Exactly 100 days ago, I made a decision to go all in on an idea I had, against popular opinion and even logic.
I decided to embrace being a jack-of-all-trades, to give myself room to explore my many interests, and to live on my own terms for 90 days.
Looking back, that is how I would describe what happened.
I am writing this to document the experience: the things I did, the opportunities that came along, what I learned, what it cost me, and how I have changed over the last 100 days. I want to tell the story as honestly as I can, including the things I understood at the time and the things I can only make sense of now.
There were things I had been thinking about for a while, things I wanted to do, things I had already started, and things I had not yet figured out how to approach. Then, at some point, those thoughts began to take a particular direction. Eventually, I decided to do something about them.
This is the story of that decision, the 90 days that followed, and what I have taken from the experience.
Reflecting on the First Half of the Year
June had just ended, and we were moving into July. I was reflecting on the first half of the year and thinking about what I wanted to do with the months ahead.
I had been making progress in several areas. My newsletter was growing, and I had been publishing consistently, week after week. From the first week, I had been writing about building momentum, and I was beginning to see the results of that consistency.
See how it spiked in July
I had also started an eight-week writing bootcamp, which was approaching its final stretch. There were articles I wanted to publish, drafts I wanted to revisit, music and other things I had created that I wanted to share. I had accumulated quite a lot of material, and one of my goals for the year was to get as much of it out into the world as possible.
I wanted to stop accumulating ideas and unfinished work and start doing more with what I already had. I wanted to publish the things I had written, share the things I had created, and move on to new work.
The problem, if I can call it that, was that new ideas kept coming.
I would think about one thing I wanted to do, then another. There were projects I wanted to start, opportunities I wanted to pursue, and things I wanted to learn by actually doing them. Some of these things had been on my mind for a while. Others were things I was only beginning to consider.
I wanted to do more than write about things. I wanted to execute.
I wanted to go all-in on business. I wanted to share my thoughts on other platforms. I wanted to own platforms and build projects. I wanted to do more of the things that required me to put something into the world, take responsibility for it, and see what happened.
Some of these things were already in motion. I had been thinking about them, discussing them, or making plans. The Brand Builders Assembly's The Builders Series, for example, was something I had planned for July. Starting an internship programme was another idea I had discussed with friends several times.
So, it wasn't as though I suddenly woke up in July with a completely new set of ambitions. There was already a lot happening in my mind and in my life.
But I was thinking about how much more I could do with all of it.
And underneath that desire to execute was another question I had been considering for some time: how do I make room for the many things I want to do?
The Question of Being a Jack of All Trades
I have multiple interests. There are different subjects I enjoy thinking about, different kinds of work I find interesting, and different things I want to create or contribute to.
I can be interested in accounting and finance, branding and strategy, writing, building communities, creating content, and a number of other things. My interests do not always sit neatly within one category, and I don't necessarily want them to.
I had been thinking about what it meant to have all these interests and abilities. I understood the practical need to communicate what I do to other people. I understood why positioning matters, why people need to understand your value, and why it can be difficult to communicate several interests without creating confusion.
But understanding those things in principle did not mean I had figured out how to apply them to my own life.
How do you communicate what you do when there are several things you genuinely care about? How do you make decisions about what to pursue when you are interested in more than one direction? How do you give one part of yourself room to grow without unnecessarily restricting the others?
I had some ideas, but I did not have all the answers.
One experience that brought some of these questions into view was the The Builders Series session on personal branding.
The flyer for our first ever session
The first Builder Series session was titled “You Are the Brand.” It was about building a personal brand and showing up more intentionally, including on LinkedIn. Peace Akanni was the guest speaker.
As the host, I could have treated the session as an opportunity to simply facilitate the conversation and listen half-heartedly to what the speaker had to say. But I decided to actively participate in the exercises.
In the course of the session, one of the questions Peace asked was “What do you want to be known for?”
It seemed like an easy answer at first, but I found that I could not give a straightforward answer.
It was not that I had nothing to say about myself or that I had no idea what I was interested in. The difficulty was that I had several things I wanted to be known for, and I had not quite figured out how to bring them together or communicate them in a way that made sense.
I understood that a person could have multiple interests. I also understood that, when communicating with people, you sometimes need to make choices about what to emphasise. But I was still working out what those choices should look like for me.
And that question connected with the other things I had been thinking about: my ideas, the projects I wanted to execute, and the desire to do more with the abilities and interests I had.
It was part of a longer process of thinking, reflecting, and trying to understand how I wanted to approach my life.
I didn't have a complete answer. I thought I would figure things out along the way.
That thought became important.
Because, at some point, I began to consider what it would mean to stop trying to resolve everything in my head before allowing myself to act.
What if I gave myself room to explore? What if I did more of the things that interested me instead of feeling that I first had to determine exactly how each thing fitted into a single identity? What if I allowed myself to try things, learn from them, and make decisions based on what I discovered?
These were not questions I answered in one sitting. They developed progressively as I thought about my interests, my plans, and what I wanted to do with the time ahead.
Eventually, I decided to do something about them.
July 14: The Decision
On July 14, I published an article titled Your Next 90 Days.
As you can see, I published this by 5am. It was something that tugged my mind all night.
The article was connected to a question I had been thinking about: what could happen over the next 90 days?
