1,000 Days Should Do It

After 1,136 days, I stopped tracking my daily workout. Not doing. Tracking.

“The goal is not to run a marathon,” James Clear says, “the goal is to become a runner.”

When you pick up a new behavior, tracking keeps you accountable, but if, after three years of daily practice, you still need it to be a box on a list to get it done, perhaps it was never the right habit for you to begin with. Not a good fit for your identity.

Scientists always argue about how long it takes to build a habit. Is it 21 days? 66 days? 90 days? Well, do it for a thousand, and then you’ll know for sure. If you can do it for 1,000 days, you can do it forever — and if, by then, you’ve decided you don’t want to, no one will argue with your conclusion.

Nik

Niklas Göke writes for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. A self-taught writer with more than a decade of experience, Nik has published over 2,000 articles. His work has attracted tens of millions of readers and been featured in places like Business Insider, CNBC, Lifehacker, and many others. Nik has self-published 2 books thus far, most recently 2-Minute Pep Talks. Outside of his day job and daily blog, Nik loves reading, video games, and pizza, which he eats plenty a slice of in Munich, Germany, where he resides.