Day 227 Record Keeping
Day 195 Fixed Meditation (Vipassana)
Day 141 Bodyweight Exercise (2x5 pushups, 2x5 inverted bent knee rows, 1x5 1 legged inverted bent knee rows)
Day 68 Writing = 66
Day 241 Eating = 63
Great sleep, great wakeup. Pushups need work, dropped down to regular pushups from my attempts at the diamond pushup progression. Been very emotional last few days.

The Real Battle
After my travels I feel that my habits are all off. I drop down to do diamond pushups and my back hurts, which affects my form. I have to drop down to work on regular pushup form after wasting a lot of time on back stretches.

As my morning routine draws out I start thinking about how long it’s taken me to get this far, and how little I’ve accomplished. When I was traveling a friend dared me to show him my bridge, which I proudly did. He then attempted a bridge for the first time in over a decade, and did it with better form than me - after I had worked on mine for 6 months!

It’s the slowness of this whole project, the constant steps backward that wear at me. And I feel myself sink.

I have to remind myself that this is where the real struggle manifests. This is the meaning of a growth oriented mindset - it’s not about the progress you make, it’s about getting your daily regiment into perfection. Perfection in a growth oriented day is not about how many pushups you do, it’s the fact you do them. And I’d add that it’s also about keeping your mind focused on calmly pushing through any setbacks.

Because the truth is that getting angry and frustrated just wears you down. It makes tasks harder. I recently read research that suggests that automated tasks have less and less emotional impact. This makes a lot of sense - I brush my teeth every day, but I don’t think about it and I don’t attach any emotion to it either. And I wonder if over thinking and freaking out about a project doesn’t act to prevent an action from becoming a habit.

Back steps and difficulty in this project are understandable - I’m not trying to habituate one or two habits - I’m trying to do them all. And sometimes life isn’t fair - my friend might just be naturally flexible and gifted physically. Who cares? Obsessing about the unfairness of it doesn’t make me any better.

Yet, we always forget. Maybe I’ve just been indoctrinated for so long to think of progress in terms of concrete results. We all have, really. But sometimes constant repetition does the trick.

And so today I do it again today - I remind myself that focusing on the tasks at hand in their execution is where progress - and the real battle - lie.