100 Mondays | Chasing Values and Systems Over Goals

When was the last time you did something 100 times in a row??Maybe 100 consecutive days brushing your teeth or making a cup of coffee.?Or a 100 days of no sugar or alcohol.?For me, this week marks a streak of 100 Mondays starting my week with a run.?As Luke Combs sings in Does to Me, “That might not seem like much to you, but it does to me.” Rain or shine, on the treadmill and outside, at home or on vacation, always in the morning.?Whether or not I wanted to, I laced up my shoes and ran an average of five miles every Monday.? I never missed.?And during this nearly two year stretch I learned a few things that I hadn’t known before about goals, systems, incremental progress, discipline and accountability. ?

This is a reflection of something that I’m somewhat proud of, and it’s a unique personal milestone.?Specifically this post recounts four specific insights I experienced that I wanted to share with others.?I’m hopeful that this two year training will offer something worthwhile, and that you might find a nugget of helpful information.

1.) Values Trump Goals

Around bedtime after the first day of school in the New Year, my 11-year-old daughter asked me why I hadn’t mentioned any of my personal New Year’s resolutions to her.?In her class they were discussing resolutions, and several students shared their goals with the rest of the classmates and she was starting to percolate some of her own.?As she did this, she wanted to know what some of mine were for for the New Year.

This is pretty typical for a bed time routine in our house.?Usually the kids begrudgingly share a bit about their day immediately after school, but they reserve the big theological questions exactly two minutes before lights out.?This is about the time that Shelly and I are ready to tidy up the house and hit the couch for some reading or Parks and Recreation.

I love talking with my kids about their deep questions, especially if it is in an area that I’m qualified in.?Mom usually gets the questions and vulnerable thoughts about relationships and other serious topics.?Nonetheless, I told Charlotte that I don’t create New Year’s resolutions and instead we talked about our core Huseman family values.?Admittedly, I do have a running list of goals that would be fun to achieve sometime, but?being married 50 years, driving a race car, and learning to ride a horse are more “bucket list” items than annual resolutions.

You can probably picture this annual ritual that happens every New Year.?Blog posts, newspaper articles and the like all provide tips on how to hit that resolution this time.?I think we find comfort in hitting the reset button in doing annual planning.?Warren Buffet countered this notion hen he told investors that his long-term investment performance has nothing to do with the length of time it takes for earth to rotate around the sun.?The calendar is meant to bring order, but January 1st is meaningless in our pursuits of values.?We pursue our values every day, and our behavior is a reflection of those values.?Goals will change over time, but values should remain consistent.

I believe that if I would have set a goal to run 100 Mondays in a row without connecting it to a more important value, I would have failed.?However, I did connect the idea to our value of Meaningful Work, which we define as “Saying no to average priorities, so that we can say yes to great pursuits.”?A healthy lifestyle is an example of a meaningful pursuit in our family, and while it’s hard to say “no” to sleeping in today and “yes” to running, the behavior is consistent with the values I want to demonstrate in our family.

By the way, our family went through an exercise a couple years ago to establish our core values and I wrote a post connected to this idea here.?I’d encourage you to formalize a set of your own. ?

Key Idea:? A core set of values provides a steadfast place for decision making, and t is important to have these in place before setting any meaningful goals.

2.) Predetermined Decisions Preserve Willpower

Once your values are in place, then there are some lifestyle choices that should be consistent with those principles.?For example, one of our family values is “Faith” and one way our family demonstrates this is to attend church together every week as a family.?This isn’t an aspirational goal, nor is attending church the value.?Instead it is simply the predetermined decision that reflects a deeper principle.

This is when I decided on the idea of “Never skip Mondays”, after hearing this from a banker friend of mine (Shout out to Tammy).?Actually, I run three days a week but making the predetermined decision to run every Monday meant that I would always start the week on fire.?It’s a great feeling to have my 10,000 steps in by 7:45 every Monday morning.

The psychology experts define this as “precommitment”, which is a decision made in advance that removes potential options at a future time.?What I learned here is that willpower is something that is extinguished over time.?Every time we say “no” to ourselves we use a little bit of our willpower, and we will eventually give in to the temptation.?But when I make a precommitment, such as “I run on Mondays”, then there is no decision to make, because it was made in advance.?I save that willpower for another decision later on.

This is where I built a whole system of predetermined decisions that have really boosted my discipline.?For example, I also eat the same breakfast on run days.?I used to think that I earned something after my run and then I would eat a donut or indulge some other way, but Jeff Cavalier from Athlean X says that “you can’t out train a bad diet”, which introduced me to a new way of thinking around my food choices.?Now there are three days a week where I don’t have to choose what I eat to start my day, since it has already been decided and the momentum carries through the day.

