I was listening to a recent episode of the Indie Hacker Podcast on which Courtland’s guest () talked about completing the #75Hard program. It piqued my interest so I looked at the web site detailing the program. It’s a program of maintaining specific habits for 75 days straight without skipping a day, without cheating, and without compromising on the rules mid-way through.
The rules are short and simple:
- Follow a Diet, no junk food, no cheat meals, no alcohol.
- Work out twice a day, for at least 45 minutes. At least one of these workouts must be an outdoor session.
- Drink one gallon of water per day.
- Take a five-minute cold shower.
- Read 10 pages of nonfiction a day.
- Take a progress picture every day.
- If you miss any of these tasks (1 oz. short of water intake, 1 page of the reading, 1 minute of the exercise, etc), you MUST start the program over at Day 1!
The rules are simple, but I can see it’s not easy. So why am I doing this on top of trying to build a profitable start-up? Because what I am doing now simply isn’t working. I still procrastinate. I still talk myself out of working on my goals and just relaxing because ‘it’s been such a long day, and I deserve a small break’ – because I still make excuses.
I’m keeping track of the tasks (among others) on my Habit List app tracker. I’ve been trying to do some of these things daily anyways, so this program is a good match for the habits I am trying to build anyways (Reading daily, bike a century, lose weight, cut down on junk food, drink more water, build stronger habits).
Since my primary goal is to build a profitable start-up, I am adding to this list the following items:
- Read a book / watch a video to learn or improve programming skills for at least 30 minutes
- Build current application (ie Plan, Code, Test, Deploy features & code) at least 4 hours
- Livestream my daily coding to build in public
- 3 social media posts promoting the app I am currently working on or SoloMaker.life progress
- 1 blog post – Either on SoloMaker.life detailing the daily start-up progress OR on my current side project for content marketing
So I’m really making this difficult. But it’s on purpose. Up to this point, I’ve failed. I continue to fail. I really need to improve my MENTAL fitness so that I can improve my physical fitness and my ‘shipping’ muscle so that I can move forward on the path to controlling my own life for the betterment of myself, my wife, and my kids.
What I’ve done up to this point hasn’t worked. I’m going to do this, and in the process I am going to completely take control of my life and my future. I am going to work insanely hard to develop the superpower of controlling my mind so I can control my life for the better.
Wish me luck, and feel free to cheer me on as I post my progress daily to keep myself accountable.
TL;DR
I’m going to start the ’75 Hard™’ mental toughness challenge.
Founder Andy Frisella, says to think of ’75 Hard™’ as an ironman for your brain. As a perpetual procrastinator and non-finisher, I am hoping this radically changes my way of thinking, to the level of discipline I approach every single task in front of me with.
I’ll post daily updates here so you can follow along and cheer on my success.
