You say you'll get up at six, and you're still in bed at eight. You say this is the week you start, and it’s Wednesday and you haven’t.
Breaking promises to yourself once or twice isn’t that bad. But break them over and over again, and sooner or later “not following through” becomes the default expectation.
And once that's the expectation, you stop moving. And if you don’t change, you’ll still end up somewhere. You just don't get a say in where.
It looks like a discipline problem from the outside. It’s really a self-trust problem. You’re not lazy. You just don’t believe you’ll show up tomorrow.
The part of you that commits has lost trust in the part of you that acts.
Someone who follows through doesn’t have more willpower than everyone else. They’ve kept enough promises to themselves to stop questioning whether they’ll show up.
When you fail to follow through, you blame the part of you that had to act. But look at what you asked it to do.
Every day. No end date. Starting tomorrow.
That plan wasn't built for the version of you that has to keep it. It was built for the fantasy that you'll wake up tomorrow a different person.
No set duration. Vague goal. No system. No rule for what happens when you break a promise. Just a list of things that you have to stick to.
The plan set you up to fail. Then you blamed yourself for not being disciplined enough to keep it.
The answer is not more discipline, but a new plan – and a new goal.
The eight-item list gave you eight chances a day to break your word — eat the pizza and the guilt takes the workout down with it.
With one item on the list, there's only one promise to keep. Nothing else can take it down with it.
But how does showing up for exercise make you someone who can fix their life?
The Show Up Challenge
You know what you have to do to fix your life – that's not the problem. The problem is that when you try, some force seems to prevent you from doing it.
This force is your identity – who you believe you are – and it's built on evidence that says you are not someone who shows up when they don't feel like it. Skew too far from who you believe you are, and you'll always get pulled back to it.
Trying to fix your life before fixing this belief about yourself is putting the cart before the horse.
You don't have to muster up a godly amount of willpower to become someone who shows up consistently. You just need to limit the amount and size of your promises to yourself until the identity takes root. When the identity is strong, the behavior will simply be a consequence of who you are.
The problem is we want the results right away – so we don't want to spend our time building an identity, we want to spend it building towards our dream life.
But if your dream life is the destination, you'll never get there in a car with no engine. Building the identity of someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not is putting the engine in. It might take a while, and you might have to let go of the fantasy that you'll arrive on the schedule you planned. But without the engine, the fantasy stays a fantasy forever.
Here's how it can be done:
90 days, one promise a day — show up for exercise. Every night you put out your workout clothes. The clothes are the promise. The next day you see the workout clothes and have the opportunity to keep the promise or not. The promise is small on purpose – it's not "finish a full workout", it's simply "show up".
Every night, after you’ve shown up, you repeat the phrase “I show up whether I feel like it or not” – that statement paired with the evidence makes it start to feel true.
The red x is a missed day, but notice that it keeps going.
The identity isn't built overnight, and you don't lose it overnight either. Someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not doesn't stop being that person because they missed a day. They may feel bad about it, but they show up anyway – that's who they are.
There are no resets. You miss a day, you show up tomorrow. There's nothing to start over.
After a while you stop questioning whether you'll show up tomorrow – when you put out the workout clothes you know you'll put them on the next day.
The trust between the part of you that commits and the part that acts has now been restored.
So in light of making promises you can keep, let me tell you what to expect from this challenge:
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You won’t achieve your dream life within 90 days.
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You won’t become shredded.
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You won’t become immune to self-doubt and negative feelings.
But
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Self-doubt and negative feelings will stop having the final say in what you do.
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Whether you’ll show up or not will stop being in question.
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You’ll trust yourself to handle what you can’t predict.
Why is it free?
I created this challenge to help people who are in the same position as I was in a couple of years ago. I’d tried to change for years, but I couldn’t stick to anything – I always ended up back at the same place. At that point in my life, I didn’t need more self-help books or superficial tips – I needed someone to tell me exactly what to do, how, when, why and for how long. I wouldn't have trusted some random person on the internet to have the answer to my problem, so if it wasn’t free I’d have labelled it a scam and moved on.
The Challenge is complete on its own. The Show Up System is an optional Notion home base the Challenge can run inside. $49. The Challenge doesn't need it.
What happens when you sign up and press “Start Challenge”?
You add the Challenge to your cart, put in your email, and press "complete order." (It's a cart because that's how the shop works. There's nothing to pay and no card required.)
You'll download a PDF with a link. Press it and you'll be redirected to the Challenge.
You read a Health & Safety disclaimer – when you click accept, you're redirected to the Challenge template.
You press duplicate to copy the template into your own Notion workspace.
Then you press Start, which takes you to a short introduction — what the Challenge is, what you do and why.
Then a setup page. It takes about ten minutes: your start and end dates, backup plans for the days you can't do your scheduled workout, and a workout program. There are three in the template, or you can use your own.
That's it. The setup is done. All that's left is putting out your workout clothes tonight, and putting them on tomorrow.
Every other challenge depends on you showing up for the thing. This one is about building the capacity to show up at all.
The Show Up System
The Challenge works on its own. The System is where the showing up gets easier and the proof of it accumulates.
Your program's already there — today's workout surfaces on its own, so there's nothing to decide in the morning. The record keeps what you actually did, not just that you did it. And when you press end workout, it asks you for the sentence the whole thing is built on, right when the evidence is strongest.
When the ninety days are up, it's still there.