As an adolescent I always weighed around 80 kg and never worried about it much. But after college I worked in rural India for a few years. I ate all that deliciously cheap street food and contracted a parasite that screwed up my intestines. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for physical exercise either (other than running away from straw dogs at night). My weight came down to 69 kg. When I returned home, my digestion was permanently disturbed and I didn’t feel healthy.

I wanted to get back to my former self and grow big again. So I started lifting weights at the gym, 4-5 times a week. I grew a bit more muscular initially. But my weight didn’t increase. For 3 long years, the scale just wouldn’t cross the 70 kilo mark. Gym buddies, 5-day-split, HIIT, Protein supplements, creatine, L-leucine … I tried it all, my body just didn’t grow.

Then I read two books that changed everything.

The first one was Fitness Fibel 2.0 by Sjard Roscher. It made me realize that, if I wanted to grow muscles, I had to steadily increase the weights I was lifting. All these years I had dragged myself out of bed and gone to the gym each morning. But once I had gotten there, I would just lift the exact same weight from the the previous week. It already felt exhausting enough to stay at that level and finish the workout. I felt accomplished, when I achieved that much on a given day. The mere thought of increasing the weight felt painful. So I didn’t think about it. At times, my gym buddy would push me to lift a few extra kilos. But of course he was not a paid personal coach. He wouldn’t yell at me and insist that I continue with the higher weights. So I always returned to my plateau.

The fitness book came with a workout plan in the shape of an Excel sheet. Based on the weights I was currently lifting, this Excel sheet calculated the progression of weights I was supposed to lift in the future. It told me which exercise to do, how often and with what weight – for every single workout of the entire year. I loved that clarity. I decided to fully trust this system as my new fitness authority. Partly, because it was well explained in the accompanying book and made sense to me. And partly, because I enjoyed the relaxation of not having to choose what weight to lift and what exercise to do each day. Someone else had done the work of figuring that out for me. I could just blindly follow the system and relieve my brain of making all those decisions. And since the plan prescribed increasing the weight for each exercise by 2.5 kg after a 4-week cycle, I just did that. No matter what.

The second book was Atomic Habits by James Clear. It made me realize how I could fix other lifestyle issues that had caused stress and prevented me from getting good rest. I had been juggling my entrepreneurial dreams with a demanding day job, time-consuming hobbies and an active social life. My days were rushed and at the end I never felt like I had done enough concentrated work. So I would spend nights at the computer, drown my stress in chocolate and show up to work tired. I knew ways to fix these problems and I am sure you have heard of them, too: deep work, regular sleep schedule, meditation, journaling, and so on. But in 30 years of living I had not figured out a sustainable way to integrate these techniques into my daily routine.

Atomic Habits paved the foundation for changing that. In it’s culmination the book proposes a technique called ‘habit tracking’. It’s a technique to visualize your success (or failure) in establishing a new habit and it works like this: First, you draw a bunch of empty boxes on a sheet of paper, one for each of the coming days. When you complete the behavior of a certain habit, you put a green checkmark into the box for that day. When you do not manage to complete the habit, you draw a red cross instead. Putting a green checkmark into a box is satisfying and so it becomes an immediate reward for performing the habit. When the day is almost over, you are getting sleepy and you have to decide whether to still complete a habit or not, this little reward of having a green checkbox can make all the difference. There were also days where I performed the habit, but forgot to check the box. I often realized that at night in bed, just before falling asleep. I would wake myself up and drag myself up for a moment just to give myself that pleasure of checking the box. When you manage to perform the habits for multiple days in a row, you see a lot of checked boxes lined up. You become proud of that streak and want to keep it up all the more.

A habit tracker can be on a physical sheet of paper as described above, but of course there are also apps to digitize the process. Some habit tracker apps even allow you to share your streak with your friends. This creates even more motivation: If you fail to execute your habit you don’t just look bad to yourself but also to your friends. The habit tracker gives you a visual reflection of your success, just like a badge in an online game. It now feels good to do the right thing.

I downloaded a social habit tracking app and started entering the habits that I wanted to develop. I focused on three boxes for each day: One for waking up early at the right time, one for working 2.5 hours on my business without interruptions, and one for completing my daily meditation. I also applied a similar technique to my workouts at the gym: I started tracking my workouts with another app which allowed me to record the number of reps and weights I was lifting. After each set, after each exercise and after each workout I would indulge in the pleasure of checking the corresponding boxes in that app and seeing my database of completed workouts grow.

Within 10 months of reading these two books and implementing their proposals I gained 9 kg. My sleep got better and I felt more focused at work. This is how I realized how important it is to have a system that helps you plan and track your progress. Both aspects are critical: You need a clear plan for what activities to perform going forward and when to push yourself to the next level. And you need a monitoring system to be able to look back at what you have achieved already and feel good about it (or bad, if you haven’t been sticking to the plan). 

This combination of planned progression and habit tracking became my go-to strategy for personal growth. After experiencing its power in health, I decided to apply it to my dating life. The NoGame app was born. 631 approaches, 119 dates, and 53 field reports later, I found an amazing woman and we fell in love. Now I finally have the time I need to make NoGame work for you guys, too – rather than just using it myself all the time. But that is another story.