But I was also arriving at a decision about how I wanted to live those days.
I decided to embrace being a jack of all trades. I decided to give myself permission to explore my interests, pursue the things I wanted to do, and live on my own terms for the next 90 days.
That was the idea.
I wasn't setting out with a detailed plan of everything I would do between July 14 and October 12. I already had plans, projects, interests, and responsibilities, but I wasn't going to make the next 90 days depend on following a rigid script.
I wanted to do things as they came. I wanted to make room for what interested me. I wanted to stop imposing unnecessary restrictions on what I could explore or what I could allow myself to become.
The phrase I kept coming back to was:
I am not bound by rules.
I don't mean that responsibilities no longer matter, that commitments should be ignored, or that a person should do whatever they want without considering the consequences. I mean rules and expectations that needlessly restrict self-expression: the assumptions about what I should be doing, what I should be known for, or which interests I should be allowed to pursue.
I didn't want those assumptions to dictate the next three months.
If I wanted to write, I would write. If I wanted to create a video, I could create one. If I wanted to work on a business idea, I could do that. If I wanted to explore a subject, take on a project, host something, or try something new, I could give it a chance.
And if I didn't have the energy or capacity to do something, I didn't have to force myself to do it just because I had thought about it earlier.
The idea was to give myself room to live, explore, and express myself without constantly trying to fit everything into a predetermined picture.
I had a sense of what I wanted to do, but I didn't know everything that would happen. I was willing to find out.
What the 90 Days Actually Looked Like
The next 90 days were not limited to one part of my life.
This was not simply a content challenge or a period of posting more frequently on social media. Online, there were visible things I could point to: posts, videos, projects, and initiatives. But the decision itself was broader than what I published.
It affected how I approached work, the projects I took on, the things I explored, the opportunities I pursued, and the way I thought about my interests.
I wasn't trying to create a spectacle out of it. I was living my life, doing things, and allowing myself room to explore. Some activities had been planned before July. Others developed along the way. Some were things I had wanted to do for a while; others emerged from simply being active and available to new possibilities.
Here are some of the things that happened.
LinkedIn and Substack
For a period, LinkedIn and Substack were on fire.
I started showing up consistently on both platforms, publishing every day for at least about 30 days. I was writing and sharing ideas, exploring different subjects, and putting more of my thoughts into the world.
Motion at the beginning from the first week
On LinkedIn, I recorded approximately 20,000 impressions over that period.
That was significant to me, not just because of the number itself, but because it showed what could happen when I gave more attention to sharing my ideas and actually followed through.
23k Impressions in one month. 2000+% more than the previous month.
I already had a backlog of things I wanted to write and publish. I had ideas I had been sitting on, drafts that needed to be finished, and subjects I wanted to explore. The period gave me room to bring more of those things out.
I was also discovering what it felt like to share more frequently without making every post part of a carefully defined content strategy.
Some things were thought through. Others were simply things I wanted to say. I wasn't always trying to fit each post into a specific category or make every piece of content serve one narrow objective.
In the beginning
I was exploring.
And the activity itself generated information. I could see what I was interested in writing about, what I could produce, and what happened when I showed up more often.
Growing
8k! I actually wanted to make a post about it oo. I'm at 8.3k right now though
I don't know what they are looking for
Creating Videos and Sharing More Freely
I also made videos and shared more content across different platforms.
I had created videos before, so this wasn't my first experience with video content. But I approached it more intentionally during this period.
H1 videos on my Instagram
I posted things on TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Some of the content was planned, and some was more spontaneous. I wasn't following a highly structured schedule across all the platforms.
Campaign for The Builders Series - Episode 3
The point was to create and share more freely.
There is a difference between having an idea for something and actually making it. There is also a difference between saying you want to create videos and getting into the habit of recording, producing, and publishing them.
During those 90 days, I did more of the latter.
I gave ideas a chance to become actual pieces of work. I experimented with how I wanted to communicate, what I wanted to share, and how I could use different platforms.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel
Not every piece of content needed to be part of a larger campaign. Sometimes I simply had something I wanted to share, and I shared it.
That freedom mattered because it made it easier to act without having to resolve every question about strategy, positioning, or long-term direction first.
Starting the Internship Programme
Another thing I did was start an internship programme.
This wasn't an idea that appeared out of nowhere during the 90 days. I had discussed it with friends multiple times before it happened. It was already something I wanted to pursue.
But there is a difference between discussing an idea and getting it off the ground.
During this period, I moved from considering the possibility to actually doing something with it. The programme became a real commitment with work to do, people to coordinate, and an end point to work towards.
By October (23rd), the day of publishing this, the programme comes to its conclusion.
It was one of several examples of something that had previously existed as an idea becoming a concrete activity in my life.
And it wasn't the only one.
Building the Brand Builders Assembly
I continued building the Brand Builders Assembly (BBA).
The community had its own plans and activities, and there were hiccups along the way. But we kept going. I wanted to create something "sticky" that would make sure we won’t ghost for months or leave the community like every other group. And that’s why we thought of The Builders Series.
The Builder Series was one of the things I had planned for July, and it became a meaningful part of the period. We hosted four episodes, featuring five speakers in total so far.
