep doing it for 90 days or more, then I will have a consistent daily habit. The secret to daily habit-building is just to keep doing it, NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS. It is an exercise in repetition, that is it. So do the minimum amount of activity that you will do for 90 days or more, and voila – habit. The key is to keep the activity small enough to where you will do it. So run for 1 minute if that is what it takes. The important thing is not the quality but the habit formation. You can get better later, and you will. Once the habit is in place, you will naturally try to improve.
However, that is not what I am talking about today. I am reflecting on the hardest habit to form, and that is one that does not end in a completed activity. Something where you incrementally add to it every day, but you will not get to completion for days, weeks, or months. In this situation your primal brain is coming up with a million reasons to not do this because you are not getting that dopamine hit from completing the activity, so your body and mind will want to seek for shorter term things to accomplish. Incremental habits take tremendous willpower to get over the resistance that humans have to these types of activities.
I have decided that for this 365 commitment, I am going to write and publish far more meaningful content. Something beyond my daily ramblings on my blog. I want to produce something worthy of a read, that will provide value to someone who reads it. This is going to require a sustained effort, where I work on crafting the article each day for a long string of days until I can get to a completed product. This is the focus of my commitment to work on a major artifact or article every day for 365 days in a row. This is hard because it is something that I just do not want to do. I want the result, but the work I have to put in to get there is just brutal. I am working on a term paper every day, basically. Who would want to do that?
This is the habit that I seek to build. Can you imagine what a cool superpower it would be to get into the habit of building a quality work product every day? At the end of each day, you will know that you have made one more step towards producing meaningful and substantial work. I have never been able to reliably and consistently do that in my entire life. I am getting older now, but hey, you can always improve right?
But here’s the thing: I’ve come to realize that the hardest part isn’t the work itself—it’s getting comfortable with the discomfort. It’s about accepting that some days the work will feel like a slog, other days it might feel pointless, and sometimes you won’t see the finish line for so long that you’ll wonder if it even exists. And yet, that’s where the magic happens. That’s where you turn a simple routine into a transformative process. The ability to chip away at something bigger, without that constant rush of completion, is what separates the mediocre from the remarkable.
So, this is what I’m committing to now. Not just to start, but to persist. To let the discomfort come and stay until it becomes a familiar companion. And who knows? Maybe after 365 days of this, I’ll look back and realize that somewhere along the way, I didn’t just build a habit—I built something far greater. Something that lasts. Something that matters.
