Spark Challenge Update – Health Month

So far I’ve had 3 challenges and I’m currently in the middle of the 4th. It’s been a very interesting experience having a goal a month of something new and it’s the reason I’ve been doing so much of the activities from the challenges. October was writing, November was meditation, December was playing guitar and January is eating very healthy. I haven’t set a goal for the end of the month yet because some of things I’ve been doing don’t fit well with having an end goal. Writing was just an hour a day. Meditation was 15 minutes a day. Playing guitar was supposed to be 30 minutes per day until I found out I couldn’t work my fingers after playing that long so I scaled it back a bit. January’s healthy eating challenge is something that happens all day long.

Coming off December’s food binge it took a few days of struggle to get control over what I was eating. We still had a lot of treats from Christmas laying around and I failed at stopping myself. A little chocolate here, a couple cookies here. Being off gluten has probably been the hardest part. A lot of food from restaurants or that friends bring has gluten in it. I’ve had to say no to a lot of things. We have donuts once a week at work and pizza once a month and those were hard to turn down but as soon as I did it once, I found it easier after that. That and the fact that I told people at work what I was doing and they would be watching.

The first Saturday after the end of the month is going to be a binge day. I’m going to eat pretty much everything, then I think it will be back to very healthy eating for the rest of February. This will be a challenge I’d like to keep going.

PureOutside

Between Corbett’s Million Dollar Blog Project and Tyler’s Bootstrapper’s Guild, I’ve had my hands full for the last 2 months keeping up with blog posts and getting the new guide and newsletter sorted out. The first newsletter will be out at the end of January and the first trail guide will be out at the end of February. I’m very excited for both these things will update you more when they come out. A few things have helped get a lot more done in the past 2 months than I think I’ve ever got done in that time frame.

Batch tasks – Instead of writing a blog post once per week on some topic for PureOutside, I’ve started to group the writing of a few posts together. I’ll focus for a week or 2 on writing 6-8 blog posts and scheduling them. I’ve found this method much easier than switching back and forth from the guide to blog post writing every week. With all the blog posts scheduled for the next 6 weeks I can focus on working on the guide and not switch back and forth.

Chunk time – I often get overwhelmed when I’m trying to think about too many things at once. If I can chunk down tasks to 20-30 minutes then it’s much easier to handle those. I can see exactly what needs to be done and that’s motivation to start it. Hat tip to Tyler (LINK) for that one.

Schedule Work Time – Up until recently, I’ve just tried to work on PureOutside stuff whenever I can. I’ll sit down here and there and do a bit of work. The problem has been that I can’t get much done because I’m constantly trying to remember what I was working on and by the time I’ve figured it out, I’m off doing something else. Now, I schedule 1 hour a day every day of the week to sit down and work on PureOutside blog posts, technical issues or social media. This has worked very well because it’s not a long period of time. I know I can sit for an hour to work on it so I’m more likely to start. Working on it every day keeps everything fresh in my mind.

Monotask – The opposite of multi-tasking. I used to think it was fun and interesting to work on 20 different things in a given week. Now it stresses me out. When I saw how little I was actually getting done on each project I knew something had to change. Anything I start now has to be finished before I start anything else. Batching things like blog posts helps do this. I’ll work on only blog posts for 2 weeks and then go back to working on only the blog. I have tons of things I would like to do but I’m trying to push them all into a cleanup project scheduled for later this year.

Fitness: Marathon Training

My major fitness goal right now is to do well in the Vancouver Marathon on May 6th. I’ve got 4 months to train for that. It seems like a long time but with 13km runs feeling fairly long right now I’ve got a long way to go. I’m going to be documenting my fitness work here to give a bit of accountability to myself and to let everyone see what I’m doing.

Last Week:

Sunday: Rest

Monday: 5km easy run

Tuesday 6km speed workout

Wednesday: 1 hour of floor hockey

Thursday: 6km easy run

Friday: Night skiing

Saturday: 13km long run

Writing

It seems like I’m writing more and more every week. And it feels good. I’ve never been much of a writer but it’s flowing easier now. I used to be held up or not even start because I didn’t have an amazing idea or know exactly what to say for my whole article. Now freewriting, an article framework or a intentionally terrible first draft are great ways to get going and it’s easier to start. Starting is the tough part.

Recent Articles:

The Vancouver Christmas Market on Aviawest.com http://www.aviawest.com/blog/2011/12/vancouver-christmas-market.html

Paddling, Hiking and Climbing Marble Meadows on PureOutside http://pureoutside.com/blog/2011/12/1338/

Mount Elma Ski Tour on PureOutside http://pureoutside.com/blog/2012/01/mount-elma-ski-tour/

Osprey Talon 33 Backpack Review on PureOutside http://pureoutside.com/blog/2012/01/osprey-talon-33-backpack-review/

Good Tunes

Deadmau5 – 4×4=12

I’ve been rocking out to this the past couple weeks. It’s my goto music for working right now. Very few lyrics and wicked bass. Raise Your Weapon and Some Chords are my favorites.

Great Reads

I’ve read a lot lately but some of these will be catch up from the last few months.

Uncertainty

Jonathan Fields latest book is all about being courageous and creative in the face of uncertainty. A fantastic read that I’m about to start again to full get what he has to say about this incredibly deep topic.

