Well, it was hard, but it was worth it.

I became a bit bored at about 15th day of my challenge, so I decided
to make a trip to Egypt.

Well, it was great and exciting. It was a bit extreme too, because
I’ve been travelling the whole foreign country by myself, all alone.

I’ve been in Cairo for 3 days, walking all days and all nights long,
and that was great. There are a lot of friendly people there.

I’ve been in Sharm-El-Sheikh, Dahab, Nuweiba, St. Katharine
Monastery, and Ras-Mohammed national park.

I brought about 700+ pictures from this trip.

Even if it was difficult to start up, I’ll try to continue my new
habit. My new habit serves me well.

Thanks, Steve, for organizing this challenge, and supporting the
whole idea.

The Next 30 Days
May 23, 2005 in the late evening

So… following on from 30 Days to Success - Postmortem. Seeing as he enjoyed it, i came out ra […]

My next challenge will be to write in my blog every day, and I will start it as soon as I get my home internet connection (should be sometime this week, my hosting company was out of modems when I signed up )

I always got up at around 8:30 - 8:45 and I was always rushing to work, so I set these goals:
1) On weekdays, in bed at 12:00, get up at 7:15, max 1 hour later in weekends.
2) Get out of bed when I wake up

My results were adequate, but certainly not perfect. I do in fact get up earlier than before - around 7:45 - and I now don’t have to rush to work anymore, I still don’t have time to eat breakfast before I go. Goal 2 was a rather complete failure. I forgot about it and because I didn’t review my goals, I didn’t adhere to it.

My second set of goals were related to my physical condition.
3) When I get out of bed, I do a set of exercises with weights, push-ups, stretching, etc.
4) I’ve already enlisted at a traditional wu shu school, and am going to do 2 lessons a week and practice at home every day for 30 mins minimum.

These two challenges went very well. I really like the wu shu school I enlisted at and from the second week on I have been exercising there for 5 days a week, 3 days Liu He Men, an intense external style, 1 day Pa Kua Chuan, a more “internal” style and 1 day Qi Gong. I also practice at home, though not at regular times, so I sometimes miss a day or two. But in all I now spend about 7 to 8 hours a week exercising, compared to 0 hours for the last couple of years, and I like what I’m feeling and seeing.

I set one last, food-related goal.
5) No cheese for 30 days

I set this goal as I noticed that I was eating a _lot_ of cheese. I didn’t eat any cheese for the first two weeks and after that I slipped a little, but I am satisfied that I went from 2-3 portions a day to 2-3 portions a week.

I set the goal because I’m investigating changes to my diet, but I don’t want to get obsessed by what I’m eating. I’ve read quite a bit about all kinds of diets and they all have sensible arguments for and against, so I think I’ll just experiment for myself.

Moving on, I’ve set goals for the next 30 days:
1) Wake up at 7:00 AM and get up as I wake up. Sleep when I feel tired, around 23:30
2) Do my exercises consistently when I wake up
3) Have healthy breakfast each day after exercises
4) Spend 3 hours a day working on my own business
5) After working on my own business, write a quick review on my blog about the progress I made that day for 15 minutes
6) Review these goals each day

Besides that I of couse plan to keep my current schedule at the wu shu school, but that won’t be a problem.

Thanks for the challenge, Steve! It works!

conclusion, this was quite an interesting experience, I know I imporeved a lot from this habits, and I decide to keep this habit for the next 30 days, now my rank is about 8kyu, I would like to see my self end up as 1 dan Go player before the end of this year. Cheer!

Yeah, thanks for the invitation! I had two missions.

1. I tried to be vegetarian for 30 days that I completed. In the future I try to eat less meat than before the mission.
2. I also tried not to eat after 8pm every day. I failed 3 times. Even though I failed I try to make it a habit for the future.

Thanks again and congratulations for your book!

