A quote that resonated with me recently is: "You can't live a beautiful life without making beautiful choices" and "beautiful choices don't require negotiation".

When I hear myself negotiating with myself in my head, the thing I'm trying to negotiate for can't be a beautiful choice. If I'm trying to say "well, I can eat some late night pasta right now, because _____" that's a negotiation and not a beautiful choice that will lead to a beautiful life. Don't know if that will resonate with you or not. Came from this video which I found fairly motivating: https://youtu.be/ZBvfa6xSKfY?si=3zoaFjuv5oOAjEGb

I make sure I solve at least one problem every day. After it became routine I would solve 3/day. After the yard is mowed, the hedges trimmed, all that crap I find more shit to do like take my sons shooting. Life is an endless string of challenges you can overcome every day.

“Slow and steady wins the race.”

After going balls-to-the-wall for work for a really long time, I got a long stretch of slack time, and I was able to shift towards self-care that had to take a back seat. I threw myself into making up lost ground and getting into a project I’ve had to postpone until recently.

One of the areas I hit hardest is the gym. I went every day in August and September… sometimes twice in the same day, and saw some mad gains. That’s an unsustainable level of effort: both time-wise because my hiatus is ending, and physically. Even if I was going to have all the time in the world I would have to cut back to avoid overtraining.

Obviously, you’re trying to avoid having your efforts look like a high amplitude sine wave, or worse, something that alternates between all-in and full stop. The keys are to find a level of effort that you can sustain that meshes with the level of discipline you have. The other thing is replacing start / stop with wax / wane. Let me explain.

When you feel yourself getting burned out, scale back a little rather than stopping altogether. Maintain the habit of doing something, so when you’ve recovered you don’t have to re-establish your routine from scratch.

I’ll use the gym as an example, although it works with almost anything. Let’s say that you feel like a slug, so you spend three hours a day working out seven days a week. You make some mad gainz, but after a couple of months you’re completely burned out, so you stop going altogether. That lasts for a couple of months, at which point you repeat the process.

Don’t do that. Don’t alternate between full-blast and dead stop.

You can try to manage it by going six days a week. It will take you longer to hit the wall, but if you don’t have the discipline (or if you have some issue that makes that untenable), you’re still going to burn out. Rather than stopping entirely you may drop to once a week, and the process repeats. That’s the high-amplitude sine wave I was talking about.

Don’t do that, either. It’s not as bad as on / off, but it’s not ideal, either.

In this example, maybe go four days a week, and when you start to feel maxed out, drop back to three until you’re ready to ramp back up.

Obviously this is a gym routine, but it works as a metaphor for anything you put effort into.

Discipline,forget the momentum and forget whatever is going on in your body and your mind. I know it can get lazy, rationalizing how to procrastinate tasks but your body can move regardless of all the brain fog,the laziness and the overthinking. Just move and do the things, that's how you stay consistent and it'll start feeling great