By Stanley Ngugi, October 19th, 2025
We've all been there. January 1st. New notebook. Fresh enthusiasm. This time will be different. You're going to write every day, hit the gym consistently, finally learn that instrument gathering dust in the corner.
By February, the notebook has three entries. The gym membership is a monthly guilt tax. The instrument remains untouched.
What happened? The standard answer is "you lost motivation." But I've discovered something stranger, something that sounds like a contradiction: the habits that stick require both desperate attachment and complete detachment.
The first stage is pure desire. I call it attachment, and it's essential. You have to want something badly enough that you're willing to restructure your life around it. This isn't casual interest—this is "I will do whatever it takes" territory.
When I commit to something, I go all in. Research experiments, skincare routines, learning piano—I start with an intensity that borders on obsession. This matters because lukewarm desire creates lukewarm habits. You need that initial fire.
But here's what everyone misses: you're not actually falling in love with the thing itself.
I saw a clip once about online courses that changed how I think about this. When you sign up for a course, you're not falling in love with the curriculum or the lectures. You're falling in love with who you think you'll become after completing it. The imagined future self who speaks fluent Spanish, who has that skill, who is that person.
This insight is crucial because it reveals what we're actually attached to: an identity, not an outcome.
Here's where it gets counterintuitive. After that initial attachment, after committing with everything you have, you have to let go of checking for progress.
I avoid short feedback loops at all costs. When I started a skincare routine, I deliberately stopped looking in the mirror frequently. When learning piano, I don't record myself to hear if I'm "getting better" every week. When running experiments for my research, I've trained myself not to obsess over each data point.
This sounds insane. Aren't we supposed to track progress? Isn't that what all the productivity advice says?
But tracking becomes a trap. Every time you check for progress, you're putting your habit on trial. "Is this working yet? Should I keep doing this? Was today good enough?" You're making continuation conditional on seeing results.
The habit dies because it never had a chance to become normal.
Remember: you fell in love with who you'd become. Now you have to make that future-tense identity present-tense.
Not "I want to become a researcher" but "I am a researcher."
Not "I'm trying to get better at piano" but "I'm someone who plays piano."
This isn't manifestation nonsense. It's a recognition that the behaviors you want aren't temporary experiments—they're expressions of who you already are. When something is part of your identity, you don't debate whether to do it. You just do it, the same way you don't debate whether to brush your teeth.
The detachment from short-term outcomes is what allows this identity shift. When you stop asking "is this working?" every day, you start asking "is this who I am?" And if the answer is yes, one bad day doesn't matter. One failed experiment doesn't matter. One practice session where your fingers felt clumsy doesn't matter.
You're not performing for results. You're being yourself.
I've developed an unusual habit that sounds almost masochistic: I actively want things to fail or get rejected early on.
When I started my research, I found myself hoping my first experiments would fail. When preparing to publish papers, I almost welcomed the thought of early rejections. Job applications? Same thing.
This isn't pessimism or self-sabotage. It's something I've come to love: the process of breaking my own novelty-seeking behavior.
Here's why it works: If I can experience failure or rejection and still show up the next day, I've proven something important to myself. I've proven I'm not doing this for the high of success. I'm not chasing the dopamine hit of validation. I'm doing it because it's genuinely part of who I am.
Early rejection is a vaccine against fragility. It normalizes struggle before struggle can discourage you. Most people quit when the novelty wears off and reality sets in. I'm deliberately ending the honeymoon phase myself, on my terms, to see if the relationship survives.
And when it does? That's when you know it's real.
There's a deeper principle at work here, especially in creative or research work: breakthroughs don't come from staying motivated. They come from making the process so automatic that you're still there experimenting long after everyone else got bored.
Novel results come from normalized experimentation.
Think about that. The word "novel" next to "normalized" sounds contradictory. But it's not. The people making discoveries aren't the ones riding emotional highs, constantly pumped up by motivation. They're the ones who've made showing up so mundane that they're still there on day 347, running yet another experiment that might not work.
The same is true for any ambitious pursuit. Writers who finish novels aren't more motivated than those who don't. They've just made writing so boring and automatic that motivation doesn't enter the equation.
Someone might read this and think I'm advocating for some kind of stoic detachment from caring. That I'm cynical about progress or success.
It's the opposite.
This approach is about doing justice to the picture of my future self. That future self I imagined in the attachment phase—the one who is a researcher, who maintains their health, who creates—that person isn't built on good days and visible progress. That person is built on showing up when it's boring, when it's hard, when there's no immediate reward.
By normalizing what matters to me, by detaching from the need for constant validation, I'm actually taking my goals more seriously than people who are always measuring.
I'm not protecting myself from disappointment. I'm protecting the habit from the brittleness of emotion-dependent behavior.
Attachment and detachment sound contradictory. But they operate on different timescales:
Attachment is long-term. It's about identity and values. "This matters deeply to me. This is who I am."
Detachment is short-term. It's about daily execution. "Today's result doesn't define everything. This one instance doesn't require judgment."
You care deeply about being someone who does the thing. You don't care whether Tuesday's session was perfect.
This protects you from both failure modes: the person who never starts because they're too detached from outcomes, and the person who burns out checking for progress every five minutes.
Skincare routine: Do it every day. Don't inspect your face for changes every morning. Trust the process exists on a longer timeline than your anxiety.
Learning an instrument: Practice because you're someone who plays, not to hear if you're "good yet." Record yourself monthly, not daily.
Research and creative work: Run the experiments. Write the drafts. Submit the papers. Welcome the failures as proof you're serious.
Any habit: Attach to the identity. Detach from each day's performance.
Most people are trying to maintain the honeymoon phase forever. They're chasing that initial high of a new habit, that burst of motivation, that feeling of "this time is different."
Your job is to survive the end of the honeymoon phase.
That's the only test that matters. Can you keep going when it's not exciting? When you can't see progress? When you've faced rejection or failure?
If you can, you've won. Because you're not doing it for the feeling anymore. You're doing it because it's who you are.
And that's the only foundation stable enough to build a life on.
The habits that change your life aren't the ones that feel good every day. They're the ones that survive feeling like nothing at all.