The most difficult thing to do – PERSISTENCE

July 21st, 2010 Filed under Life, Thinking

I’ve just finished 63 push-ups. I feel good for that accomplishment. However, 63 has already behind my original schedule. I should be doing 93 push-ups today if I stick to my original plan that do one more push-up everyday than the previous day from the starting point of 30 on May 27. So for the past 63 days, I persists about 50% of the total days of doing push-ups. Where I am in the rest 50% days?

Well, if I draw a frequency bar chart of days every week I’m practicing push-ups, I will find that the frequency is decreasing gradually from 7 to 1 or 2. Why? First is because that as the days accumulates, the bar becoming higher each time you try to persist. 30 is the starting point, then 31, then 32, 33,….50, that’s a breakthrough, then gos on and on, higher and higher. Second is that you begin to find more and more excuses to stop persistence. This day you have too much work to do. That day you don’t sleep well. Well, where there’s a need, there comes out an excuse. There’s a lure of lazy, of stopping persistence.

Recently, I’ve planned to keep journal everyday. When I turn on my journal book, I found the last journal was on 21st Jun – whole month ago! And I only keep 16 days of journal. Compared to that my persistence on push-ups is actually much better. And persistence does pay off. 63 is remarkable. How many people at my age can do that much of push-ups? And I will be able to do even more latter. That feeling is great.

I heard that it takes 5 years to form a habit. The reality is that even you persisted something for 5 years, it’s still easy to give up. Wangjianshuo has been writing daily English blog for 8 eight years with total journal of 2,700! What a great achievement. However, he almost gave up that habit due to, as he himself explains, busy work. Good thing is that Wang resumed its daily blog recently. “Now, I feel I am starting to get back to the original energy level, so, I think I am able to get back to the daily blog schedule which I kept for years.” he said.

I think Wang would proud of himself for that persistence, even he write only nonsense in many entries. That doesn’t matter, what matters is the ability to persist. It would stand there and say: hi, dude, look at what have you done. You can make it!

So, here’s what I’m going to persist recently:

Do one more push-up every day that the previous day until it reaches 100
Write a comment about every movie I see and with a picture of the poster, director and actor/actress.
Restart the habit of write daily journal

It’s a lot to do.

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