The Things I Said Still Count
Day 90 - 96 / 1000
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
To Be Continued
For Myself
Two Kinds of Fuel
The Roller Coaster
The Habit I Keep Breaking
Actual Rest
Say It Out Loud
1. To Be Continued
What does it feel like to keep faith in work that nobody can see yet?
For a while, I was struggling to keep up with this project, and I want to be honest about why.
There are several reasons I could blame, or use as an excuse.
I was working a job I had zero interest in.
It was draining me, and the only short escape I found was mindlessly scrolling on my phone.
Not exactly the fertile ground for creative work.
At the same time, I was hunting for a new job and a new apartment, planning a move with my girlfriend, and squeezing in a digital marketing certificate on weekends.
Six months of running on four fronts at once.
Things have since shifted.
I left that job.
The certificate is done.
The move happened (partly).
CLEFSOR, my AI consultancy, is now what I spend my days building.
The slate isn’t clean, but it is different.
But that is not why any of us are here.
My situation might have not be ideal, but no one ever got anywhere by making excuses for not working on what they are supposed to work on.
I would love to hear how you handle these kinds of situations yourself.
2. For Myself
What kept you moving when you had no motivation, no audience, and no obvious reward for continuing?
I hope we all know times when we kept going without any external promise of reward.
Why does that matter? Because I believe it is important for each of us to experience something like that.
And why again? Because it helps you uncover parts of yourself you did not know existed.
It helps you learn what you can endure and what you are capable of.
And that carries over into many other parts of your life.
The most recent example from my own life is my daily writing practice of 100 words.
There are days when there is no motivation, there is still almost no audience, and I am not even going to talk about any obvious reward for continuing.
But I am not doing this for outside recognition or praise.
I am doing this for myself.
No one is looking over my shoulder, checking whether I really write every day.
I write because it matters to me to share a few lessons with the world, lessons I believe are helpful and might bring value to someone else.
I am not going to lie, it is sometimes hard to keep going, especially when you do not feel well or are exhausted.
But I gave myself this challenge of writing 100 words a day for 1000 days, and I am going to make it.
What was the last thing you committed to consistently, simply for the sake of showing up, with no guarantee of a reward at the end?
3. Two Kinds of Fuel
Which kind of discipline is actually driving you right now?
There are two types of discipline.
The first is the discipline that comes from fear of failure or judgment.
The second is the discipline that comes from genuine care for what you are building.
Being able to tell these two apart, and to truly realize which one is behind your actions, is harder than it might seem.
I had to stop and look deep inside myself to actually confirm which discipline is driving me right now.
Honestly, right now it might be a little bit of both. Something like 80% genuine care and 20% fear of failure.
Why is that, and how does it really show up in your life?
Being driven by fear of failure can have its time and place.
It can be used as a powerful fuel.
It is the kind of fuel that burns really strong, but if it burns for too long, it starts burning you along with it.
So which discipline is driving you right now?
4. The Roller Coaster
When you look back on the past year, what is the one thing you actually did consistently?
Consistency over everything.
This is a big one for me.
I am still learning how to stay consistent and work on something until it is done.
I have mentioned before that I struggled, and still struggle sometimes, with shiny object syndrome.
I get excited about something and want to jump straight into it, leaving everything else behind.
On one hand, it is a great source of energy, because it pumps you full of ideas and adrenaline that are hard to resist.
On the other hand, it is very unproductive, because it leaves you with a lot of half-finished projects.
When you look back on the past year, what is the thing you did consistently the whole time?
I had a real struggle answering this question myself.
I like to think of myself as an active person who works on his health and fitness consistently over the years.
When faced with this question, I realized that even though I am an active person, last year was more of a roller coaster when it came to my health and fitness.
It is easy to feel consistent simply because nothing in your daily life seems to be changing.
But that stillness can also mean you are not actually working on something greater, something that would move you to the next level.
I think it is a really interesting way to reflect on your life, because being consistent with something, or not, has a huge impact on how your life looks now and how it will look one or five years from now.
What is one thing you could start doing consistently today to build a better version of yourself?
5. The Habit I Keep Breaking
What actually happens in the moment you break the habit you keep starting and stopping?
I think the one habit I keep breaking is my journal writing.
At the beginning of this year I gave myself a rule that I would never skip two days in a row.
It lasted for almost two months.
Then a week of travelling came along, and somehow all of it got forgotten.
The most surprising thing to me is how a habit you have been trying to build for years can fade away just like that.
It is not like I started journaling for the first time. I have been writing in my journal for over five years now.
Yet it took just one busy week, and my mind already “forgot” to remind me in the evening to write my daily reflections.
What happened the moment I realized I had broken the practice?
I felt angry and disappointed with myself.
Especially because writing is such a huge part of me, and I genuinely care about this practice.
But do I really care about it when I let that happen?
That is what I am asking myself again today, after missing another two days in a row and realizing it the moment I sat down at this table to write.
I think the simplest solution for this kind of habit is to set a reminder to do it every day.
I should probably take my own recommendation seriously first, but you get the point.
I believe we all find ourselves in moments when life gets really busy and heavy on our shoulders.
But that does not have to get in the way of becoming a better version of ourselves.
Think about habits like going to the gym, eating healthy, reading books, and so much more of the genuinely good stuff out there, the kind that makes us 1% better every time we do it.
Why would we let go of that?
Maybe we do not have to.
Not for the sake of a busy and demanding world.
Life can feel too short to spend it pleasing everyone else and chasing dreams that belong to someone else.
So I want to stick to what I decided to do, in the name of becoming better for myself first.
What happens to you the moment you break the habit, practice, or commitment you keep starting and stopping?
Not the justification. The real thing that happens inside you.
6. Actual Rest
How does actual rest feel?
Not productivity disguised as rest. Actual recovery.
Working hard on yourself and on your goals, building the future you want to live in, is one thing.
Knowing how to rest, reset, and take care of your mental health along the way is another.
I have to admit that knowing how to rest was always a problem for me.
I would always feel guilty if I just lay around and did nothing.
Rest on my day off from work usually turned into a day filled with to-dos from my personal life.
There was always a project or a hobby to get to, or a friend to meet, or a place to go.
Always something.
Rarely is there a day when I would just stay home, lie on the sofa, and watch Netflix.
At a certain point in my life, self-growth became so addictive that I did not want to do anything other than grow.
Soon enough, life reminded me that life never moves in one direction only. It is never going only up, and never only down.
I would love to hear your recommendation on how to rest properly.
7. Say It Out Loud
Should you say your emotions out loud?
Sometimes we just wish the other person would understand us more.
Sometimes we even struggle to understand ourselves on our own.
So it is not realistic to expect others to understand our emotions for us.
If something is bothering you, tell the other person directly instead of waiting.
That is the best thing to do.
Communicate with each other.
Assuming that someone already knows how I feel about a situation is just foolish.
The things I said still count.
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over the past decade.
As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
Lukáš