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You Broke the Streak. Now What? · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: How long has it been?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know that journal that you said that you were gonna write in every morning or the meditation that you did for eleven days straight and then stopped?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: The early nights, or the exercise plan, or that resolution that really did feel different this time.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere back there, it stopped.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know roughly when, and you've been not looking at it the way you'd not look at an unpaid bill ever since.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a strange part, right?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, I relate to this, I get it.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking to you from a place of superiority.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm another human being just like you, who likes to examine my own thoughts, intentions, actions, behaviors.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I learn a lot about other people through myself.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've noticed was that missing one day was nothing, right?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: What did the damage was the day after, when a voice said, Well, that's ruined now.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: May as well start again Monday or in January when things calm back down.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is not gonna work.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like honesty, it feels almost like self-compassion, it feels like honoring your emotions, it feels like respecting your resistance, it feels like it's loving in a sort of way, you know.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've come to this deep realization that I am not really meant to be doing this at this time.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: But most of the time I would say it's just arithmetic that's done by shame.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Stoics who get sold to us as the sternest people in history would have no patience with this at all.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So start with what they actually believed about perfection.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The person of complete wisdom who never steps.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And their own tradition said bluntly that this person is about as common as the phoenix.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: One every five hundred years, maybe.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, it's not you, it's not me, it's not your teacher, and it's not theirs.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: We don't see any phoenixes around here.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Extremely rare.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Epictetus was once asked whether it's possible to be entirely without fault, and his answer reported in the discourses was no, it can't be done.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: This from the man with the hardest reputation in the whole school.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: So what was the practice for if nobody ever arrives at this fully perfected state?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Their word for the working state was procope, progress.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: The person practicing wasn't called a sage, they were called simply one making progress.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: That was the entire job description, not clean records, but just direction.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now listen.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Epictetus, coaching an actual habit in the wording of Ward Farnsworth uses.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: He says, If you wish not to be quick to anger, don't feed your habit.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Don't throw it fodder on which to grow.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: As a first step, keep quiet and count the days on which you didn't get angry.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Then he voices the count for you.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I used to get angry every day, then every other day, then every third day, then every fourth.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Every day, then every other day, then every third.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Do you hear what's inside that sentence?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Lapses.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: The count he's recommending has failure built into it.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: He isn't tracking a streak, he's tracking a trend.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: A streak dies as soon as you miss it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm on a 95-day streak, and on day 96 I missed it.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Done.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Streak's over, lots of shame.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: You've messed up, you may as well not try.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: A trend absorbs the miss.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's more of a shape, a pattern, an overall trend.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Their critics attack them on exactly this point.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: If only the sage is wise, then everyone else is equally lost.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And one ancient image put it pretty brutally.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: A man an inch underwater is drowning just as surely as a man a fathom down.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So why bother swimming?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: The stoic answer is the best thing I think they've ever said about habits.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you're still underwater, but an inch is not a fathom.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: The distance to air is close, it's real, and closing it is the point.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's what we're doing.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Seneca, who was rich, compromised, famously imperfect, said openly that he would never be a sage and that he'd be content to lessen his vices.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty honest, I think.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think a lot of us could be more honest in our attempts at self-improvement.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: That is self-improvement in action.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, this is thousands of years old.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the day after you break any streak that you have, there are two moves you can make.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: The shame move totals everything, destroys your progress.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: It imagines the whole year of the habit, all the days you now have to do again, the person you were supposed to be by summer destroyed.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And because that total is crushing, it it files the whole project under Sunday later.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Marcus Redis knew that this was a trap.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And in Farmsworth's reading, he says, Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: The progress move does something almost insultingly small.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: It asks, What's the tiniest unit of the thing I dropped?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it does that, and it does that unit today.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not to catch up.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Catching up is the shame arithmetic it can.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Just to re-enter.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: A trend is rescued by the very next data point.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the next data point is the only one you control.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Every long practice anyone admires is a graveyard of broken streaks with one habit of returning laid over the top.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: I spoke to the ex-UFC heavyweight world champion Bas Ruten recently, and he was talking about his habits, his discipline, his training, his prey.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he was he described his consistency as like 95%.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and I and that to me indicates this kind of trend that we're talking about.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you miss one day over the course of 10 years, you've barely took a dent in that 100% percentage.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need 100%.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's not realistic, and it's probably not helpful to try and maintain that because life happens.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: But to try and keep it as high as you can and keep building that percentage, that makes more sense.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we want to do something called same day return.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: The moment you remember a dropped habit, the flinch when it crosses your mind, that's a starting gun rather than a verdict.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the instruction before you sleep tonight, do one tiny unit of the dropped thing.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: One line in a journal, not a page, two minutes of sitting in meditation, not 20, 10 lines on a piece of paper if you want to start that drawing habit again.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's got to be small enough that you can't talk yourself out of it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very binary, right?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: You either return today or you didn't.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: And mark the return.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: On whatever calendar you keep, write a single letter R.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not a tick for the habit, an R for returned.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Over a year, the thing worth counting was never your longer streak.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's how many times you came back and how quickly.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: You will drop it again, whatever it is you're doing.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's not pessimism.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the phoenix.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: The sage is not here.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's not realistic.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every practice you keep for life will be dropped and picked back up a hundred times.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the picking up is the practice.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: I like Brazilian jujitsu.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Every great jujitsu athlete has been injured or couldn't train for life circumstances at some point, sometimes for months.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: But they don't give up.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta keep going.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: An inch underwater is not a fathom.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Come back up today, even one line's worth.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Write the R on the calendar.