Keep Going—Even When It Doesn’t Look Like It’s Working

In this episode, I reflect on what it means to keep showing up for the things that matter—even when life is full, progress feels slow, and perfection is nowhere in sight.

I talk about the tension between discipline and grace, the power of identity-based habits, and the quiet but radical shift that happens when you simply choose not to quit. I also share how lessons from Atomic Habits are shaping my approach to writing, podcasting, and staying consistent—even while working long shifts and chasing big goals.

If you’re in a season where you’re wondering if any of it’s working… this is your reminder:

Sometimes, the most important thing you can do is just keep going.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Good morning. I forgot that I had just hit record. So you see me like checking my wrinkles, checking my hair. Here I am. Welcome back to Peace of Work the Podcast. I'm Danielle Tantone. I'm a nurse, an author, a coach, a survivor, and just a human trying to make it here in this world. Um I have my SWATL specialist shirt on today because I'm actually it's about 6 a.m. before a shift at the hospital. I have to be there at 7. And I really wanted to get this recording done because I am trying to keep a commitment to myself of being ultra, ultra consistent on publishing this every Wednesday at 5 a.m. And it's um Tuesday. No, it's only Monday. I still have a couple days, but I work both of those days at the hospital. So thought I would squeeze in a little recording. We'll see if this is the one that actually ends up getting published, because you know, sometimes I have to redo it and I don't have time to redo it this morning. So we'll see. But anyway, I wanted to talk to you about progress, pacing, and just trusting the process, even when you can't see the outcome yet. Kind of like trajectory over timing. Um so here I am, not from a perfectly polished studio, but real life. Um and I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm struggling with my own, you know, trajectory and my own goals. I'm working on finally writing my second book. Um, I published one book that was a memoir, that was a story from a from a piece of my life. It's called Piece of Work. And I am working on a memo, not a memoir, a more of a prescriptive book about resilience. So there'll definitely be some elements of memoir in there, but I wanted it to be more about you than me. Um the cool thing about memoir is that you know it's it's specific and universal, and you can learn lessons from someone else's story, but I want to actually write more of a prescriptive book. So again, it's all about resilience, and I've been working on it for about a year now. Um, kind of a couple different iterations of it, and then a couple of different I had some side, you know, stops and starts where I was working on another book about Medicare, which may or may not be coming at some point in the future. But I'm really, really focused on resilience because I feel like this idea of not only bouncing back, but rising higher, um, staying flexible and you know, um supple and just uh, you know, keep keep going even when life gets you down, is is what I want to share with people. Because I have definitely been had had the opportunity to do that many times uh around many different things. So this is the um fifth episode in a row that I've that I've recorded after taking a two-year break, as you know, if you've been listening. Um and this season of life is teaching me what real progress looks like. And spoil alert, it's not sexy. Um so I've been learning, you know, lessons in real time as I go about momentum, consistency, and the power of small shifts, especially when you're waiting to feel the change. I've been recently um rereading, or I should say listening to um James Clear's Atomic Habits. I I believe I read it several years ago because as I'm listening to it, I'm, you know, it's it all sounds very familiar. Or maybe it's just that I've followed, I get his newsletter, and I, you know, so many other people refer to his to his stuff that um, you know, that it's just it's like almost already part of part of what I believe and what I what I live. But anyway, I've been I've been listening to it in the audiobook version in the car. I really love audiobooks. I don't know about you. I know I've talked to some people who just think that it's not real reading, it's not as good, you know, it's like a cheater way, it's um all these things. But to me, I love hearing, especially when they're read by the author, I love hearing the author's voice. Um, I love listening. I I guess I guess I guess I'm an auditory um learner in some ways. I love doing it, listening while I'm driving. Um it's I do like listening to music too, but most of the time you'll have me, you'll hear me listening to a podcast or an audiobook. I really, really, really enjoy that. Um, I also like sometimes listening while I'm