UnMarketing

Scott Stratten is the president of UnMarketing and spends way too much time online. Or that’s what his website says. His book is about common sense strategies to get marketing online. So many people get all confused and stressed about marketing online and end up screwing it up big time. Scott sets you straight with his no BS approach and hilarious stories.

Anything You Want

A fun little read from Derek Sivers about how he set up his business and got to where his is now. There are some gems of unconventional business advice in there and is great if you’re looking for a quick read about online business.

Do the Work

Another one from the Seth Godin’s Domino Project, Do the Work was written by Steven Pressfield and is about the demon’s inside us. It’s specifically about the Resistance, a hidden force, demon or whatever you want to call it that prevents us from sitting down and doing the work. It’s pretty much a manifesto of putting on your hard hat and doing what you need to do . If you’re lacking in any sort of motivation I would highly recommend reading this.

End Malaria

A book of many essays by online influential, End Malaria has a bit to say about everything. If you are online running a business, you’ll probably want to read this book. There is something for everyone in it. The best part is that most of the price is donated to help buy mosquito nets to stop the spread of malaria.

The Flinch

Julien Smith’s latest book. He talks about everything you flinch at. Everything in this world that you shy away from because you think it might hurt you. Most of that stuff won’t hurt you though so you’re just wasting your time and you’re life worried about what isn’t going to happen. Another good kick in the pants if you want to get some work done.

How to Travel Full Time

A great little book from Colin Wright. It’s only $.99 and worth every penny. If you ever thought about travelling the world full time or are just curious abut the idea, I highly recommend getting it. If you sign up for Colin’s paid Exile’s letter you get his books for free.

Poke The Box

A great one from Seth Godin about asking questions and doing great work. Along the lines of Do the Work and The Flinch, he asks us to poke the box more to see what happens. Be a rebel, a shit disturber, a nuisance. You might do something incredible.

Cool Sites

Philospher’s Notes

I’m working my way through the first set of 100 Philospher’s Notes right now. Brian Johnson has filtered through tons of philosophy books and brings you the main points from the best of them. There are awesome business and life lessons in there. Brian’s chill demeanor and the amazingly good info that comes out of all these books gets me so stoked to live after reading or listening to them. You can get them in PDF or mp3 format. I’ve been listening to all the mp3′s as I work out or clean the house. Some of the notes are so good I had to go by the actual books to by more.

Hope you guys liked the new updates. I’ll be posting about more as they come up as a bit of an accountability journal for myself.

The months go by so fast when you’re super busy ( and having fun ). I feel like I just post a wrap-up and I have to start writing another one.

December was an especially busy and fast-paced month. I even had a week off from my day job and it still felt like it was packed to the brim with awesome stuff to do.

December’s challenge was one of the reasons that it went so fast. I was trying to play guitar every day. I certainly didn’t end up playing every single day, I did improve quite a bit from where I started. I’m still playing almost every day and love every minute of it.

What can you really learn in 30 days

I wasn’t sure where to start with guitar. The first day in December, I was so hopelessly slow and uncoordinated at doing any of the chords. I didn’t think anything would change as I went through the month. Watching videos and thinking about guitarists in bands and how fast they move through their picking and chords on the guitar, I had to wonder if they were superhuman, or just born with some special skills that I just didn’t possess.

As I played day after day, I would get a little faster. Each time I sat down it was easier to hold the strings. I could hold them for a little longer. It was tiny amounts sure, but I could feel myself getting better and better after a few days would go by.

I know 30 days isn’t going to be long enough to be playing tough songs by the end of it but I was hopeful that I would at least improve.

Unfortunately because of how much I had already planned for December, travelling, Christmas, skiing, New Years, hanging out with people, I found it extremely hard to keep up the guitar every day. I ended up only doing about half the days after missing a big chunk around christmas and it was very noticeable. Most of the time it’s nice to take a break from what you’re doing for a little while and then come back to it refreshed and re-motivated. Taking a break from guitar, thought, meant sore fingers.

Playing guitar isn’t like learning a language or some other act of willpower. You can sit down and learn things on the mental side for hours if you really want to. On the physical side of things  you have a limit. You can only play guitar for so long before your fingers start to hurt so much you can’t play.

The nice part about this natural limit was that it was forced. I could not play longer than my fingers could hold out. It was easier to sit down and play because I knew there was a natural time limit for playing that day. Initially I could only play for 5 or 10 minutes. It got longer near the end. Accidentally taking time off meant that I was decreasing my time limit instead of increasing it. For every day that I didn’t play, I would be able to stand the rough strings on my fingers for a slightly shorter amount of time. Many people say that the best way to learn is little by little every single day. Guitar forces this. It’s the only way to learn it.

What I learned playing guitar for 30 days

Time Limits

As I said above, when you start off, you won’t be able to play guitar for long periods of time. I couldn’t at least. Someone with much more callused hands would be able to play for longer sessions right off the bat. I don’t do much that would strengthen them naturally. Climbers would probably be able to play for hours!

On the plus side, it forced a time limit on each session. This made them more relaxing. I feel like when I don’t go for more than an hour or so doing something, I’m just making excuses and I should go for longer. I know this sounds silly. Most people can’t concentrate on one thing for much more than 90 minutes. The little voice inside my head natters at me to keep going, even when I know I’ve had enough and it’s time for a break. I’ve been experimenting with hard time limits on things. Much like in the pomodoro technique. It’s nice to know that I only have to work for 30 minutes or 1 hour no matter what I’m doing. Sometimes I do get lost in something if I’m really into but I end up doing less of other things. I don’t want to get sick of what I’m working on right now so time limits are a good way to keep things fresh.

