Consistency, and Not Giving Up

Before starting anything — sports, reading, learning a language — the excitement and motivation lasts about a week at most. After that first week, we stop feeling the same rush we did at the start. That's the point where most people abandon whatever they started.

Strava, the world's largest running and fitness app, analyzed data from millions of users. According to their findings, the largest share of people who start running in January with new goals quit sometime in the second week of the month. That day has come to be known worldwide as "Quitters' Day." In other words, most people's willpower only lasts about 10 to 12 days.

Today is day 23 of my daily walking challenge. Honestly, I ran into a fair amount of friction in the first 10 days too. Work, family, personal life — and on top of all that, more than an hour of walking every single day. From the outside it looks easy, but it isn't.

On one hand, there's the promise I made to myself. If I don't finish the challenge, what will I be in my own conscience? On the other hand, I've already announced it to people.

Maybe I could find some excuse and talk my way past my own conscience, but if I stopped the challenge, what kind of person would that make me in front of others? In some sense, that thought is exactly what kept me from quitting.

In other words, people give up on promises made to themselves pretty easily. In our internal dialogue, we're our own most forgiving lawyer — always ready to find some neat excuse for our laziness, quietly letting ourselves off the hook ("It's cold today," "I'm tired," "My life is already full of problems as it is," and so on).

But once a promise is announced to the people around you, to friends, the rules of the game change. Research on the public commitment effect shows that if a person simply sets a goal privately, their odds of actually achieving it are only around 10 to 25 percent. But if they announce that goal and challenge to others, their odds of success climb as high as 95 percent.

Why? Because humans are social creatures. For us, social status, and being seen as reliable and credible within a group, is — at the hormonal level — quite literally a matter of survival.

Here's the logic: if you did the challenge secretly, without telling anyone, and then quit, all you'd lose is something abstract called "health" — and the brain adjusts to that loss easily.

But once you've announced it, you're now risking something else: people's trust in you, your reputation as someone who keeps their word and follows through. The brain treats that kind of loss as genuinely painful — painful enough that it will drag you out the door and onto the street to walk, whether you feel like it or not.