The first session, “You Are the Brand", featured Peace Akanni and focused on personal branding and showing up more intentionally. The second, Adekunle Okuniyi, on “Your story is your strategy.” The third one, “Show Up", by Abisola Akinyemi. And the fourth, Precious Adesanya and Tiwatayo Olayinka for two days, “From Person to Brand".
As we continued, I became more comfortable with hosting sessions and managing the experience.
That change did not happen all at once. The first session felt tense. Hosting required me to think about the speaker, the audience, the flow of the conversation, the time, and the different things that could happen during a live session.
Over time, it became easier.
I gained experience. I learned how to navigate the sessions. I became more familiar with the responsibilities involved, and I had more confidence in my ability to handle them.
That mattered beyond the individual events. I could see that something which initially required more effort and attention was becoming more natural through repeated experience.
The community also continued to grow, and we kept learning about what we wanted to build and how we could serve people better.
Reviews from one of our sessions
I began thinking about bigger plans, including something for December. By that point, the thought of hosting something larger carried less tension than it would have earlier in the year.
I still had things to figure out, but I had more experience to draw on.
Developing a LinkedIn Positioning Service
I also made significant progress on a LinkedIn positioning service for professionals.
This was connected to my interest in branding, positioning, communication, and helping people present their expertise more effectively.
The idea was to help professionals think about how they show up on LinkedIn and whether their profiles and presence support the opportunities they want to pursue.
I had been thinking about how to develop the service, what it should offer, and how to communicate its value. During the 90 days, I moved further along that process.
It isn't completely finalised even now. There were still decisions to make and things to refine.
But there was progress.
That is an important distinction because projects don't always move from idea to finished product in one uninterrupted stretch. Sometimes the meaningful achievement is that you have moved a project considerably closer to becoming something real.
That was the case here.
Speaking at an Event
I also spoke at Fremack Academy on the topic “The 10x Team: The Blueprint for High Performance & Exponential Results.”
This was one subject I had been thinking about and had shared earlier in the year in my newsletter. Eventually, I got to participate in it.
Speaking at an event is different from privately thinking about a subject or writing about it. You have to organise your thoughts, communicate them to other people, and engage with the setting in which the conversation takes place.
It requires you to bring your ideas into a different environment.
I had wanted to do more of this kind of thing, and this was one of the opportunities that became part of the period.
The Personal Branding Challenge
I also ran a personal branding challenge for people in the Brand Builders Assembly.
This was another expression of my interests in branding, communication, personal development, and community building.
It involved creating an experience for other people rather than simply working on my own projects. There was a purpose behind it, material to share, and a community of people participating.
Again, the different things I was doing were not all isolated from one another. My interests often overlapped, and the projects sometimes created opportunities to apply what I knew in more than one context.
Starting The Professor Gee Brand
During this period, I also started a personal brand called The Professor Gee on Instagram.
The idea was to have a place to share things that interested me.
I didn't want every interest to require a separate explanation or to feel that I could only talk about something if it fitted neatly into an established professional category. I wanted room to explore and communicate the things I found interesting.
Professor Gee was one way of giving that interest an expression.
It was part of the broader question I had been considering: what happens when I allow myself to do more of the things I want to do instead of trying to fit every one of them into a single, tightly controlled picture?
Taking My Work More Seriously
There were also changes in my professional work.
I took my work more seriously, was trusted with more responsibilities, and had opportunities to contribute to high-impact projects that I enjoyed.
I worked on things that required me to think, solve problems, and make meaningful contributions. I also had opportunities to apply and develop different skills.
This is worth mentioning because the period was not only about things I could publish online or projects I could point to publicly. Some of the most important activity happened through the work I was doing and the responsibilities I was handling.
My professional capacity was growing, too.
I was doing more research, more thinking, more writing, and more work that required me to bring different abilities together.
Building Life and Doing Other Things
There are details I may not be able to recall immediately because so much was happening across different areas of my life. Not every activity became a major milestone, and not every project deserves its own section in this story.
But the accumulation matters.
When I look back at the period, I see a variety of activities: things I had planned, things I started, things I learned, things I created, and things I contributed to.
Some were visible to other people. Some were part of my professional work. Some were personal projects or experiments. Some were small actions that made sense in the moment but contributed to the larger experience.
Taken together, they give me a much fuller picture of what those 90 days looked like.
And this is one reason I want to document the experience in detail. If I only remembered the most visible milestones, I would miss part of the story.
The period was made up of more than its headline achievements.
The Things I Didn't Plan For
Not everything that happened during those 90 days was something I had deliberately planned.
Some of the activities were already on my list before July 14. I had been thinking about The Builder Series. I had discussed the internship with friends. I had ideas for content, projects, and things I wanted to do.
But not every outcome was planned, and not every opportunity came through a carefully laid-out strategy.
Sometimes I was simply in motion.
I was writing, creating, sharing, talking to people, participating in activities, and working on things. That activity put me in situations where other things could happen.
A post I shared casually could reach more people than something I had spent much longer planning. An opportunity could come from an experience that I had not originally approached with a specific outcome in mind. I could discover a new interest, see another possibility, or learn something about myself through doing something I had not fully considered beforehand.
A random post I made in the middle of work happened to be my highest performing post by a wide margin.
When you are constantly trying to plan everything, you can unintentionally exclude these experiences.
You may decide in advance what counts as useful, what deserves your attention, and what should be ignored because it does not fit the immediate objective. Planning is valuable, but it cannot account for everything that may emerge once you start moving.