folding laundry or doing housework. It's just um some people have said that they have trouble focusing when they're doing something else, but I find it almost easier to focus when I'm doing something else. It it internalizes even better than if I'm just sitting there trying to read. Um, I love reading also, but I just don't have a lot of free time because here I am trying to record a podcast in between getting ready for work and my 12-hour shift. So I, you know, there's just not a lot of free time in my life. When I get to bed at night, I might read a couple pages, but I'm pretty much out. But I don't get very far. So audiobooks are great for me. So anyway, I've been listening to James Clear's um atomic habits, and there's so many good, such a good book. I mean, definitely worth reading. But I was, he was, he uses this metaphor. It's all about, you know, atomic uh habits are little tiny, tiny things. You know, atoms are the the building blocks of our of everything. Um, I love the idea though, because uh also an an atom bomb can blow up a whole city. So it's it's tiny and huge at the same time. So it's breaking it down to the smallest, the smallest habit, you know, instead of just focusing on the outcome or the goal, break it down to the habit. So it's it's there's so many good things. But what I was thinking about is this ice cube metaphor that he uses toward the beginning of the book. Um, you know, you they it talks about this ice cube is sitting, sitting on the counter in a 25 degree room, and you know, it's just frozen, it's an ice cube, and you start systematically, you know, slowly warming up the room, 25 degrees, 26 degrees, 27 degrees, 28 degrees, and the ice cube just sits there. It's it hasn't changed at all. It looks exactly the same, even though you've warmed up the room a lot, like you've warmed it up five degrees. Like, why is it still the same? And I think it can feel a lot like that in when you're working on a book, or where you're working on uh you know building a business, or when you're working on trying to lose weight, or trying to build a habit, or trying to run faster or run run more miles. It it can feel a lot like you're doing all this work and nothing is moving forward. But the thing is, it is. I mean, as you're you know how temperatures work. I mean, you get you get to to um 29 degrees, 30 degrees, still you don't see anything. 31 degrees, 31.9 degrees. What if you quit then? I mean, that I think that's what we do sometimes sometimes is like we get to 31.9 degrees and then we quit. And right at 32 degrees is when all the magic happens. And it looks like it just happened instantaneously, but you've been working on it that whole time. So that's kind of how I've felt with a lot of things I've worked on in my life. I've been, you know, I'm gonna, I'm trying to write this. My original goal was to finish my book by the end of January, which may actually be a little bit too lofty given everything that I have going on. But in my mind, I was like, you know what, it's already written. I've been working on it. You know, there's little pieces of it. I really just have to bring it all together. There's it's all in my head, it's all, you know, in my notes. So it really shouldn't be that hard to bring it all together. I'm at maybe I'm not at 31.9 degrees. I'm probably still at like 27 degrees, if I'm really honest. But I but I've been working on it and it is already warming up. It is already getting there. So that's that's kind of the idea that's been in the back of my mind this week is that real change happens one degree at a time. And it's happening even when you can't see it. So keep going, and that's keep going. You know, whether you whether you're trying to work on your health or your or a or a business idea, keep going. That's what I'm trying to remind myself. Um, so yeah, I'm in the thick of it writing my book. I gave myself a really ambitious goal of trying to write 2,000 words a day to finish by the end of the month. Um, and it's kind of funny because James Clear says, make the habit easy, start small. So, you know, don't start trying to write 2,000 words a day, write two not two pages a day or you know, one page a day, something really, really minute rather than than something that's impossible to do. But I thought that, you know, since I'm not starting from scratch, I'm starting from, you know, a whole bunch, and I'm a lot of it's more revising than actual writing from scratch that I should be able to do it. Um, I'm hoping, I was like hoping that this craziness of my life would just write the the book for me, but it's kind of not going quite that way. So I might have to go back to to, you know, make giving myself a little more of a reasonable goal and writing a little bit more of a reasonable amount each day. Kind of just like I did with this podcast. I I just realized today it doesn't have to be an hour episode. It doesn't have to be a 30-minute episode like my others have