Best Practices

Everything in the world has best practices. There may not be one best way for doing something but there are always tips and tricks for getting the most out of your experience. You don’t want to learn something the wrong way and keep those bad habits for the rest of your life. Learning on your own can be a fantastic way to try things out but finding good resources like websites, books or teachers to help you out can save you a lot of time down the road. The book I’m using to learn guitar comes with a DVD with videos and other resources to use while you’re learning. You can watch the videos as you’re playing to learn how to get the fingering correct and how exactly to do things. Words are amazing tools for teaching but often a picture or a video just makes learning so much faster.

Nail the Basics

You can’t play guitar without learning the basic chords and ways to pick the strings. It’s impossible. Also impossible is thinking that you can skip to the awesome part at the end of years of playing and be a rockstar guitar player. It doesn’t work that way. If you practice every day for a couple years, you could actually get to be a very good guitar player. Playing for 30 days is not the same thing. I never liked things that simply required repetition to learn them. While it’s not exactly the same every time, each chord is still the same chord. What I didn’t know before was that it wasn’t just mindlessly strumming the guitar over and over and over with the same chords to learn how to play. Actually learning something required deliberate practice. In this case, thinking about where your fingers are for each chord and moving them from chord to chord faster every time requires concentration. If you never increase your speed, you’ll never become a better play. Sometimes it doesn’t work and the note sounds terrible but you don’t get faster unless you push.

January’s Challenge

I loved playing guitar every day and have continued to practice these first few days of January while I dive into my next challenge.

I almost did this challenge for December but thought that I might fail before I’d even started. It would have been very tough and not a lot of fun. January is going to be month of eating extremely healthy. I’ll be trying to follow the Paleo diet strictly for 30 days. The main idea is that I’ll be eating lots of veggies, meat and fruit with very little sugar, coffee or gluten. I’m already entirely gluten free with what I’ve got in my cupboards and fridge at home but eating out is tough. It’s rare to find a place that has a gluten-free menu and beer is right out the window.

If you’ve gone Paleo, or are thinking about it, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what your thoughts are about it. Maybe you could do a Paleo challenge for January as well?

One of the biggest encouragements to try was through Jonathon Fields book Uncertainty. After reading through the examples of people using meditation as an anchor in their hectic lives to keep them grounded and live a creative life, I was convinced. I had to try it.

Initially I had a few questions, I’ll answer them here as best I can but I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on meditation. I did it for 30 days and that’s about it. I will say right now that I like the practice very much if for nothing else than the relaxing few minutes of the day I could look forward too.

What do I think about?

I’m not sure which style I was focused more on while I was meditating. Vipassana or “insight meditation” is about just sitting, there is no thinking or focus involved just sitting. I read a bit about Zazen as well or the focus on the breath. I found this to be the easiest to do because it gave me something to focus on. I count to 10 and then start back at one. When you reach 20 or 30 you know you’ve been thinking about something else and can restart your count.

What time of day should I meditate?

I tended to sit and meditate when I got home after work. That was the time that worked best for me. Sometimes I would have too much coffee or my brain would be spinning from everything that happened that day and it was hard to slow everything down. I guess that’s one of the benefits of meditation is it can help you relax and organize your thoughts from the day. I’ve heard many good things about meditating early in the morning soon after you wake up. This helps you be present and mindful for the rest of the day instead of focusing on it near the end of the day. Early morning can be a peaceful and quiet time to sit as well.

How long do I sit for?

I used a recording from Blissitations and sat for 15 minutes each day. I found some days I couldn’t go a second longer than that, and some I took my time and ended up doing 25 or 30 minutes. I’ve read that anything more than 5 minutes can give you some benefit in terms of relaxation and starting to organize your mind but many say that 15 minutes would be he bare minimum you’d need to actually meditate.

Do I listen to anything?

I didn’t plan to listen to anything while meditating but sometimes it’s helpful to screen out sounds from around me. I’d get listening to something in my house and start thinking about the things I had to do around the house. I’ve read that listening to soothing sounds and counting at the same time splits your attention and that’s not really the point of the exercise. I found that I’d either be actively listening to the Blissitation or I’d be counting and not really both anyways.

Did I listen to music? 

I didn’t listen to any music while I was doing it. The Blissitation I was using was 15 minutes long and a relaxing recording of the rain. I find that sound very relaxing to begin with so it worked well.  A lot of what I read said that music can be very distracting although there can be times where just listening to the music and only the music can be meditative.

What’s a Binaural Beat?

I ran across these things called Binaural Beats during my research. Apparently certain sounds can induce your brain into certain states. When you are meditating you want to get your brain to slow down and get into the states where the brain waves move slower. Delta is the slowest. Some people that have been meditating for a long time can get into that state from meditating but most can’t. Binaural Beats can help you get into that state by just listening to them and experience the benefits without having to meditate for years and years. One I came across was called Holosync and I saw a few different recommendations for it.  I did see some information about it causing “upheaval” periods so I decided not to try it now until I got more information about it. It was on the expensive side of the available products as well so it will have to wait.

Should I sit or lay down?

