We tell stories about greatness. We tell stories about how history is shaped by genius, talent, genetic, divine inspiration. In fact, those are my favorite kinds of movies and books: athletes, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs.

I’m a very competitive person. What I mean is what competition promises — differentiation from the masses, the idea of pursuing excellence to be better than others. “keep your enemies closer”, I say to myself.

Still, I’ve always been the one to look for the clever solution.

But the reality is usually there was no secret to their success. I spent all my time looking for shortcuts and they spent their time showing up to practice. A lot of this I would attribute to my affinity to puzzle games. But life is a grindy grindy game. The answer seemed to just be spend a lot of time and work on it.

For others, it’s enough to just call them genetically talented and give up. I always found this to be a defeatist answer though. Remember these people are actually just inperceptively smart. But I’ve found that if you really worked that hard, the comparison is not really that unbelievable. It’s just easier to call it impossible or they had unattainable gifts to give up.

Most people really are following a script. Most people really don’t want it that bad. Most people aren’t doing much at all. Most people think it’s too boring. Most people think it’s too hard. Most people don’t have time. Most people won’t. And that’s OK. Everyone can live however they’d like.

A lot of people want to be spectacular in life, but also want to be normal in life. You can’t do what everyone else has done and expect not to get what everyone else does.

But doing something everyday and showing up is how you can get ahead of people that in even a few months can make you unrecognizable. It depends on how niche something is, but if you even study a specific problem for several weeks, you are now an expert on that subject now. Because most people have spent no time at all on that subject matter. So in this case, how do I build a habit to get ahead of everyone else?

![[IMG-Clothes Closet-2025-07-10-4.png|image 4.png]]

How many people finish the 100 Days of code challenge

Habits are obviously useful and compounding ones even more so, but realize that those habit books won’t help you do what you gotta do. Analyzing hooks and rewards for your habits will just make you beat yourself up for not wanting to do it. Even this writing today is part of a painful habit I must do every week because I set myself out to do it. I saw this graph of people who did 100 days of code. The completion rate dropped to 5% within the first week. Sure, there are plenty of people who signed up without the full intentions. But I really don’t think it’s that far off from most commitments that can have compounding results. Just compare gymgoers in January vs February.

Wake up and execute. Let the rest fall away.