A few weeks ago, I started 75 Hard.
Not for the transformation, not for the badge of discipline, but because I needed something to ground me.
I had been feeling unmoored, my days scattered, my body slipping into that familiar entropy—the slow drift from intention, from strength, from a sense of presence in my own skin.
This was meant to be a reclamation.
A structure to bring me back.
I wasn’t chasing a radical new self.
I was trying to find my way back to something I had lost.
And then I got sick.
The Collapse
Not just a cold, not something I could push through.
A full-system shutdown.
Fever, delirium, the kind of exhaustion that wraps around your bones and does not let go.
The night before, there had been warnings—a sore throat, an ache that pulsed in the joints—but I ignored them.
I pushed forward, hoping my body wouldn’t betray me.
By morning, it had.
I laid in bed for two days, slipping in and out of sleep.
No workouts, no gallon of water, no pages read.
The rules of 75 Hard shattered around me.
And yet, there was no guilt.
Maybe because I had been here before.
The last time I ignored the warnings, I was knocking doors six days a week, working 12-hour days, grinding my body down until it simply refused to continue. I laid in bed a week and a half to recover.
Before that, I was in my PhD program, mono hit and I tried to outwork it rather than resting.
The result was nine months of chronic illness.
I had pushed through before, and I had paid for it.
This time, I didn’t fight.
I let myself stop.
Discipline vs. Surrender: The Art of Knowing When
There is a kind of mythology around discipline.
The grind.
The relentless pursuit.
The belief that success is just a matter of pushing through, of never stopping.
But what if real strength isn’t in how much we endure, but in knowing when to yield?
I’ve built my life around control—around shaping my circumstances rather than letting them shape me.
And yet, there are moments when control is an illusion.
When the only move is to stop, to wait, to listen.
This was one of those moments.
To push through would have been foolishness.
To stop was an act of trust.
It’s a balance.
A spinning plate act.
Some plates glide smoothly, some wobble, some crash.
The mistake is not in dropping one.
The mistake is in believing that one broken plate negates the entire effort.
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The Shape of Progress
Stopping made me rethink what progress actually is.
It’s easy to believe in absolutes—either you finish 75 Hard, or you fail.
Either you hit the gym, or you don’t.
But life isn’t binary.
Progress isn’t a single moment of success or failure—it’s a trajectory.
A continuum.
Two years, I couldn’t get out of bed.
There were weeks where even showering was insurmountable.
My body wasn’t just weak; it was something I wanted to escape.
The fact that I made it through several weeks of 75 Hard before stopping—that alone is progress.
Years ago, I wouldn’t have even begun.
There’s a reason pilots use checklists before every flight.
A reason surgeons double-check instruments before every operation.
75 Hard is, in a way, a checklist for discipline.
A structure that makes progress tangible.
But life doesn’t always live in checklists.
Success isn’t always a perfect streak.
It’s how you move forward when the streak inevitably breaks.
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Strength and Identity: What Really Matters
Stopping forced me to confront something deeper: how much of my identity is built around endurance.
Around persistence.
Around never quitting.
And yet, this experience made me ask—am I strong because I never stop, or am I strong because I know when to?
I started 75 Hard to rebuild my body.
But really, I was trying to rebuild my sense of self.
And if that’s the real work, then stopping doesn’t erase it.
It’s part of it.
Moving Forward
Tomorrow, I’m restarting 75 Hard.
Not because I feel guilty.
Not because I believe I failed.
But because I believe in momentum.
Because I believe in finishing things.
Because I want to prove to myself that stopping and restarting are not the same as quitting.
I’ve been critical of 75 Hard before, and if I stopped now, I’d feel like a hypocrite.
But I’m going back in with a different mindset.
This isn’t the only way forward. It’s just one way.
And I’m choosing it.
Maybe that’s the real lesson: stopping is inevitable.
Resting is necessary.
The challenge is not in never breaking the streak—it’s in how you continue after everything crashes down.
So I start again.
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