Deliverable

There have definitely been days when this challenge has been difficult to complete, simply because of the amount of time involved. There have been two or three times when I’ve been really close to just giving up and saying the hell with it. “It’s too late to do 50 minutes on the book” I say to myself… but then I somehow I find time to watch an episode of a TV show I’ve taped. In the end I manage to talk myself into just “putting in the damn time”. I’m also noticing that it’s much easier to just “put in the damn time” earlier in the day. Once this is done the rest of my day is my own and I can be free from the guilt of knowing I should be working on my project.

I was initially hesitant to continue for another 30 days, but I also know that I’m into the home stretch with the book, and the delivery date is a little over a month away. (“Projects” has really meant “The Book” for the past 60 days…). Now that I look at the calendar, I realize that my 90 day check-in corresponds exactly with the date that my Preview version of the book is due. I’ll take that as a sign that I need to continue for another 30 days.

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30 Day Challenge: Projects
Start date: Saturday, 8/12/06
Next check-in date: Sunday, 9/10/06

This past Thursday was my 30th day with out refined sugar. Ok, technically it wasn’t 30 days completely devoid of refined sugar… I continued to eat my Frosted Mini Wheats in the morning and I’m sure there were meals where refined sugar was used in the preparation of the food. The main point of this 30 days was to break my soda habit, and I think I went a long way towards that goal. There were definitely times that I craved a soda, or found myself wanting a desert while eating out but I’m glad that I held on and made it through. I’m going to give this another 30 days.

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30 Day Challenge: Refined Sugar
Start date: Friday, 8/11/06
Next check-in date: Saturday, 9/9/06

Today marked the 60th consecutive day that I’ve eaten my fiber cereal, and taken a multi-vitamin.

I had originally planned on continuing the challenge another 30 days, but frankly the check-in’s are becoming tiresome, especially since I feel fairly confident that I can continue this habit without keeping track of the number days that I do it consecutively.

I’ll continue to track this on my “Habits Tracking” page (because that’s easy enough to do…) but basically I consider this a successful completion to the challenge.

Hopefully it’s enough of a habit now that I’ll continue eating cereal in the morning and taking my vitamin indefinitely.

This past Monday was my 60th day sleeping in my bed. Avoiding TV has definitely helped with this. I know that I don’t want to fall back into old habits, so I’m giving myself another 30 days.

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30 Day Challenge: Sleeping in My Bed
Start date: Tuesday, 8/8/06
Next check-in date: Wednesday, 9/6/06

I have a few challenge check-in’s to catch up on. It’s been busy! This past Friday marked 30 days of clean dishes. Definitely a positive habit… I’m giving myself at least another 30 days to make clean dishes a no-brainer, because I never want my kitchen to look like this again.

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30 Day Challenge: Clean Dishes
Start date: Saturday, 8/5/06
Next check-in date: Sunday, 9/3/06

Thre are alot of open loops in my life right now. Things left unfinished. I made a list.

For the each of the next 30 days, I will close at least one open loop from that list.

Simple enough.

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30 Day Challenge: Open Loops
Start date: Tuesday, 7/25/06
Next check-in date: Wednesday, 8/23/06

How to make this work? The keys to the 30 day challenges are:

• Variety – The reason I’ve been successful exercising daily is that I have a large variety of exercises. In the beginning I decided that it was ok if I only did one of the exercises on my list. Walking a half mile is considered “exercising”.
• Did I mention, “Variety”? – With my 30 day practice challenge I have 5 instruments to choose from. So far I’ve been able to focus on a couple a day. When I feel like I’m burning out on one, I can easily shift to another the next day.
• Variety, oh wait… I covered that. I mean to say “Being prepared – I went into each of my 30 day challenges with my tools in place. I track my progress on the blog. I set up the exercises before I began. I made a list of my options, so I wouldn’t be caught wondering “What do I do today?”

This begs the question: What are the tools of the acting trade?

• Reading plays/scripts
• Attending plays/readings
• Watching movies (movies out, or DVD’s in)
• Watching the commentary or special features on a DVD
• Reading a biography of an actor or director
• Checking Backstage for leads
• Sending out headshots, or committing to a Headshot Thursday
• Researching theatre companies/directors online
• Researching / Developing contacts
• Working on my voice & speech
• Working on an accent
• Researching/finding monologues at bookstores
• Learning a monologue
• Auditioning
• Taking an acting class

That’s probably enough of a list to start with. I’ve been putting this off for some time now, mostly out of fear of not being able to pull it off or not being able to do it perfectly.

Screw it. I’m just going to do it, and see what happens.

For the next 30 days, I’ll spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day, doing one of the things on the list above.

I’ll add things to the list as they come to me, and check-in 30 days from now.

