Streaks are ideal, averages are real

Who doesn’t love an unbeaten 100 days Snapchat streak? Or an unbeaten streak of gym sessions to your name? The sports news goes bonkers reporting the unbeaten streak of wins for a football club. Certainly, winning or performing an action without a single lapse is the highest possible measure of success. It is true for sports, academics and life.

If this is the case, why are we even discussing it? Because the hard truth about any streak is that it ends. Someday your phone goes out of order and your Snapchat streak ends. The team that was winning the champions league 3 times in a row loses the 4th time. The richest and the most competent empires lose a battle in the most devastating way. And for those supreme few who never saw the other side of win, stop voluntarily before the time stops them.

Now before you start wondering whether this blog is motivational or demotivational, let’s move to the real point. The fact that streaks end denote that they are ideal. They are great to have but one has to be ready. Ready for what? Ready to face the next day the streak ends.

You set up a resolution, say for a new year, new beginnings; to do an activity regularly. It could be jogging for 20 mins 6 days a week. Meditating 10 mins every day. Writing in your journal before sleeping or reading a book every month. The list continues. And unfortunately, at some point of the year, this streak breaks.

What happens then? We are so much attached to this streak of ours that we get disheartened the day it breaks. And at this moment, it doesn’t seem to be meaningful anymore to do the same activity. The meaning only dissolves with every passing day and we no longer do anything that has to do with this resolution of ours. Been there? Well, most of us have been.

It’s this attachment that inherits the all or nothing approach that stops us from continuing the day after the lapse. This attachment could very well be the thing that drives us to maintain the streak but it’s a double-edged sword. It can cut you down if you can’t hold it in position forever.

Instead, if we focus on a larger period to draw our conclusions and motivations; it can prove to be more reliable. So if you were able to go only 3 times to the gym instead of decided 5 times, it still means you missed fewer times than you didn’t. It didn’t make you weaker immediately.

Let’s expand this timeframe further. Say the first week you made 3 out of 5 times to the gym. 4 times the second week, only once the third week because you had a cramp in your calf and 3 times the last week because the other days you had to travel out of the town due to work. In total, this accumulates to 11 days out of the possible 20. That is 3.67 times better than had you stopped after the 3rd day in the first week because you couldn’t get to your target of 5 days for that week! What does this imply in reality? Your muscles, your body is also 3.67 times better even though you couldn’t maintain the streak you intended to.

Needless to say, this difference is only going to amplify over months and the year, exponentially. This can be applied to all kinds of resolutions or repetitions you plan to do. As long as you are averaging well over long periods, you are doing just fine.

The football team that wins the league titles surely craves the winning streaks, but what the team focuses more on is to get back to winning ways after a defeat or two looming around the corner.

The athletes, the students, the financial pundits and even this blog, sometimes fail to deliver on the planned timeline but they put it behind quickly and move on looking forward to doing what counts over a longer time!