For whatever reason, whenever I resolve to get good at something, I habitually take a “boot camp” sort of approach. I draw up a challenging regimen, to be followed by hell or high water—for 30 days or so.

The regimen is always way too much to sustain forever, and I know that. The hope is that an intense period of focused striving will catapult me to new, higher realms of prowess and confidence, so that when I return to baseline, that baseline will be higher.   

It works, sort of, sometimes. You can look at my experiment logs to get a sense of the mixed outcomes. Some have been abject failures, almost comically so. Write at least a thousand words a day! (Result: “Outright failure.”) Read a book a week for a year! (Result: “Catastrophe.”)

And those are only the immediate outcomes. Longer term, the results are probably weaker. On many occasions, I soared through the boot camp period, declared myself permanently improved, and then quietly slid back to the baseline, which apparently had not moved.

For a long time I assumed that this pattern was due purely to my own personal bumbling, and not a problem with the method. After all, a boot camp style approach can be found for anything you want to get good at. There are programs that identify as “boot camps” for novel writing, personal budgeting, dating, poker, building a YouTube channel, reading the Russian masters, and of course hundreds of fitness programs.