It's Absolutely Pointless to Start Anything Unless You'll Do It Daily
The simple shift in thinking that'll help you work on less so you get deep focus.
Most people live a Cinderella fantasy of a life.
They somehow think they can get everything they want and have time for everything. So, they take on more than they can handle and end up achieving nothing.
I have no shame for people like this. I lived this way for decades until I came across a simple idea. It changed everything. It got me writing. It helped me quit working a job forever at 34. It even helped me make millions in Bitcoin.
Let me break it down. It’s so simple it’s criminal, which is why it works.
I’ll be deconstructing this idea of doing it daily in 3 parts from 3 ideas I got from an X post Zach Pogrob posted recently (hat-tilt).
“Daily removes the 'option'“
I write daily. There’s no other option.
It’s that time of the year when my email inbox is full of people saying, “Yeah mate, I’m off for the holidays. I’ll revisit this writing thing (maybe) in March 2025. Then I’ll be off again for 4th of July weekend and Thanksgiving after that. Oh, and my cat died, and I need money to repair my car, so I’ll be off because of those things, too.”
They know they should do it daily, but they should-all-over-themselves and get covered in their own sh*t.
I, too, will slow down for holidays. But I never remove daily habits from my schedule. Writing is daily no matter what. It’s another form of oxygen. If I don’t do it, I suffocate and die inside but get buried at 85.
When you do something daily you remove the decision to start. You remove the decision to plan or to make time. You just do it because you’ve decided ahead of time. It’s a faster way to operate. The mental load is less too.
When I had to think about whether I should go to the hospital recently, it was a big decision. I wish my doctor just booked it for me and said “go to this hospital at this time or you’ll die. Sound good, mate?”
If you have to think about “doing it” chances are you won’t do it. Remove the decision by doing it daily.
“Daily keeps it in the back of your mind”
This sounds dumb… but we forget our goals.
Doing it daily is a consistent reminder of what you agreed with yourself to do. It keeps your goal top of mind which means you see the world differently. Your big daily goal is subconsciously appearing in the world and helping you find answers.
Doing it daily acts as a limiting valve on your consciousness. It’s a superpower.
“Daily forces you to iterate”
The average person moves at a snail’s pace.
The big reason is because they work on their goals sporadically. They have nice-to-have goals or I’ll-do-it-someday (mayday) goals that will never happen.
When you work on a goal weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually (don’t laugh, people do this), you have a much slower feedback loop. Your dataset is smaller. Your experience takes longer to acquire.
Daily is the fastest feedback loop.
If you’re a psychopath like me, then you do it twice daily.
Racking up hours more experience by doing it daily isn’t the real goal. It’s iterating faster so you can learn faster and hit the goal faster. This is what daily iteration does. You end up looking superhuman compared to the average person, when all you did was apply the simplistic technique of doing it daily.
I used to teach people to write using theory, but many people never did it. So I launched a writing challenge. I decided that if people couldn’t write for 28 days straight, then I wouldn’t waste my time on them. It worked.
It became 10x easier to teach people who already had a daily writing habit. Now it’s my default. I’m not interested in working with anyone on their business or writing unless they do it daily.
Doing it daily is a mindset. Adopt it before starting any goal. And make sure to track your daily progress to provide automated motivation to continue daily.
Don’t let this toxic mindset invade your brain
There are $0 critics who call the daily mindset hustle culture.
They don’t want us to have daily goals. They say we should interrupt our daily goals with self-care (self-indulgence) and find balance. They say I’m advocating for no holidays, weekends or fun. I’m just a big boring bum.
What these critics don’t understand is by *not* doing it daily you’re stealing from yourself. You’ll never get critical traction doing it once a month or by taking a lazy approach to a goal.
It’s daily… or zero results that lead to deep regrets. You choose.
I still take holidays and have a life, but my daily habits are a non-negotiable. They’re a system that can be executed from home, a hotel room, a hospital room, or my parent’s house. They’re designed to work with my 2 year old daughter too.
Daily habits aren’t the problem. It’s a lack of systems.
I have minimum viable habits. That means I do my daily habits no matter what, but if I’m on holiday or recovering from hospital, I decrease the time I spend on my daily habits. So the habits don’t change but the time I allocate can.
This mindset has let me write every day for 10 years (soon to be 11). I tie all of my success to this mindset.
Doing it daily shows you want it badly enough
If you won’t do it for 15 minutes a day, is it a serious goal?
People who want to write once a month aren’t obsessed. They’re lukewarm. They got the idea from a hero and it makes them h0rny. “Maybe I could be a writer like Stephen King and have a mansion one day.”
They ma$turbate over this idea every day in their mind, they just don’t take action on it. I call them hobbyists.
Hobbies like gardening are fine. But if you have a big goal you want to take action on and dare to make it your full-time income at some point or reach a world-class level, the hobbyist mindset will destroy you.
People who have lots of hobbies rarely succeed in life. They use hobbies to fill the void that a true obsession or purpose could have filled for them.
Calling something a hobby is an excuse for it to be mediocre.
Instead of sucking at something – do it daily, learn about it, iterate, and actually achieve some level of mastery.
Being world-class at something feels 10x better than being a hobbyist driving a toy Ferrari around a race track pretending to be Michael Schumacher.
People with the hobbyist mindset need to grow up. Get serious or go home.
You're competing against people who do it daily (like me)
A weekly or monthly mindset can’t beat the competition.
People like me are your competition. We do it daily. We’re obsessed. If you want to join saturated markets such as writing, music, online business or leadership, you better at least be doing it daily – it’s a minimum requirement.
Even if you do your goal daily, it’s not a guarantee of success.
One pattern I’ve noticed is that people give up a goal within 90 days. The reason is they don’t get enough traction to give them the motivation to continue. Doing it daily produces traction faster so there’s a higher chance you’ll go beyond 90 days.
If you make it to a year, then the chances of giving up drop further.
If you make it to 5 years, you’ll probably be working on the goal daily for the rest of your life.
If you keep the goal going daily for 10 years, you’ll probably be in the top 0.01% of your field.
This is the formula for success. The greats have known it for years but they rarely share it out of fear it’ll give them more competition.
I love how most people ignore the simple solution.
They prefer to look for hacks and pay gurus for shortcuts than just adopt the right mindset and take action on their goal daily.
Here’s what to do next
Doesn’t matter whether your goal is athletic, career-related, creative, business, or financial – do it daily or just give up on the goal.
It’s that simple.
This strategy works both now and in the year 2250. Even Roman Emperors like Marcus Aurelius used it hundreds of years ago.
Nothing other than doing it daily works. Everything works if you work daily.
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Yes I blame all these 6am starts on you Tim. I don't even need an alarm. Just roll over and grab some water and sit down to it. Last week I topped 1k reads on my posts for the first time. So I guess something's happening 🙏
I was talking to a friend last weekend. He said he'd come visit us on December 31st but not stay for the night. "Why?" I asked. He said "Because you're a damn junkie." And he was right - I'll get up at 6 am on January 1st and go for a 12 km run or to a pull-up bar (haven't decided yet). Being a sports junkie removes the option of saying "no."