I tried laying down at first because I thought it would be a great time to catch up on my napping and that’s exactly what happened. I would fall asleep. I have read about people doing “napitations” which start as meditating and end up being a short nap. They can be beneficial if you need to catch up on your sleep at the same time. I ended up sitting for most of my sessions. I had troubles sitting in the lotus position or even cross-legged for 15 minutes. The indian position worked well or just sitting on the edge of a chair or couch. Sounds like whatever position that is comfortable to sit in for 15 minutes is ok.

Should I close my eyes?

I closed my eyes for most of my sessions. That lead to falling asleep when I was laying down but it was fine when I was sitting up. The traditional way to do it is to have your eyes slightly open and focused a few meters in front of you. This prevents you from falling asleep. The whole idea is that you are awake and present the entire time. You don’t want to have to close your eyes every time you want to relax during the day!

Meditating before or after exercise?

I ran a few times before and after meditating and both orders felt great. When I ran and then meditated I had to be careful to stretch and then get into my position for meditation or else I would stiffen up while sitting. Running is almost meditative for me anyways so the two went along well. I found I would be a lot more present on my run if I meditated first. I want to experiment with this more and see if there is more of a difference I missed the first few times I did it.

What’s the next Spark Challenge for December?

I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing a Guitar challenge but wasn’t sure if I should just start on my own and see what happens or go take some lessons. I feel like guitar is one of those things that you can get some pretty bad habits engrained if you start practicing in earnest without having had some formal lessons.

I’ve got a marathon training clinic coming up in January so I didn’t want to start any lessons that I’d only take for a few weeks. I am still doing the guitar challenge but it will be with a book and DVD set I have called “Learn Guitar in 24 Hours”. It sure sounds hokey but so far it’s been really good.

I think almost any learning methods would work for guitar as long as I practice a ton. I’ve been doing about 15 -20 minutes a day so far and I’m sure feeling it in my fingers. Each day I go to practice, I feel it less though. I’m not sure how long it’s going to be before I can play as long as I want but I hope to keep up the practice as long as I can and get to a point where I can at least play a couple songs before having to take a finger rest!

I’ve got a couple easy songs in my head that I’d like to learn how to play so the first couple weeks of December are going to be practicing chords and getting the basics down and then the last week, I’ll be trying to get a song or 2 learned.

Anyone else doing a Challenge for December? If you are let me know so I can check out your progress!

Every day was a battle of time. What do I spend my time on? I could spend 2 or 3 hours of time on whatever I wanted before I left for work and after I came home. In between cooking, cleaning and hanging out with my girlfriend there was some time that I was free to do what I like. That’s when the priority battle started. What should I work on? Should I be configuring the new section for PureOutside? Should I be writing more guides to sell there? Should I be writing on rcThink trying to expand my horizons and conquer fears? Should I be reading about what other people are trying to do and chatting with them about it?

Even with a full-time job, I still find the time to do the things I love to do. The only problem is that the full-time job takes so many of my waking hours that I’m left with only a few for the awesome stuff.

With that said, I think I did pretty well. I wrote 22 or 23 days of October. That’s more than I’ve ever written in my life. Some of what I wrote got published. Some of it didn’t. My rules for the challenge was that it had to be at least journalling. I spent the majority of it working on articles for PureOutside, which worked out well. That site is a priority for me and I also get to work on the challenge. I’m finding more and more these days, that I need to work on things that accomplish a few goals, not just one. Something that I write that can be used for multiple things, or I’m working on a mental goal and a physical one at the same time. Adventuring is always like that for me. Exploring outside is a great workout, I get some time away from work and machinery to relax and think, and it’s great material for photography and writing guides. There are many beneficial byproducts from adventuring. That’s my case for needing to do it and I’m stickin’ with it.

I’m proud of the fact that I wrote most days in October but I still think I could do better. To be honest, some of the days I forgot that I was doing a writing challenge. I was quite busy for a couple of the weeks travelling, with sports and other commitments that by the time I got home, writing wouldn’t even enter my mind. When I remembered, though, I was all over it, totally immersed in WordPress or Evernote on my laptop and typing away like mad. That leads to a couple of things I learned from the first Spark Challenge.

Teh Learnings

1. It gets easier

The Resistance was telling me writing every day was going to be like pulling teeth every single day. It was going to be like wringing a dry towel to get more water from it. It was going to be terrible. It wasn’t like that at all.

Every day I wrote more and more and while I was focused on writing because I was doing a challenge for the first couple days, I would flow into just writing to write after doing it for a few days straight. Doing it every single day and creating a routine is a huge part of being able to do it all the time. I couldn’t get the same time every day to write but if I could wake up and remind myself I had to write at some point that day, it would usually get done. Days that I forgot to remind myself or were just to crazy to get an extra relaxed thought in edgewise were the ones where I dropped the ball and forgot about it. I can’t think of a single day where I remembered but intentionally did not write. My mind was just elsewhere sometimes.

2. You have to make time

These new challenges I’m doing are things I don’t do normally. There would be no point to making a challenge for going to work every day. I already do that (minus weekends). They are things that are tough to do every day because I already have commitments pulling me in every direction and other projects on the go that are splitting my time even thinner.

I started just adding to do list items to my lists for writing but that wasn’t working. It was hard to relate a to do list to the actual amount of time I had. The to do list didn’t display things as a schedule or calendar. Oh wait, I have one of those. It’s called a calendar and I use it for other things. I ended up sitting down with my to do list and my calendar on as many days as I could, at least once a week, and scheduling out some writing time. Surprising things happen when you look at tasks scheduled on a calendar.

