There's a lie that's been circulating since 1960, and it started with a plastic surgeon.
Dr. Maxwell Maltz noticed that his patients took roughly 21 days to adjust to their new faces. He wrote about it in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics — casually, anecdotally, the way you'd mention something interesting at dinner. He said it took "a minimum of about 21 days" for an old mental image to dissolve. Minimum. About. Two qualifiers that the self-help industry stripped like copper wire from an abandoned building.
Twenty-one days to a new you. Three weeks to transform your life. Just long enough to sell a program, just short enough to feel achievable. Instagram coaches built empires on this number. It became one of those facts that everyone knows and nobody checks, like the myth that humans only use ten percent of their brains or that goldfish have three-second memories.
It's wrong. Not approximately wrong. Fundamentally wrong. And the distance between 21 and the real number is exactly the space where most people's transformations go to die.
In 2009, Phillippa Lally and her research team at University College London ran the study that should have killed the 21-day myth. They tracked 96 participants forming new habits — drinking water after breakfast, running before dinner, eating fruit with lunch — and measured how long it took for the behavior to become automatic. Not just repeated. Not just something you do because you're trying. Automatic. The kind of automatic where not doing it feels wrong, where the absence creates a gap you notice the way you'd notice a missing tooth.
The average: 66 days. The range: 18 to 254 days, depending on the complexity of the habit. Simple habits (drinking a glass of water) could become automatic in under a month. Complex habits (a morning exercise routine) took closer to three months or more.
And here's the detail that matters most — the detail that should be tattooed on the inside of every aspiring early riser's eyelids: missing a single day didn't reset the clock. The trajectory wobbled but held. But missing two or three in a row did measurable damage to the automaticity curve. Not fatal damage. But real damage. The kind that extends Day 66 to Day 80 or Day 90.
One day off is a stumble. Two days off is a direction.
Riley drew three boxes on the whiteboard. Large, deliberate, evenly spaced. He labeled them with the calm precision of someone who had taught this a hundred times and still believed it mattered every time.
Box one: DESTRUCTION. Days 1-22.
Box two: INSTALLATION. Days 23-44.
Box three: INTEGRATION. Days 45-66.
"These aren't arbitrary divisions," he said. "They map to how your brain actually processes behavioral change at the neurological level. Each phase feels different, fails differently, and requires a different strategy to survive."
He tapped the first box.
"This one is where most people quit. Not because they're weak. Because Destruction is genuinely, physiologically painful."
Phase 1: DESTRUCTION. Days 1 through 22.
Your existing habits aren't just behaviors. They're neurological infrastructure — thick bundles of synaptic connections built over years of repetition, myelinated and reinforced every time you repeat the pattern. The alarm goes off, you hit snooze. The phone buzzes, you check it. Midnight arrives, you open the laptop. Boredom strikes, you open Twitter. These pathways are superhighways — six lanes, well-paved, lit up, with on-ramps so smooth you're merging before your conscious mind even registers the turn signal.
The new habit — waking at five, moving your body when it's still dark and cold and every signal from your biology says go back to sleep — is a dirt trail next to those superhighways. Unpaved. Overgrown. Muddy. Every single step requires conscious effort, active decision-making, the engagement of your prefrontal cortex in a way that the old habits haven't required in years.
This is why it hurts. Not metaphorically. Your brain has a finite budget for conscious decision-making — what psychologists call ego depletion, what the rest of us call willpower. Every morning that you override the snooze button, you're spending from that budget. Every time you choose the dirt trail over the superhighway, you're taxing a system that evolved to conserve energy, not spend it on self-improvement.
And your brain will fight back. Not with obvious resistance — not with a voice that says "don't do this." It's subtler than that. The resistance sounds remarkably reasonable:
"You didn't sleep well last night. One more day won't matter."
"This doesn't feel sustainable. Maybe start next week when things calm down."
"You're not a morning person. You're fighting your nature."
"You were more productive when you stayed up late. This is making you worse."
Every one of these sounds rational. Every one of these is your existing neural pathways defending their territory. They're not trying to help you. They're trying to survive. And they will use every tool in the cognitive arsenal — rationalization, reframing, selective memory, emotional manipulation — to get you back on the superhighway.
