NathanBowers.com

On February 1st, 2008 I started a 29 day challenge to improve several areas of my life. To ensure that I couldn’t just half-ass it and fail silently I went public with this kickoff blog post.

Even though I didn’t hit every goal every day, I was 100% successful in upgrading my health, habits, and creative outputs. Below are my daily goals for the 29 days and the results I got:

Health

• Eat fewer than 2,500 calories a day - I lost 10 lbs. in 29 days. It is easier to lose weight when you’re heavy, and it gets harder as your approach your ideal weight, but this result is encouraging. The first week of this was hard because I felt deprived and my eating routine was upended. Also, finding and logging nutritional information was a pain. After that first week it got much easier and now my habits are set and I barely have to think about what I eat. A friend told me I look younger, and I think it’s true. Probably the only thing that ages you worse than being fat is smoking a pack a day in your personal UV tanning bed.
• Exercise daily - This was easy from the start since I set the bar low. As I got more into it I raised the bar. I did have a setback due to a snowboarding injury, but I snapped back quickly. At this point I’m walking and jogging about 25 minutes, then doing crunches, then doing pushups. I started with girlie pushups, but halfway through the month as I laid on my belly to do them I assumed proper form on impulse and busted out 10 real pushups. I hadn’t done real pushups in years and now I’m up to 13.
• Give up beef this month, except for 2 phở indulgences - I only had one bowl of beef phở near the end of the month and I didn’t like it. Somehow it tasted wrong and afterwards I felt slow mentally and physically. Cutting out beef is a great way to lose weight because it’s easy and it keeps you away from hamburgers, fries, and huge steakhouse meals by default. Though I allowed myself 2 beef meals in February, I plan to avoid it completely in March.
• No more than 4 servings of alcohol this month - Not drinking was easy. If it wasn’t for a Vegas trip I wouldn’t have allowed for any this month. Like avoiding beef, avoiding booze keeps you away from bad food decisions.

Work Habits

• Get up by 9am - This wasn’t hard at all. By the end of the month I was getting up by 7:30. Getting up early is something everyone should do. Pouncing on your day and grabbing it by the balls is much better than letting your day get the drop on you. Since I’m self employed getting up early is optional which can bite you if you don’t make an effort to get up early. For day jobbers, your psyche is happier when you get up early for your own reasons than to get up at the last possible moment because “The Man” says you have to.
• Blog daily - At first writing was hard and slow, now I look forward to it. I wrote 36 new posts in February. Before that my average was about 1.5 posts every 2 weeks. Like getting up early, blogging is something everyone should do. One day you’ll be dead and if you’re not writing or creating then all you’ll leave to posterity is the crap in your garage.
• Do at least 1 significant task to create passive income - This month I compiled my photographs that were just sitting on my hard drive and started a photo print store with them. I also filled a sketchbook with character designs for my future toy empire, registered domains for said empire, and found out about Shopify for no-mess online store building. I would have liked to do more with this because it’s the lynchpin for my future life of low budget jet-setting, but a month spent in R&D isn’t too bad. Many people stay in “paralysis by analysis” mode forever. By the end of March I plan to have my store up and running.

Creativity

• Daily drawing or artwork - Some days I slacked and only did quick sketches, other days I spent hours doing drawing exercises, designing cartoon characters that I plan to market, or abstract digital paintings. I’m not significantly more artistically skilled today than I was a month ago, but the impact on my well-being has been enormous. For more about creative unblocking read The War of Art, or, if you’re more process oriented, The Artist’s Way.
• Meditate Daily - Paradoxically, sitting still for 10 minutes a day was harder than anything else I did last month. Now I look forward to it, but even so, some days I easily get into a calm, aware, undistracted mental state, and other days my mind is all over the place. Even though I’m apparently on the slow train to enlightenment, meditation, like exercise, is worth doing as it strengthens all the other good habits.

What I’ve learned from this process

• Going public with your goals makes you 10 times more likely to achieve them. You could shave your head and post intimate details about your gastronomy like I did. Conversely, you could sign up with a pseudonym on Making the Chain, Twitter, or Wordpress and only tell a few supportive friends about it. The key is that someone besides you has to know what you’re doing so you feel accountable.
• Morpheus was right; There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. You can read all the self improvement books and productivity blogs in the world but they won’t do you any good if you don’t take action. Spinning your wheels by reading or talking about the path can actually make you feel just good enough not to start. If this sounds like you I want you to stop reading, take a walk, and not read a single thing about self improvement for a week while you take action. I bet you already know what you need to do, you’ve just been procrastinating by sharpening your axe.
• Forging new good habits is only hard at first. Think about it. If humans are built to outrun other land animals over long distances we’re certainly capable of walking 30 minutes a day. All the resistance you feel when starting an exercise program or changing your diet is just an emotional reaction to change. Once you’re over that hump new habits become the new normal, and believe me, the new normal feels great.

Posts related to the 29 day challenge from latest to earliest (hairstyles shown in reverse chronology):

• 29 day challenge: Last day (cue Europe’s “Final Countdown”)
• Days 23-24
• One week left
• Days 19-20, turning the corner
• Calories for days 14-18
• The halfway point
• Days 12-13
• Days 9 through 11
• Report on Week 1
• Days 7-8 diet report
• Day 6: Vegas
• Day 5: Oops
• Day 4: Meditation still hard
• February 1-3
• My 29 day leap year personal development challenge