The Habit That Survives When Motivation Dies
Let me tell you about my graveyard of abandoned habits.
Meditation: 3 separate attempts. Longest streak: 22 days. Running: started 5 times. Best run: 8km on day 12, then nothing for 6 months. Cold showers: 9 days. Reading 30 minutes before bed: managed 2 weeks before Netflix won.
I’m not bad at discipline. I built a company from zero to 40 people over 10 years. I’ve shipped products, hit deadlines, pushed through things that seemed impossible. When it comes to work, I’m relentless.
But personal habits? I’m a disaster.
Or I was, until I figured out what was actually going wrong.
The motivation lie
Every habit article on the internet starts the same way: find your why. Visualize the outcome. Get motivated. Build momentum.
This is, and I say this with love for all those writers, complete nonsense.
Motivation is a spark. It’s great for starting. It’s terrible for sustaining. You know this from your own experience. Day 1 of a new habit: you’re excited, energized, you even tell your friends about it. Day 15: the excitement is gone and you’re negotiating with yourself about whether today really counts.
Motivation works like sugar. Quick energy, fast crash, leaves you worse than before because now you also feel guilty.
What I learned from building Mailigen
Here’s something interesting from my company-building days. When we were 4 people in that tiny office, everything ran on motivation. We were excited, we worked late, we ordered pizza and coded until 2am. Pure startup energy.
When we grew to 15 people, motivation stopped working. Not everyone was equally excited every day. People had bad weeks. The energy fluctuated.
What saved us wasn’t more motivation — it was systems. Regular standups. Clear responsibilities. Processes that didn’t depend on anyone feeling inspired on a given Tuesday.
The company didn’t run on enthusiasm. It ran on structure that made the right behavior easy and the wrong behavior hard.
Personal habits work exactly the same way.
The two-minute floor
Here’s the pattern I’ve found in every habit that survived past 90 days in my life:
It has a floor so low you can’t fail.
My gratitude journaling practice — the one that actually stuck — has a floor of writing one sentence. Not three things. Not a page. One sentence. “Lana said something funny about dogs at breakfast.” Done. 30 seconds. Habit preserved.
On good days, I write more. Sometimes I write 4-5 sentences, describe the scene, get into it. On bad days — exhausted, frustrated, don’t want to do anything — I write one sentence. Still counts. Streak alive.
This is different from the “just do 2 minutes” advice you’ve heard. I’m not saying start with 2 minutes and gradually increase. I’m saying: keep the floor at 2 minutes forever. Even when you can do 30 minutes. Even when you want to do an hour.
Because day 47 will come. The day when everything goes wrong, you’re exhausted, and the only thing standing between you and breaking the streak is whether the minimum bar is 2 minutes or 20.
The three ingredients
After examining every habit I’ve successfully kept (and every one I’ve dropped), the pattern is clear. Surviving habits have three things:
1. A ridiculously low floor. One sentence. 5 pushups. One page. The floor has to be so easy that “I don’t have time” is never a valid excuse. Two minutes. That’s the maximum floor.
2. No ceiling. On inspired days, you can go as long as you want. Write 3 pages. Do 50 pushups. Run 10km. The freedom to expand when energy is high is what keeps the habit interesting. It’s not a prison — it’s a playground with a very low entry gate.
3. A trigger you can’t avoid. My journaling happens after I put my daughter to bed. Not “in the evening” — that’s too vague. After the bedtime routine. Every single night, there’s a moment when I walk out of her room, and that’s when the journal comes out. The trigger is unavoidable, specific, and already in my routine.
Why most habit advice fails entrepreneurs
I think there’s a specific reason habit advice doesn’t work for people like us — people who build things, who are high-energy, who are used to intensity.
We set the bar too high. Because in our work lives, high bars are what drive us. Ambitious targets, stretch goals, moonshot thinking. That works for work because there are teams, systems, external accountability, and money on the line.
Personal habits have none of that. It’s just you, alone, at 10pm, tired, and the only person who cares whether you journal today is yourself. In that moment, a high bar is your enemy.
The paradox: the lower you set the bar, the more consistently you clear it, and consistency is what produces results.
I’ve done 5 pushups a day for 147 consecutive days. That’s 735 pushups I wouldn’t have done otherwise. Not because I’m disciplined — because the bar is so low my ego won’t let me skip it. “You can’t do 5 pushups? Really?”
The 7-day test
Here’s my challenge to you. Pick one habit you’ve been trying to build. Now slash the daily requirement to something embarrassingly small:
- Want to journal? → One sentence per day
- Want to exercise? → 5 minutes, any movement
- Want to read? → One page
- Want to meditate? → 60 seconds of eyes-closed breathing
Do that for 7 days. Not more than the minimum. Force yourself to stop at the minimum for the first 7 days. Yes, even when you want to do more. Especially when you want to do more.
You’re training yourself that this habit is easy. That it’s not a burden. That it fits into your life without negotiation. After 7 days at the minimum, then — and only then — let yourself do more when you feel like it.
But keep the minimum forever. Day 200 should have the same floor as day 1.
That’s how habits survive when motivation dies. Not with willpower. Not with vision boards. With a floor so low you’d feel ridiculous stepping over it.
Choose the easy win. Every day. That’s how you build something that lasts.