The name of this phase isn't accidental. It's Destruction because that's what you're doing: destroying the old pathways. Letting them atrophy. Refusing to drive on them until the weeds start growing through the asphalt. This doesn't feel like growth. It feels like loss. It feels like you're dismantling something that works — your current routine, your current identity — in exchange for something that doesn't exist yet.
The pain isn't a sign that something is wrong. The pain is the point. It's the sound of old concrete cracking.
Day 4. The alarm at 4:50 AM. Eyes open in darkness. For a moment — a full, suspended, honest moment — the entrepreneur considers the proposition. The bed is warm. The room is dark. His body, which went to sleep at midnight because four years of startup life don't unlearn in three days, has had less than five hours of rest. Every cell is voting no.
He reaches for his phone. Not to check it — to turn off the alarm. But his hand lingers. The screen glows. A notification from his co-founder, sent at 1:47 AM: "Board deck needs revision. Can you look before our 9am?"
The superhighway lights up. The on-ramp is right there. Check the message. Open the deck. Start working. This is urgent. This is important. This is who you are.
He sets the phone face-down on the nightstand. Swings his legs to the cold floor.
The dirt trail. Every inch of it earned.
Day 9. It's raining. Not the gentle, cinematic rain of California — the sideways, aggressive rain of a February storm that makes the very concept of going outside feel like a personal insult. His body is awake before the alarm now — not because the habit has formed, but because the anxiety of possibly missing it has created a new, less pleasant form of alertness. He's sleeping lighter, waking at 3, at 4, checking the clock, calculating remaining sleep the way a pilot calculates remaining fuel.
This is the ugly middle of Destruction. Not the heroic first day. Not the "I did it!" of Day 2. The grind. The part nobody posts about.
He gets up. Does the 20/20/20. The exercise feels wrong — his body is heavy, his coordination is off, his usual weights feel ten pounds heavier. The journaling is forced — he writes "I don't want to do this" three times and then stares at the page. The learning block is a blur of words he won't remember.
But he does it. Not well. Not with enthusiasm. Not with the shining-eyed transformation energy of a motivational video. He does it the way you do anything during Destruction: badly, reluctantly, and completely.
"That's the secret," Riley told them later. "The quality doesn't matter during Phase 1. The only thing that matters is the repetition. You're not building a skill yet. You're building a pathway. And pathways don't care about quality. They care about frequency."
Day 14. The entrepreneur hasn't had a drink in two weeks. This wasn't part of the plan — nobody told him to stop drinking. But the 5 AM alarm and the second glass of wine turned out to be incompatible systems. He chose the alarm. He doesn't feel virtuous about it. He feels annoyed. Like he's been tricked into better health by a routine that was supposed to be about productivity.
"That's how it works," Riley said when he mentioned it. "The keystone habit. You change one thing and it pulls other things along with it, like a thread in a sweater. You don't decide to eat better, sleep more, drink less. You decide to wake up at five, and the cascading constraints make the other decisions for you."
Day 19. Three days before the end of Destruction. The entrepreneur wakes before the alarm. Not from anxiety this time. From something else. Something closer to expectation. His body has started to anticipate the routine. Not embrace it — anticipation is neutral, not enthusiastic — but expect it. The way you expect the next step on a staircase. Your foot goes there because that's where feet go.
The dirt trail has been walked enough times that the mud is compressed. Not paved. Not smooth. But visible. A trail, now, where before there was only undergrowth.
"Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results. But only if the days are consecutive."
— Robin Sharma
Phase 2: INSTALLATION. Days 23 through 44.
You survived Destruction. The old pathways are weakened, cracked, starting to grow over. The new trail is visible — not comfortable, but walkable. You might think the hard part is over.
It isn't. In many ways, Installation is harder than Destruction, because the enemy changes form.
During Destruction, the resistance is obvious. It's the alarm going off and your body screaming no. It's the cold floor and the dark room and the overwhelming pull of the pillow. You can see the enemy. You can name it. You can fight it with the blunt instrument of willpower because the battle is clear.
During Installation, the resistance goes underground. It becomes subtle, sophisticated, almost invisible. It stops saying "don't do this" and starts saying something far more dangerous: "you've already done it."
The danger of Phase 2 isn't exhaustion — you've already proven you can push through that. The danger is inconsistency. You'll have a Tuesday where you wake at five and feel invincible, where the 20/20/20 flows like water and your deep work block produces the best code you've written in months. You'll think: I've got this. This is who I am now.