I always thought I had tons of time during the day to do extra things. I would give myself 10 tasks to do each day but wonder why I wasn’t getting anything done. I had lots of time right? Wrong. I didn’t have a lot of time. After putting all the little random tasks around the house and my full-time job, that left me with minimal amount of time to spend writing. What did I typically do with half that precious free time? I’d lolligag around on email, Facebook and all sorts of blogs. By the time I got around to writing, my time was up and I needed to move on to other things.

If I was going to write then it was going to happen first. I had to schedule time to work on things and when that time came around I would sit down and write, nothing else. I wouldn’t “warm up” by checking email or reading blogs because they just turned into time sucks. They’re required yes but they can happen in little slivers of time I have here and there. Writing deserves a  nice big uninterrupted chunk of time. Once I gave that time the respect it deserved, wonderful things happened. I got so much more done, and even though there was tons of email and Facebook messages around I felt much better about what I had accomplished.

3. Nothing is perfect the first time

I get stuck in a rut sometimes with my writing. I start thinking more and more about what other people think about it and me, the writer. I worry about what other people are writing, how they’re doing it and why it sounds so much better than what I write. As it is it every creative endeavor and really anything you start doing in life, I had to get over the fact that I’m not a top-notch writer yet. I like to think it makes sense and is relatively interesting to read but it’s not quite a literary classic. I’m coming to grips with the fact that I’ll never be writing classics. I just like too many things to spend the time to learn to write that way. If I wanted, I could devote all my time to becoming an amazing writer but then I wouldn’t have as much time to adventure, take photos and experiment with new things I haven’t even tried yet. That fact still stresses me out a little but I’m getting closer to fully accepting it. A question for you: Do you specialize or go shallow into meany different endeavors? Which is better?

4. One at a time is best

At least to start. Leo Babauta from Zen Habits has been pushing this idea for as long as he’s written. One thing at a time. As soon as you introduce more stuff to the mix, things get diluted, forgotten, pushed back, lost. If you want to learn something, and learn it well, you have to focus on it. I feel like having at least an hour a day to do something could get you some traction in it. More would obviously be better. You don’t want to burn yourself out right away but the more you can pick up in a short time span the more you’ll recall later on. I remember learning to snowboard and only going to the hill once or twice a year. It took forever to get to a certain level. When I finally took a family trip to another ski hill and boarded for 4 days straight, I improved much faster than I had riding so sporadically. It was exactly the same thing learning wakeboarding, skiing, ultimate frisbee and sailing. The more time you can spend in it when you’re first learning the better.

There seems to be a critical point you get to along your path that you’re no longer a newbie. You’ve got things figured out, you’re no longer one of those brand new people trying to figure out what’s going on. You certainly don’t know everything there is to to know but you know enough to get you started and you know about what you don’t know. Realizing there is a lot you don’t know goes a long way to keeping you humble and hungry for more. No one wants to spend a huge amount of time learning something only to realize that’s all there is, the learning is over.

5. Let the squirrel do it

I read an awesome article recently about writing or really doing anything in general. I can’t for the life of me remember where it was though. They were talking about letting your squirrel brain do the writing. Often when you’ve learned what you need to know and you’ve thought about it enough, you can just let go and let your subconscious or squirrel-brain do the work. At this point it’s less about conscious thought and just about letting go and allowing your brain to do it’s work. You don’t have to force it. If you’ve done your prep, research, thinking, interviewing and checking, it’s all there there already. Just let it flow.

I’m sure there were a bunch more insights that I had writing for a month but my brain’s already turned to the next Spark Challenge.

A month of meditation

I’ve been hearing more and more about meditation as a daily practice for creatives. Brian Johnson from Philosopher’s Notes talks about it a lot and Jonathon Fields mentioned it in Uncertainty as an anchor to clear thinking in the seas of crazy life. I made up that terrible metaphor, don’t think Jonathon would write something like that. In his book, Jonathon talked about it as a great way to relax, clear your mind, organize your thoughts, and allow your brain to do some heavy, creative thinking all at the same time.

I’ve always seen meditation as some weird fluffy thing that guys on mountain tops do because they have nothing else to do with their time but the more I read, the more it sounds like something that would benefit my life in many ways.

I’ve started with the free sample Blissitation from Brian Johnson. It’s 15 minutes long which I think is a perfect time to start off at. I know some start at 5 minutes but I found 15 minutes very easy to do. I’m almost falling asleep after that amount of time though, which I’m not sure is supposed to be happening. Along with the practice of meditating every day, I’ll be looking into exactly how it works and the different types. In a couple weeks I should have another post up about what I’ve learned and how I’m doing with the challenge.

Post Yours

I hear about challenges going on all over the place and I’d love to hear about them. What are your rules? Is it 30 days long? What have you tried and what are you going to try next?

I’ll be tweeting every day about how things are going with the hash tags #sparkmonth #day1. If you’re doing any monthly challenges, I’d love to see your tweets too.

So many things can go wrong along the path to creating something awesome and doing great things. One of the biggest obstacles that can get in your way is yourself. You can make up million of excuses and sabotage your own projects like no other. Make sure that doesn’t happen by practicing these habits with every project.

Line up Values and Priorities

Is it in line with your values and priorities? Why are you doing it?