James Clear talks about this more in his book Atomic Habits.?He says “We don’t rise to the level of our goals.?We fall to the level of our systems.”?Until I picked up these habits, I used to be spontaneous in my exercise and diet, which meant there wasn’t a routine.?While I thought I was living a pretty healthy lifestyle, it was really just a reaction to my mood and what I felt like doing.?If you are interested in other tips about building habits and establishing priorities in your own pursuit, I would like to recommend three books here:

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Indistractible, by Nir Eyal

Deep Work, by Cal Newport

Key Idea: Find proven practices and build systems to help preserve your willpower and reinforce your habits

3.) No big goal is achievable today

Shane Parrish from Farnam Street provides this simple wisdom that I have come to appreciate. “Incremental gains are too small to notice until they are too large to ignore”.?Dorie Clark, author of The Long Game says that “we overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a year”

Here is where I’ll mention that I didn’t set a goal to run 100 Mondays.?Back to my first point about values and goals, it was instead a pursuit of a healthy lifestyle and meaningful work.?Coupled with the precommittment of never skipping a Monday, the momentum started to happen on its own.?I keep a log of my running in the Nike Running Club app, and one day I was scrolling through my mileage and started to see how it was adding up.?Only when I saw that I had 30 or 40 Mondays in a row did I start to think about setting a goal of a 100.?It was an arbitrary number, but it was something that I could see incremental progress every week. ?

This next section will only apply to runners, but during this two year stretch I set three sequential personal records in our local 5k and 10k community races.?This wasn’t something I set out to do, but the more disciplined I was in my running, the faster I got.?I also picked up some reading on Vo2 max and interval training which helped, but my times consistently got faster, and I know it is all because of having a routine in place and embracing small gains.

James Clear again comes through with some cool words of wisdom when thinking about long-term gains.?He says that the cost of your good habits are in the present, and the cost of your bad habits are in the future.?I finally embraced the idea that long-term pursuits cost something, and that cost is my behavior today, but the value will compound and show up in the future.

Another note from Clear to point out.?In his book he mentions “never skip twice”, which introduces the flexibility I think we all need in pursuit of a big goal.?There were two or three times that I ran at 4am to catch an early flight, and I ran less than five miles.?My personality can be a bit rigid here, and I needed to embrace that the spirit of the effort was in tact, even if it was less than the target of five miles.?But this only happened a couple times, and I surely didn’t let it happen two times in a row.?Again to the psychologists, who call this “self empathy”, which is a pretty important concept that I would have been less experienced in a couple years ago.

Key Idea: Embrace small gains and incremental progress - both will compound over time

4.) Accountability Matters

This is the section where my personality kind of got me in trouble, but it worked out anyway.?After I hit one year of 52 Mondays, I started telling my buds about the idea of hitting 100.?Once I did this, it accidentally created accountability, which happens to be a relevant part of achieving a big goal.?Telling others about our plans, specifically people who look out for your best interest, goes a long way in helping achieve big goals.?Nir Eyal in Indistractible points out that sharing with others helps to both reinforce your identity as well as introduce accountability.?He also has some worthwhile “pacts” that can be helpful when trying to make a behavioral change.

Anyone that knows me well knows that I can dish some ribbing and poke fun at my friends, and I definitely expect to get some back.?I regularly like to point out to my propane grilling friends that they are basically using an outdoor oven, and the only way to grill is with charcoal or wood.?Further yet, a wifi thermometer and automatic auger is a shortcut to smoking meat.?I can’t say why I do this, and I’m sure it’s off putting to people, but this allowed me to stumble into accountability.?The more I talked about it, the more people have asked - or at least they feel compelled to ask because I talk about it.?Perhaps that is a self reflection topic for another time.

In either case I have supportive friends, several who are runners, who have asked about my habit.?They are better friends than I am, and deserve a shout out.?James, Kris, Kevin, Laura, Brian, and others.

I also used my Apple Watch with a few buds where we mutually share our workout activity.?This occasionally will act as some extra motivation when I know there are a few close friends who will notice if I didn’t run on Monday. ?

Key Idea: Having supportive people in your life who are aware of your goal will provide meaningful accountability?

100 Mondays is a fairly meaningless accomplishment, but it represents a handful of insights I learned from others that I think can be applied in more important pursuits.?It is a small indicator of how I have come to embrace systems and values over intuition and spontaneity.?The lessons have carried over into the more essential parts of my life, and it was fun to reflect back on the effort.

Thanks for indulging me.?If you made it this far, this was for you.

P.S. These are my own opinions and I've tried to give credit to any published authors.