There is knowledge you can gain by thinking through a possibility. There is also knowledge that becomes available only when you act on it.
You cannot always predict which experience will matter most.
Sometimes you have to participate in life and allow yourself to discover what is there.
This was one of the things the 90 days made more apparent to me. The value of the period was not limited to the things I set out to achieve. Some of what I gained came from experiences and opportunities that emerged because I was active and willing to engage.
I could not have planned all of it in advance.
And if I had insisted on doing only what fitted a detailed plan, I might have missed some of those things.
What It Cost Me
Looking back, I wouldn't say the decision itself came with some dramatic sacrifice. I wasn't running a formal experiment with a strict set of conditions, keeping a daily countdown, or deliberately depriving myself of things.
It was a decision about how I wanted to approach my life.
But the period did have costs.
The biggest was that I sometimes took on too much.
I could learn quickly, and I had a number of abilities I could put to use. When people knew I could handle something, they were sometimes willing to give me tasks with tight deadlines or high expectations.
I accepted many of those tasks. I wanted to do them, I believed I could do them, and I did them.
But being able to do something does not mean that taking it on is always the best decision.
I could complete tasks and still find that the volume of work affected my effectiveness, the quality of my performance, my energy, or the attention I could give to other priorities.
There were times when I was spreading myself across too many things. I was doing a lot, but that did not mean I was always applying myself to each thing in the way I would have liked.
I was also learning that having many interests can make it easier to keep adding things to your plate. If something catches my attention and I believe I can learn it, I may be tempted to pursue it. If someone needs help with a task I know how to handle, I may be willing to take it on. If a new opportunity comes along, I may see a reason to explore it.
Individually, each decision can make sense.
The problem emerges when you consider them together.
How many things can I take on at once without compromising the quality of my work, my capacity, or my ability to sustain what I have started?
I was not always asking that question carefully enough.
The result was that my energy fluctuated. I could have periods of high activity, followed by periods when I had less energy to give. I could be productive across many areas and still find it difficult to maintain the same level of intensity everywhere.
The decision to give myself freedom had opened up possibilities. But I was also learning that freedom did not remove the need to manage my capacity.
If anything, having more room to do things made that responsibility more important.
The Curse of Ability
This brings me to something I have been thinking about: the curse of ability.
I learn quickly, especially when something interests me. When I want to understand something, I can spend time with it, learn the necessary skills, and add another ability to my existing set.
That is useful. It allows me to explore different fields, work on varied projects, and bring different perspectives to the things I do.
But it can also become a burden.
When you know you can do something, it becomes easier to feel that you should do it. When you learn something new, you may begin to see more opportunities to use it. When people know you have a particular ability, they may come to you because they trust you to handle the task.
Before long, you can find yourself doing many things simply because you are able to.
And this can happen in two ways.
First, you can take on too much because of the abilities you already have. You know how to write, research, analyse, organise, create, or solve a particular problem, so you keep accepting work that requires those skills.
Second, you can keep adding new things to your life because you learn quickly. A new interest becomes a new skill, and that skill becomes another possible direction you could pursue.
There is always something else you could do.
The question is whether you should.
During this period, I accepted many high-pressure tasks with tight deadlines because I believed I could handle them. I did handle them, but I also saw how taking on too much could affect my effectiveness, performance, and energy.
I was sometimes operating from a simple sequence: I wanted to do it, I could do it, and so I did it.
What I needed to consider more carefully was whether doing it was the best use of my capacity at that particular time.
Ability without direction can become a problem. You can be capable of many things and still struggle to apply those capabilities in a way that produces the results you want.
You can become so occupied with doing things that you have less room to think about which things matter most.
You can become known as someone who can handle a lot while gradually compromising the very quality that made people trust you with those responsibilities.
The curse of ability is when there is no clarity on what you direct your ability to.
That is how I would put it.
It isn't that having multiple abilities is a problem. The issue is what happens when you do not have enough clarity about where those abilities should be directed, how much you can take on, and what deserves your attention.
I am still learning how to manage this.
The 90 days gave me room to explore, but they also showed me why exploration cannot be the only consideration. There has to be a way to decide what to pursue, what to prioritise, and what to leave alone for now.
Sometimes the most important decision is not whether you can do something. It is whether you should take it on.
Clarity Comes in Motion
One of the most important things I took from this period is that clarity comes in motion.
There are things you can think about for a long time without fully understanding them. You can read books, watch videos, listen to lectures, have conversations, and develop theories about what might happen.
Those things can be useful. They can prepare you, expose you to ideas, and help you make better decisions.
But there is a kind of knowledge that comes only from doing. I talked about this first on my article on building momentum.
Think about a seed.
You can hold a seed and think about where you might plant it. You can consider the soil, the environment, how much space it might need, and what kind of tree it could become.
You can learn about the plant and talk to people who know how to grow it.
But the seed remains a seed until you plant it.
And even after you plant it, you cannot know every detail of what it will become. You may have an idea of its potential, but you will learn more as it grows.
You cannot fully understand the tree by standing over the seed and imagining it.
The same applies to ideas, interests, and ambitions.
You can think about a business you want to start, a service you want to offer, a skill you want to develop, or a kind of work you want to do. You can imagine the possibilities and plan how you want to approach them.
