2,243 days on Duolingo. Not a typo.
Seven years. French, then Turkish, now Spanish. Dozens of ten-minute lessons. A low-key smugness about being “consistent.”
And my Spanish is still nowhere near B2.
Something clicked this week during pull-up warm-ups. Thinking about my November Spanish deadline. How far I still am from it. That’s when it dawned on me:
I don’t have a consistency problem. I have a volume problem.
Consistency and persistence aren’t the same thing. One maintains something. The other attains something. And for years, I’ve been mistaking the first for the second.
Today in 5 minutes or less, you’ll learn:
✔️ A small experiment to test if your habit is actually moving you forward
✔️ A question that reveals the gap between what you do and what you actually want
✔️ Why consistency might be the thing keeping you stuck at your current level
Doable ideas 💭
Pick one habit you’re proud of being “consistent” with this week, and stress test it. Add a rep. Lengthen the session. Raise the difficulty by one notch.
For me this week, it meant doing 10 sets of pull-ups for two sessions instead of my usual 4. My healing hand hated me. I needed resistance band for the last 3 sets usually. That’s the point.
If the habit can’t handle a little more weight, it was probably maintaining you, not advancing you.
Reflections 🪞
If I keep doing this habit at my current level for the next 6 months, what outcome will I actually get, and is that what I want?
Mindfulness 🧘🏻♀️
Let me show you what I mean with the two goals I’m chasing this year.
Spanish. Aiming for B2 by November — actually considering the DELE exam. I’ve been doing Duolingo daily for seven years across different languages. Five minutes. Sometimes ten. Mostly keeping the streak alive before bed, tapping through sentences about finding a pink island and cats eating croissants.
“I’m being consistent. I’m doing the work.”
The streak is impressive. The Spanish is not.
B2 doesn’t come from five minutes of gamified vocab. B2 comes from holding a fifteen-minute conversation with my partner about how my day went — fumbling through past tense, expressing opinions, getting corrected, trying again. It comes from listening to podcasts where I don’t catch every word and choosing to keep going. It comes from writing journal entries in Spanish and feeling stupid about the grammar and the gaps.
Duolingo is great for getting from zero to A1. It doesn’t take you past it. And no amount of doing the same five minutes harder gets you there.
Calisthenics. I want a clean muscle-up by the end of this year.
For months: pull-ups twice a week. Three or four sets. Consistent. Felt good.
Muscle-up? Nowhere closer.
What actually moves the needle is 10 sets in a session, twice a week. The kind that makes your back ache the next morning. The kind that takes proper time and recovery to schedule. Not comfortable. Not maintainable forever. Necessary.
Here’s the trap: consistency feels productive. Streaks are addictive. Showing up daily becomes its own identity — and after a while, you stop asking whether the showing up is actually doing anything. I confused the habit for the outcome for years. Duolingo streak equals Spanish progress. Pull-up sessions equal muscle-up progress. Showing up equals moving forward.
It doesn’t. Not after a certain point.
Consistency gets you to a level. Persistence — the willingness to keep pushing into the uncomfortable — gets you past it.
Most of us, once we hit our level, keep grinding the same rep. Same five minutes. Same three sets. Same comfortable version of the work, year after year, wondering why nothing changes.
The answer isn’t more discipline. It’s more honesty. Look at what you’re actually doing and ask whether it matches what you actually want.
If the gap is wide, the habit needs to grow. Not the streak.
So this week: Spanish input up to at least an hour a day. More 15-minute conversations with my partner. It will be awful. He’s a native speaker. I’ll feel like a toddler. And it will do more for my Spanish than another 2,243 days with the green owl.
What’s your version of that?
Pick one goal you say you want. Look at the habit underneath it. Ask, plainly: is this habit sized for the goal — or sized for your comfort?
If the answer is comfort, you already know what to do.
Ideas Worth Pondering 🧠
As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education. Otherwise, we are dooming ourselves to a sort of self-imposed ignorance.
– Ryan Holiday, Ego is the Enemy
Did you enjoy this article?
If so, please let me know by either:
- #1: Forwarding this to a friend whom you think would benefit from actionable well-being tips
- #2: Hitting reply. Send me a sentence or two about what you enjoyed. I meant it when I say I’d love to hear from you. Typing into the void isn’t nearly as fun as interacting with real humans 🙂