Choosing Progress Over Perfection

Leo spent most of the summer before university watching self-improvement videos. By September, he had a plan. He wrote it on a sheet of paper and taped it above his desk in his new dorm room.

1. Wake at 5 a.m. 2. Cold shower. 3. Gym for two hours. 4. No porn. 5. No masturbation. 6. No social media. 7. No sugar. 8. Read 50 pages. 9. Meditate 30 minutes. 10. Journal every night. 11. No video games.

At the top, in capital letters, he wrote: MONK MODE.

#Day one

Day one was incredible. Leo woke at five, gasped through the cold shower, and was at the university gym when it opened. He read his fifty pages, meditated, journaled, and went to bed at nine feeling like a different person.

On day two, he was exhausted. He’d only slept six hours, his body ached from two hours of lifting, and he spent his afternoon lecture fighting to keep his eyes open. He still ticked every box, barely.

#Day three

On the third night, Leo had a wet dream. He woke up in a panic. One of the videos he’d watched had said that any release “drains your progress” and “resets your energy.” He lay awake at four in the morning, scrolling forums on his phone, which broke rule six, reading increasingly dramatic claims about what he’d lost.

He skipped the gym that morning because he was too tired. The plan above his desk now had two broken rules on it, and it was only day three.

#Day four

On day four, he slept through the 5 a.m. alarm. He woke at ten, missed a lecture, and felt something collapse inside him. I can’t even do four days.

What followed was a blur: a whole afternoon of social media, a bag of sweets from the vending machine, gaming until midnight, and porn. By the time he fell asleep, he’d broken nearly every rule on the list, and he felt like a total failure.

#A plan for a robot

That weekend, Leo’s older cousin Sofia, who was a physiotherapist, came to visit and saw the sheet above his desk. She read it slowly.

“Who’s this plan for?” she asked.

“Me,” Leo said. “Well. The me I’m supposed to be.”

“It’s a plan for a robot,” she said. “Two hours of training every day with no rest days? I’d tell my patients that’s a recipe for injury. And you’ve got eleven rules and no room for one bad night’s sleep.”

He told her about the wet dream and the forums. Sofia looked at him for a moment. “Leo, wet dreams are completely normal. Your body does that. It’s not a failure and it’s not draining anything. Who told you that?”

He didn’t have a good answer. The video’s creator had sounded so sure.

#The second plan

That night, Leo took down MONK MODE and wrote a new plan. It was much shorter.

One rule: no porn. Two habits: in bed by midnight, and gym three times a week.

For each habit, he wrote a minimum version for bad days: In bed by 12:30 at the latest. If I can’t make the gym, ten minutes of push-ups and squats in my room.

He thought about the other rules. Some of them, like reading and journaling, he liked. He decided to add them later, one at a time, once the first ones felt easy. Others, like the 5 a.m. alarm and the cold showers, he realized he’d only adopted because someone online had made them sound essential. He let them go.

He read up properly on the things that had scared him, and found that much of what he’d been told was exaggerated or simply untrue. The anxiety he’d felt about his own body started to ease.

#Three months later

The second plan was less impressive. It made a terrible video. It was also still going three months later.

Leo had missed the gym a handful of times and done the minimum version instead. He’d slipped on his rule twice, both times during exam weeks, and both times he’d gone back to his plan the next day instead of declaring the whole thing a failure.

In November, feeling steady, he added a fourth item: read ten pages before bed. In January, he added journaling, just three lines a night.

#What he’d tell his September self

At the end of his first year, a friend asked Leo how he’d become so consistent.

“I stopped trying to be perfect,” he said. “My first plan was built for the best version of me on his best day. My second plan was built for a tired guy on a Tuesday. Turns out that’s who shows up most of the time.”

He still watches self-improvement videos sometimes. But now, when someone says you have to do everything at once or not at all, he scrolls past.