been. It can be a 15-20-minute episode. You know, I think you guys will be okay if you don't hear me rambling on for 30 minutes. Um, so anyway, the ice cube metaphor, you're raising the temperature, you're building momentum. You just don't see anything until you cross that invisible line. And the truth is most of us give up at 31 degrees because you've been working so hard for so long and it's like you can't see the progress. But the shift is happening. So I've been acutely another word that um he mentions a lot in his book that I've been aware of is trajectory. Um, and that has been a big buzzword in my life over the past year, as um my daughter has had some some big struggles, and I I used that word. I can see this trajectory of where this is going, and I don't like it, and I want to shift her trajectory. And thankfully, we it has shifted dramatically, which is amazing. But what what I've always what what I've always learned about trajectory, and I don't know if this came from James Clear or if he borrowed it from someone else, because I've been talking about this for years, is that you know, a one-degree shift is dramatically changes where you end up. Um you, you know, you think of an airplane, if you just change that trajectory a tiny, tiny bit, and I'm not good with the numbers to know exactly what that amount is. I mean, that that plane could have been headed for New York and ends up in Miami instead because of a tiny, tiny shift. So that has always been kind of at the back of my mind is like, you know, you don't have to do these huge, huge um shifts. The same thing when you're driving, you know, when you're um driving a boat. Um, I've only driven a boat a few times here and there over the years, but I the the biggest thing you learn really quickly is that you don't you don't make huge huge turns. You just you just shift uh slightly and it has a little bit of a lagging uh reaction. It doesn't, it's not like a car where it just instantly turns. So um trajectory has been has been uh a really big thing. It's it's not about instant results, it's about the direction that you're headed, and a small pivot can change everything. Um there's one more thing I wanted to say about that. Oh, I remember a quote that I heard like years and years ago about you know if you're headed in the wrong if you're working really hard but you're not heading in the right direction, then you know you're gonna get nowhere quickly. Um really butchering it. But you know, it is important to know to know where you're fate where you're heading, to know what your goal is. And then it's also important to just make those those small movements forward. It doesn't take as much once you're once you're heading in the right direction. All right. So one more thing I happened to read this week that I wanted to talk about was this story about Kevin Plank who um came up with um oh my gosh, what's the call? Under armor. And um the story I I I don't know about you, but I always end up reading, you know, I guess you know how Facebook and TikTok and all of these algorithms give you more of what you click on and what you like. So on Facebook, um, which is probably the social media platform that that I am on the most, yeah. Hello, Gen X, I guess. Um, but on Facebook, I always see reels about babies. You know, I'm a I'm a postpartum nurse, so I I guess I I see see reels about babies, houses, um, you know, like organizing and things like that. Sometimes recipes, lots of babies and lots of things that have to do with uh labor and delivery and having babies, which is funny since I'm not in that season myself, but because my life is. But anyway, I also in my feed get lots of these inspirational stories. A lot of times they're about a historical figure, and they're really clearly written by AI, usually, um, kind of long. Some of them are really bad, you know, clickbait where you have to like go through a bunch of ads, and I still sometimes read them because I I like them. You know, it's like a story of like someone who come who rises up from the ashes. I love those stories. And this one was not like a clickbait one. It was um it was actually a full post that I could actually read without having to click on a link. And it was about Kevin Plank. Um and I'm just gonna read it a little bit to you because it's I I found it so uh motivating and so inspiring. And it's just exactly about what I'm talking about here about um keep going. So living in his grandmother's basement, took on Nike with 40,000 in debt, built a five billion dollar empire anyway. Kevin Plank was 23 years old, special teams captain for the University of Maryland football team, one of five boys in a fiercely competitive family, his brothers were athletes, Kevin was the backup, never the star, always fighting for playing time. Changed his sweat-soaked cotton t-shirt two or three times a practice every single day. His compression short stayed dry, his cotton shirt was drenched. This didn't