Never Let the Hard Days Win
Between 2017-2018, I made a bet on myself that nearly cost me the thing I'd already built.
I'd put real money - close to $35k - into chasing the idea of becoming a professional speaker. And while I was staring up at that mountain, I took my eyes off the business we'd actually built.
Over the next year, I watched it start to come apart.
The summer of 2018 was the lowest online sales stretch Compete Every Day had ever had since shirts were being sold (and stocked) in the trunk of my car. I sat in my office running numbers I didn't want to look at, second-guessing every decision that got me there.
Rock bottom.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I put four words on a shirt: Never let the hard days win.
I told myself it was for our community. The truth is I printed it because I was the one who needed to read it.
Here's the part it took me years to understand: how I wrote it mattered as much as what it said.
In 2014, researchers at Michigan and Berkeley ran seven experiments with 585 people, putting them through the things most of us dread β making a first impression on a stranger, delivering a speech with almost no time to prepare.
One group worked through their nerves using "I." The other group used "you," or their own first name. You can handle this. Jake, you've done hard things before.
Raters who had no idea which group anyone was in scored the second group as performing better. And the effect held strongest for the most anxious people in the room - the ones most likely to fold.
In plain English:
When you talk to yourself the way you'd talk to a friend you believe in, you get just enough distance from the panic to think clearly.
That's my Shore Principle in four words on a cotton shirt. Fog rolls in 0 the bad quarter, the diagnosis, the season that refuses to break your way - and the first thing you lose isn't your ability.
It's your line of sight.
The words you repeat become the ceiling you compete under, and in a hard season most of us are quietly repeating I don't know how much longer I can do this.
Take 10 minutes today and write the one sentence you need to read for the next 90 days.
Two rules.
1.Write it in second person β you, not I - and make it an instruction, not a feeling.
Never let the hard days win is an instruction. I hope this gets easier is a wish.
2. Then put it somewhere you can't avoid: phone lock screen, bathroom mirror, laptop lid, the inside of your gym bag.
Somewhere it hits you before the day starts, not somewhere you'll find it when you go looking for it. Read it out loud once each morning this week.
Out loud matters - that's the version your brain can't skim past.
The fog doesn't ask whether you're ready for it. But it doesn't get to pick your words.
Go compete.