Habits

I work out almost every day. Five functional training sessions a week, two runs. It sounds like a lot until you stop thinking of it as effort and start thinking of it as infrastructure.

That shift took me years to make.

For a long time I treated exercise the way most people treat good intentions — something to fit in when conditions allowed. When the week wasn't too heavy. When travel didn't get in the way. When I had the energy. The problem with that approach is that conditions rarely allow it. The week is always heavy. Something always gets in the way. You end up doing it occasionally and wondering why it doesn't compound.

The breakthrough wasn't motivation. It was removing the decision entirely. Same time, same days, non-negotiable. Not because I'm disciplined in some exceptional way, but because I learned that discipline is mostly just a system that runs without asking your permission. Once the habit is load-bearing, it holds even when you're tired, even when you're traveling, even when part of you would rather not.

I think about this constantly at work.

The teams and products that improve consistently aren't always the ones with the most talented people or the clearest strategy. Talent helps. Strategy matters. But neither compounds without the habit underneath.

Specifically: the habit of looking at what users actually do. Reading the feedback. Watching the session recordings. Talking to customers not because there's a specific question to answer but because staying close is the practice, and the practice is what generates the questions worth asking.

This sounds obvious. It isn't easy. Customer feedback can be uncomfortable — it surfaces things you'd rather not see, it takes time you feel you don't have, and the benefit is diffuse and delayed. You don't get stronger from a single workout. You don't get better at building product from a single round of user interviews. The return is on the streak, not the session.

What I've had to build — in myself, and in the teams I work with — is the infrastructure for consistency. Not campaigns to go talk to users. Standing rhythms. A regular slot in the week that isn't canceled when things get busy, because things are always busy, and the habit has to be stronger than the noise.

The body adapts to what you ask of it repeatedly. So does an organization.

The question worth asking isn't whether you value customer feedback or physical health — almost everyone says they do. The question is whether you've built a system that doesn't depend on you remembering to value it today.

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