make sense to him. After graduation, everyone had the same advice. Get a real job. You were a backup fullback, nobody cares. Cotton t-shirts, that's your big idea. The sportswear market is owned by Nike and Adidas. Nike has billions, you have credit card debt. You couldn't make it as a player. What makes you think you can sell to them? He didn't listen. Here's what Kevin knew that everyone else missed. Athletes didn't need another Nike. They needed a solution Nike wasn't providing. Cotton shirts had been the standard for decades. Nobody questioned it, but every player changed shirts two or three times a practice. That wasn't normal. That was a billion-dollar problem hiding in plain sight. So he went to work, drove to New York's garment district, walked fabric shop to fabric shop, felt every material he could find, found a moisture wicking synthetic fabric, the same stuff his compression shorts were made from, took it to a tailor, had her sew seven prototypes, gave them to his former Maryland teammates, asked them to wear them, tell them what tell them tell them what worked and what didn't. They loved them. That's what Kevin when Kevin knew he had something. Sorry, my reading is so bad. It is 6 a.m. after all. He called it Under Armour, the U instead of O because the URL was uh was available. Spent his$450 on business cards, then he started selling, moved into his grandmother's basement in Georgetown, set up a shop on a futon, drove to every college campus on the East Coast, walked into locker rooms, handed shirts to equipment managers. Try these. If your players like them, I'll come back and sell you more. Most people told him no, some threw him out. Kevin kept driving. I'm gonna skip ahead to the end. You know, that oh, about so then, you know, he's going. By 1990, I guess I guess I can't really skip. His girlfriend Molly was helping him pack boxes at night. I skipped a little bit. They'd ship orders during the day. By 1997, Under Armour did$100,000 in revenue. By 1998,$300,000. Still running everything from that basement. By 1999, Kevin was$40,000 in credit card debt. Collection agencies were calling, his grandmother was worried, his girlfriend wondered if he'd ever pay it off. Most people would have declared bankruptcy, started over, got a corporate job. Kevin didn't. Then in 2000, Kevin made a decision that almost killed the company. ESPN, the magazine, offered him a full-page ad,$25,000. He didn't have$25,000, didn't have$2,500,$2,500, I guess. He was already drowning in debt. Everyone told him not to do it. You'll bankrupt the company. Magazine ads don't work for athletic gear. Nike spends millions. You're spending everything on one ad. Athletes don't buy from guys in basements. Kevin did it anyway. Maxed out another credit card. The ad ran in October 2000. Last month, Under Armour did$7,500,000 in sales. Sorry, that month, not last month. Last month they did billions. Anyway, in 2005, the company went public, raised$153 million on the first day. Kevin was 33 years old. So it goes on and on. But the point is debt isn't failure. It's the price you pay for building something real before you can afford it. Being the backup doesn't make you less capable. It makes you hungrier. Stop waiting for permission from the industry leaders. Stop thinking you need to be the star to start something. Find your problem, find your prototype, load your car trunk. And then the end, the last thing it says, it says more, it says, don't quit. So I think that's a reminder for me and hopefully for you, just to keep going with whatever it is that is your um maybe it's not a billion-dollar idea, and maybe it's not even a product, and maybe it's not even a business. Um, but whatever you're envisioning for your life, just keep moving forward even when it doesn't seem like it's working. Um this has been the theme in my personal life this year, over the past year, and then as well as as now. So I'm Danielle Tantone. That's it for today. Keep going, keep moving forward. Keep that trajectory in the right direction, and you'll get there. Uh, if you haven't read my first book yet, it's called Piece of Work a Memoir. We're all a piece of work, a work in progress, and a work of art. It's available on Amazon. Maybe eventually I'll have it on my own website, which is danielletantone.com. You can also see me on social media. I'm trying to work on getting a little bit bigger presence there. I have an assistant helping me now, so that's exciting. Um, it's at Danielle Tantone on all of the platforms. I have a little TikTok account and starting to do more on Instagram and all of that. So look for me there. And in the meantime, thank you so much for listening. If you liked this, please share it with a friend. Please subscribe so that you get all the updates every Wednesday. And um write a review. This all means so much for for podcasters and for authors. So thank you, and I hope you're having a great day, and I'll see you next time.