About six months ago a doctor told me something wasn't right.
Nothing dramatic, nothing you'd put in a newsletter for sympathy. But enough that the word cardio stopped being a thing I'd get round to and started being a thing I had to actually do.
So I did what every experienced founder does… I built a plan ASAP.
Five sessions a week in my iPhone notes. Tracked. Logged.
It lasted about two and a half weeks.
Then one of the girls got sick. Then I got sick. Then a NOVOS week from hell. Then I just… didn't go. Four weeks of nothing.
The old version of me would've spiralled & just written off the month. Started again Monday. You know the loop.
This time I didn't.
I went on walks. Long ones. I pushed harder at home, the kind of sessions where you’re carrying both heavy-ass kids around the house at max intensity because they’re bored. I moved, just not the way I'd planned to.
And when I went back to the gym, I wasn't behind. I was fine tbh… better in some ways.
That's when it clicked.
I've spent years being sold consistency as the answer.
Show up every day, don’t break the chain. The compounding power of small daily actions.
It's a beautiful idea. It's also content written by people who've never had twin babies, never run a company through a bad quarter & never had their body tell them to slow down.
Real life doesn't move in straight lines, or at least mine certainly doesn't!
I have weeks where I post every day and weeks where I post nothing. Training blocks where I'm dialled in and stretches where surviving the day with kids at the weekend is the workout.
And here's what I've noticed: the output keeps coming.
Not because I'm consistent. Because I'm honest about the season I'm in, and I adapt instead of quitting.
The trap with consistency isn't the effort. It's the all-or-nothing wiring it builds into your head.
Miss a day, miss a week, miss a month and suddenly you're "off the wagon," starting over, beating yourself up for not being the person on the productivity podcast.
That story is the thing that kills you. Not the missed sessions.
Leaders I respect don't run on metronomes, they run on intensity and recovery. They go hard for a stretch, ease off, come back. Athletes have known this for fifty years & they call it “periodisation”. Somehow business leaders are still being told to grind every day at the same volume forever.
The girls taught me this faster than any book could. You cannot have a routine with two small humans whose needs change every three weeks. You can only have principles and the willingness to adapt the routine around them, again and again.
I'm not consistent, I'm committed. There's a difference.
Consistent means I do the same thing every day. Committed means I don't stop, even when the shape of the doing has to change.
The gym became walks. The walks became wrestling-with-babies cardio. The newsletter goes out Wednesday, except when it doesn't, and the world keeps turning, and the next one is better for the gap.
Six months in, my health markers are moving the right way. Efforia is growing. NOVOS is doing well. The girls are, somehow, even more chaotic.
None of it came from consistency.
All of it came from refusing to quit when consistency broke.
See you next week.
— Antonio