April 27th. That’s when I started. Well, restarted.
A month into the stay-at-home order in California, I was disappointed in myself. I wanted to use the quarantine as alive time instead of dead time. I had a vision of writing an article every day. Reading a book a week. Working out every day.
But I was struggling. We had just moved my family from Toronto to Los Angeles. We had a toddler and a newborn. No childcare support. All that while trying to build a good reputation at a new job. It was rough.
I was struggling to keep my head above water. Was I in bad shape? Probably not. I was working out four or five times a week. I was eating relatively healthy, but doing the dad thing where you finish your toddler's macaroni & cheese. And drinking. I was hitting three beers a night four or five times a week. Nothing terrible … but still, nothing great.
Most of all, it was the looming presence of constant stress. Something that I was never able to tune out. From work. From our downstairs neighbors harassing us. From parenting. I wasn’t using this time at home to become a stronger human being. I wasn’t thriving. I was barely surviving.
And I don’t want to be a person who treads water. I want to be someone who swims for shore. If I’m spending most of my week with my kids instead of at the office, I need to be a good example. Have energy. Take pride in hard work. Practice patience. All of the shit that I was definitely not doing.
So I decided to take up a challenge. Those who know me know that I love taking them on - a 30 x 30 run challenge, 5 day fasts, Whole30 diets. All that shit. I love making a commitment that eliminates thousands of decisions. When I have to do the mental gymnastics of whether I should work out today or not, that’s when I fail. When I follow a program, that’s when great shit happens.
I found my quarantine challenge - 75 Hard. The theory is this: do a couple of key things that you know are good for you for 75 days straight. No cheat days. No rest days. No compromise. And if you fuck up on even one of those things, you start again.
“THE 75 HARD LIST - THINGS TO DO EVERY DAY
Follow a diet
1 workout (45 min)
1 outdoor workout (45 min)
Read 10 pages of a real book
Drink 1 gallon of water
Take a progress picture ”
Are any of these tasks hard? No. Did it seem like one of those bullshit internet click funnel coach challenges / fitness instagram hashtag? Yup. But then I realized that Andy Frisella, founder of the challenge, had put all in the info is out there. For free. By design. It wasn’t a complicated scheme to trick you into giving your email or your credit card info. Or as one my favorite podcasters says “It’s free. Not enter your credit card free. Just free free.”
So I started.
And failed a week in.
Then I started again.
And failed four days in.
And then I started again.
And finished it 75 days later on July 10th.
Was it easy? No. Was it worth it? Yes. Will I be doing it again? 100%. It wasn’t for fitness. It was to build resilience. To reinforce the commitment to myself that if I tell myself that I’m going to do something, I’m going to fucking do it. No inner debate. Just get it done or don’t put it on the list.
Here’s what I learned:
Lesson #1 - SYSTEMS > WILLPOWER
The first two times that I attempted 75 Hard, I failed. Plain and simple. I attribute that failure not to a lack of willpower, but a lack of planning. I thought - in the way of Forrest Gump - that I could just start and keep going … and going … and going. I could will my way through it. I was wrong. To succeed, I needed to build the right systems. To design my environment, days and routines in a way that makes it harder to fail than to succeed.
So I built a routine. One that I would stick to for 75 days straight. Wake up, chill with my toddler and then take the progress picture.
The next big step in the chain I knew that I had to do was get buy-in from my wife. There’s no way that she was going to clear almost 11 hours of exercise time a week … especially when we didn’t have any childcare support. She was running on fumes as much as I was, so I knew I had to solve it.
So this is where I built the biggest step in my routine - my morning jog. I would take my toddler out in the stroller and do a jog while he ate his cereal in the stroller. Mom would get to rest for a bit early in the morning, I get to hang out with my son and the outdoor workout got done. I would also end up drinking a little more than a liter of the daily water for the day. All done before 8AM. Perfect.
After that, everything seemed to be downhill with momentum. Building a morning routine had me well on my way. This allowed for flexibility in the rest of the day to get the rest of the 75 Hard tasks done. It made it easier.
Having clean ready-to-eat foods in the house made it impossible to cheat on my diet. Having no alcohol in the house made it a lot of work to drink. Having an accountability-buddy back in Toronto made it tough to skip my second workout. The systems picked me up and made it easy to do the hard things day after day after day.
Lesson #2 - JUST GET IT DONE.
Some days are awesome when everything goes right. Some days have a three year old busting out a 45 minute tantrum while you’re trying to finish a strategy for a new uniform launch. And when those days drop into your life, that’s when you realize that done is better than perfect.
The act of sticking to your commitments - especially when things get hairy - builds resilience. The consistency through the tough times are votes for the person that you want to be. The satisfaction in knowing that you dragged your I-don’t-want-to-go ass out of the house to finish your last 45 minute work is untouchable. The feeling that comes with checking that box and getting it done especially when you didn’t want to … I love it.
As Neil Pasricha says, action causes motivation. It’s getting the little stuff done every single day that builds the motivation to get out and do it again tomorrow. No excuses.
Hard days come and go. Just get it done. And celebrate yourself when you do.
Lesson #3 - THE POWER OF COMMITTING TO YOURSELF
I didn’t publicize that I was doing this. I barely told my wife until I was a month in. I waited two months until my sister knew. I never posted it to social media.
I wasn’t struggling for praise or support from other people. I was struggling for myself. I knew that making a commitment and holding myself accountable to it was more powerful than social pressure.
I find it easy to make excuses to myself. I think a lot of us are like that. You know the right thing to do, but you opt to let yourself rationalize yourself out of having to do it. You balance the mental math of “I went running today, so I can eat this delicious donut lying around.” You didn’t plan to eat that donut. You just gave yourself some bullshit rationalization on why you can’t hold back. Same for procrastinating at work or at home.
But by showing up every single day, I knew that I was building confidence in myself. Making it easier to believe that I was going to finishing it. Making it harder to bitch out on my commitment to myself. Once I was over the halfway mark, I knew there was no going back. I had invested so much time and effort into the process that I wasn’t about to throw it away. The downhill was definitely easier. Not easy. But easier.
The progress picture on Day 1 vs Day 75.
THE LAST LESSON - DOING HARD THINGS IS REWARDING
I love doing hard shit. It started because of my ego. Because, if I fail it’s no big deal. Normal people would think that it would hard be hard to do that anyways. And if I succeed, it separates me from the people who didn’t make it. Or even better - the people who never even tried.
But now it’s more than that. It’s greater than fluffing my ego with meaningless comparisons to other people. It’s about the challenge of chasing my full potential. To wake up and see what I can actually do.
As an athlete. As a businessman. As a writer.
As a boss. As a friend. As a father.
As a husband. As a son. As a brother.
Doing hard things build our resilience. It makes us more flexible to different conditions. It constructs the confidence that we can survive tough shit. Like job loss. Like a recession. Like tragedy.
Like a pandemic.
My favorite memory from the whole process was about halfway through. My three year old son had been with me on a bunch of runs / jogs / hikes. And he wanted in. So what started as a father-son hike ended up being a father-son hill runs. Proudest moment of the year.
- Christian