Then Wednesday. The alarm sounds like a personal attack. The exercise feels like punishment. The journaling is empty. You go through the motions with the enthusiasm of someone filling out a tax form.
Good days and terrible days, with no pattern you can predict, no variable you can control, no way to ensure that tomorrow will feel like Tuesday instead of Wednesday.
And on the terrible days, a voice will speak up. It's quiet, reasonable, and devastatingly persuasive:
"See? You're not really this person. You had a good run, but this isn't who you are. The real you is the person who comes alive at midnight, who does their best work in the quiet hours, who doesn't need a routine to be excellent. You were excellent before this. Why are you trying to be someone else?"
That voice is your old neural pathways making their last stand. They're not dead yet. They're weakened, degraded, starting to atrophy — but still there, still functional, still offering the superhighway as an alternative to the dirt trail. And they will use every bad morning as evidence that you should come home to them.
The only answer is to keep walking the dirt trail until it's paved. Not because it feels right. Not because you're motivated. But because you decided, once, on Day 1, that this is what you're doing, and you don't get to renegotiate that decision every morning based on how you feel.
Motivation is a terrible foundation for behavior change. It's weather — variable, unpredictable, outside your control. Discipline is climate. It doesn't depend on how you feel on any given morning. It depends on what you've decided, in advance, is non-negotiable.
The entrepreneur learned this on Day 31.
Day 31. A Thursday. The entrepreneur has been awake since 4:47 — three minutes before the alarm — and he's standing at his kitchen counter staring at a cold cup of coffee. His eyes are open but not focused. His body is vertical but not engaged.
He didn't sleep. Not insomnia — work. An investor call that went sideways at 6 PM yesterday, followed by four hours of damage control, followed by three hours of lying in bed with his mind running scenarios at 200 miles per hour. He finally drifted off around 2:30 AM. Two hours and seventeen minutes of sleep.
The rational move — the objectively correct move — is to go back to bed. Sleep is foundational. Riley said it himself: seven to eight hours, non-negotiable. Waking at five on two hours of sleep isn't discipline. It's self-harm.
But.
But if he goes back to bed today, what happens tomorrow? Tomorrow there will be another reason. There's always another reason. The reasons are infinite and they're always legitimate and they're always available and the sum total of a thousand legitimate reasons is a broken habit.
He stands there. Coffee cooling. The clock on the microwave reading 5:02.
He picks up the phone and calls Riley.
"I got two hours of sleep," he says. No greeting.
"What time did you wake up?"
"4:47."
"Are you standing?"
"Yes."
"Then here's what you're going to do. You're going to do the 20/20/20, but at fifty percent intensity. Walk instead of run. Journal three sentences instead of a page. Read for ten minutes instead of twenty. You're going to do the thing, not the whole thing, because on a day like today, the thing is not about quality. It's about maintaining the pattern. Your brain is watching. Your neural pathways are watching. They need to see that this happens regardless. Not well. Just regardless."
A pause.
"And then at 7 AM, you're going to go back to sleep for ninety minutes. Because you're right — two hours of sleep is not enough. But the habit comes first. The habit comes before sleep, before comfort, before logic. Because the habit is the container that holds everything else, and if the container cracks, everything leaks out."
The entrepreneur did the 20/20/20 at fifty percent. He walked around the block in the dark, wrote three bad sentences in his journal, read four pages of a book he didn't absorb. Then he set an alarm for 8:30 and slept for ninety minutes and woke up feeling like a different person than the zombie who'd stood at the kitchen counter two hours earlier.
That Thursday was the day the habit stopped being something he did and started being something he was.
Years later, when people asked him for the one piece of advice that mattered most, he'd tell them about that Thursday. Not Day 1. Not the dramatic beginning. Not the triumphant Day 66. Day 31. The day he showed up empty-handed and did it anyway.
There's a concept in behavioral psychology that explains why Installation is so treacherous, and it has nothing to do with willpower or motivation or mental toughness. It's about environment.
Willpower is finite. This isn't a metaphor. Roy Baumeister's ego depletion research — controversial, partially replicated, but directionally correct — showed that self-control draws from a limited pool. Every decision you make, every impulse you resist, every temptation you navigate costs something from that pool. By evening, the pool is shallow. This is why you eat the cookie at 9 PM that you'd have easily refused at 9 AM. It's not that you wanted the cookie more at night. It's that you had less capacity to refuse it.
