1100 Day Streak? How?
This is probably the most shocking thing I saw this week. Most of us are familiar with apps that have streaks on them. Plenty examples are workout apps, learning games like Duolingo and Elevate amongst many others. One of the things humans find difficult to do is to stick to something they have started. Most of us are lazy by nature and procrastinate like there is no tomorrow, we abhor stress and labour like it's a plague and it's fine. But most times in life those things are all we see, life is unapologetic and forces you to always do things you may not have loved and even get used to them very quickly.
I was on the Duolingo app as usual trying painstakenly to get my daily streak and lesson in, I went to the daily updates page and there I saw a user who had just completed a 1100 days streak on Duolingo. PAUSE..... I was in shock and all kinds of bewilderments. I didn't even get the username, my mind immediately went into calculating that number into years and that is a whopping 3 years and 5 days. That is a massive time. I looked at myself struggling with a streak in the 70s and I was shocked. Mind you I'm a committed person, I always want to finish what I start but I was blown by that level of commitment.
I tried to relate that to all of life. Of course I don't know anything about this user and if they also have the same tenacity for other things, but I felt it didn't matter. I don't need to know much about a person to copy their attractive attributes. If there is something that needs to be done, let it be done.
I believe this should be more than a motivation, this is a possibility that you can do it, whatever that thing is. Do you write but feel lazy most times? This is a possibility. Those that do workouts? This is a possibility. That stressful job? You can keep showing up. That bad relationship can be fixed if you keep it up. There are a whole lot of “wonders" that we have seen happen but what we don't see is the mad number of consistency behind it that brought about that single “wonder" we see.
Then again I thought about the fact that consistency in the wrong thing or the wrong direction or discipline will yield negative results. Which is why we ought to apply knowledge to whatever it is that we do. One thing I was excited about for the user is the fact that he has been learning something for over years.
The 10,000-Hour Rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers." The idea is that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in a particular skill or field.
The penitself.