THE SHOW UP CHALLENGE
90 days. 90 promises. 90 pieces of evidence you're someone who shows up
"I NEVER FOLLOW THROUGH"
You say you'll get up at six, and you're still in bed at eight. You say this is the week you start, and it’s Wednesday and you haven’t.
Breaking promises to yourself once or twice isn’t that bad. But break them over and over again, and sooner or later “not following through” becomes the default expectation.
And once that's the expectation, you stop moving. You still end up somewhere. You just don't get a say in where.
It looks like a discipline problem from the outside. It’s really a self-trust problem. You’re not lazy. You just don’t believe you’ll show up tomorrow.
The part of you that commits has lost trust in the part of you that acts.
Someone who follows through doesn’t have more willpower than everyone else. They’ve kept enough promises to themselves to stop questioning whether they’ll show up.
When you fail to follow through, you blame the part of you that had to act. But look at what you asked it to do:
Eight items, eight promises, eight chances to break your word. Every day. No end date. Starting tomorrow. The standard is perfection. Eat the pizza? You failed — might as well eat the chocolate bar and skip the gym too.
No set duration. Vague goal. No system. No rule for what happens when you break a promise.
That plan wasn’t even a plan. The plan was that you'd wake up tomorrow a different person.
The answer is not to push harder, you’ve already tried that. It’s a new plan, a real plan – and a new goal.
The Show Up Challenge
You don’t hand a wrench to a guy who’s never touched a pipe and expect him to fix your sink. Before anyone can fix anything, they first need to have the capacity to do so.
The same goes for your life – you’ll never follow through on anything meaningful before you have the capacity to do so.
And that capacity is this: The ability to show up consistently whether you feel like it or not. Build that and you’ll have one of the most essential skills you need to achieve anything you want – the ability to persist in the face of discomfort and uncertainty.
Whatever it is you want to complete – be it writing a book, finishing a project or learning an instrument – there is a whole lot of time and discomfort between starting and “following through” – and surviving that gap takes a small change in your internal program:
From: IF resistance is high AND motivation is low THEN don’t show up.
To: IF resistance is high AND motivation is low THEN show up anyway.
This is the program update The Show Up Challenge is designed to help you make.
Becoming someone who follows through is the goal. But it’s achieved indirectly – you don’t aim at it — you aim at becoming someone who shows up.
The target of the Challenge is to be able to say, without a hint of doubt: "I am someone who shows up whether I feel like it or not." Because when you believe that about yourself it’s just what you do.
This is not about becoming Batman and ignoring your feelings – it’s about not letting your feelings have the last say in what you do anymore. And when your feelings stop deciding, you start moving in the direction of your word.
START THE FREE CHALLENGE
Here's how it’s done:
90 days, one promise a day — show up for exercise. Every night you put out your workout clothes. The clothes are the promise. The next day you see the workout clothes and have the opportunity to keep the promise or not. Remember – it's not "finish a full workout", it's simply "show up".
Every day, after you’ve shown up, you repeat the phrase “I show up whether I feel like it or not” – that statement paired with the evidence makes it start to feel true.
The red x is a missed day, but notice that it keeps going.
The identity isn't built overnight, and you don't lose it overnight either. Someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not doesn't stop being that person because they missed a day. They may feel bad about it, but they show up anyway – that's who they are.
There are no resets. You miss a day, you show up tomorrow. There's nothing to start over.
After a while you stop questioning whether you'll show up tomorrow – when you put out the workout clothes you know you'll put them on the next day.
The evidence tells a clean story: when I feel discomfort, I show up anyway. And once that's true, making a decision — and following through on it — starts to feel possible again.
The trust between the part of you that commits and the part that acts has now been restored.
So in light of making promises you can keep, let me tell you what to expect from this challenge:
- You won’t achieve your dream life within 90 days.
- You won’t become shredded.
- You won’t become immune to self-doubt and negative feelings.
But
- Self-doubt and negative feelings will stop having the final say in what you do.
- Whether you’ll show up or not will stop being in question.
- You’ll trust yourself to handle what you can’t predict.
What you do with this new capacity is up to you. No one can promise you'll get the results you want – but now you have what it takes to go find out.
START THE FREE CHALLENGE
Why is it free?
It’s kind of been a running joke in my family that I have a lot of ideas and new things I’m trying out, but that I never stick to them. I get a surge of inspiration and get obsessed for a while, then, when the inspiration dies down, I quit and find the next more interesting thing.
The result was a life with a bunch of half-finished projects and almost nothing completed. I was spending a lot of energy, but I wasn’t moving.
After a years of starting and prematurely quitting, I had had enough – I was going to stop trying a bunch of new things and I was going to try and figure out why I never finished anything.
I set myself a goal – though I hadn't really diagnosed the problem yet, so what I actually wrote down was "find the key to transformation in 90 days." Super vague and naive looking back, but it motivated the hell out of me.
My plan was to transform my body while building out an intricate system that helped me capture what happened every day, so I could review it every Sunday to analyze my patterns – I thought that if I could just become more aware of the patterns I would be able to change them.
90 days later I had the body transformation, but no key. And I still felt terrible.
I hadn't changed at all. I was the same person, with better photos. I was completely aware of my patterns, yet I couldn’t change them.
