Not too long ago, I was looking around on Google. I wanted to see if my framework, Adaptable Discipline, was doing decently, or at least close to that.
Before that day, it was mostly just my website referring to itself... wah wah.
But while looking through the results, I came across this article: The return is the practice.
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That really piqued my interest, so I took a look. As I read through it, I realized I was getting into the mind of the author. It was impossible not to feel identified with her thoughts. My mind had gone through a similar process not too long ago, which is what led me to write What If You’ve Been Measuring Progress the Wrong Way All Along?.
The struggle was too relatable to not care.
It was sort of nice to realize that the author, Anastasia, went through the same rationale to reach an eerily similar conclusion:
The streak model assumes a broken run is a failed run. That the bad days cancel out the good ones. But that’s not how any of this actually works.
It was even more surprising when, further into the article, I realized she had actually referred to Adaptable Discipline’s content when talking about training.
I felt flattered. And drawn to learn more.
I reached out to her, and we discovered we were really aligned on ideas. So I invited her to talk about this topic in her own words.
And here she is, talking today about her own perspective on returning.
But I’ll let her tell you more.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Anastasia Green.
After the inspiration, that’s where craft actually lives.
The return to unglamorous work is the real skill that nobody talks about. Most things start with a burst of energy that feels a lot like certainty. The idea is clear, the motivation is high, and there’s something genuinely exciting about being at the beginning of something. People start new projects in this state, tell others about them, and then get into the actual work, and somewhere in the middle of it, without any drama or decision, the feeling quietly disappears.
What comes after that is the part that almost never gets talked about, not because it’s rare but because it’s genuinely unglamorous and doesn’t make a very good story. It looks like a messy notes document, or research calls where you’re trying to understand a problem before you’ve tried to solve it, or just the slow stretch where there’s no visible progress and you’re not sure if any of it is going anywhere.
This is where most of the enthusiasm stops, and it’s also where the real work begins.
Passion is a spark, not a fuel source
If you ask someone who achieved any level of success, they will most likely tell you that consistency is what gets you there.
Showing up every day, not breaking the chain, building the habit, and yes, that’s a part of it. But consistency assumes the thread never really broke, that momentum is still available somewhere underneath the doubt.
What doesn’t get talked about is the art and craft of returning to your practice when the thread did break, when the drift went on longer than you meant it to, and you’re sitting back down without the support of excitement or momentum or any real confidence that the thing is going to work.
The truth is, passion was never going to carry anyone through the muddled middle. It tells you something matters, points you toward the work, and then it’s finished with its job.
The spark has no doubt in it because nothing has been risked yet, and the doubt arrives later, right on schedule, the moment the excitement clears and you have to face the real work.
That timing is what makes it so easy to misread as a sign that something is wrong with the idea, when usually it’s just a sign of where you are in the process.
What the return actually is
The return isn’t inspiration, and it isn’t momentum either.
It’s opening the document again when you don’t particularly feel like it, getting your hands dirty without any strong sense that it’s going somewhere, making a choice without the clarity or sense of direction, because the belief in the thing is still there even when the feeling isn’t.
What we tend to call discipline is really just this: someone who came back after the passion had done its job and gone, who understood that the doubt wasn’t a verdict on the work, who kept going not because it felt good but because they still believed in what they were making.
And the return isn’t made once.
It gets made over and over again across the life of anything worth finishing, every time the work stops feeling like creation and starts feeling like a job, every time the doubt arrives right as the excitement clears and asks its reasonable-sounding questions, every time there’s no visible traction yet and the question of whether any of this is actually working gets a little louder.
The spark is the easy part because it asks nothing of you yet. The return asks for belief without evidence and showing up without any guarantee, and doing that repeatedly, back into the unglamorous middle of something you care about, is what craft actually looks like.
Thank you, Anastasia!
I want to echo a passage from her article:
And the return isn’t made once.
It gets made over and over again across the life of anything worth finishing, every time the work stops feeling like creation and starts feeling like a job, every time the doubt arrives right as the excitement clears and asks its reasonable-sounding questions, every time there’s no visible traction yet and the question of whether any of this is actually working gets a little louder.
What she is describing there is what I’ve been calling discipline. It’s the constant combination of noticing, choosing, and acting that brings us back to what is worth finishing.
Because motivation wanes. Willpower doesn’t last. But our ability to choose deliberately is always there.
👉 Want to actually train this, not just read it?
Each week inside Discipline Circle, I publish a short Paid Companion you can work through in 10 minutes on a slow day, so the idea sticks when a hard day hits.
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Well, as long as our prefrontal cortex allows us to reason about it. But that’s where the inner work comes in.
To learn about ourselves. To learn what triggers our fight-or-flight response. To learn what escalates into procrastination. To learn to identify when drift exercises its pull on our behavior.
The more we learn to notice and work with those aspects, and the more we practice that, the more we will be able to return as well.
You don’t learn by keeping a perfect streak. You learn when you break it, because that challenges you to learn and experiment, so the next time you can remain consistent, or return to it if you drift.
In our next companion, we will practice katas to notice, choose, and act when we don’t feel motivated to get back to the tasks that move us toward a goal we care about.
For now, just remember:
Drift is the default. The return is the skill.
Have a wonderful week!
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Lovely notes, Camilo! So happy to have collaborated with you on this one :)