Just start again
If you miss a personal or work goal, it’s okay to start again. You don’t need anyone's permission, and you don’t need to feel bad about it.
Just start again.
Case in point.
In 2023 I discovered the 75 Hard. A fitness challenge where you do 6 strict tasks every day for 75 days. No exceptions.
The official rules are:
Drink 3.8L of water
Two x 45-min workouts (one outdoors)
Read 10 pages of non-fiction
Follow a diet
No alcohol
Daily progress photo
Sounds intense, right? Yeah, it is. I never attempted it because I am not an insane fitness junky.
Instead, I created my own. The 75 Easy! My version looked like this:
2L water (because I am not a fish)
30 minutes of exercise
30 minutes reading
30 minutes drumming (new hobby at the time)
Stick to the 5:2 diet
Progress photo
And it worked. I finished all 75 days and got an enormous feeling of accomplishment. I lost 10kg, reaching a weight I hadn’t seen since I was 18 years old. I even got slightly better at drumming.
The highlight for me was that I now had a system that worked. If I wanted to get fit and healthy and lose weight, just do a 75-easy. Done!
Or so I thought.
Since then, I’ve tried restarting 75 Easy at least 9 times. I haven’t made it past day 14, and sometimes I dropped out on day 3. The magic of that first run hasn’t been easy to recreate.
In startups, most experiments don’t work the first time. If you treat each failed experiment as wasted effort, you can lose inspiration. If you treat it as “just start again,” you keep momentum.
Even if you failed 9 attempts at your 75 Easy, you still exercised, read, drummed, and drank more water than if you had done nothing. In startups, failed launches or campaigns often leave behind infrastructure, learnings, and better instincts that compound into the next attempt.
So on the Monday just gone, I started a 75 Easy again. I don’t feel discouraged by my past failed attempts, because I know the simple truth:
👉 If you fall off, you can start again.
That’s what I’m doing. And that’s what you can do too.