How did this all begin? If you look at my GitHub, you’ll see a sea of black in 2024 followed by a relatively abrupt yet sustained wall of green. What’s not shown is that in 2024 I ran ~1400 miles, towards the end of which I ran the NYC marathon. My life was in a large part consumed by jogging around Central Jersey and Manhattan.
I kept up a daily running streak for many months, and only broke it after facing extreme sickness that necessitated going to the NYU Langone Emergency Department to face the most intense pain I’d ever felt in my entire life. At my peak last year I was running 60 miles/week, and on one of those weeks I nearly ran the entire perimeter of Manhattan (~24/31 miles).
In Q1/Q2 of last year, I found myself in North Carolina attending a family friend’s wedding. At the wedding I was introduced to a student at UNC Chapel Hill. Upon sharing my hobby with her, she told me I should look into the Tarheels 10-miler, which would take place around 10 hours later, the morning of the next day. Registration was closed, but I showed up anyway, PR’ing in the 2-mile, 5k, and 10k, all in the same race.
After the marathon in November, I stopped running. I traded in exercise for House M.D. & Attack on Titan, binging them among other content every moment outside of work. I had decided to follow what my body and mind were telling me, which was to cease 95 percent of my prior socializing and spend time alone.
Then, one day, my friend invited me to swim and sauna, and I obliged. We finished up, and I suddenly felt a wave of energy and a sense of inspiration to do something productive. I wanted to build, and I wanted to meet up with my other close friend. A few moments later we found ourselves at the Bryant Park library in a quiet area working on our individual projects. In that session I finally created a presentable personal site for myself.
It was hard to focus. For over a month I had been binging shows and lying around, and my brain was not in the habit of focusing on a task for more than a few minutes. Come to think of it, my productivity was lacking the whole year outside of running, and I was getting sick at the frequency of around once a month. Maybe running was draining precious resources my body needed to focus on tasks and fight off ailments?
I was somehow able to gather my focus and prevent doom-scrolling for the entire period at the library, which was around 2-3 hours. I hadn’t done that in a long long time, and it took every ounce of willpower I could muster. Later that evening I made the important realization that attention can be trained, and a few days later I decided to put some effort into maintaining my nascent daily coding habit. I told myself I would push at least 1 commit a day on any project, to outsiders a seemingly paltry amount.
At first I stuck to the bare minimum. At times I pushed off the single commit until 11:55pm. What happened next I never would have imagined. 2 months in, I started naturally pushing to do more and more with the various projects I had been working on. Pushing is the wrong word, rather, I was being pulled. I couldn’t stop myself.
One of the biggest benefits of deciding to code every day is that it has greatly fueled my creativity. This is because coding consistently and not forcing myself to live up to any standard gives me the freedom to fail consistently, and that organically grows my skills and comfort with being a producer. I always used to get writer’s block in school. Looking back, if I had kept up a daily practice of writing without expectations of quality, I would’ve saved so much time and become a better writer.
Around 90 days in, my coding sessions started putting me in the flow state sporadically. I would sit down to work and fall into a state where I was intensely focused and knocking out several tasks, going from intention to immediate task completion over and over. When you get into this mode consistently, it becomes absolutely addicting. The dopamine rush of moving so fast on tasks rewires your brain such that good food, intimate relationships, traveling, and other things normal people enjoy become absolutely deprioritized.
I forgot to mention one other factor that might have greatly contributed to my increased focus and productivity. I visited my ENT in October of 2024. I had been a long-time sufferer of sinusitis, and after having my condition addressed with the correct combination of antihistamines and steroids along with a daily nasal rinse, I could finally consistently breathe without obstruction for the first time in 15 years.
Now, after having coded for 100 days straight and learning mountains of information through my honed focus and work ethic, I think health probably plays a big role in your success, and especially the absence of chronic debilitating conditions such as allergies. If you can’t breathe right, sleep well, and you feel lethargic all the time, do not listen to hustle culture and just push harder. When there’s a certain behavior you’d like to exhibit, and you find yourself falling short of it all the time, realize that it’s not your fault. If you take care of yourself in the right way, you will naturally become the person you intend to be.