What's one thing you do, every single day?
Team Letter | September 9, 2024
Sep 9, 2024
Happy Monday, Alpaca, I have a question for you.
What’s one thing that you do intentionally, every single day?
Is it journaling for yourself or time connecting with another person? Is it preparing a meal or eating a specific breakfast? Is it a little ritual like a glass of wine at the end of the day or time of day you like to put on a little music? It can be anything – or (as is often the case for me) your answer can be “nothing” – there are times that I don’t do any one thing every single day.
But lately, I’ve been learning a lot and thinking a lot about consistency, and how it relates to momentum. This is probably because I’m doing this silly challenge where I’m drinking a lot of water, eating a lot of good food, and getting back into marathon training – and training to run 26.2 miles is one big lesson in doing the same thing, over and over, in order to build better results.
What does it matter, to do something consistently? I think consistency, stacking habits, and repeated rituals are really about doing less, for more. The thing is, running every day or reading or journaling each morning SOUNDS disciplined, but actually, it’s lazy – in a good way. When you do something every day, you remove the “should I or shouldn’t I” decision. That decision, in my experience, takes up A LOT of brain power. It goes like this:
Alarm goes off. “Should I run?” “I mean, yes, I should run. That would be a good idea. I’d feel better. But also I’m so tired and rest is ALSO really important. I’m going to rest 30 minutes and then decide.” “Should I run?” “Ok, rest over. I should run. That would be a good idea. I’d feel better and be more ready for the marathon. Gah, it’s in 90 days. Am I going to be ready? I need to do more strength training. Maybe I’ll do that INSTEAD at the end of the day. But maybe I should also run.” “Should I run?”
This is, in all ways, exhausting. And more importantly, the brain energy it takes to make this decision is not productive. I often use the phrase “worry does no work.” That means that we can contemplate and debate over a million things, but no result comes of such contemplation – so it is doing no work, but it IS depleting our smart, good brains.
But take the brain power out by simply making the thing a “non-decision,” and something magic happens. You’ve just opened up brain power, time, and energy to do that thing, and once you’ve done it, you’ve laid one more brick on the foundation, and you’re one step closer to the thing you’re after. And once you start seeing progress build up, the work starts getting easier, faster, more natural, and…more fun? I think so.
Doing a thing every day removes decisions in order to make way for momentum.
I’d like to challenge us to each choose one thing – maybe something that we don’t usually do every day – to try to do every single day this week. Decide on what it is today, and then do it Monday - Sunday, and bring us a little report about that one thing to retreat on Sunday afternoon. I choose writing and publishing something each day. Why? Because I want to build that habit, and because writing begets writing and that begins a momentum wheel turning.
We’ve got three fantastic weeks left of this extraordinary quarter, and we want to end it with a crescendo! (For those who weren’t forced to take piano lessons your whole childhood, that means we end it bigger than we started!). Let’s remove what’s not necessary in order to make room for that momentum. If we each do that in our work, we’ll collectively accomplish so much as a team.
So…what’s one thing you’re going to do every day?
♥️
Kb