My 30 Day Challenge to Myself

I am an avid reader of Steve Pavlina's blog and I recent read a post about his 30 Day challenge. The idea is simple - set yourself a habit that you either want to develop or to break for a solid 30 days. At the end of the period assess it and either keep doing it, modify it or drop it.

Over the last week or so I have really begun to think deeply about the kinds of permanent habits that I want to develop in my life so this would be a great tool to put some of them into practice. Today is the 31^st May tomorrow is a brand new month with 30 days in it and leads me almost to the end of my first year of my Life Change so it’s a perfect time to start. Below I have outlined exactly what I want to achieve.

1. Exercise for a minimum of 30 minutes every single day
2. Work on my web development projects for a minimum of an hour a day
3. Read a personal development book for a minimum of 30 minutes a day

These are minimums. Ideally I'd like to spend an hour on all three but on some days (like when I have a 2 hour karate class in the evening) I just can't do it as long as I still plan to turn up to work :-)

There is one major challenge with my chosen time frame – at the end of the month I will be on holiday in France visiting relatives. Number 3 is easy, I just take a book with me, but what about 1 and 2? The exercise shouldn't be too difficult if I get creative as my relatives own an entire valley complete with mountains! So I could go outside and just practice some karate, go for a hike up the nearest mountain, find a valley to run around with my son!

The hardest one will be web development. My partner has a nice spiffy laptop but does not want to take it. I do have an extremely old clunky one which I could take. I can't do much with it but I wouldn't need to - I can write HTML in Notepad! I could also take along one of the web development books that I am studying and read through those.

One thing I have noticed about myself is that I often set myself tasks that help me move towards my goals but whenever life gets in the way they tend to get pushed aside. The other thing I have noticed is that life gets in the way a LOT, so of course if I'm always waiting for everything to be perfect I'll never get anything done. To make consistent progress we have to just deal with whatever obstacles are in the way, and be persistent.

I've identified these three activities as being extremely important to me and not only do I want to spend lots of time on them but I want the consistency of daily attention. Doing something day after day lets your mind focus on it so that you can get into the "flow". When you pick up something that you've not paid any attention to for several days (or weeks, months, years...) it takes you a while to get back into it so if you are constantly stopping and starting your progress will be inefficient and frustrating.

This is certainly true with all of the above 3 things. If I don't exercise regularly I find myself going back to square one over and over. If I don't read consistently I forget where I was and have to keep re-reading parts that I have already read. If I don't work on my software projects regularly I don't have a clue what I was doing last time and I have to spend ages getting myself re-acquainted with the project.

So this is my challenge to myself, and this post is my accountability! I shall report back on my progress periodically.

Part of a challenge like this is sticking to your values and ideals even when life events get in the way. This is an excellent opportunity for me to really test myself.

Revisiting my Purpose

It's been many weeks since I posted about my purpose in life. In fact I haven't posted anything at all because at first I wasn't even sure if I wanted to continue this blog. I was worried that I'd just be talking rubbish most of the time as I struggle to make sense of it all as well. But I digress...

Life. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Over the last few weeks I keep finding reference after reference to the value of finding our purpose. I mean think about it, if you don't know why you are here then why bother being here at all? Now I'm not talking about the purpose of mankind as a whole. No, I mean us an individuals. Every person must have some reason to be alive and I'm trying to figure out what my reason is.

When I posted about it before I was confused. I was thinking about purpose in terms of what I wanted to DO in life. Thats not a purpose - that's a goal. When I figured that out, it all started to click into place. I was struggling to find a single major purpose because there are so many things that I want to DO. There isn't just one thing. And that's where I was going wrong.

A goal is an objective and if you've ever read anything on goal setting you'd probably have heard guidelines such as to make them specific, and measurable and most importantly to figure out why you want to achieve them. The why is the purpose behind the goal. I currently have a fitness and fat loss goal but why? Because I want to be healthier so I can live longer. Because I want to be fit enough to do the things I enjoy such as Karate. Because I want to look good in clothes and in my opinion 'fat clothes' just don't look good. You get the idea.

Money is a common source of confusion. Ask people about their goals and most people will have money in there. But they don't really want the money. If you watch the TV series Lost you'll appreciate that in certain circumstances money is useless. It's not the money people want, it's what they can buy with it. Money is the means to an end and the end is what we are after.

When I was trying to define my purpose I was listing activities. These are the means, not the end. They are just goals. I was coming up with things related to software development and then getting in a pickle because it wasn't covering other important areas of my life.

Once I realised my error it became a whole lot easier. I had a good hard look at my life and thought about times when I was happy. What was I doing? I was fixing stuff, making things better, providing some unique service that nobody else was doing, I was teaching other people stuff that I knew. These themes ran through all sorts of areas, here's a few of them:

1. Being one of the top providers in the country of public domain software in my first company.
   
2. Automating a huge amount of manual work in one of my early IT jobs.
   
3. With another company, I provided a unique twist that nobody else did and provided a service that others would eventually try to emulate.
4. Running a highly popular games website that provided unique strategy guides.
5. Building a database for a company and building reports that could save them weeks of work at the click of a button.
6. Building a database for my own company that enabled me to generate my entire website at a click of a button saving myself weeks of work!
7. Becoming a consultant for a slimming franchise and helping others lose weight.
8. Writing a game that other people get enjoyment from.

This is some of the stuff I have done. It's varied and covers many of the things I have dabbled in job-wise. But instead of focussing on the details (Do I want to build websites? Develop utility software? Write games? Be a consultant?), I instead pulled out the common elements. It doesn't matter where my career and personal committments take me. What is important is that in whatever work / hobby / project I am currently engaged in that I am in alignment with my purpose. So what is my purpose then?

My purpose in life is to find ways to provide unique services that make a difference in people's lives, ensure those services are provided long after I am gone, and to teach others everything I have learned along the way.

Notice that it's a bit 'worky'. I am very much a career person. I have a family and I like spending time with them but I'll admit that I spend more of my free time on my projects than I do with them. For other people it's quite the opposite. Their major purpose will be the cultivation of their family lives and work is just something they do to pay the bills. But that's the thing - everyone is different. There is no right or wrong purpose, just our own.

I have a sence of peace now that I have figured it out. Whether I am developing business software at work, or writing games at work, or developing a website, or writing a blog, I can look at it and ask myself if I'm providing some unique service. Does it make a difference? If I die tomorrow will it carry on? Can somebody else do this? If not, I'll teach them. That's largely what my blogs are for. I'd also like to write books one day but that's another story...