You've been worse for months and you're already writing yourself off

It's Sunday night, you've got your resit prep open on your laptop and you've spent twenty minutes on the same exercise you could do without thinking back in June. It's been like that with almost everything for three months. And you've already got the whole movie playing in your head: that what came before was just luck.

Before you buy it, look at how things went for Marc Márquez. I'll tell you starting from the end.

28 September 2025, Motegi, Japan. He finishes second, and that makes him MotoGP world champion for the seventh time, 2,184 days after his previous title. At the press conference he says: “I feel at peace with myself.”

1 September 2024, Aragón. He wins a race again. He'd gone 1,043 days without winning one, almost three years. By then he'd already left Honda, the team he'd won everything with in MotoGP, and moved to a smaller one with the previous year's bike. Lots of people had written him off, and with those results it was normal to think so.

June 2022, Mayo Clinic, in the United States. Fourth operation on his right arm. The bone had healed crooked, so they cut it and rotated it about 30 degrees to straighten it.

19 July 2020, Jerez. He comes off the bike and breaks his humerus, the long bone in the arm. He has eight world titles and he's the one everyone wants to beat. They operate, and a few days later he's already trying to race again. That rush costs him dearly: the metal plate they put in his arm breaks and they have to operate again.

Out of the whole story, 2020 is the part I keep. The guy who won in 2025 is the one who had to accept that the comeback was going to take years, and he learned it the hard way, with one operation too many.

Other people wrote him off for almost three years. You, so far, have only been written off by yourself, and it's been three months.

Before you close your laptop, write today's date in your phone and the exercise you can't get right. One line. Set a reminder for a year from now and don't open it before then.