The first thing you have to look at when something new comes up is why you are doing it. There is so much going on these days and so many new things coming in through every input channel imaginable that it’s hard not to latch on to every new thing that comes by. Twitter, gotta get on that. Facebook, have to have one. Google Plus, must update status. People are doing everything these days just to get attention. That doesn’t mean you have to as well. Don’t keep up with the Jones. Do what you need to do.

Start with your major goals and priorities. Is your focus writing? Then why are you dabbling in video? Do you want to help people in a specific area? Then why are you tweet and facebooking about things other than that. Give me a really good reason why this new project lines up with the core of your values and priorities right now and then you can go ahead.

Estimate then Schedule

I’m usually terrible with this one but I’m getting better and it’s helping a lot. You have 168 hours every week. In that time you have to eat, sleep, relax, travel, hang out and deal with emergencies. All those things take up a lot of time. Are they in your calendar? No? That might be why you’re trying to schedule 20 hours of work for yourself every day. This may work for a day or 2 but you’ll kill yourself scheduling that much work. You want to have a good life right?

Your calendar is your god with this. When you are looking at starting a new project first look at how much time you have. Up to your eyeballs in work for the next 3 weeks? Not a good time to start something new. Your calendar should tell you this. If it doesn’t then you’re not using it enough. For every task you work on, estimate how long it’s going to take and then put it in your calendar. In your head you think you can do 30 hours of work each day no problem. Your calendar, and real life, will tell you differently. If it doesn’t fit in your calendar, you’re not doing it.

Don’t worry about estimating time. It’s really hard. The last thing you know about some things is exactly how long it’s going to take. Often it’s after it’s done that you know how long it’s going to take. Make a guess, schedule it and get moving.

Set SMART Goals

We’ve all heard the SMART goals thing before. I heard it first in high school and totally disregarded it as some fluffy thing a teacher said that I’d never use in my life. Apparently I was wrong. If I took anything out of school this was probably one of the golden nuggets I should have remembered.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. I’ll do a quick run through if you were like me and weren’t listening for that class in high school.

Specific refers to how detailed your goal is. It needs to be specific, very specific. If anything, err on the side of more specific than less. Vague goals are junk. Your brain has no idea what you’re talking about when you tell it you want to get fit, build an amazing business, or live an exciting life. Your subconscious looks at that and goes, “What do you mean?”, and throws it out. Think about explaining your goal to a 5 year old. If they don’t get it, it’s not specific enough.

Measurable basically means you know when you are done. How do you finish something if you don’t know where your finish line is? Think of yourself as an employee asking “when do I know when I’m done?” Answer that for yourself and you’ll be well on your way to making a measurable goal.

Attainable can be a confusing one. It means you have to set a goal that’s attainable by you, that you are able to achieve what you set out to do. How high do you set it? It mainly depends on time. You can achieve anything you want in your life but how much time are you willing to devote to it. If you want to climb Everest do you plan do it in 6 months or 10 years? I’d say nearly anybody could do it in 10 years with focus and determination for those entire 10 years. 6 months? You’d better be ridiculously strong and fit and have a ton of money. Big huge goals have an abysmal rate of success. Pick a smaller mountain and knock that off and then maybe look at the Everest goal again.

Realistic is requirement that’s similar to attainable. It’s up to you to decide whether something is realistic for your. It comes down to your situation again. You may have some huge goal you want to tackle but with all the sports your doing, family commitments and little side projects you have on the go, you don’t have time for that huge goal. It’s not realistic. Clear off some of the other stuff and you might find that big goal becomes more realistic.

Timely means deadlines. Yes, I hate deadlines too. Just the thought of them makes me think of writing papers at 4 in the morning the night before something was due at school. Not a fun way to create things. After school was done I had an allergy to deadlines. I kept as far as I could away from any deadline inducing activity. I got nothing done. Deadlines are like broccoli, they might taste gross but they’re good for you*. I’m always amazed at the different in productivity on projects I have with deadlines and ones without. The ones without seem to drag on forever. The ones with deadlines are organized, moving and finished in a flash. One note that on deadlines is that they have to be intelligent. Having a goal to finish 80 hours of work in 2 days is just dumb. Make sure your goal fits in your schedule and you actually work on it and it will get done within the deadline.

Chunk It

I love this one. Big hairy goals (and audacious ones if you want) are really difficult for your mind to comprehend when you go to do anything with it. You want to get fit? What does that mean? What steps are you going to take to get fit? When are you going to do those steps. Break it down to 20 minute steps. Not vague blocks that last a few hours, 20 minutes max. The less thinking and more doing you do when you sit down to work the better. That means laying out pre-defined chunks. You probably can’t chunk a whole project. That’s like planning your life 3 months in advance. Doesn’t work. Chunk your weeks into hour blocks on Monday then chunk your days each morning.

Set the Finish Line

This came up in the SMART goals. It’s so important it deserves it’s own point. I’ll add one other important piece to it here. You have to set your finish line. Ask when you are done. If you don’t know, it’s not defined well enough. The key here is that you are limiting scope creep. You don’t want your project to get bigger and bigger and grow out of control. Do the things that are required and nothing more. If anything that comes up that could be a cool feature or would be nice to have add it to a Maybe list. After the project is done, look at the maybe list and see if there are any features that need doing.

