(Full method at the bottom of this post)

Yesterday, while cleaning out a drawer, I found my old diary. I opened it and read an entry from 2020: "Relapsed. Slept till 14:30. Ate what I wanted. Didn't train. I need to start over."

This hurt to read. Because I remember the hell that I was living in back then. How completely and utterly hopeless I was. Years went by like this. Endlessly starting over, getting nowhere.

When I reached the halfway point of my twenties it really started to hit me. I had to do something. I needed some sort of transformation, and it couldn't just be a side-project anymore. My life depended on it.

So I made a commitment. I was going to find the key to transformation. I wasn't sure one existed, but I knew I needed it, and I was going to find it.

I spent the first six months doing a bunch of experiments. I did a 90-day challenge to transform my body, and built out a system in Notion that helped me keep track of everything I did in a day. Then I'd reflect on that data every Sunday to learn from my patterns and hopefully change them.

I ran on pure willpower for those ninety days, and ended up with a good body transformation. But I hadn't changed… I was still the same guy looking slightly better. I thought my body transformation and diligently capturing everything I did in a day would help, but no matter how aware I became of my bad habits, I couldn't break them. I still ate sugar, I still smoked, I still found myself in bed at 2am with a Pringles can and my computer on my chest. I was missing something, but I didn't know what.

Three months went by and I lost most of the gains I'd made in the first ninety days. I got the body, and once I got it, I lost it. But those ninety days weren't wasted. There was a lesson in it, and one day, reflecting on my experience, I saw it.

Consistency.

It may seem obvious, but it hit me hard. What had given me the body transformation was simply a bunch of reps repeated over ninety days. And it was the same pattern with everything else: the key to any result I wanted was just reps consistently taken over time. With patience and the capacity to consistently show up, I could use the same principle to get anything I wanted: a skill, a finished project, a better relationship.

The "key" to transformation from this perspective revealed itself to be good old unsexy discipline.

A small shift in the program I was running on became the new goal:

From

IF resistance is high, AND motivation is low, THEN don't show up

To

IF resistance is high, AND motivation is low, THEN show up anyway.

That shift had to happen at the level of my identity. Consistently showing up despite high resistance and low motivation was the behavior of a particular type of person. But how could I, running on the old program not being that type of person yet, transform myself into that type of person?

In Atomic Habits, James Clear speaks about identity-based habits. In short: every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to become, and as repeated actions shape that identity, the identity in turn reinforces the actions.

So I needed a really good plan: a system that could help my undisciplined self use the little discipline I had to show up consistently enough for my brain to accept I was disciplined.

To do that I needed to study my past behavior.

Looking back, there was a clear pattern: I would often reach a point where the pain of staying stuck became intense enough to spark motivation to change. I would then make a plan to replace all my bad habits with good ones, go to bed, wake up the next day, and follow through on the plan. But a couple of days in, I would give in to one bad habit, spiral because I had "failed," and give up.

Repeatedly breaking the promises I had made to myself over the years had convinced me that I was undisciplined. And that identity, reinforced by my all-or-nothing plans, kept me stuck.

The solution was simple.

For 90 days, I would make one promise each day: show up for exercise. But this time, not to build my body, but to update my identity.

I would have only one non-negotiable. I wouldn't make any other promises. If I wanted to scroll all night, eat a pizza, or smoke, it didn't matter. All I had to do every day was show up for exercise. And not even a full workout. Just show up. Five minutes would count.

By doing this, I removed the mechanism that had made me fail on every previous attempt. Giving in to a bad habit could no longer make me spiral, because it was completely unrelated to the challenge I had set for myself.

To make it even simpler, every night I laid out my workout clothes. In the morning, the decision was almost already made for me. All I had to do was put them on and show up.

Every time I showed up, I was casting a vote for becoming the kind of person who shows up whether they feel like it or not.

The final part of the strategy was teaching my brain what to do with that evidence. Every day, after showing up, I would say out loud: "I show up whether I feel like it or not."

At first, the words didn't feel true. I would say them, but I didn't really believe them. But as the days went on and the evidence accumulated, they started to feel more and more true.

As I repeated this every day for weeks and months, laying out my clothes in the evening became automatic. I didn't even have to think about it anymore, and I no longer doubted that I would show up the next day.

One day, while sitting in my kitchen eating lunch and reflecting on my life, I realized that a transformation had taken place. I was no longer just showing up consistently for exercise, but for my bedtime, my work, and my reading too. I was finally moving forward and gaining momentum. My unhealthy habits (lying in bed late at night watching YouTube, smoking, getting up late) had started to fall away without effort. Anything that no longer fit my new disciplined identity seemed to lose its pull.

I've done what I now call "The Show Up Challenge" twice, and I can say without a hint of doubt: I am someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not. The key to my transformation was not doing more, but doing less, strategically, for longer. I had to loosen my obsession with the outcome I wanted and focus instead on becoming the kind of person who could eventually get it. Once I was, I started to believe that I could.

Even though the goal of this challenge was not a physical outcome, it's the one thing I've done that has had the biggest positive effect in every area of my life.

The most important shift I ever made was going from trying to fix my life to becoming someone capable of fixing my life. And it started with a simple action: putting out my workout clothes before I went to bed.

METHOD:

90 days:

What you do:

1. Put out your workout clothes the night before.
2. Put them on the next day.
3. Show up for your scheduled exercise (do the backup if you can't do the full thing).
4. After you show up, say "I show up whether I feel like it or not" out loud.
5. Repeat.

The rules:

• Create a sustainable 7-day workout routine so you don't have to question what to do every day. Make sure you start out light if you're new. A walk is a workout.
• Pick a backup when you create your routine. A minimum version, like a 5-minute walk, for the days a full session isn't happening.
• One non-negotiable for ninety days. Fix your sleep, your diet, your phone time if you want, but keep them separate from this. Eating a pizza shouldn't be able to end your challenge. The old pattern is spiraling as soon as you fall a little short of your standard. The new pattern is showing up despite falling short.
• The promise is showing up, not finishing. Five minutes counts. A walk counts. A bad session counts. If you got there and started, you kept your promise.
• Your backup counts too. On the days a full session isn't happening, do your backup. That's still showing up.
• If you didn't show up today, you show up tomorrow. Missing a day doesn't end anything. Don't chase a streak, but count the days you showed up.
• If you're sick or injured, rest. Listen to your body. Recovery isn't a broken promise. Show up again when you're better.

I'd love to hear from you:

• Does the all-or-nothing spiral sound familiar? What usually ends your attempts?
• If you're starting: what's your backup for the days a full session isn't happening?

If you try it, come back after the first week and tell me:

• How many of the 7 days did you show up?
• What happened on the day you almost didn't, or didn't?
• Did saying it out loud feel stupid, and did that change?

TL;DR: Years of trying and failing to change my life. What finally worked: make only one non-negotiable promise and drop all others. Put out your workout clothes every evening, put them on and show up for some type of exercise in the morning, then say out loud "I show up whether I feel like it or not." Repeat this for 90 days. I kept failing before because I chased outcomes. The outcomes started to come when I gave that up and started chasing becoming someone capable of getting them.