30 Day Supertrial

This morning I revisited my good friend Steve Pavlina who, though he's never met me, is a frequent participant in my life. At his hands I've tried many things I wouldn't have had the idea or motivation to try on my own. There have been many interesting experiments over the years: polyphasic sleep (the Uberman schedule), lucid dreaming, Site-Build-It!, blogging, staying unemployed, and probably a few others, but my favorite weapon of the arsenal of life-changers he's handed out has always been the 30 day trial. If you want the full treatment, read it on his website, but the basic idea is that changing any non-trivial aspect of your life is freaking hard. A 30 day trial lets you try out a new thing without committing to it as a lifelong change. It's a magical operator on life changes:

Hard Life Change X 30 day trial = Doable Experiment

Example: quitting smoking is hard. Quitting smoking for 30 days is doable. Eating healthy is hard. Eating healthy for 30 days is doable. Not going to the bathroom is hard. Not going to the bathroom...well, it almost always works.

Since I first happened on Steve's blog, I've done many 30 day trials. I've given up sugar, meditated daily, drank water, gone vegan, worked out, studied Chinese, blogged, and wrote jokes. I've even participated in a family 30 day trial, where we refused to get annoyed at each other for 30 days.

Then I took a break from Steve Pavlina for a while. His articles, although wonderful to a degree, make me feel wimpy. Plus, the last time I visited his blog he was blogging about being married and polyamorous (a friend of a friend of "promiscuous"), which seemed like a slight departure from his usual inspirational fare.

Anyway, I checked his blog this morning and discovered he'd posted another entry regarding 30 day trials. This time he wasn't addressing the average Joe, but the supermen among us, the above average Marks for instance. The upgraded 30 day trial was not particularly creatively but quite accurately called "30 day supertrial." Basically, you do several 30 day trials at once.

So here we go, the daily must-do's for the next 30 days:

1. do 200 pushups
2. study French for an hour
3. draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin)
4. learn how to tie a new knot a day. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her daily asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. write a blog entry (100 word minimum)

Doesn't sound too bad when you look at it in crisp Times New Roman font. I wouldn't even call it a supertrial, maybe a 30 day trial with extra cheese, but watch this:

1. Do 200 pushups EVERY SINGLE DAY
2. Study French for an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY
3. Draw for 20 minutes (my patience for drawing is paper thin) EVERY SINGLE DAY
4. Learn how to tie a new knot a day...EVERY SINGLE DAY. This one's courtesy of Lucy, who apparently has people running up to her every day asking her to tie non-slipping knots on their poles...but not in the dirty way, whatever that would be.
5. Write a blog entry (100 word minimum) EVERY SINGLE DAY

Capitalizing the first letter of the first word in each task description makes it so much more potent, eh? Oh and I suppose the EVERY SINGLE DAY adds that last grain of rice to the straw stack on the camel's back.