But at some point, you have to do something.
You have to start, test, create, participate, and see what happens.
When you move, some of your assumptions will prove wrong. Things you thought would work may not work. Things you thought would be difficult may become easier. You may discover opportunities you could not see before you started.
And sometimes, you will realise that what you thought you wanted is not quite what you want after all.
That information is valuable.
It helps you make better decisions because you are no longer relying entirely on what you imagined would happen. You have actual experience to work with.
During these 90 days, I learned things by doing things. I became more familiar with activities I had previously only considered. I gained experience in areas where I wanted to develop. I saw how different projects worked in practice, what they required, and how I responded to them.
Some things became clearer because I tried them. Other things became clearer because I discovered what they demanded of me.
I also began to understand that clarity does not always come before action. Sometimes action is part of how you arrive at clarity.
You do not always need to know the whole path before you take the first step.
Sometimes you need enough understanding to begin, and then you learn from the journey.
Show Up With Intensity
Another thing I learned is the importance of intensity.
It is possible to be consistent in doing something and still not apply yourself fully to it. You can show up regularly without giving the activity the attention, effort, or presence it deserves.
I am learning that how you show up matters.
One example that comes to mind is a Brand Builders Assembly session.
I had a rule that the session would start at 7 p.m. We would wait for about ten minutes before proceeding with introductions and the main conversation.
On one occasion, by around 7:10 or 7:12, when I was speaking and introducing things, there was only one other person on the call besides the speaker. We had expected more people—perhaps 20 to 30.
Olatunde is the real MVP! With our Speaker, Precious, myself, and my AI friends.
It would have been easy to let the small attendance affect how I approached the session. You could look at the number of people present and decide that the occasion did not deserve much effort.
But I still spoke as though I were addressing 100 people.
I gave the session my best.
That experience is one way I think about intensity. It is not about how many people are watching, how much attention you are receiving, or whether the circumstances are ideal. It is about the effort and attention you bring to what you are doing.
If I have an hour to work on something, can I apply myself fully during that hour? If I have an opportunity to speak, can I communicate with the care and attention I would give to a much larger audience? If I am working on a project, can I give it my best effort within the time and resources available?
Intensity is not the same as frantic activity. It is not simply doing more, moving faster, or making yourself busy.
It is applying yourself fully to what you have chosen to do.
This matters when you have multiple interests because it is easy to spread yourself across many activities without giving any of them enough attention. You can have a long list of things you are doing and still struggle to make meaningful progress.
Doing many things is not the same as doing them well.
The ability to direct your attention and effort matters just as much as the number of things you can take on. Read my essay on focus.
Consistency Is Alignment, Not Frequency
One of the ideas that became clearer to me during this period is that consistency is not frequency. It is not quantity. It is alignment.
We often talk about consistency as though it simply means doing something repeatedly or doing it every day.
But repetition alone does not tell the whole story.
Consider a promise to buy food tomorrow. If I say I will buy food tomorrow and I do it, I have kept my word. I do not need to buy food every day to prove that I was consistent with that promise.
The consistency lies in the alignment between what I said I would do and what I actually did.
Or consider a signature. A signature is consistent when it corresponds with the signature you have established. It is not consistent simply because you sign your name frequently.
Branding offers another example.
Consistency in branding is not merely about using the same colours repeatedly. A brand may choose yellow because it wants to express happiness, energy, or an upbeat personality. Using yellow consistently means continuing to express the identity and meaning that the colour was chosen to represent.
If you repeat a colour without understanding the identity it is supposed to communicate, you may be repeating a visual element without being consistent with the underlying brand.
The same principle applies to other parts of life.
Suppose someone promises to publish a post every day at 7 p.m. If they honour that promise, they are consistent with the commitment they made.
Someone else may publish every day but at different times, even though they specifically promised to publish at 7 p.m. That person may be consistent in frequency, but they are not necessarily consistent with the particular commitment they made.
The distinction matters because the thing we are being consistent with must be established first.
During my 90 days, I was not promising myself that I would publish on every platform every day. I was not committing to one narrow subject, one professional identity, or one fixed routine.
The central decision was to give myself room to explore, pursue my interests, and live on my own terms.
That was the promise I was trying to honour.
Some days, I wrote. Some days, I created content. Sometimes I worked on other projects. Sometimes I had plans that I did not follow through on because something else required my attention or because I did not have the energy to do what I had intended.
If I decided to write every day for 30 days and then did not show up every day, I did not automatically treat that as a failure of the entire period. I could return to the writing, or I could decide that another activity was more appropriate at that time.
The point was not to avoid discipline or to redefine consistency whenever it became inconvenient. It was to recognise what I had actually committed to.
If I make a specific promise, I should take that promise seriously. If I establish a rhythm to achieve a particular result, I should understand what it requires and make an effort to follow it.
But I should not assume that every change in activity, every pause, or every abandoned idea means I have become inconsistent.
Sometimes the activity changes while the underlying intention remains the same.
That is an important distinction, especially when you have several interests and are trying to work out how to make room for them.
You Can Achieve a Lot in a Short Period
These 90 days also reinforced something I have been thinking about: you can achieve a lot in a relatively short period.
We often hear the idea that people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in five years.
