Gym - 5 months straight. Nice.

Writing - no consistency. Fell off the rhythm more than a year ago and never got it back.

Going to the gym helps me exercise my body and keep it primed for action.

Writing has always helped me exercise my mind and keep it primed for mental action. It has also helped me connect with many people I otherwise wouldn’t have connected with.

With the confidence gained from having created a new habit of gymming 3 times a week for 5 months, I’m now seeking to create a new habit of creating something (writing being one of those media) every day. And there’s one more reason for it.

How I formed the habit of gymming 3x per week

After numerous starts and stops, the thing that made it stick this time was stories.

I told myself a story — a true story — about how living in Germany as a foreigner who looks foreign has made me an occasional target of racism. If it can happen to me, it can happen to my family (wife and daughter).

I told myself that the best way for me to immediately insulate myself against this racism at an individual level is to look like I could pack a punch. I need to go to the gym so that I look stronger than my racist aggressors, in hopes that the appearance would deter them from being overtly aggressive towards me or my family.

That is all there is to it. That story, which I repeat to myself whenever I entertain the idea of skipping one workout, always gets me fired up to go to the gym.

Why I’m going to apply stories to help me create regularly

I don’t find as much joy in my work as a software engineer as I did a few years ago. The work is occasionally enjoyable and mostly just… meh. And having changed jobs 3 times in the last 5 years, I don’t think this will differ from company to company. It’s my new state of reality.

At the same time, it’s 2025. Creator is a word you can use without quotation marks to refer to people who write, produce, record, and publish their work to their own audience (followers).

I’ve witnessed many ascendant stories where folks quit their full-time jobs eventually and finance their similar lifestyles with sales of merchandise, subscriptions, sponsorship slots, speaking gigs, and so on, all fuelled by their consistent sharing of work with their audience.

So this is the story I’m going to tell myself: I need to create and share something everyday so that one day sooner than later, I can leave the software engineering profession and find joy in my work again. This is the best time for me to do it, because my daughter is the source of infinite creativity at this age, which I can tap into for inspiration everyday.

Written in 30m 50s at 7:30 am in my living room in Dusseldorf.