Mate

I made a little spreadsheet with 30 numbered boxes and some room to write my challenge. This is in my ‘tickler file’ folder for today. I cross the next number when I attain my goal for today and then put that piece of paper in the file for tomorrow.

I made a few of these papers and put them seven days apart in the tickler file. This means that every week I will be presented the opportunity to start a new daily habit. Let’s see how that works out.

I also made a list of daily habits that I may want to start. When I am ready for a new challenge I would look there.

On that list I also state which daily habits I already have or that I am currently working on. If I check that every week or so it would function as a safety net to ensure that a daily habit stays a daily habit.

I hope these tips serve others as well. Thanks for the article, Steve!

I also set three more ambitious goals but didn’t post them online. Here goes:

Second goal was to exercise a little every day. I did and it was good, so I will continue to exercise daily from now on (same with the forums - I realized did’t really need them).

Third goal was to wake up early every day. Early for me, that is, I won’t tell you the exact hour because you’d laugh but it was a big challenge for me and I did get up on time every day. After two weeks I would wake up exactly one minute before the alarm - I found that quite amazing… this new habit I’m definitely not going to throw away.

And my fourth goal was again taken from Steve’s suggestions - ask a girl out every day… this one was the hardest and took a lot of courage every time. I didn’t finish. After a week I met the girl of my dreams (no kidding), so there’s no point really.

Thank you very much Steve.

I only completely achieved one goal - I didn’t miss a day of yoga.

As for the first and second goals, I got pretty close to 100% result, but I still missed a couple of days when I went to bed too late and got up too late (by an hour at the worst).

When it was about day 15 I felt I should make my second goal even stricter and all the subsequent days I got up by 7 am.

All in all, I think the challenge has done me a lot of good. I am going to keep early waking hours and doing yoga for as long as I can.

My first goal was to exercise at least 15 minutes a day. This I did with no problem. Most days I did more than 15, but I found on the days I had lots to do and was really busy I stopped myself at 15 minutes.

My second goal was to eat vegetarian lunches. This one failed miserably and for two reasons. The first is that I was not completely committed to this goal. The second was because I didn’t prepare myself. I did ok for almost a week or two but then when my schedule got off one day and I was running late I stopped by a fast food resturant and it was downhill from there.

I also had a 30-day goal to work on implementing something I learned from “Getting Things Done” each and every day, but I think my definition of “implement GTD” was so broad that I don’t know if I missed any days or not. But I probably missed a couple.

As far as what I accomplished - I got my voicemail, email, and snail mail inboxes totally organized and processed. And I’m able to keep everything processed. I’m going to keep at it this habit also because I still have a lot of stuff left to organize, process, and purge. But rather than trying to do something, anything, each day that would fall under “GTD”, I’m going to commit to one mini-project a week. Because I think I wasted a lot of time on unnecessary “system tweaking” in one area when I could have done something more productive in another area. So each week I’m going to focus on one area that needs organizing (storage area, car, Contacts lists, books library). And when that week is over, I’ll have to force myself to focus on something else. Because these past 30 days I’ve learned that no matter how much I think I’ve accomplished in a certain area, it will never be 100% “done”. Where if allowed to, I’d probably always find some new way to organize and improve some particular area forever.

Health and fitness are not the same. Health is a requirement for fitness. Health is more important, I learned.

I got sick mid way through; the hardest part was to stop running. (I’m already a runner and I enjoyed the challange of sneaking in a 3 or more mile run during the morning, noon, or night)

I gained some wisdom from this experience: I will pay attention to my body. Due to physical stress (no recovery days) and perhaps some life-changing decisions (quit my job-got a new one.. yeah!), my immune system dropped and I became very very ill. (had several afflications at once..)

I’m still coughing up stuff (didn’t get bronchitus, thank god) , but I resumed running , careful, good, workouts. Proper recovery is part of my M.O. now.

Oh, and yeah, My pants are looser and my avg weight is down 5 pounds (no matter what I eat…)