During my Uberman adjustment, I spent a night watching TED talks with a friend who had just discovered them. If you’re reading this and don’t know what TED talks are, go watch some. You’ve been missing out on a lot of inspiration.
It’s only 3 minutes long, so you might as well watch it, but the summary is essentially that Matt Cutts decided awhile ago to challenge himself to do something daily for 30 days. The idea behind this is that since the time-period is so limited, it’s a much more achievable goal because you can tell yourself, “Okay, 10 more days, then I’m free”. These aren’t necessarily going to be permanent life changes, but they show you how much you can accomplish if you just set your mind to it.
A cool point he made is that the 30-day challenges really raised his self-confidence. I think this is a really subtle way of enacting some pretty awesome personal development. Here are the promised 2 easy steps:
After watching the video, myself and the friend decided when the video ended that we would decide on our own 30-day challenges before we watched another video. After talking about it briefly, I decided I wanted to write a poem or song every day and he decided he’d do the same. While I think writing a full song every day would be extremely difficult for me, I feel that this will be manageable because if I get to the end of the day with nothing written then I can just write a haiku. Haikus are poems.
Many of these poems will be posted to the blog. In some cases, I might not have the time or technology to post a song, or it might be about a private part of my life, but I will make sure to at least post the title of such a piece within a few days.
If it all sounds too hard, start with something easy, like “Take a photo every day”. Like my inclusion of Haikus, that makes it virtually impossible to fail, but you will still feel drawn to taking more interesting photos than you have to.
What will your challenge be?
Constantly consciously expanding the boundaries of thoughtspace and actionspace. Creator of Intend, a system for improvisationally & creatively staying in touch with what's most important to you, and taking action towards it.
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