Today marks the 100th day since I made “The 365 Commitment.” It also coincidentally marks the 50th day since my commitment to run, do +1 pushup, +1 situp, and +1 squat. I am generally very happy about this achievement and I have looked forward to finally write this note as it has been quite a journey getting here. Now I have 265 more days to go!
Yesterday, I decided to take my daughter Jolie’s advice and actively attempt to listen to people better. Listening for engagement is not easy at all. Interjecting my opinion, or trying to take the conversation to a place I would like to talk about is a temptation that is hard to resist. Interesting how really trying to figure out what someone means, what they know, and what their intentions are can help you grow. I think I spend too much time trying to broadcast what I think and not enough time receiving.
This last few days I have adopted a new practice while I am running. What I do, is I open up YouTube – and I type in a topic like – “building good habits” then do a search. I click on the first video that seems interesting and start to play it. I make sure the auto play feature is on and so as one video ends another related video starts. I put the phone in my pocket and listen to these videos in succession. This morning I heard a variety of talks that all had some great points about habit building.
The first girl that spoke, liked to speak through her nose and some sort of growling sound in the back of her throat and she spent 20 minutes talking about exactly how she like to get her morning tea ready. This annoyed me, I had to stop my run, get my phone on and click “next” as fast as I could. However, the second one was by BJ Fogg. He is a behavioral psychologist at Stanford. He has a concept called tiny habits and focuses on queues and rewards as this will reduce the need for tremendous will power and constant motivation. The 365 commitment has absolutely taught me this concept. I have started with something small and simple, and focused on the hard part – which is learning the behavior first. We should always start small so that we can condition ourselves to the behavior. I build the behaviour of doing push-ups by adding one a day. I do them every morning when I wake up – just add one a day. This repetitive exercise has built the habit. Now I am doing 50 – and that would have been an overwhelming concept 50 days ago.
The next video was by Conor Neill, who teaches at a business school in Spain. He spoke slowly and repeated himself frequently. This was annoying at first but then after I ran another block – his slow repetitive nature was actually very good for me. He had this concept of what would you look for in a person if you were promised 10% of their income for the rest of their life. Who would you bet on? He talked about Warren Buffet’s criterion for this same concept. I was actually very impressed with this criteria and I could see many parallels to The 365 Commitment.
He indicated that there was one major criteria and two minor ones. The minor criteria was the adaptive intelligence of the person. Can this person adapt intelligently to a given situation. This is a different type of intelligence and it is probably something learned by those who are willing to actually get on the path, rather then waiting at the starting line. The second one was the energy, or health of the person. Quite simply, is the person resilient can they overcome challenges. However, the real energy is the drive to put things into action, to get them going and to not wait around for someone to give the person permission. The major criteria was integrity. I was not expecting this one, but Conor Neill defined integrity much differently then the way I thought.
Look at your calendar right now. Look at what you are planning to do today. Does your daily schedule actually reflect what is important to you? Are you being true to your ambitions, the people you value? Where are you spending your time? The person with integrity, has a calendar that matches their values. In short, people with integrity say no to things that distract them from their values, their goals and ambitions.
I think this concept captures the spirit of The 365 Commitment. Every morning, we are realigning our days to fit our dreams, ambitions, goals. In short we are learning to have integrity.
Guy Reams (100)
365 Member
