Round 2, Day 6
Friday, February 20, 2026
I’m going to be honest with you — I’m exhausted. Today involved picking up seventy pressure-treated boards for my wife’s garden, personally lifting them about a hundred and fifty times between loading, unloading, and repositioning. On legs that were already sore from Wednesday’s workout. It was a full day.
But everything got done. All seven habits. Book covers finished for both of my novels. And a decision I’ve been circling for a while finally locked into place: my first book is going up on Kindle. Soon.
All of that said, I have a thought for you tonight. And it has nothing to do with lumber.
More Capable Than You Think
Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Not intelligence. Not credentials. Not how many facts you can memorize or how high your test scores were. Imagination. Creativity. The ability to see things differently and do something unique with what you see.
That idea has been sitting with me all day.
Because here’s what I’ve learned over forty-six days of this challenge: we are infinitely more capable than we think we are. And the thing that unlocks that capability isn’t discipline alone, and it isn’t grinding harder. It’s creativity.
These daily habits I’ve been practicing — the reading, the writing, the exercise, the spiritual foundation — they haven’t just made me more consistent. They’ve made me more creative. And the creativity is what’s producing the results.
In the last forty-six days, I’ve written and revised two complete novels. I’ve designed book covers. I’ve written a blog post every single day. I’ve built social media channels from scratch. I’ve lost over twenty pounds. None of that happened because I’m smarter than anyone else. It happened because the daily rhythm created space for creativity to show up.
Protect It
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: creativity is fragile. It doesn’t thrive in chaos. It doesn’t show up when you’re running on empty with no structure and no rhythm. It shows up when you’ve built a foundation strong enough to support it.
That’s what the habits do. The Bible study grounds me. The exercise clears my head. The reading fills the tank. And when I sit down for my creative hour, there’s something there. Ideas. Energy. Output. Not because I forced it, but because the rest of the day made room for it.
Creativity is not a luxury. It’s not the thing you get to after the “real work” is done. It is the real work. It’s the thing that separates going through the motions from building something that matters.
So guard it. Protect it. Build a life that gives it room to breathe.
You are more capable than you think. And the creativity you’ve been putting off, ignoring, or telling yourself you’ll get to someday? That’s the very thing that will take you where you want to go.
Day 46 of 280. Tired, sore, and still creating.
The 740 Challenge 