At the end of 2023 I purchased a chin-up bar.
I then started to work on my hanging.
I use an app called Just Six Weeks to program the progress. It’s set to two sets, five days a week.
When I started I totaled 32 seconds of hang time (15 and 17 seconds). Today I’m at 1:10 (25 and 45 seconds). My goal for the next month is to get up to a one-minute hang and then focus on building up to 10 pull-ups over the next 6 weeks.
When I saw the graph tracking my total hang time today I felt a remarkable sense of optimism and motivation.
Confidence is a word that comes to mind as well, but it’s not the right word. It is a sense of possibility more than confidence that comes from seeing the compounded gains of consistent progress.
Seeing the results of my consistent work makes me hungry for progress in other areas. How far can I go? What can I do next?
This is interesting to me because hanging is a very small thing and on the surface not relevant to my life. But seeing that I can hang for 45 seconds feels in many ways more gratifying than the work I do all day long. That work is not tracked and it is hard to define if I am getting better at it or not.
If I couldn’t see the graph I don’t think it would feel as gratifying. If I didn’t track the numbers I don’t think I would feel much of anything at all.
To me, this emphasizes three things.
First, small daily challenges that are 100% within your control can provide fuel for the bigger, less certain projects. Doing one more pushup each day for a year, working towards a long hang, doing a daily blog post, these things can feel like a distraction from work, but when you live in uncertainty all day having a project you control and make consistent progress with is critical.
Second, is that for your big projects, finding some way to create feedback and a sense of progress is very helpful. Many times picking a metric of success feels awkward because the success of your project or business feels bigger than any one metric, but without something you can see you’ll feel much less satisfied at the end of a long week.
Third, for life’s great projects, like raising a family, becoming the best version of yourself, or creating great art, there is no reasonable way for you to track progress. God is the only one who can truly track the results, so you have to trust the work and generate some contentment in showing up every day even when you don’t feel you are making progress.
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