At the start of this month (June 2026) I set a goal to write a certain number of words each day for the whole month. I was inspired by advice I had gotten to write more often and had heard of people participating in and benefiting from similar kinds of challenges. The thing is, this is entirely self-imposed and therefore self-enforced.
A lot of aspects of life are like this. Especially once you become an adult, at any given point you have a set of habits, and if you want to change those habits you have to make the effort to do so yourself. This includes everything from diet, exercise, hobbies, addictions, and more. You could hire a personal trainer/coach/assistant/manager/chef/etc, but many people don’t have the resources to do so. Also, you would still have to decide to stick with it and follow the instructions of whoever you hire as best you can. At the end of the day, you have to provide your own motivation to accomplish what you aspire to do.
There is a spectrum that these goals generally lie on, with absolute strictness lying on one side and incremental change on the other. On the former end might be the lifelong smokers who one day just decide to quit cold turkey and just kick the habit right then. This isn’t to say that it works for everyone, or that all the ones who it does work for don’t occasionally give in and smoke once or twice before going back to zero. Indeed, the main weakness of this strategy is that it takes a significant amount of willpower to make such a substantial change. The main strength is that it can significantly disrupt your existing habits, providing the necessary catalyst for change to occur.
The opposite end of the spectrum would involve taking small steps towards the eventual goal. This would be like a smoker resolving to not smoke on certain days of the week, or only smoke a certain amount per day. The pros and cons are basically the opposite of the ones above: it is easier to take the first step and therefore to make some progress, but the changes aren’t that significant at first and may not be enough to get you to your end goal. You can take intermediate approaches of course, and the optimal strategy may even be different for different areas of your life: cold-turkey works for quitting nicotine, but probably not for getting back to the gym after a long break, where slowly ramping up volume is more sustainable than trying to lift everything you used to on day one.
I’m thinking about this today because I have had quite a busy day, with various activities taking up almost all of my free time. Yet somehow, I still feel a compulsion to write enough words in a semi-coherent manner to fulfill this somewhat arbitrary deadline. I could have built in one or two optional days where I don’t have to post anything, and that could have been fine, but when I was originally coming up with the plan I thought this might make me become too lax to carry through with the plan altogether (coming down on the stricter end of the spectrum).
So here I am typing this post on my phone at 10pm on a Friday while I’m out in Brooklyn. Such is the incorporeal power of self-imposed goals.