7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 10
I’m reading Admiral McRaven’s Make Your Bed this week. In Navy SEAL training, there’s a brass bell. If you want to quit, you ring it. You’re done. No more cold water, no more impossible runs, no more being pushed past what you thought you could take.
McRaven’s message: if you want to change the world, never ring the bell.
My bell doesn’t look like that.
There’s no brass bell in my living room. Nobody’s watching to see if I ring it. There’s no ceremony to my quitting — no moment where everyone knows I stopped.
My bell is when I stop doing the habits.
It’s the morning I skip Bible study because I’m running late. It’s the day I don’t track my calories because I already know I went over. It’s the walk I don’t take, the book I don’t open, the blog post I decide can wait until tomorrow. One day becomes two. Two becomes a week. And by the time I notice, the structure I built is already eroding and I barely heard it happen.
That’s what makes the ordinary bell harder than McRaven’s. His bell is loud. Mine is silent. His is a single dramatic decision. Mine is a hundred tiny ones, each one so small it doesn’t feel like quitting. It just feels like a day off.
I’ve rung my bell before. Not this year — but I know exactly what it sounds like. In 2022, I lost significant weight, stopped doing what got me there, and the habits dissolved so quietly I didn’t realize they were gone until the weight was back.
That’s why I built the 7-40 Challenge the way I did. Not as a goal with an endpoint, but as a rhythm that doesn’t stop. The habits are the structure. The structure is what keeps the bell out of reach. As long as I’m doing the seven things — even imperfectly, even six out of seven on a rough day — I haven’t rung it.
Day 5 of this round, I hit the wall. Six out of seven habits. No creative work. In bed early. That was a bad day. It wasn’t the bell. The bell would have been Day 6 looking the same. And Day 7. And Day 8. Until I stopped counting altogether.
Day 6, I came back. That’s the difference.
McRaven’s bell is dramatic. Mine is ordinary. But the commitment is the same — you decide, every single day, that you’re not done yet.
David Willis 