Mouthing Verbatim
- nick Brickell
- May 10
- 2 min read
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Will Durant (summarizing Aristotle)
Simple premise: make 2025 better than 2024 by tracking daily and weekly habits together with a friend. No exactly original, just a long list of minor course corrections that might add up to something decent.
Food is a problem. Less beige, more structure. Less impulse takeaways, more “we actually planned this meal and aren’t scrambling at 6:30 PM.” Lofty goal: zero takeaways for the year. Reality check: immediate failure. But progress is progress, and Friday night pizza is still sacred. The true win is not making that decision at the last second in a fit of hunger-induced despair.
Exercise is life. The goal? Fourish high-intensity workouts a week. The experience? Pain. Forty-year-old bodies don’t love sudden bursts of movement, but consistency seems to be working. The scale, however, remains an untrustworthy narrator. Best to ignore it and focus on the fact that pants fit better and climbing stairs isn’t as tragic as it once was.
Reading please. Less, actually, no doomscrolling, more bookscrolling. A fine idea, but defining it helps. One book a month, maybe two. Switching between fiction and non-fiction, or at least mixing the mind-numbing (hello, Jack Reacher) with something that requires slightly more brain engagement. Apparently, reading sailor adventure books is a new hyperfixation. No one knows why.
Meditation is avoiding me. It has been life-altering in the past, so why is it impossible to restart? No good answer. Just resistance. The kind where you know it’s good for you but can’t get it in the schedule, like flossing. A work in progress.
Others goals floated in: spending more time outside, connecting with people in meaningful ways (not just via memeingful), cutting back on screens, and creating more — writing, music, or just something that exists outside a work email. All excellent ideas, all equally susceptible to being abandoned.
So that’s where we’re at. No epiphanies, no breakthroughs, just a few habits in motion and a running commentary on how it’s all going. No promises of life transformation, but maybe some relatable failure and the occasional win.
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