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30 Day of Acting
Start date: Friday, 7/21/06
Next check-in date: Saturday, 8/19/06

The benefit of exercising every day in some form or fashion is that you’re essentially saying:

Having a healthy and fit body is not optional.

You’re making a concious decision to make exercise a daily part of your life. You’re saying that exercise is as vital to the body as food, air, or water. If don’t eat or drink, eventually I’ll die. You’re raising exercise to that level of importance.

The mistake that most people make when they begin an exercise program is that they try to do too much. They’ll go all out, hit the gym, work really hard… for about a week. Perhaps two. They begin they’re exercise program too quickly and usually burn out.

I’m approaching things differently. The idea is to make consistency your goal. You’re trying to develop a lifetime habit. You’ve decided that you want to exercise and be healthy 365 days a year. (Or as close to it as possible…).

Is it possible to do 2 hours of weight training 7 days a week, 365 days a year?

Of course not. You’d burn out and you’d hurt yourself.

So what’s the happy medium? How do you exercise daily and not burn out or hurt yourself? The way I figure it, a healthy exercise routine needs to meet the following criteria:

• It should have enough variety so that you don’t get bored
• It should be challenging (again so that you don’t get bored).
• It should develop both your strength and your cardio fitness.
• It should be flexible enough so you can exercise in some form or fashion everyday.
• It should have built in “down time” for each body part.
• It shouldn’t be too complicated.
• There should be lots of ways for you to succeed.

When I started my first 30 Day Exercise Challenge, I made it really easy for myself to succeed. Basically, if I did one of the things on my list of exercises each day I considered that a success. Some days I did more, some days I did just the one exercise. I did this for 60 days. What I found towards the end of the challenge was that apathy began to set in. I did alot of the minimum number of push-ups, those last couple of weeks… simply because it was easier. The challenge had grown a bit stale. Come to think of it, the daily things began to be abit blah soon after I finished my 7 Day Bikram Yoga Challenge. (There’s probably something to that…).

So, how do you make it more challenging without getting too rigid? (With the last challenge, if I had a really busy day, or was out of town with no access to anything but my own body weight, I could always walk, or do push-ups, or crunches.)

I think the answer is to increase the minimum amount of daily time I’ll spend exercising to 20 minutes a day. This will force me to choose more of the exercises off of my list to fill the time. I’ll also give myself the “out” of allowing myself to choose walking one of my routes as an accepted exercise for the day.

The rules:

I’ll check in 30 days from now.

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New 30 Day Exercise Challenge
Start date: Friday, 7/21/06
Next check-in date: Saturday, 8/19/06

Today was the 60th day that I did some type of exercise each day. (Here’s the 30 day check-in, and the beginning of the challenge.)

While I think that this challenge has been valuable for me, I think this will be the last day of the challenge in it’s present state. I’ve found that I’ve become complacent over the last week or so in my exercise. I’ve still exercised everyday, but I need something that is going to challenge me to a new level of fitness.

I love the variety that I’ve created for myself, but the bar has become too easy to jump over. If I were to continue at this current level, I’d probably get bored and eventually just quit.

The challenge of my next “30 day fitness challenge” is going to be in answering this question:

“How do I create a workout that is more physically taxing, flexible enough for an active busy schedule, and yet still able to be done every day for 30 days?”

We’ll see how it goes.

For the next 30 days, I will ask myself the following question(s) right before bed, and first thing in the morning when I wake up:

How do I create a million dollars for myself doing the things I love to do? (see updated question below)

All of the habits I’ve been working on are definitely a good thing. I want to now focus on ways to maximize these new habits, and better utilize the time and energy I’ve been freeing up. If I’m going to change the world, then I’m going to need the resources to do it.

My thinking is that if I consistently ask this question then the answer will eventually be revealed to me. (Seek and ye shall find, and all that. ) I may tweak the question as I go along, or I might add new daily questions.

–update: 7/18/06–
I’ve set up a daily RSS feed to remind myself to also ask this question at least once during the day.

–update: 7/26/06–

Better Question:

How did I create a million dollars for myself doing the things I love to do?

It’s a subtle change, but an important one. This presupposes success on my part. It puts the imagination to work. It forces me to imagine myself as successful. It’s as though I’m sitting on my million dollars, and someone has just asked me “How did you do it?”.

“How did I earn a million dollars doing the things I love to do? Well, let me tell you…”

Sure, I may not know the answer to the question yet… But phrasing things in this way forces me to look at things in a more positive light. It gets the creativity flowing.

Me: “How did I earn a million dollars doing the things that I love to do? Well, let me think about that for a bit… One of the ways that I did it was by publishing my book.”

Wide eyed student: “How did you do that?”

And so on, and so on.

It may seem like semantics, but this feels like the right direction to go with this. We’ll see how it works out.

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30 Day Challenge: Question(s)
Start date: Monday, 7/17/06
Check-in date: Tuesday, 8/15/06