Only about 4 months after, after having lost most of the gains, did I realize what the key had been all along, and it was laughably obvious – the reason I got the body transformation had nothing to do with all of the data I analyzed every Sunday to become more aware of my patterns, or because I was adhering to the perfect meal plan, it was simply because I showed up every day for some type of exercise, be it walking or the gym.
This realization reignited my obsession. If I could figure out what creates consistency I would have the "key" I'd been looking for – and though it's the kind of thing anyone could read on the first page of a self-help book, it had never landed until I saw it in my own experience.
I spent the next half year digging into the mechanism behind it, and eventually got to the explanation I've tried to distill into this page.
I’ve taken The Show Up Challenge two times now – and I can say with my hand on my heart that I’ve never been as disciplined and persistent as I am now. I almost have no bad habits left – other than my unhealthy love of soda – and it’s not something I’ve consciously forced myself to do, they sort of just fell away naturally as I built the identity of someone who shows up.
It’s important to mention that this is simply my experience. This isn't a promise the same will happen to you. But if you’re anything like me, and you want to feel what it's like to finish something for once – this challenge is worth a try.
The reason it’s free is because it should be. Simple as that. I would never have trusted a random guy on the internet taking money for a challenge – I want to help people that are in a similar position to mine, that comes first.
I've built a system that supports you through the challenge – it's $59, but completely optional. The challenge is complete on its own.
If the buttons aren't working
Click this if the other links haven't worked: START THE FREE CHALLENGE
It'll take you to the checkout page. Just put in your email and click "Complete Order" — You don't have to put in any card details.
A few things people ask
What if exercise isn't my problem?
Good – this isn't about exercise. Exercise is just the training ground, chosen because it's a habit worth having anyway. You show up for it, and that becomes the evidence that you're someone who shows up whether they feel like it or not. Over time the habit and the identity feed each other.
Isn't exercising every single day risky?
Yes – if the promise were to follow through whether you feel like it or not. But it isn't. The promise is to show up. So on days you're very sore or short on sleep, you don't force yourself through an intense hour – that's how people get injured or overtrain. You pick one of the backups you set up at the start. And if you're genuinely sick or hurt, you rest, and show up again when you're better.
What if I don't have time to exercise every day?
You have time for this – because "show up" isn't "do a full workout." On a normal day you do your session. On a wrecked, slammed, no-time day, showing up might be five minutes, or putting your shoes on and doing one set. Don’t sneak in an outcome goal of “transforming my body” – because then you’ll either overtrain or not show up at all if you can’t follow through with the whole workout.
What happens when you press “Start The Free Challenge”?
You put in your email and click "Start The Challenge"
You get an email and have the option of choosing between two different themes.
There are simple instruction in the email that helps you add the challenge to your own Notion workspace.
Then you press Start, which takes you to a short introduction — what the Challenge is, what you do and why.
Then a setup page. It takes about ten minutes: your start and end dates, backup plans for the days you can't do your scheduled workout, and a workout program. There are three in the template, or you can use your own.
That's it. The setup is done. All that's left is putting out your workout clothes tonight, and putting them on tomorrow.
Every other challenge depends on you showing up for the thing. This one is about building the capacity to show up at all.
START THE FREE CHALLENGE
If you want the workout decided too
The Challenge works on its own — the System is just a help.
When you face the decision each morning — between putting the clothes on or not — you'll want there to be as little friction as possible.
Part of removing that friction is knowing what you have to do after you've put them on and showed up.
The System solves that problem.
With the help of an AI prompt, designed to build training programs for The Show Up Challenge, you create a program built around your level, experience and available equipment.
The program merges into the System, and you have everything in one place. Today's session is already laid out, the program cycles on its own, and the evidence statement comes up the moment you finish training rather than in the evening.
Start today
Not Monday. Not the first of the month.
Free, no card, no trial. You need a free Notion account. Setup takes about ten minutes.
Put your clothes out tonight.
The Show Up Challenge — Free
Years of broken promises to yourself have given your brain a lot of evidence that when you say you’ll do something, you won’t.
This evidence is what supports the old program that has been keeping you stuck for so long:
when discomfort arises → escape.
The Show Up Challenge is ninety days of collecting evidence of the opposite, to build a new program:
when discomfort arises → show up anyway.
For ninety days you focus on one habit: putting out your workout clothes every night.
The next morning there’s one decision to make: put them on, or don’t.
That’s the whole challenge. For ninety days your job is to put them on as many days as you can.
When you do, you show up for some form of exercise. Five minutes or an hour, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you showed up.
At the end of the day, you log it. You press a button that says I showed up, and you say out loud: “I show up whether I feel like it or not.”
That line, said out loud, coupled with the evidence that you did it, repeated for ninety days, makes it start to feel true.
And when you can say, without a doubt in your body: I’m someone who shows up whether I feel like it or not, that’s a sign the new program has been installed.
And that’s who you have to be to finish anything you start.
What's inside
- A 90-day tracker
- A daily showed-up / didn't-show-up log
- The line to say out loud
- A backup you pick in advance, for the days a full session isn't happening
Free. No card. Duplicates into your Notion in one click.
