Are Cycles Meant to be Broken

Anytime I have time to relax on the weekend or after doing work, I watch Suits in the background and play Pokémon Showdown Gen 6 random battles. Yes, I know. Peak life.

Also, I was Mike Ross and my friend Sumer was Harvey Specter for Halloween, so yes, I am quite a tuff human being.

But it’s kinda funny because I’ve been doing the same thing since COVID, and it’s been six years. It’s not a harmful cycle. It doesn’t interrupt any other aspect of my life. It’s just something I kinda do. Watching the same shows over and over again, playing the same games, eating the same guilty treats. But it’s also the same workouts, the same work ethic, and a lot of the same mindset.

I don’t really know how to change. And I don’t think most people do.

Change is something I’ve written about before, but it’s such a weird thing because there are so many ways to go about it. Delete social media. Go to the gym. Join clubs. Learn a new skill. Travel. Basically everything you already hear during your reels session.

People try to change all the time. New gym memberships, deleting DoorDash, setting screen-time limits. Sometimes it works. A lot of the time, you end up exactly where you started.

In my first book, Right or Wrong, I wrote a chapter called Comfort in the Known. The idea was that humans love clinging to familiar cycles because the unknown is scary.

I used an example of going to a Post Malone concert by myself in Boston. Post Malone meant a lot to me growing up. I used to listen to him on the bus in Singapore, staring out the window, so even after he changed genres, I still had that attachment to his older music. When I saw he was performing at Gillette and none of my friends wanted to go, I bought a ticket and went alone.

It was awkward at first. I got there way too early, kept checking my phone, and felt weird sitting alone while everyone else came with friends. But the concert was amazing, and it became one of my favorite memories.

That whole day only happened because I broke a comfort cycle. Normally, if nobody wanted to go, I wouldn’t go. That time I did. But even though one moment like that can spark change, it often doesn’t change your entire life.

This post isn’t about how to change. It’s more about why so many people are desperate to change everything.

A lot of people have similar goals. Get smarter. Get richer. Get fitter. Find someone. Become more social. Read more. Make more money. Lift more weight. All good goals on paper.

But if you stayed somewhat similar to who you are right now, would that automatically be a bad thing? Would you genuinely care if you never hit every number you set for yourself?

I’m not sure. I struggle to imagine being on my deathbed thinking, damn, if only I made another $50,000 or read ten more books that year.

The other part of this is quitting things you genuinely enjoy because you think they’re stopping you from becoming some optimized version of yourself. If quitting Pokémon Showdown genuinely transforms your life, then fair enough. Me and Electivire strongly disagree though.

But a lot of quitting doesn’t seem like it actually benefits the goal. Watching Suits and playing Showdown isn’t going to 10x my work.

So maybe the better question isn’t: Are cycles meant to be broken?

Maybe it’s: Does quitting this cycle actually change anything?

Am I removing something I enjoy for a 5% improvement that I probably won’t even notice?

There are successful people who play video games, doomscroll reels, party, watch TV, and waste time. We can say “balance” and other buzzwords, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that.

Instead of constantly removing pleasure from our lives, we could focus more on the cycles around the actual work. How do you work? When do you work? Are you actually moving in the right direction?

Not in a productivity-guru way. Just whether the work you’re doing is genuinely moving you forward.

I think people spend so much time changing the system around the work. New productivity app. Delete Instagram. Wake up at 5 a.m. Watch Alex Hormozi.

Funny enough, since I mentioned him, there’s one quote of his that I actually think has some merit:

“90% of success can be boiled down to doing obvious, simple things for an extraordinary period of time.”

Is that the part people overlook? Work often doesn’t feel productive while you’re doing it. Some days you work three hours. Some days six. Some days you solve one difficult problem. Some days you do boring stuff that doesn’t feel meaningful at all.

That doesn’t mean nothing happened.

I don’t think every work session has to be six hours straight, no reels, no fun, completely locked in. If you’re doing the important things consistently, that compounds.

Something I don’t really like admitting is that I learned this through the gym.

I used to try training six times a week. Then work would get busy, I’d feel fatigued, miss a few days, take some rest, and try going back to six again. Then five. Then three. Then six. Then two. Then back to six.

Eventually I started going three times a week and training hard, two sets to actual failure per exercise and only 3–5 exercises per day. And weirdly, I became more consistent. I had more rest. It was easier to fit into my life. I stopped constantly feeling like I was behind.

More sessions had actually led to fewer sessions overall.

Going from six days to three felt like going backwards, but the smaller cycle survived.

I also think that’s why so many New Year’s goals fail. People don’t say, “Once a week I’m going to talk to someone new.” They say, “I’m going to become more social.”

The goal becomes so large that you spend more time imagining the new version of yourself than actually becoming them. Change doesn’t always mean breaking the cycle. Sometimes it means shrinking it until you can actually keep it.

And some cycles don’t need to change at all.

Watching Suits for the hundredth time isn’t holding my life back. Playing Pokémon Showdown probably isn’t either, unless it’s obviously preventing me from doing work. Some cycles trap you. Some cycles keep you comfortable. Some cycles keep you grounded.

Cycles don’t need to be broken. They can be adapted toward the same goal, just with easier tasks every day. Funny enough, that can lead to compounding results.

I lowkey gotta win some more Showdown battles though. I swear I keep getting Delibird.