Did you know the first Monday in February is “National Respawn Day?”
It’s true. This is definitely NOT something I made up.
(Okay I made it up).
But it should be. We all just spent a month testing driving our New Year’s Resolutions, goals and habits.
Some of them worked. Most of them didn’t.
This is fantastic news.
What if this January is just a Beta Test for next January? What if we’re not aiming for 100% perfection; we’re not trying to maintain a perfect streak. Instead, we are trying out a bunch of strategies, like trying on clothes, to see which ones fit us best. So let’s talk about your January.
Maybe you learned that Keto is too restrictive and doesn’t work for you. Maybe you learned that training for a 5K makes you want to give up on everything. Maybe you learned that 47 goals is too many. Maybe you learned that you actually like journaling or meditating.
Great!
Like scientists, we’re doing little experiments to try and figure out how the heck to level up in a way that works for us.
When some of those things don’t work, it’s not a failure; it’s simply more data we can use to inform future experiments! Yay science!
We Never Start Back at Square 1
Like a video game, each attempt to build a new habit stands on the shoulders of our past attempts.
We might need to “start over,” but we are now equipped with all of the knowledge, experience and skills we’ve been accumulating along the way.
At the very least, we know what doesn’t work.
We can be thankful for Past Us, who paved the way for this next attempt.
We never start back at Square 1. We get to try again, try differently, and pick a different path. And we just repeat this, over and over, until the next apocalypse or our brains get uploaded to the cloud.
This is actually the ugly, unfun secret to life:
“Success is moving from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”
So, let’s restart today.
Be proud of yourself for trying again.
In my quest to make sure the content on Nerd Fitness properly reflects my 15 years of experience, I found and updated an article I wrote about “How to Respawn.”
Updated Article: How to Respawn
After all, today is National Respawn Day (I mean why not).
Just make sure you start over and try again differently.
Change a variable. Pick fewer goals and narrow your focus to 1-2 things.
Not sure what you should be doing?
Go for a walk.
-Steve
PS: I left my hobbit hole 32 out of 33 of the past few days! I don’t care that I wasn’t perfect. I missed a day, and just left the property again the next day.
