Be loyal to your craft on the days it doesn’t love you back. That’s usually right before it does.

Anything you are getting good at has long stretches that give you nothing back. The work feels worse than last week, the thing you could do on Tuesday is missing on Thursday, and quitting sounds reasonable for the first time. That dip is rarely the ceiling of your ability, it is what learning looks like from the inside. Staying through it is the part almost nobody watches.

On the flat days, lower the target instead of skipping it: twenty minutes, one drill, one paragraph. Keep a rough log so a bad week has evidence standing against it. Small and present beats absent.