Self Accountability

      Yesterday I missed my goal for the first time. I wrote a total of about 11 words before accidentally shutting off my laptop instead of holding down the backspace key. At this point it was already 11:30 so instead of messing with my password manager to get logged back in, I just went to bed. I don’t feel good about missing a day, but I’m also not going to beat myself up about it. It’s already happened, time to move on.

So far from this experience I’ve learned that keeping myself to a habit is hard work. Every part of my personality has been battling me the last few days to take the lazy way out. So far I’ve been successful and written quite a bit more than my one paragraph per day rule. Yesterday however, my baser instincts won out. The little voice in my head told me that it wasn’t worth it, that I was too tired, that it was too much of a hassle. And I listened. I knew right away what I was doing but my weak will stood no chance against the late hour and my deeply-ingrained habits. So, this being Day 6 now, my longest streak stands at four days.

I want to take some time to talk about my challenge a little more. I mentioned previously that my first month’s goal would be daily writing. I haven’t gotten a set in stone plan for the rest of the duration, but I have an idea. I think at this point it’s mostly the order that needs to be established. I intend to write a post about it once I know for sure. For this one though, I want to talk about writing.

I decided that I wanted to get into writing regularly a few months ago, but until I started this challenge I hadn’t written down one sentence. The challenge is a way for me to improve several aspects of my life, and I figured by starting off with writing, not only will I improve a lifelong skill, but it will help me track my progress. People have been writing for thousands of years, and without it we would be nowhere. Writing is one of the big “pillars” that separates us from animals. No other creature on the planet can record it’s thoughts or ideas in such a way that future generations can look back at them millennia later.

Writing has also been shown to improve the way your brain thinks. Like a big dump truck, the brain is constantly taking in information and eventually it reaches capacity. Now, for most of the data our brains absorb throughout the day, it doesn’t matter if it spills out the top of the container. There are also a lot of things that we don’t want to spill out. So we can deposit some of that information onto the page to save it and make more room in your head. This is important for me because I feel like I have a tendency to live in my head. Lots of thoughts, feelings, and ideas pass through my brain on any given day, and up until now they have been wont to eventually disappear into the aether.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”

This is common advice that we hear these days, but what does it really mean? When you picture the rest of your life, what do you see? For most of us, myself included, we see next Tuesday. Thursday if you are a forward thinker. I aim to change this. But first, some backstory.

For the past few years, I have been listing aimlessly through life. I have always envisioned greatness for myself, but one thing I never picked up on was that I would have to work for it. I took for granted all the opportunities presented to me and never really pushed myself to achieve anything. When I was young, a knack for picking things up quickly and a good memory recall allowed me to excel in school. As a result, I rested on my laurels and cruised through most of school. It wasn’t until 8th grade pre-algebra when I found myself struggling to pick things up naturally as I had. It was well within my means to understand the subject, but I still had this mindset that I was infallible. I rarely did my homework because I was able to score well enough on tests to carry my grades, but I wasn’t learning, not really.

This problem persisted throughout high school, and I found it only getting worse as work, friends, and the never-ending chase for the opposite sex clouded my visions further. I was less motivated than ever, but I was making decent money as a high schooler and having a blast.  My last year of high school, I completely blew off my math class. I had the requisite number of math credits from a fluke earlier in my school career, so I was able to graduate without having to make up any credits.

That was four years ago. It’ll be five this coming May, and it occurs to me that I have accomplished absolutely nothing since then. I still want to achieve that greatness that I’ve always dreamt of, but the path is muddy now. That’s not to say that it was clear before, but I believe that I have finally caught sight of it. I still don’t know where it’ll take me, but I know that if I don’t choose my own path, then I will end up on the wrong one. It’s taken a long time, but at last I know that I need to act lest I waste another five years.

This brings us to the present and my plan. My plan to improve myself and reach those heights I know that are waiting for me. My plan will take the next six months of my life to complete, and even then I will be just beginning. This is a big deal, because as anyone who knows me will tell you, I have a really hard time committing to any one thing that I do.

Over the next six months, I will embark on a journey of self-improvement. Starting with this month, November 2014, I will be dedicating each month to one skill I want to develop or a habit that I want to change. For this month, my task is writing. I will be writing at least one paragraph a day for every day this month. I recently read a guest post on The Art of Manliness that recommended setting “micro-tasks” for yourself that are more easily surmountable than creating a much larger goal. So my goal is one paragraph, and my hope is that since I’m already sitting down writing, I will be able to write more.

I will be using this page as somewhere to organize my thoughts, but I could do that with a good old fashioned journal, or Google docs. The reason I am making this public is to keep myself accountable. It is one thing to mentally tell myself every day that I need to do the things I want to do, it is another to announce publicly what you are doing. Whether or not anyone actually reads anything I post here, it lives forever online. Ten years from now, my words will still be out there somewhere. The question is, did I follow through?

The whole point of this challenge would be moot if I didn’t actually make it a challenge, so as I progress, I will not only be starting new tasks every month, I will keep up with the previous ones. At the end of this, I can choose what I would like to keep up or drop, but the goal is to make it to the end with six new habits that I can build the rest of myself from. I let my foundation wither and rot from disuse, and now I need to rebuild it.