Did I complete the 75 Hard Challenge? You be the judge.
Utah
Actually, I don't give a shit what you think. (And if you've been reading my work for any length of time, you won't be surprised by that.)
So, let's talk about why that is.
The arbitrary rules of 75 Hard
75 Hard is a "challenge" that has become social media-famous and completed by millions of people around the world. The founder of the challenge, who's enough of a shithead conspiracy theorist that I won't name him here, claims that 75 Hard isn't "a new fitness program or challenge" but is instead "a transformative mental toughness program." As I argued in my first article, calling this a "challenge" is a little embarrassing. All the tasks wrapped up in the "challenge" are merely the daily tasks required for living a healthy life.
But perhaps some people out there are living so out of alignment with what it means to be a flourishing human being that they need to be "challenged" to get back into alignment. If that's the case, then fair enough.
Here are the basic tasks which you must complete every single day, for 75 days, to complete 75 Hard:
One 45-minute workout
One 45-minute outdoor workout
Read 10 pages of nonfiction per day
Follow a diet (no cheat meals allowed) and don't drink alcohol
Drink 1 gallon of water
Take a status picture
After 75 days spent following these arbitrary rules, I think I've earned the right to deconstruct this "challenge."
Did I complete the 75 Hard Challenge?
I have the damnedest time following anybody else's stupid fucking rules. My rebellious, anti-establishment streak is why I don't enjoy organized competitive sports loaded with arbitrary rules. It's also why I'm sometimes the only person willing to ask a question on an all-hands call with 400 people on it: I don't take anyone's bull shit at face value, and I'm always willing to chart my own course. I'm playing my own game.
So when it came to 75 Hard, I opted to make it more difficult by mandating that I get my checkmark in the "Happiness" meditation app every day for 75 days, too.
I also tweaked the fitness challenge a bit. Official challenge guidelines say that you can't simply complete one 1.5-hour outdoor exercise to qualify for both 45-minute workouts and, instead, that you have to do two separate workouts that are time-separated. This makes sense to me, as that's part of what makes this challenge a bit more difficult.
"But what if," I asked myself, "I'm out for over 3 hours on a ride or a hike? What if I literally DOUBLE the minimum time requirement in one activity?"
I realized that if I doubled the minimum time requirement, I could have theoretically done one 45-minute workout, rested for an hour and a half, and done another 45-minute workout in the same span of time.
Instead, if I head out for a 3-hour mountain bike ride, I was then active for the entire time, effectively showing how embarrassingly easy it is to fit two 45-minute workouts into your day. So, I chose to count one 3-hour workout as covering both workouts.
If you have a problem with this, well, let's expand the time horizon. What if I was out there for 4 hours? Or 6 hours — 4x the minimum time. Or what if someone does 12 hours — 8x the minimum time?
While I didn't get any 12-hour rides in, I did enjoy a few that passed the 6-hour mark. If that's not enough output to qualify for the challenge, then you can fuck right off.
However, there was one day when I may have technically screwed up. One night, I forgot to take my progress picture, and I didn't realize it until the next morning when I quickly snapped a selfie.
"Oh shit, Greg didn't do it," I hear you say. "Greg forgot one of his progress pictures until 6am the next morning! That means that he failed. He FAILED the 75 Hard Challenge!
Are you going to spend your entire life living by someone else's fucking rules?
If you think I'm a failure because I missed one progress picture by six hours, that I didn't complete the challenge, then I have one question for you: Are you going to spend your entire life living by someone else's completely arbitrary list of rules?
Life is raw, rugged, and painful. It's filled with challenges, difficulties, and setbacks. But in the midst of this pain and struggle, one of the truly beautiful aspects of human existence is that we always get to choose. No matter how bleak the circumstances may seem, we always have a choice. We choose how to act in the face of our challenges.
By choosing to follow an arbitrary set of rules through life, you relinquish your one superpower: your autonomy. Your ability to chart your own course and shape existence in the way you see fit.
Yes, I think there's some value in setting out guidelines about how you want to live. You can even temporarily adopt certain rules in order to challenge yourself. And yes, there's great value in finishing what you start. But simply subscribing to some random-ass person's "LIVEHARD Program" in the hope that it will somehow transform your life misses the point.
You don't transform your life by blindly following in somebody else's footsteps. You transform your life by making your own voluntary choices to improve it.
There is still room for inspiration
While I firmly believe that you need to choose for yourself which guidelines to insert into your life, I think there's still plenty of room for us to be inspired by the choices that other people have made, and consider whether or not we should adopt them for ourselves. For example, I read Rich Roll's memoir and decided that I could try out a vegan diet and simultaneously eliminate alcohol from my life. And the results have been incredible.
Being able to learn from people who have done extraordinary things in their own lives is a superpower. When we see someone inspiring, we can choose to try some of their healthy habits on for size and see if they work for us. In my mind, that type of experimentation is entirely different from subscribing to a "program" that claims it will transform your entire life through bathroom selfies and excessive water consumption.
A healthy path to adopting a new guideline or rule for life follows a repeatable formula:
You're inspired by someone else's example
You freely choose to adopt some new rule, guideline, or goal
You test it out in your personal life to see if it works for you
If the new goal/rule/guideline benefits you, then you can choose to adopt it long-term once the initial test is complete
If we approach these sorts of challenges with this healthy mindset, and consider challenges to be a "test" after which we might adopt a habit long-term, then great.
But as I've argued, there's really very little to learn from the 75 Hard Challenge. In my opinion, the single best thing it has going for it is that it encourages people to go outside and be active, every single day.
