Streaks Are Self-Sustaining

My longest Snapchat streak is, at the time of me writing this, 2512 days old. It’s equal to the exact number of days, minus one, since I began my freshman year at UIUC. It’s also when I met one of my closest friends from college, Lara. We sat next to each other on the first day of our Intro to CS discussion, learned that we both come from families of five, and walked to a bookstore to pick up the class reading materials together. Like every other freshman, the primary way that I would socialize back then was by adding people on Snap, and keeping up streaks with the folks I wanted to maintain an open connection to. Lara and I exchanged our Snapchat & contact info and went on our merry way. The friendship that followed would have a steady heartbeat: a photo exchange once a day.

At the time, I didn’t know that we’d become good friends, or that we’d build this habit of sending snapshots of our day back and forth. The beginning of a streak rarely feels significant, whether it’s tracked by Snapchat, Strava, or no one but you. We don’t always know when an ordinary action is about to become a ritual. I started my Snapchat streaks to feel like I had a low barrier to entry for socializing with people, just like I started journaling daily because I wanted to write down my thoughts and the highlights of my time in college. The act of starting a habit and the act of maintaining one both look the same on the outside. But the twentieth time you go for a run feels very different from the first, not only because you have more experience/conditioning, but because you are carrying momentum instead of raw ambition.

Raw ambitionMomentum

Day 1Day N

People can get a lot done on pure willpower alone. I see this especially among friends that have started companies, who describe the work as a kind of voluntary insanity: believing you have noticed something about the world that others have missed, giving up stability, and trying to turn nothing into something. That ambition can come from many places. Maybe you want to retire your parents, own a home outright, or bring a version of yourself or the world into existence. The spark is often enough to get you moving, but it rarely burns at the same intensity forever. Eventually, you need routines that can carry the idea forward on the days when the feeling that started it is nowhere to be found. Streaks, as it turns out, are a powerful tool for this.

It doesn’t really take much effort for me to open Snapchat and send a selfie. It is actually kind of funny to look back on the times when I lost my phone, or was unavailable for a few days, and had friends of mine maintain my streaks for me for the purpose of keeping my numbers alive. The streak itself, not so much the isolated behavior, is the thing that carries weight.

For example, one of my former coworkers has run at least a mile every day for more than a decade. I once saw in our Slack workspace a 25-minute mile that he logged with the caption “flu run”. Nobody in their right mind would want to jog while they’re bedridden with a high fever. But with the streak in jeopardy, it produces the momentum necessary to get some running shoes on and sneeze your way around the block. Not long ago, when I discovered I was about to break my “publish a blog post once a calendar month” streak, I sprang out of bed on the last day of April, hung up on my girlfriend’s FaceTime (sorry!), and wrote something short that I had been thinking about for a while. Consistency makes it easier to be consistent.

Handshake’s CEO, Garrett Lord, will often talk about stacking hard days at our company all-hands. In a fast paced organization like ours, it’s common to see people putting in overtime to make miracles happen. To carry businesses forward, as a leader, you need to reliably create momentum from nothing. Zero to one doesn’t apply just to ideas, but also to ideologies. You need your team to continue to give their best effort, to fight against entropy in an attempt to make your shared vision real. Motivation without the ability to act leads to frustration, and action without proper motivation is a one-way ticket to burning out. In the early days of the company, Garrett was literally sleeping in his car to keep the business moving. The work did not become easy overnight, but each hard day made the next one feel more survivable. The same is true of most practices: your confidence usually arrives after the evidence for it. You have to keep showing up long enough for your sense of who you are to catch up with what you have already done.

At the moment, I have a few streaks in mind that I think are worth beginning. Reading regularly, lifting consistently, building more things, and playing more tennis, to name a few. I’ll probably focus on these one at a time, developing small strings of daily wins until they become part of my identity again. It’s also worth recognizing the ongoing streaks, old and new, that I have been successfully incrementing. It’s been about six weeks since my last sip of beer (but I gotta say, N.A. options are actually pretty good). This weekend marks the seventh year in a row that I’ve celebrated my friend Tyler’s birthday with him in person. My other friend Aishani and I have been getting coffee on the first Tuesday of each month to talk about the careers we are building and where we think our industry is going. And of course, I have no plans on deleting Snapchat anytime soon. You win this round, Mr. Spiegel.

As I establish more of these routines and traditions over varying time horizons, they make me feel confident in my ability to follow through in other parts of my life, too. It’s also eye-opening to realize that every streak I have is, somewhat, sustained by itself. Once enough days are stacked up behind something, continuing no longer requires the same argument that it used to. The past begins placing pressure on the present. You have already proven that you can show up, so you show up again. The best streaks seem to eventually become tiny pieces of continuity that exist within lives that otherwise change very quickly. A run around the block. A page in a journal. Coffee at the same place. A picture sent to an old friend.

You gotta start by carrying the streak. After a while, the streak carries something for you.