You’ve done a whole lot. And no one knows about it. Because you’ve finished nothing.
You have plenty of potential. But potential doesn’t count for much when nothing ever makes it into the world.
A stack of half-filled journals on your shelf. A graveyard of brilliant notes on your phone. A half-finished course in a browser tab you keep open.
If you continue this pattern, the business, the book, the art will only ever be what ifs.
Boredom when novelty fades, fear of being seen failing, overwhelm when it starts to feel too big – something always keeps you from following through.
And whatever it is, it falls under one label: discomfort.
If you ever want to get anything meaningful done, you have to be able to show up daily despite discomfort.
The business never gets shipped if you don’t show up to work consistently.
The novel never gets written if you don’t show up to write consistently.
The instrument never gets mastered if you don’t show up to practice consistently.
The completion of anything big depends on small reps repeated over time, and whatever those reps are, showing up is the necessary first step to any of them.
Showing up is a daily promise you can keep – and if you can make it a habit to keep that daily promise, you'll have built the capacity that following through depends on.
The Show Up Challenge helps you accumulate enough evidence that showing up despite discomfort becomes part of who you are.
And when it's part of who you are, showing up stops being a fight. It becomes a given.
THE SHOW UP CHALLENGE
The Show Up Challenge is about keeping the promises you make to yourself – and removing the ones you don't.
Instead of a list of things you want to change about your life, you make one non-negotiable promise to keep for 90 days.
For 90 days you put out your workout clothes every evening as a sign of a promise made – and you put them on the next day as a sign of a promise kept.
Then you show up.
After showing up, you say this out loud: “I show up whether I feel like it or not”.
It will feel untrue at the start, but over time the accumulating evidence coupled with the phrase will start to update your self-concept – and the statement “I am someone who shows up whether I feel like it or not” will 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.
Look at the identity update as changing the program running your behavior.
The update makes discomfort start to trigger action instead of escape, because escape is no longer coherent with your identity.
That small shift, at the decision point you face every day, is the whole thing.
The Show Up Challenge is built to make that shift possible.
What you can expect from this challenge:
- You won’t achieve your dream life within 90 days.
- You won’t become shredded.
- You won’t become immune to self-doubt and negative feelings.
But:
- Self-doubt and negative feelings will stop having the final say in what you do.
- Whether you’ll show up or not will stop being in question.
- Following through will start to feel possible.
No one can tell you if the book, the business, the art will work. You only find out by finishing. And no one finishes without showing up first.
Show up today.
Why is it free?
Hi! My name is Nicolas, and I created this.
It’s kind of been a running joke in my family that I have a lot of ideas and new things I’m trying out, but that I never stick to them. I get a surge of inspiration and get obsessed for a while, then, when the inspiration dies down, I quit and find the next more interesting thing.
The result has been a life with a bunch of half-finished projects and almost nothing to show for it. I was creating a lot and spending bunch of energy, but none of it amounted to anything.
About a year ago, I had had enough – I was going to stop trying a bunch of new things and I was going to figure out why I could never follow through on anything.
I hadn't really diagnosed the problem at this time, so what I actually wrote down was "find the key to transformation in 90 days." Super vague and naive looking back, but it gave me that surge of motivation I always felt when starting out on something new.
My plan was to transform my body while building out a system that helped me capture what happened every day, so I could review it every Sunday to analyze my patterns – I thought that if I could just become more aware of my patterns I would be able to change them.
90 days later I had the body transformation, but I hadn't changed at all. I was the same person, with better photos. I was completely aware of my patterns, yet I couldn’t change them.
Only about four months later, having lost most of the gains, did I realize what the key had been all along. And it was laughably obvious.
The body transformation had nothing to do with the data I analyzed every Sunday, or the perfect meal plan. It happened because I showed up every day for some type of exercise – walking or the gym.
This realization reignited my obsession. If I could figure out what creates consistency I would have the "key" I'd been looking for – and though “consistency” would seem obvious to anyone who has read the first page of a self-help book, it had never truly landed until I noticed it in my own experience.
I spent the next half year digging into the mechanism behind it, and eventually arrived at what I've tried to distill into this page.
I’ve taken The Show Up Challenge two times now – and I’ve never been as disciplined and persistent as I am now. I wouldn’t have been able to finish this project without it.
But this is simply my experience. I can’t promise the same will happen to you. But if you’re anything like me, and you want to feel what it's like to finish something for once – this challenge might be worth a try.
It’s free because it should be. Simple as that. I would never have trusted a random guy on the internet taking money for a challenge – I want to help people who are in a similar position to mine, that comes first.
I've built a system that supports you through the challenge – it's $49, but completely optional. The challenge is complete on its own.
A few things people ask
What if exercise isn't my problem?
This isn't about exercise. Exercise is just the training ground, chosen because it's a habit worth having anyway. You show up for it, and that becomes the evidence that you're someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not. Over time the habit and the identity feed each other.
Isn't exercising every single day risky?
Yes – if the promise were to follow through whether you feel like it or not. But it isn't. The promise is to show up. So on days you're very sore or short on sleep, you don't force yourself through an intense hour – that's how people get injured or overtrain. You pick one of the backups you set up at the start. And if you're genuinely sick or hurt, you rest, and show up again when you're better.
What if I don't have time to exercise every day?
You have time for this – because "show up" isn't "do a full workout." On a normal day you do your session. On a wrecked, slammed, no-time day, showing up might be five minutes, or putting your shoes on and doing one set. Don’t sneak in an outcome goal of “transforming my body” – because then you’ll either overtrain or not show up at all.
What happens when you 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.