0 Percent Weeks

The median of life is often ignored. It is 100 percent or nothing. 0 percent or all the way. The median battle of “partial,” “somewhat,” or “almost,” is disregarded. The rules of our society perpetuate this idea. In sports, there are winners and losers. The team, or player, with the better score, wins. Any ties that occur in the natural game have some sort of tiebreaker down the line that determines a real winner. When you apply for a job, you either get it or you don’t. When you ask a person out on a date, they either say yes, or they say no. So many equations in society prompt polar opposite answers and responses. There are winners. There are losers. There is all the way. There is nothing.

This all-the-way-or-nothing mentality infects your habits and how you move through your life. You feel you have to be perfect, 100 percent of the time, or you feel like a failure. This ideology is not the way to lead a sustainable, repeatable, and consistent life. Instead of focusing on being perfect, instead of focusing on being 100 percent, flip this perspective around and focus on avoiding the opposite. Focus on avoiding the 0 percent. Focus on avoiding doing nothing. Stop chasing weeks where you are 100% perfect and valiantly oppose weeks where you are 0%.

0 percent weeks (0%) are weeks where one bad day of habits leads you to give up and say you will start again next week. A 0% week occurs by following perfection too closely. When perfection is followed so closely, one slip-up can cause you to spiral. The ensuing spiral is your choice to give up on the remainder of the chosen time block, typically a week, with the decision to start again at the next time block. Sleeping in one day causes you to sleep in the rest of the week. One overboard cheat meal causes you to sacrifice your meal plan for the rest of the week. One missed workout causes you to take the rest of a week as a rest period. One failure leads to you throwing in the towel. Instead of it being one mishap, you let it become an entire failure.

The key to sustainable success over the long term is not pursuing 100% weeks, it is avoiding 0% weeks. Zoom out. One missed day does not hurt you if the rest of your week is focused. Enjoy some flexibility. Give yourself some space to build and maintain habits. Understanding you don’t need to be 100% perfect all the time, every week, enables you to appreciate the weeks of being 50%, 75%, and 90% on the right path. By stacking these weeks repeatedly you’ll achieve far more than if you give up after every failed day. You don’t need to be 100% to find the results you are looking for, you just need to avoid being 0%. No 0% weeks is the sustainable and consistent path to success, not chasing 100% weeks.