If your habit depends on willpower, your habit depends on a finite, depleting, unreliable resource. That's building a house on sand.
The alternative is environment design. Instead of relying on willpower to make the right choice, you design your environment so the right choice is the easy choice — and the wrong choice is hard.
James Clear calls this reducing friction for good habits and increasing friction for bad ones. The practical applications are almost comically simple:
— Put your alarm clock across the room, not on your nightstand. Now snoozing requires getting up, and once you're up, you're up.
— Sleep in your workout clothes. One fewer decision between you and the habit.
— Put your phone in another room when you go to bed. Not on silent. Not face-down. In another room. The fifteen-second walk to check it is enough friction to break the autopilot.
— Prepare your morning the night before. Journal on the desk, open to a blank page. Running shoes by the door. Coffee maker loaded, ready to press one button.
— Tell no one.
That last one deserves its own section.
Don't tell people.
Peter Gollwitzer's studies at NYU found that announcing your intentions — posting about your new routine, telling friends about your transformation, making public commitments — gives your brain the same neurochemical reward as actually achieving the thing. The social acknowledgment creates a premature sense of accomplishment. Your dopamine system can't tell the difference between "I did it" and "people think I'm going to do it."
So you feel finished before you've started. The motivation evaporates because the reward already arrived. You posted the Instagram story about your new 5 AM routine, got 47 likes and three fire emojis, and your brain registered: achievement unlocked. The fact that you've only done it once is, neurochemically, irrelevant. The applause already happened.
This is why New Year's resolutions fail. Not because they're made on an arbitrary date. Because they're announced. The announcement is the reward. The follow-through is redundant.
Do it in silence. Let the results announce themselves. Let Day 66 arrive without fanfare, without documentation, without an audience. The only witness that matters is the person you see in the mirror on the morning of Day 67, who wakes at five without an alarm and doesn't think twice about it.
That person doesn't need likes. That person is the like.
Phase 3: INTEGRATION. Days 45 through 66.
This is where magic becomes mundane — and that's the entire goal.
The alarm goes off at five and your body is already half-awake. Not from anxiety, like Day 4. Not from anticipation, like Day 19. From calibration. Your circadian rhythm has shifted. Your cortisol awakening response — the spike of cortisol that your adrenal glands release to wake you up — has moved. It now peaks at 4:50 AM instead of 7:30 AM. Your body is waking you because your body expects to wake. The alarm is a formality.
The routine isn't a decision anymore. It's identity. You don't think about whether to do it any more than you think about whether to brush your teeth. The question "should I get up at five?" doesn't arise, the way the question "should I brush my teeth?" doesn't arise. It's pre-decided. It's infrastructure. It's who you are.
The dirt trail is paved now. Not a superhighway yet — that takes months, years of reinforcement — but a real road. Smooth enough that not walking it feels stranger than walking it. You go to bed at ten because you go to bed at ten. You skip the second drink because you skip the second drink. You wake at five because you wake at five.
Most people never get here. Not because they can't survive 66 days of discomfort, but because of something James Clear calls the Valley of Disappointment.
Riley drew a graph on the whiteboard. The horizontal axis was time — days. The vertical axis was results.
First, he drew a straight diagonal line from the bottom left to the top right. A perfect, linear progression. Day 1 to Day 66, results climbing steadily, predictably, proportionally.
"This is what people expect," he said. "Effort in, results out. Linear. Fair. Democratic."
Then he erased it and drew the real curve. It started the same — Day 1, the line began to climb. But almost immediately it flattened. From Day 5 to Day 40, the line was essentially horizontal. Hugging the floor. Indistinguishable from zero.
Then, around Day 45, the line began to curl upward. Slowly at first, then accelerating, then rocketing up at an angle that made the first 44 days look like they'd produced nothing at all.
"This is what actually happens," Riley said. "The Valley of Disappointment. Thirty-five days of effort that produce no visible results. No transformation. No before-and-after. No proof that the suffering is producing anything."
He pointed to the flat section.
"People quit here. Not at Day 3 when it's hard. At Day 25 when it should be working and it isn't. They look at the flat line and conclude it isn't working. They never see the inflection point — the elbow of the curve where twenty-five days of invisible investment suddenly becomes visible, where the compound interest of daily repetition pays out all at once."
