A page from my journal

The following is a journal entry from 30th April, 2020 :

I’ve been watching Matt D’Avella a lot lately. I admire his calm-collected vibe and love the cinematography even in the simplest videos he makes. Armed with the sensibility to reject anything mainstream that doesn’t work for him, he makes some pretty interesting content.

I want to focus on two different ideas he mentioned in his videos.

1. The 3 year rule
2. The 2 day rule

It sounds very cliche. I see that. But it could work. These are simple ideas that could work well if combined together.

In a world full of distractions and one click satisfaction, my generation has slowly gotten used to getting what we want instantly. Although, I don’t think that instant gratification prevents people from working hard, I do believe that it makes failures hurt way more than they should. You are just used to getting what you want when you want it. So when you do fail, you are more inclined to shift your goal to something that is more “achievable”. A perspective shift is needed to break this feeling.

The 3 year rule is there to help with that. It asks us to pick something we really want to achieve and give ourselves a much longer runway to take off. 3 years is an arbitrary number. It could be 1, 5 or 10 but something that is much more than the few weeks that we unknowingly give ourselves. The idea being, in this seemingly massive time scale, your failures will dull in comparison. You fail for 2 weeks straight? Don’t worry, you have 154 more weeks to get it right.

An issue with having such a massive time scale for your bigger goals is how do you ensure consistent efforts? I think that’s where the 2 day rule comes in. It simply states that you will not take a break two days in a row for anything that you truly want to achieve. To be honest, this is impossible and that’s okay. You are bound to fail and that is normal. The idea is that even if you fail, the rule still applies for you! You pick back up again until you fail again.

I will definitely not be able to do this without failing for 3 years straight but mathematically speaking, I’ll be tending towards never failing the rule. I should see much more success than wandering aimlessly through these 3 years.

A great side effect of these rules are that I can finally take failures less seriously because I will fail a lot. It’s a good thing. I’ll be more inclined to try new things and succeed in ways I now cannot fathom.

So in summary, for 3 years never faltering for 2 days straight to achieve that 1 goal. It should be simple enough. :D

Here’s a link to his Youtube channel.