Don’t stop until you’re insanely proud of yourself.

I can’t believe that I am still analyzing my efforts from last year. 2020 was an insanely great year, to be honest. I decided to be consistent at doing various things, and no matter how hard I tried, I failed miserably at every one of them. It sounds quite disappointing, but the best part about putting consistent effort in any direction results in insane success and unfathomable resilience.

Let’s take a few examples of consistency I have considered for 2020–21 —

• Exercise — HIIT exercising daily for 15 minutes, 365 days a year can result in a fitter body with significantly reduce body fat and toned muscles.

• Reading Books — Reading a book every week can increase your reading speed; you can discover real-life exercise and learn from life change changing mistakes without making yourself. See Jay Shetty’s hack for reading a book every week.

• Writing Blogs — Writing two blog posts every week will improve your writing and story narration skills. It might also open doors to other unreal opportunities like what happened with Julie Zhuo (ex-VP product design — Facebook), who tried this formula and got offered a chance to write her book.
• Learning something — It takes 10,000 hrs to become an expert at anything, but it only takes 20 hours to learn anything new. If you invest 45 minutes every day for 26 days, you will acquire a unique skill set.

If you tried to put out consistent effort in any form of goal, you would surely succeed. But even if you don’t, the results are going to stun you anyway. I will be discussing a few of my failures next.

Don’t stop until you’re insanely proud of yourself.

— Gary Vaynerchuk

Exercise

What you see above is my move minutes charts from Google Fit for the year 2020. I set out to exercise every day for an hour — even if it means walking. I couldn’t even put out a consistent effort for 30 straight days. But there are two notable improvements I have made during the year 2020 —

1. I started jump-roping 1000 skips in 20 mins on 1st Dec. By 31st Dec, I completed 1K skips at the sub-15 mins mark.
2. I could swim 2K meters in 60 minutes during the start of the year. By the end of the year, I could swim 5K meters in the same amount of time.

Writing

I decided to write 52 blogs in 2020, that is, one blog/article every week. I was only able to write 16 articles in 2020, but —

1. Approximately 10K people read it.
2. It was clapped/applauded by 200 people.

Although I failed at this, I understood the meaning behind what Gary Vaynerchuk said here —

We tend to erect barriers to our own success. The voice in our head can serve as the proxy for an imagined naysayer who tells us no before we even had a chance to say yes. Or we settle for incremental progress and ignore opportunities for step changes, big moves that upend everything.

As I’ve said before, to defer an idea is actually a decision to relinquish its pursuit to another. What an indignity to see someone else progress an idea you fomented but dismissed. Now you’ll be force fed your own idea from another.

Harsh but true.

Don’t be too precious or paranoid with your own ideas. Nobody is copying them. They’re more likely to humor you and come to with 10 reasons it won’t work. Good. Release them into the world anyway by stating your intention. Now you’re on the record and on the clock. Once your idea is working and gaining traction, you can out-execute the competition and the copycats. But you have to initiate.

— Matt Higgins

Impressive! I am looking forward to seeing how comfortable I can become by losing in 2021.

End Notes

As I said before, putting out consistent effort in any direction (or multi directions) is arduous work. Our minds are going to trick us into procrastinating and lying comfortably in our lazy zone. But great things will happen when you get out of your comfort zone.

Changing your mindset is strength.
— Gary Vaynerchuk

The choice is always going to be yours. But for sure, a thousand failures achieved every day will lead to hitting a big success. Failures compound to become a big success. So, don’t be afraid to set big goals that you may be intimated by because even if you don’t achieve them, the growth that happens along the way of hitting that goal will be well worth it. Do stupid things fast with more energy!