Never Miss Three Days In A Row

Anyone who's read a few self-help books might be surprised by my headline. Doesn't it say that you should never miss two days in a row if you want to get into a new habit? Then why do I talk about three days?

Well, Firstly, because I am not a friend of too rigid rules. The two-day rule is broken too quickly to make your soul depend on it. This rule says that you can only miss one day at a time when you are pursuing a goal.

Secondly, I know from my own experience that the real danger of dropping a new habit only becomes very serious when you slip up three times in a row.

As a writer, it took me a long time before I got into the habit of writing every day. In recent years I have tried to do so again and again, and sometimes there were phases in which it worked for several weeks at a time.

I sometimes had two-day breaks in these phases of several weeks, but they never led to me giving up my project completely. I simply continued on the third day and then held out again for a long time without a break.

But whenever I allowed myself not to write for three days, many weeks followed in which I found it challenging to write at least three or four days a week. After such interruptions, it always took a very long time before I had the energy to resume daily writing.

Why is it three days? I have no idea, but that is what I have observed about myself.

Break the promise you made to yourself three times in a row, and you will have no scruples about giving up altogether.

Even more often, this has happened to me related to my running training. I never had the goal of running every day. Three times a week was all I wanted. And yet in the past years, I had months of regular jogging and months of doing nothing at all and slowly getting fat and lazy.

If you want to do something three times a week, but miss it three times, you have missed a whole week. After a week off, everything feels like starting over. And starting over is just as hard as starting entirely from scratch.

But if you only miss two days out of three, at least you haven't had a week without sport. It's easier then to just keep going and get back into the rhythm.

As much as I believe that the two-day rule is too strict, I think that the three-day rule is a real law of nature.

I believe that the difference between success and failure is whether you take the three-day rule seriously or not.

I have learned to take this rule seriously. In the last two days, I haven't published an article because I had to finish my new thriller. I just concentrated on it and ignored everything else.

But today, I limited the work on it to five hours, because I didn't want to break my three-day rule under any circumstances. I had achieved my goal of writing an article every day since the beginning of March. Yesterday and the day before, I had decided to make an exception because I had set different priorities.

But today there was only one priority: do not break the three-day rule.

I could have written about other issues today. I have enough ideas for the next two weeks. But it was essential for me to today to convince you that momentum is always more important than anything else when it comes to achieving your goals.

Whatever you're trying to accomplish right now: are you currently adhering to the three-day rule? You still have the chance not to let today become your third cheat day in a row. You just have to decide.