Why the Bike Works
Three or four mornings a week, 5:30, I'm on the bike. Group ride. Coffee after. I've done it for years, and I've never once had to talk myself into it. This morning was 93 minutes, and hard.
Nothing else in my life works like that. Not the products. Not the apps. Not the emails I mean to send.
In March I put cycling and meditation side by side in Habits Over Goals — one had stuck, the other never had. A month later I went further, in notes I never published, and I thought I'd found the reason. The bike gives me data, ride after ride; Strava tells me I'm getting faster. An app gives me nothing for months. So the projects that died were the ones with the weakest feedback, and the fix was obvious: give every project its own Strava.
So I built one. Six months later, here's what it taught me.
I Built the Strava
It's called Game of Life. It reads my watch, my notes and GitHub, and turns what it finds into points. Every commit lands on its own, straight from GitHub — I don't lift a finger. And the rule that scores them has a word for each one: effort.
It did exactly what I asked. I wanted to see progress before a single customer showed up, and that's what it shows me. My projects used to die at 75%. Now they ship.
Then they stall again, before I've asked anyone to pay for them. Last quarter my own dashboard scored building over asking six to one.
Is the dashboard why they ship now? I can't tell you. Two things changed at once — I built it, and AI made building almost free — and I can't pull them apart.
What I can tell you is what it measures. That's where my April notes went wrong.
The Number Is the Result
On the bike, the number is the result.
My estimated FTP sits at 303 watts against a goal of 300. It flatters me a little — it comes from my best twenty minutes of the last six months, not this morning's legs. But flattering or not, those watts are real. They're the watts that moved the bike. Nobody has to agree to them. The power meter records them on every ride, whether I look or not, and reading them costs me nothing.
A business has a result too. Someone says yes.
Nothing records that for you. The only way to get the reading is to ask — send the price, put the work in front of someone who's free to say no. Until you do, there's no number at all. A ride I haven't done has no watts either.
So my dashboard measured the closest thing it could see without anyone else in the room: me, working. Once a habit is wired to an instrument, the instrument decides what counts. Mine counted effort, because effort was all it could see.
Cyclists have a word for that kind of number. Cadence — how fast the pedals go round. On its own it tells you very little. Same cadence, different gear, different speed. A power meter only gets to watts by combining how fast you turn with how hard you push.
A commit is cadence. It tells me the legs are turning. And cheap AI building is an easy gear — the legs spin fast while the bike barely moves.
The Riding Came First
My April notes got the bike wrong too.
They listed several reasons cycling stuck, and the one they carried over to my projects was the data — the watch, Strava, the power meter. But the riding came first. I was out at 5:30 before any of that was measuring me. The numbers arrived after the habit, not before it. Since July I've even had a coach, built into the same dashboard, writing me a prescription every day.
What I left behind when I copied the bike was the group. The ride happens because of the alarm and the people. At 5:30 there are people waiting, and they notice if I don't show.
But the people on a ride are on my side. The person reading an ask is the one who can say no.
My trouble with acting, I've written before, is being seen. On the bike I'm seen the whole time, and it costs me nothing. Meanwhile six finished emails to clients sat in my Drafts folder for a week.
I don't know why those two feel so different. I'm not going to pretend I do.
The April Question
In April the question I wrote down was this: how do I build Strava-like feedback into my projects?
I'd ask it differently now.
On the bike I never had to build the feedback. The watts were just there, every ride, whether I wanted them or not. A business has one reading that counts — and it doesn't exist until I ask.
I can't build that. I can only go and get it, one ask at a time.
And a no is a reading too. A bad number on a hard morning. On the bike, I've had plenty of those.