Starting new projects and watching them fall by the wayside is a fact of modern-day life. I say modern-day because it is extremely easy to start something new today. In the 18th Century, you’d have to be really motivated to enroll in a doodling class and then start a webcomic series on Instagram. For one, you’d be living in a village and would have had to walk 20 kilometers to the nearest town to attend the class. More importantly, you’d have to wait 300 years for the internet and then Instagram to be invented.
Today, I log in to a website, pay money via a plastic card, and attend the class. Or to be more precise I watch the first two videos of the class, and then reward myself by falling down the rabbit hole that is Netflix.
While some of these endeavors are destined for the ditch (like my ill-fated attempt to learn Python programming), there are others that nag at me. These are persistent, and refuse to let me go – much like distant relatives at an Indian wedding.
Such endeavors deserve my attention because they resonate with me. For me, this includes writing regularly and learning how to doodle. But it also includes stuff like exercising, maintaining my meditation practice, eating healthy. (I include these side projects because no one is paying me to do them. The only reason to do it is that they’re good for me.) But just because these things are important to me, doesn’t mean they (or I) won’t veer off the path with annoying frequency.
I have realized that the problem isn’t that they veer off the path. It’s like expecting a toddler to sit at one place and eat their dinner. The problem is that I feel extremely bad when I do deviate or fail.
I have written earlier on the virtues and mechanics of restarting. What I want to talk about here is how soon we should restart — or in other words press reset after fucking up something.
Photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash
So let’s say my goal is to exercise 4 days a week. It’s Thursday evening. Your exercise scorecard stands at a grand total of 0. You have clearly failed. Now the question: When do you hit reset?
‘Next Monday’ is a perfectly reasonable answer.
But if we hit the reset button sooner, we can exercise Friday and Saturday. (Take a rest on Sunday. You deserve it slugger.) Because 2/4 is better than 0/4. And then start on Monday aiming for 4/4.
My argument is that without those imperfect scores of 1/4 or 3/4, we are never going to reach a place where we hit 4/4.
Similarly, if you had a New Year’s resolution to eat healthy, and have failed so far, start a July resolution to eat healthy for the next 5 months. And if you fail after a couple of days, start again right then and there. Don’t wait for January to hit reset.
This is simple enough to understand, but very difficult to implement. Years of conditioning make us set these arbitrary units of time — in terms of years, months, weeks, and days.
But what if we give ourselves the permission to reset at any given moment? Even if we fail — which we will — we give ourselves the chance to get back on track as soon as possible.
Fail Fast is the productivity paradigm that many tech companies have used to build meaningful products. I would like to add a corollary to it: Fail Fast. Reset Faster.
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