STICK TO THE FUCKING PROGRAM.
Fitness: the program says train three times a week for an hour. It says do this warm up on this day, this series of lifts on that day, and finish with these movements.
Nutrition: the diet says eat this for breakfast, that for lunch and one of these options for dinner. It says that over the course of a week you should be consuming this much protein, this much carbohydrate and this much of fat.
Entrepreneurship: you have an idea. There’s a framework for validating it and testing it. It involves creating a minimum viable product and getting that product in front of the appropriate audience.
In most cases, when we don’t stick to the program, it’s because of impatience. We want whatever we want now, not later. We want immediate feedback. Instantaneous progress. We’ve haven’t got time to wait.
Sometimes, we don’t stick because of trust. We don’t have it. Whatever idea or method we’ve temporarily subscribed to doesn’t feel right. We’re not one hundred percent invested in it, and that partial investment undermines the effectiveness of our actions.
But there’s one reason to ignore these feelings of impatience and distrust. Let’s extend our original five words to eleven to see what this reason is.
STICK TO THE FUCKING PROGRAM LONG ENOUGH TO SEE THE EFFECTS.
If we quit or change our approach, it’s usually because we aren’t seeing results. There’s two reasons we don’t see results with a certain program or strategy.
- The program/strategy/method/approach doesn’t actually work for us at this particular moment in time.
- We didn’t give it enough time to work.
The problem is that the first can look exactly the same as the second: a period of time that yields no results.
To get around this harmful and expensive confusion, we need to do one thing. Before implementing any new method, strategy or program, we need to decide upon a reasonable amount of time to test the program. Three months? Six months? A year?
We should choose a time period that gives the program enough space to yield results. The worse thing we can do is put time and money into a plan of action and then quit right before we get the payoff.
So before you choose a program, decide how long you’re going to stick with it. And then stay with it until that period is up. Stay with it long enough to see whether it works or not.
Swell & Cut 