Limit Input

This tip has 2 parts to it. You need to limit input to your brain and limit input to your project while working on the project. The first has to do with your valuable time. The more stuff you read, watch and generally take in the less you’re working on your awesome project. Check your email only when you need to and cruise the news and social media channels after you’ve worked on your project. Only do what you’ve scheduled. Don’t lie to yourself about reading blogs and tweets when you’re just screwing around wasting time. Time is valuable, use it for your awesome project.

The second part is limiting input to your project itself. When too many people want to give their input on something, it gets diluted and slides away from it’s original awesomeness. Don’t let that happen. Get some feedback once in a while to make sure you not doing dumb things while in isolation but once you’ve heard what you need, head back into the secret lab and get creating.

Ship it

Next to starting something, the most important part is finishing it. Seth Godin calls it shipping. Shipping, delivering, finishing, or the fat lady singing, you need to finish what you started. There is way too much unfinished stuff these days. I do it all the time, I’ll see some new shiny idea and start a project with it and then when the novelty wears off, it sits there. The problem with that is it takes up space in your mind when it’s unfinished. The clutter sticks around and you think about it off and on, distracting you from the important things.

There are 2 things you can do after you start something. One is shipping it. This is the preferred option. Even if you just do a small project and then not follow up on any more ideas, it’s still shipping something. Do small projects then if you want to pivot or turn around then you don’t have a huge amount going on. You finish up your small project and you’re done. Start something new. Pivot complete.

The second option is to kill it. This is when something just isn’t working. You don’t want it to drag on and use up time and resources. You know there’s no future in it. Don’t let it sit around and take up mind space, kill it.

Share it and Celebrate

Yahoo! You’ve finished something. You’ve put the work in, shipped it and it’s done and gone. It’s time to revel in the fact that you are ten times farther than most people get with their projects. Even if it didn’t go well, remind yourself that you did something incredibly hard. You completed something. 100% is a good feeling. Give yourself a pat on the back, have a drink or some nice chocolate and look back on your accomplishment.

Once you’ve relaxed a little and recognized your accomplishment, start more awesomeness.

* I actually like broccoli but apparently some people don’t. That must mean I like deadlines too.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be working my tail off to get more content up on the site and driving more visitors to it. The name of the game (well, one of them) of the MDBP (Million Dollar Blog Project) is to increase your traffic. The second goal is to make as much money as possible with it. The Think Traffic Team will be aiming for one million dollars over time with the site they’re setting up for the project (which I’m stoked is about learning quickly). A secondary goal is to get the combined total money made of all the other blogs that have signed up over one million as well. We’re all helping to get to one million as well as fighting for top spot on that leader board!

Traffic is going fairly well although it could use a kick in the pants with some good evergreen content. Unfortunately some of my traffic won’t be registering with Clicky because I’ve only got the plugin on the WordPress portion of the site, the blog. The Drupal part with the articles, movies, stores and trails doesn’t have a Clicky module for drupal 7 yet so I’ll be doing without. I’ll just remember that I’m doing better than it looks because of that other section that’s not tracking. The money section of the stats will be dead on thought. Right now it is at a big fat $0!

That brings me to the product end of things. I’m working hard in Tyler’s Bootstrappers Guild to get a product ready and out the door. He’s got us working towards making $200 a month within 60 days. Tough, but doable!

I’ve been steadily going along this path to creating a product through PureOutside for a while now but really taking my sweet time with it. I had originally planned to have a guide out in the summer but adventures in the nice weather took over. Then I decided I needed a whole new Drupal section to the site to hold these new products and that took a while. Currently Drupal is running on all cylinders for the main section of the site and I’m hard at work currently installing and configuring Ubercart for the store. I was worried I would have to piece together a bunch of different modules to sell subscriptions and digital files on the site but seems Ubercart has it all. I’ll be installing that in the next few days and getting a free sample product up and ready to go.

My aim is to have the sample site ready to go by the end of October and a full paid section up by the end of November. I’m really stoked about the idea of the paid content sections or subscription style product because it means I can update it any time I need to. There won’t be any random PDF’s floating around in the wild with old content in them.

Getting excited about the release of my first digital product. Here we go!

In the back of my mind I know the solution is to just start. Ready. Fire. Aim.

And then… here comes the lizard.

Like so many other things in life, there is absolutely no way to think through each piece. It’s impossible to see something perfect in your mind, put it on paper and be done. There will always be revisions, rewrites, filled recycle baskets (not sure how when so much is digital these days…the digital recycle bin?).

I think of all the things I’ve learned over the years and not one thing has come in one fell swoop. I’ve learned a bit, played with it, tested it, got the basics down. Then when I’m ready to move on, I learn some more. Those next stages of learning can’t come first. There is always the basics, the fundamentals, the newbie stuff, to go through first.

With what you learn in the first stages of something, you can start to take in more advanced things. You have the basics now and that is used as a base for more complicated things. There is nothing like realizing you’ve moved the next stage. It feels good to level up. But you get nowhere without starting.

That’s where the Spark Challenges come in. There’s a certain lure to challenging yourself with things you’ve never done before. That’s what I plan to do with these challenges. Things I’ve always wanted to learn, or just simply to get better at, will be my focus. I’ll assign a challenge for 30 days. And then every single day during that month, I’ll work on that challenge. Rain or shine, through thick and thin, I’ll be working on that challenge.

Part of the wonders of challenges like this is that it’s every day. There is no time to forget what you learned the last time you did it. You learn something every day and you can apply it the very next day. There is no week, month or year in between to forget. Do, learn, do, learn, do learn.

Writing

Writing is going to be the first challenge.