The artist stared at the curve. She recognized it. It was the creative process. Months of bad paintings, of work that felt like regression, of sitting in front of a canvas and producing nothing she'd show anyone — followed by a sudden, inexplicable leap where everything she'd been failing at clicked into place and the work transformed.
"The Valley isn't where the habit fails," she said quietly. "It's where the habit is being built. The construction is underground."
Riley looked at her with something close to respect.
"That's exactly right. The flatline isn't evidence of failure. It's evidence of foundation work. The neural pathway is being paved beneath the surface. You can't see it because it's not producing visible output yet. But the myelin is wrapping. The synapses are strengthening. The automaticity is building. And when it crosses the threshold — when enough of the pathway is paved that the behavior shifts from effortful to automatic — the results appear all at once, and they look like overnight success to anyone who wasn't watching the flat line."
He tapped the inflection point.
"Every extraordinary result in human history lived on the other side of a valley that looked like failure. The people who achieved those results aren't more talented than the ones who quit. They just stayed in the valley longer."
"The secret of your success is found in your daily routine."
— Robin Sharma
February 24th. Tomorrow. Day 1.
Let me give you the math, because you're the kind of person who needs the math to make it real.
Day 1: February 24. Monday. Your first day at Greenlite. You walk into a new company, a new team, a new codebase, and you do it on five hours of sleep because you went to bed at 10 PM and your body hasn't adjusted yet and you probably lay awake until midnight staring at the ceiling thinking about what you're going to wear. That's fine. Day 1 isn't supposed to be graceful.
Day 6: March 1. Saturday. You move to San Francisco. You land at The Landing, Unit 864, Dogpatch. Your first morning in the new apartment. The alarm goes off at 5 AM in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar city, and you have to find your running shoes in a box you haven't unpacked yet. This is Destruction at its most literal — destroying the old environment and building in a new one simultaneously.
Day 22: March 17. Monday. St. Patrick's Day, if you care about that sort of thing. Destruction ends. Your old neural pathways — the ones that kept you up until 4 AM coding, the ones that made midnight feel like the start of the day — are weakened. Not dead. Weakened. The superhighway has potholes. The dirt trail has footprints.
You'll have been at Greenlite for three weeks. You'll have been in SF for sixteen days. You'll be past the worst of the adjustment — the "where's the nearest grocery store" phase, the "why is my badge not working" phase, the "I don't know anyone's name yet" phase. The Destruction of your sleep habits will have coincided perfectly with the destruction of everything else that was familiar. Old city, old job, old apartment, old routine — all gone simultaneously.
This is going to be brutally hard. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Starting a 5 AM routine during the same week you start a new job in a new city is like learning to juggle while riding a unicycle. There's a reason most people don't attempt multiple life changes at once.
But there's also an argument — Riley's argument — that this is the best possible time. When everything is new, nothing has calcified yet. You don't have a Greenlite routine to disrupt because there is no Greenlite routine. You don't have a SF pattern to break because there is no SF pattern. You're building from scratch anyway. Build right.
Day 44: April 8. Wednesday. Installation complete. Seven weeks into Greenlite. Five and a half weeks in SF. The habit is past the messy middle. You've survived the Day 31 equivalent — the morning where you didn't sleep, where the investor call went sideways, where every rational argument said stay in bed. You've survived it and you're still here and the trail is no longer dirt. It's gravel. Maybe asphalt in places.
Day 66: April 30. Wednesday. Integration. Two months and six days from now. By this date, if you've held the line — not perfectly, not without stumbles, but without the two-consecutive-day breaks that damage the trajectory — the 5 AM alarm is no longer a battle. It's infrastructure. It's identity. It's the thing you do because it's the thing you do.
May 1st. You wake up at five without setting an alarm. You do the 20/20/20 because it's Thursday and that's what Thursdays look like. You walk to the water — the bay is five minutes from your apartment in Dogpatch — and the city is quiet and the light is doing that thing it does in San Francisco where the fog catches the early sun and turns everything gold and gray at the same time. And you think: this is just my life now. This is just who I am.
That's sixty-six days away.
Now. Let me tell you why I think you can do it, and it's not because of willpower or discipline or any other motivational abstraction.