There is truth in the importance of thinking long-term. Big ambitions may require years of work, and trying to force everything into a single year can lead to unnecessary pressure or compromise the quality of what you are building.
But I think there is another side to the conversation.
Sometimes, we underestimate what we can do in a short period and overestimate what a longer period will automatically allow us to accomplish.
A year can feel like a long time. It can make us think we have plenty of room to delay, revisit ideas indefinitely, and eventually get around to the things we want to do.
But a year is made up of smaller periods of time. What we do within those periods contributes to what the year becomes.
If you are trying to figure something out, three months can give you a meaningful amount of information. You can learn, practise, test ideas, complete projects, and discover things about yourself that would remain unknown if you spent the same period only thinking about what you might do.
That does not mean every large ambition can be completed in 90 days. It does not mean you should rush a project that needs more time. It means you should recognise the possibilities that exist within the time available.
There is so much possibility trapped in time.
Think again about the seed. What you invest in it, and what you do to help it grow, affect what eventually emerges. If you never plant it, you will never see the tree it could have become.
Part of what led to my eventual resolution
Over these 90 days, I executed things that might not have happened if I had stayed where I was, continued thinking about them, or waited until I had everything figured out.
I published more. I created more. I developed projects. I hosted sessions. I gained experience. I learned about my own capacity and the things I wanted to pursue.
Not everything was finished, and not everything produced an obvious result. But the amount of activity, learning, and development that happened within that period was meaningful.
And the gains were not limited to the things I could count.
I became more capable in different areas. My research, accounting, strategy, writing, and leadership skills developed through the work I was doing. Some things that had once required more effort became easier because I had repeated them. Experiences that might previously have felt intimidating became more familiar.
My thinking also changed. My approach to certain things shifted. I gained new perspectives and began to understand some of my own ideas more clearly.
Things that had existed in my mind as interests, plans, and possibilities began to take form in the world.
That is part of what makes a short period valuable. You are not only trying to complete a list of tasks. You are also developing the capacity to do things you could not previously do as well, or with the same confidence.
The experience compounds.
What you learn in one project can help you with another. The confidence you gain from one opportunity can make the next opportunity easier to pursue. The work you do in one area can create connections, insights, or possibilities in another.
You may begin a 90-day period with one idea of what you want to achieve and finish with a much better understanding of what is possible.
That, too, is progress.
Freedom and Structure
The 90 days gave me a kind of freedom. I was not trying to fit everything into a rigid plan, and I was not forcing every activity to serve one predetermined objective.
That freedom made it easier to explore.
But I also began to see the limits of operating without much structure.
Because I had not established specific goals for the period, I was not necessarily directing all my activity towards a particular outcome. I was doing things, learning, and exploring, but I was not always measuring my progress against a clearly defined target.
That was intentional to an extent. I wanted to give myself room to explore rather than spend the whole period trying to execute a rigid plan.
And I gained from that approach.
But if you want a specific result, freedom alone may not be enough.
You need to know what you are trying to accomplish. You need to decide what deserves your attention. And you need some way of organising your actions so that they can produce the result you want.
This is where rhythm becomes important.
Rhythm Matters for Results
I have been thinking about the relationship between consistency and rhythm.
I see consistency as alignment with an established promise or standard. Rhythm, on the other hand, is the pattern or cadence of actions that helps you achieve a particular result.
Think about music.
Music requires rhythm, timing, and a pattern that allows the notes to work together. You cannot simply play random notes at random intervals and expect the result to be the same as a piece of music played with the intended rhythm.
The same idea applies to many of the things we want to accomplish.
If I want to develop a reading habit, I might decide to read for an hour every night. That is a rhythm I can practise and build around.
If I am preparing for an examination, I might establish a study schedule and decide how much time I will devote to different subjects over several weeks.
Studying for three, five, ten, or twelve hours in one burst before an examination may feel productive, but it does not necessarily produce the same results as a rhythm of studying consistently over time.
The rhythm gives the activity a pattern. It allows effort to accumulate and makes it easier to keep returning to the work.
The appropriate rhythm will depend on the goal. It might involve doing something daily, weekly, every few days, or once a month. What matters is that you establish a pattern that makes sense for what you are trying to achieve.
During my 90 days, I had not set out with a list of specific goals and corresponding rhythms. I wanted room to explore, and that is what I gave myself.
Now, I am thinking differently about the next phase.
I still want room to explore, but I also want to be more deliberate about the things I want to accomplish. I want to understand what deserves my attention and establish the rhythms that will help me make progress.
The lesson is not that freedom is bad or that every part of life must be rigidly scheduled. It is that different intentions require different approaches.
A period of exploration can help you discover possibilities. A period of focused execution can help you turn selected possibilities into specific results.
The challenge is knowing what you need at a particular time and organising yourself accordingly.
Pursuing Multiple Goals Without Sacrificing One
Another thing I am beginning to understand is how to pursue multiple ambitions without necessarily sacrificing one for another.
When we think about our lives, we often put things into separate boxes.
There is a career box, a business box, a personal development box, a creative box, and so on. We may assume that each goal requires its own separate path and that choosing one direction means putting another on hold.
Sometimes that is true. We have limited time and resources, and there are occasions when we need to prioritise one thing over another.
But not every ambition requires an entirely separate path. Sometimes the paths overlap, and the challenge is learning how to navigate those overlaps.