I’ve always been an ok writer. I’m definitely not the next Hemingway and that’s not what I aspire to be after this challenge. I do want to be a better writer though. It’s always fascinated me when something I’ve read gives me goose bumps, or inspired me to do something or just feels good to read. I want to be able to do that. And this Spark Challenge is going to get me closer to doing that.

For the month of October, I’ll be writing at least 500 words a day. All those words are going to be scattered around. Some of them are going to end up here as articles, or PureOutside, or Aviawest, or even my journal. Chat messages and emails don’t count. That’s cheating. Those are just like talking through a keyboard. I want to use the words in this challenge to motivate people to live better lives and get outside and do amazing things. That, in essence is what these challenges are about; finding the fastest ways to learn new things to enrich my life and others. Isn’t that what life is about?

I’ll do a couple of updates along the way, either as entire posts or tidbits tacked on to the end of other stuff this month. At the end I’ll do an update about this challenge and announce the next.

Let me know what you think. Have you done anything like this before? How did it go? What did you like? What sucked about it?

I may need some suggestions for new challenges as well. Post your ideas and your challenges!

I’ll say right off that I have no means of turning this blog into a million dollar blog. It would be nice but I don’t think it’s where I’m headed.

What IS happening is that with a whole ton of other great new blogs, I’m participating in the Million Dollar Blog Project. What is that you might ask?

The Million Dollar Blog Project is from the team at Think Traffic. They’ve started an ambitious new project to create a new blog from scratch and, over time, make a million dollars with it. What makes it fun is that they’ve created a great system, almost a game actually, that lets you sign up for the project and work along side them. Another goal of the project is to also help people create 1 million dollars worth of blogs around the blogosphere.

That’s why I’ve signed up.

I’ve been on the brink of putting some products on PureOutside for a while now. I’ve just launched a huge portion to the site to go along with the blog and am building up a store for the products as we speak (not really, I’m actually writing this, but tonight I will be). This will be the catalyst to actually get things moving on the site. I’ve got some competition in the other blogs, I’ve got the team at Think Traffic leading the way. I can’t think of a better time to really get going on it. A big thanks to the the Think Traffic Team for setting this all up. It’s going to be a huge amount of work.

One of the requirements of the project is an accountability journal. You’re looking at the start of it. I’ll be using rcThink as my journal as I go and hopefully everyone can learn a bit, or at least watch and wonder. You’ll be able to find future Accountability Journals here.

If you want to sign up yourself you can at http://thinktraffic.net/mdbp/.

My hope is to start an amazing resource for people wanting to start things like hiking, wakeboarding, computer programming or photography, all things I’ve started at some point and have got past the initial “I don’t know where to go” stage.

why start anything?

Starting is the hardest part. Often you are forced to do something but there are many times that you can start things for pleasure as well. Some things I’ve learned because I thought it was required, only to learn later that I didn’t need it.

If you look at it right, learning can be fun. The more you know, the more you can do with it. I find the more I learn about different areas of life, the more I can apply those ideas to other places. Learning new things keeps life fresh and interesting. It can get you a new job, let you meet new people or introduce you to your favorite new hobby. The more you start new things the easier it gets.

where’s the end?

Does there need to be an end? With learning new things you can set a goal if you like. You could learn a particular song on the guitar and then you’re finished. You might just want to learn some computer programming to make a website for your new business and then you will be done. You may be trying out a new hobby for 30 days to see if you like it.

I highly recommend trying something for at least 30 days to see what it’s like. You might want to try a 30 day Challenge.  Who knows where it will go from there? Maybe you’ll love it. Maybe you won’t. But you won’t know until you try.

where do i go from here?

I definitely can’t claim to be an expert in every single thing that I do. If you’ve moved past what I can teach you with my resources here, and want to continue, you’ll want to look through the resources section. I’ve made my best effort to include some blogs, websites and people that would be excellent next steps on your journey. Take a minute to congratulate yourself on your accomplishment if you’ve made it this far. You’ve gotten past the hardest part of learning; starting.

I never thought one little book could be so packed full of inspirational quotes, but Emerson has done it. Every time I read a new part of Self-Reliance, I get “anything is possible” goosebumps and start thinking about what I’m going next, what I’m going to do next, and what I’m going to write next. Then I don’t do anything. What happens? I prepare and plan procrastinate and then by the time I should have something created, something new has come along and I move onto that. Focus is a hard thing to come by these days.

The newest prompt by Eric Handler is about your personal message.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oooh, it gives me chills.

And then we’re supposed to answer:

What is burning deep inside of you? If you could spread your personal message RIGHT NOW to 1 million people, what would you say?

Ooh, ooh! I’ve got my hand up. Here in the back row! Why don’t you pick me teacher? I know my answer!

My answer is http://pureoutside.com/blog/. I’ve started. It doesn’t quite go to 1 million people but a few hundred, almost 1000 see it every month. They take the information from it and go outside. They go play, run, hike, ride, kayak and anything else they want to do outside. They move.

The whole idea is to move. Outside. We have this incredible planet we live on that’s full of amazing places, sights, sounds, animals and plants and yet we spend most of our lives inside. Away from the sun, away from the rain, away from where we came from. It’s amazing how many people say they feel so good when they’re outside. Their lazy-brain stops them dead in their tracks when they’re making plans and tells them to go to the couch and watch TV. What a waste.

When did you go outside last?