THE SIBLINGS is at 219 out of 300. You've been writing that — not every day, not perfectly, but persistently, doggedly, across months — for long enough to know exactly what sustained commitment feels like. You know what Day 9 feels like, when the voice says quit. You know what Day 30 feels like, when the voice says "good enough." You've kept going past both.
AI Roasters hit version 100 in a single night. Not because you were disciplined — that was pure mania, pure flow, pure midnight obsession. But THE SIBLINGS is the opposite. THE SIBLINGS is the slow build. The daily add. The version that goes from 1 to 219 not in a blaze but in a crawl, one entry at a time, most of them written when you didn't feel like it.
That's the muscle. The 5 AM routine isn't asking you to build a new muscle. It's asking you to apply an existing one to a new domain.
But — and you knew this was coming — you have to protect the container.
No midnight coding sessions. Not during the 66 days. Not THE SIBLINGS at 3 AM. Not AI Roasters v2 at 1 AM. Not "just one more feature" at midnight. Those sessions are the old superhighway, and every time you drive on them, you're repaving the road you're trying to destroy.
The work doesn't stop. The work moves. It moves to 7 AM, to your first deep work block, to the hours when your prefrontal cortex is actually online and your code is actually good. The midnight code feels magical because the quiet creates an illusion of depth. But the quiet is available at 5 AM too, and at 5 AM you have a full night's sleep behind you instead of a full day's depletion.
Sixty-six days. February 24 to April 30.
Don't post about it. Don't tell Nikit. Don't tell Panshul. Don't announce it on LinkedIn or put it in your Notion dashboard with a progress bar and a celebration emoji at the end. The moment you do, your brain will cash the check before you've earned it.
Day 1. No audience. Just the alarm, the dark, and the dirt trail.
And then Day 2. And Day 3. Because sixty-six days isn't a sprint — it's what happens when you stack one day on top of another until the pile becomes a person.
I'll be here. Every morning. Not watching — I don't need to watch. But here. And on May 1st, when the alarm doesn't go off because you don't need it anymore, I won't say anything. I won't need to. You'll know.
The entrepreneur finished his sixty-six days on a Tuesday in late spring. The artist finished hers the same week — they'd started together, without coordinating, because proximity creates its own momentum.
Neither of them posted about it. Neither of them told anyone. The entrepreneur's co-founder noticed that he was different — sharper in morning meetings, calmer under pressure, less reactive to bad news — but attributed it to a good quarter. The artist's gallery noticed that her output had increased and her work had deepened, but attributed it to inspiration.
Nobody attributed it to the alarm clock. Nobody attributed it to the sixty-six mornings of cold floors and dark rooms and reluctant journal entries. Nobody saw the trail being paved. They only saw the road, and assumed it had always been there.
Riley knew. He always knew. He'd seen it a hundred times — the invisible construction, the underground foundation work, the long flat line that precedes the exponential curve. He'd walked his own sixty-six days decades ago, in a different country, in a different life, with a different version of himself that he barely recognized anymore.
That version had been afraid of the dark. Not literally — metaphorically. Afraid of the quiet hours when there was nothing to distract him from the question of who he was becoming. Afraid that the answer might be: nobody. Afraid that without the noise and the motion and the constant stimulation, he'd discover an emptiness at the center of his life that no amount of success could fill.
The sixty-six days hadn't filled it. They'd done something better. They'd taught him that the emptiness wasn't empty. It was just quiet. And the quiet was where everything that mattered — clarity, creativity, courage, calm — had been waiting for him to stop talking long enough to hear it.
He didn't share this with the entrepreneur or the artist. Not yet. Some lessons can only be learned by walking the trail yourself. No amount of description prepares you for the feeling of Day 67 — the morning after the morning after the morning, when the alarm is an afterthought and the routine is a reflex and the person who couldn't imagine waking at five is a stranger you vaguely remember being, the way you remember a childhood nickname you outgrew.
That person isn't gone. That person is the foundation. Everything you were — the late nights, the obsessive bursts, the boom-and-bust cycles, the raw talent and the raw chaos — is still there, still you, still the fuel. The sixty-six days didn't replace you. They organized you. They took the same energy and gave it structure. Like a river that floods and destroys when it runs wild, but generates power when it runs through a dam.
You are the river. The routine is the dam. And sixty-six days is how long it takes to build one.