Consider building a business while also building a career.
You might want to develop a business and use LinkedIn to communicate what you are building. At the same time, you might want your LinkedIn profile to support your professional career and the opportunities you hope to pursue.
Those objectives can overlap, but they may not always require exactly the same presentation.
How you position yourself for a particular career opportunity may not align perfectly with how you would present yourself if your only goal were to attract business clients. You may need to decide which objective has greater priority in a particular context and how to give the other objective room without undermining the first.
If your career is currently the higher priority, for example, you might make sure your professional positioning communicates the expertise and credibility relevant to that path. You can then use another platform or channel to give your business more room to develop.
That does not mean hiding one part of yourself or pretending the other ambition does not exist. It means understanding that different contexts serve different purposes and making deliberate choices about how to navigate them.
I am beginning to see that pursuing multiple goals does not necessarily mean trying to do everything at once. It may mean understanding the relationship between the things you want, deciding what takes priority, and finding ways to make room for different ambitions over time.
There is also a limit to how neatly I can explain this right now.
Some of these insights become clearer when I am dealing with a real situation that requires me to make a decision. I may have a sense of what I need to do, but the full understanding comes when I encounter the tension, work through the options, and see the consequences.
That is another example of why experience matters.
You can think about the principles in advance, but some of the wisdom comes from having to apply them to your own life.
October 12: The 90 Days Came to an End
The 90 days came to an end on October 12.
I know the date now because I have looked back at the timeline, but I wasn't consciously counting every single day as the period progressed.
I may have paid attention to the first 30 or 40 days, but I wasn't keeping a strict daily countdown. I was occupied with the things I was doing, the work I was handling, and the other parts of my life.
I kept going.
I continued writing, creating, working, building, and pursuing different interests. The period did not feel like a separate activity that I had to complete before returning to my normal life. It was simply how I had decided to approach those days.
So, when the 90 days ended, there wasn't a particular moment when I stopped and declared the experiment complete.
I was already moving into other things.
In fact, on October 2, I had started another 90-day challenge that would take me towards the end of the year. This time, I was sharing material, resources, and encouragement in a group every day to help people think about what they could do over their own 90-day periods.
That challenge had already begun before the first period officially ended.
But over the last ten days or so, I had started reflecting more deliberately on what had happened.
I was thinking about what I had achieved, how much I had done, what I had learned, and what I wanted to do next. I was also thinking about the projects ahead of me, the plans I had for December, and the things I wanted to work towards in the first quarter of the following year.
There were many ideas.
My energy, however, was not always matching the number of ideas I had.
I could see possibilities and think about what I wanted to do, but I was also becoming more aware of the need to slow down and take stock.
The Last Ten Days: Looking Back and Slowing Down
Over the last ten days, I have been in a more reflective period.
I have been thinking about the things that have happened and feeling grateful for the progress I have made. I have been looking at the different areas of my life, considering what I have learned, and thinking about what I want the next phase to look like.
At the same time, I have noticed that my energy has not always been as high as it was during periods of intense activity.
For a while, my to-do list could contain around 15 items on an ordinary day. Recently, there have been days when I have reduced that list to just two items.
I have been allowing myself to slow down, breathe, and regulate my energy.
This is partly a response to what I have learned about taking on too much. I do not want to keep accepting responsibilities simply because I can handle them. I do not want to become so occupied with doing things that I have no room to think about what I am doing, why I am doing it, or whether I have the capacity to sustain it.
I want to be more deliberate about how I use my time and energy.
I am also recognising that periods of intense activity and periods of reflection can serve different purposes. Sometimes I need to be out there doing things. At other times, I need to step back, review what has happened, and decide what to do with what I have learned.
The challenge is not to remain at maximum intensity all the time. It is to know how to apply myself when it matters and how to recover and make adjustments when necessary.
I am still thinking through what this means for me.
But I can see that the last 100 days have changed the way I approach some of these questions.
I am not starting from exactly the same place I was in July. I have more experience, more information, and a better understanding of some of my strengths and limitations.
I have seen what I can do when I give myself room to explore. I have also seen what happens when I take on too much without paying enough attention to my capacity.
Both parts matter.
What I Want to Do Differently
One of the things I want to do differently is become more intentional about what I take on.
I do not want to stop exploring my interests or limit myself unnecessarily. That was the point of the decision in the first place, and I still value the freedom to pursue things that matter to me.
But I want to be more deliberate about where I direct my abilities.
I want to distinguish between something I can do and something I should do at a particular time. I want to think about the responsibilities I already have before adding new ones. I want to consider whether a new opportunity fits with what I am trying to achieve and whether I have the capacity to do it well.
I also want to establish clearer rhythms for the things I want to accomplish.
The first 90 days were useful because they gave me room to explore without requiring every activity to fit into a predetermined plan. I learned from that freedom.
But I now have a better understanding of some of the things I want to pursue, and I can begin to organise my time and effort around them.
I want to give specific goals the kind of attention they require. I want to decide what progress should look like and establish patterns that will help me make that progress.
And I want to keep documenting what happens.
That last part matters more to me now than it might have before the experience.
When you are busy doing things, it is easy to move from one activity to another without taking the time to understand what has happened. You may remember the major achievements, but forget the smaller decisions, the unexpected opportunities, the difficulties, and the gradual changes that shaped the experience.
