Streaks

Or: will I ever escape Duolingo’s nagging notifications?

Feeling a little burned out on publishing right now, but I’m almost to the 30-day mark and I’m not about to quit now.

This project has me thinking about streaks. They seem to be everywhere for me: not only the streak of posting for 30 days in a row, but also Wordle, Duolingo, Spark, and more. Doing something every day consecutively is something to be celebrated, apparently.

I get why: habits are hard to keep up. Discipline and willpower are short supply in a world that pulls our attention in a thousand different directions. Sometimes just showing up is a Herculean achievement. One of baseball’s most hallowed records is Cal Ripken’s consecutive games played streak of 2,632 in a row. For a staggering 16 seasons, nothing—not illness, not injury, not fatigue—kept Cal off the field. And while Ripken was a Hall of Fame player by stats alone, he is best remembered for his durability, reliability and consistency.

It’s worth noting that another one of baseball’s most unbreakable records has to do with consistency is a streak: Joe DiMaggio’s 56 consecutive games with a base hit. By comparison, the next longest streak is a “mere” 45. (You could put me in the batter’s box four times a game for 45 games and I don’t think I’d eke out a base hit in any of them.) I think about other mind-boggling streaks: Ken Jennings’ 74 straight Jeopardy wins. John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins winning 88 games in a row, only to be outdone by the UConn Huskies women’s basketball team winning 90 back to back from 2008-2010.

What makes these streaks so impressive? For me, it’s the precariousness of it all: fall short just one time, and it’s over. So many things have to go right. There’s luck involved, but also heaps of preparedness and hard work. Habits and routine have to win out over spurts of motivation.

Compared to this mammoth streaks, my 30 day writing challenge is dust in the wind. But it’s giving me a taste of the rewards that come from following through on a commitment. Even on a day like today, when I’m fatigued, hardly inspired, feeling spent, I know I’m working toward something I can be really proud of.

Moving forward, I’ll likely move to something closer to a “daily-ish” model, a term I’m borrowing from Oliver Burkeman’s excellent Meditations for Mortals. Showing up every day is great, but two out of three ain’t bad either. There’s even some evidence to suggest that doing certain things daily might be detrimental—weight lifting comes to mind. And as much as I want to, say, practice the piano every day, I can’t deny that sometimes if I take a day or two off I come back more polished than ever.

For now, I’m going to embrace this streak for all it’s worth, and all it has to teach me.

Almost there.