The spiral of repeated mistakes

“The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.”
–James Clear, Atomic Habits

It’s nearing the end of January. This means you’ve probably imagined some new goals or resolutions you’d like to incorporate in 2025. It also means you’ve probably missed a day or two already. It might mean you left your resolutions on the side of the road weeks ago, and you can see them fading into the rearview as each day passes. 

What’s the most painful part about missing a day or two of your goals? It’s not that you’re losing a lot of momentum, because you’re not. It’s not that missing one day puts you way behind schedule. It doesn’t. It’s that a new habit starts to form and a new identity starts to set in (or the old one comes back again). 

One missed day turns into two and five and ten and forever because we allow ourselves to emotionally spiral. We hear a chorus of negative voices in our minds. This is how it always goes, isn’t it? I always do this. 

Then you snap back to old habits and an old, depleted, defeated identity.

Sticking with resolutions and achieving goals requires a balanced combination of discipline and forgiveness. You need to be disciplined with the work, with the schedule, with the deliverables, with the facts. Simultaneously, you need to be forgiving to yourself. If you miss one day, the strongest force pushing you to also miss day two and there and four is your negative self-talk. You need to choose to forgive yourself, and get back to working without a huge emotional upheaval. 

In the 15-Day Creative Consistency Challenge, we have a Code of Honor. It’s a set of guidelines that keeps our community so rich and supportive. One of the lines we abide by goes like this: “Critique the creation, and encourage the creator.” This is what we need to do with ourselves if we’re going to make habits stick.