You may know that you were busy but not have a clear account of what that busyness produced.
You may know that you have changed but struggle to explain what changed, why it changed, and what you learned along the way.
Looking back at the 90 days has given me an opportunity to connect the events and understand them as part of a larger journey.
I can see how certain decisions led to particular activities, how some opportunities emerged unexpectedly, where I made progress, and where I need to make adjustments.
I can also see that some of the most valuable things I gained were not necessarily the things I would have identified as goals at the beginning.
Without taking the time to document and reflect, I might have moved on to the next set of activities without fully recognising what the previous period had taught me.
I do not want to lose that opportunity in the next 90 days.
Your Life Will Change in 90 Days
I have already started another 90-day challenge, which began on October 2 and will take me towards the end of the year.
The phrase I keep coming back to is:
Your life will change in 90 days.
I have written about this idea before several times. Whether you are actively pursuing something or allowing the days to pass, your life will change over the next 90 days. Time will move, circumstances will change, and you will arrive at a different point from where you started.
The question is what you will do with that time.
My first 90 days showed me that a relatively short period can contain a lot of activity, learning, development, and unexpected possibilities. If you give yourself room to act and apply yourself, you may accomplish more than you expected.
But I want the new challenge to mean more than simply getting people to do a lot of things.
I want it to help people document their journeys.
At the end of a 90-day period, how will you know what you have achieved? How will you remember the things that happened, the decisions you made, the obstacles you encountered, and the opportunities that emerged? How will you understand what worked, what did not, what you learned, and what you want to do differently next time?
You might remember a few major milestones. You might remember the project you completed, the goal you reached, or the thing you finally had the courage to try.
But what about everything in between?
What about the small steps that led to the outcome? The things that surprised you? The plans that changed? The days when you made progress in a way you did not expect? The things you learned about yourself while trying to do what you set out to do?
These are part of the journey, too.
I am able to give an account of my own 90 days because I have been reflecting on what happened and connecting the different experiences. I can point to the things I did, but I can also examine the decisions, patterns, and lessons that emerged from them.
That record gives me something to work with as I move forward.
I can decide what to continue, what to change, what to stop doing, and what deserves more attention. I can use what I have learned to approach the next period more intelligently.
That is what I want other people to be able to do, too.
I want someone to go through their own 90 days, look back at the end, and be able to tell the story of what happened. I want them to capture the milestones, the small wins, the difficult moments, the surprises, the lessons, and the changes they experienced.
Not just to have proof that they were busy, but to understand what the experience meant.
Because a documented journey can become a source of knowledge. It gives you something to reflect on, something to learn from, and something to use as you decide what comes next.
You do not have to wait until you have achieved something extraordinary before you begin documenting your life. You can record the process as it unfolds. You can capture what you are trying, what you are learning, what you are struggling with, and what is changing.
Then, when the period ends, you have more than a vague memory of having done a lot of things. You have a record you can return to and learn from.
That is part of the purpose of the next 90 days for me.
I want to pursue specific goals, establish better rhythms, and be more intentional about how I use my capacity. But I also want to pay attention to the journey itself: to record what happens, reflect on it, and use the experience to make better decisions about the next phase.
The point is not only to arrive somewhere. It is also to understand how you got there.
One Hundred Days Later
When I look back at July 14, I can see the decision that started this period and the many things that followed from it.
I wanted to give myself room to explore, do more of what interested me, and stop imposing unnecessary restrictions on what I could pursue.
Over the following 90 days, I published, created, built, hosted, worked, learned, and tried different things. Some were activities I had planned before the period began. Others emerged along the way. Some produced visible results, while others gave me experience and information I can use later.
I also learned about the costs of taking on too much, the limits of ability without direction, the importance of intensity, the difference between consistency and rhythm, and the kind of clarity that comes from doing.
I have a better understanding of how much can happen in a short period. I have also become more aware that being capable of many things does not mean I should pursue all of them at once.
I am learning how to give my interests room without allowing them to pull me in every direction. I am learning to consider my capacity, establish priorities, and create rhythms that support the results I want.
And I am learning the value of documenting a journey.
When I began, I could not have described every detail of what the next 90 days would contain. I did not know every opportunity that would emerge or every lesson I would learn. I had ideas, interests, and a decision about how I wanted to approach the period.
Now I have an account of what happened. I can look at the events, the work, the changes, and the lessons, and use them to think more intelligently about what comes next.
That is one of the things I want to carry into the next 90 days.
I want to keep doing things, but I also want to pay attention to what those things are teaching me. I want to make progress towards my goals without losing sight of the experiences and decisions that shape that progress.
I want to be able to look back at the end of the year and give another honest account of what happened—not just a list of achievements, but a record of the journey and the wisdom it produced.
There is still a lot I want to do. There are projects to build, ideas to explore, responsibilities to handle, and goals to pursue. I do not have everything figured out, and I am not expecting to.
But I have learned that I do not need to understand everything before I begin.
Sometimes I need to think. Sometimes I need to plan. Sometimes I need to act, pay attention, and allow the experience to teach me what I could not have learned by thinking alone.
I began with a decision to give myself permission to explore.
One hundred days later, I have more experience, more information, and a better understanding of what I want to do with what I have.
And I am glad I tried.
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Thanks! 😇