I’m no James Clear, but I’ve adapted his Atomic Habits advice to build new habits and behaviours using Streaks. As of this post, I’ve completed month-long streak at publishing blog posts every weekday. Are some of them crappy, full of errors and hard to read? Yep. Am I enjoying the process to come up with a topic everyday and just dumping my thoughts on it? Hell yes! My goal here isn’t to flesh out my most complex ideas using easy to follow, beautiful prose – its to get myself to start associating myself as someone who writes regularly. For now, I just want to be able to comfortable in writing down my thoughts easily, at will, without any resistance. As the saying goes, Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly, and so, I will continue with this writing streak (however badly).

Duolingo is a product that has essentially optimized how best to leverage streaks to keep users on the path to language learning (and keep using their product). I’m currently on a 429 day Spanish learning streak. Am I conversationally confident yet? Nope. Can I completely understand a native speaker? Na. Can I speak a few words here and there to impress Spanish speakers? Yep. Am I confident that I will be a better Spanish student in 1/5/10 years and enjoy learning the language? You betcha! With a few minutes everyday, I’m doing something that I enjoy and I’m OK with the monumentally slow progress, as long as there is progress. The idea is to focus on “quantity” of progress instead of “quality” of progress until you are ready to up the stakes. Sometimes, we just have to put in the reps.