It's About Showing Up Again and Again
Real progress has nothing to do with passion or motivation. It's about the will to do the basic things over and over again—in bad conditions, when you're bored, tired, and not in the mood—and still hold yourself to your standards.
4:45 a.m. The alarm goes off. I get up, walk to the bathroom, change, head to the kitchen, grab my pre-workout, then go straight to the garage. This morning isn't for weight training; it's for running—a lactate threshold day.
I can hear the rain outside. I'm sore from yesterday's weight session, and I do not want to go out. I know I'll be soaked the moment I step out.
I finish stretching and head out the door, getting drenched as my workout loads on my Garmin. Off I go.
The streets are empty. I expect to see only one or two runners—the same faces—because they're the only ones who head out no matter the weather. The rest find excuses.
Those two or three runners know the same thing I do: it's not about passion or motivation. It's about being able to keep doing it over and over again, even when you don't feel like it.
That's how you build and maintain consistency with any habit. Everyone is gung-ho the first few days or weeks, but when things get monotonous—when it's about getting steadily better one step at a time, like building a foundation brick by brick—that's when the wheat is separated from the chaff.
Bored of doing the same thing, another rep? You still do it.
When I started in practical shooting many years ago, there was a clear expectation: to get really good, you needed to dry fire constantly. Dry fire is when you practice every element of shooting—drawing, aiming, moving, pulling the trigger—without using live ammunition. Just as a pilot uses a simulator to practice emergency procedures without risking an aircraft, a shooter uses dry fire to master complex movements without the noise, recoil, or cost of live rounds.
You remove all the exciting parts of shooting a firearm and focus on what will actually make you extremely fast and accurate. You handle firearms but do zero live shooting. But that's what it takes if you want to be extremely good. And as you might imagine, it gets dull and boring. It requires a commitment to push through, even when you don't feel like doing it.
The ability to repeat a habit, whether you want to or not, is how you figure out if a pursuit actually fits you. I've tried to incorporate many things into my life that I eventually quit, and that's fine. Quitting early isn't failure; it's information that this pursuit may not be right for you.
But here's what I've learned about the pursuits that stick: in the back of my mind, no matter what I do or how well it might have gone, it's always trash to me. Not in a bad way, but I know I can always do better. Until the day I die, I'm a believer that humans live in continuous kaizen.
Even now, before I started typing this, I really didn't want to do it, nor did I have much of an idea what I was going to write. Will it be of interest or any good? Probably not. Maybe it'll be useful for someone or useless to everyone, but I still do it, because otherwise I'm never going to get better at it.
Being in a state of permanent dissatisfaction, pushing yourself to do a little better every time, is the way to go.
Real progress has nothing to do with passion, motivation, or feeling energized. It's about the will to do the basic things over and over again, in bad conditions, when you are bored, tired, uninspired, and not in the mood—and still hold yourself to your standards.