Challenge 1: doodle/sketch daily

I had to be careful with my first challenge, I was going to be traveling abroad for half the month.  What I settled on was to doodle/sketch something every day;  something I've told myself for years to get back into but never really did.

The evidence

A key and important concept here is that I did not specify quality or time in this attempt, just do.  So most of these took on the order of minutes to do, some more, most less.

The failure

• I actually had to change this into a "trial run" partway through because I actually failed the original idea of doing it every day.  I had to catch up because of days I missed/forgot/too fatigued/too busy.  I thought this was simple enough to do that I could do it while on my vacation, but my vacation was really busy and eventful and tiring.
• I may have intended to not specify quality or time, but as it turns out I did have some internal requirements.  I was not satisfied with just 30 stick figures or smiley faces which would have kept me faithful to the original plan. But I wanted to actually sketch/doodle something.  This unfortunately required (and I did not realize this beforehand) a kind of personal time that was rare when I was traveling and explains a lot of the catchup need.  In other words, I never felt comfortable sitting there sketching with the wife and kid around somewhat vying for my attention, nor did I feel comfortable busting out my moleskine and pencil while out and about at dinner.

The success

• I at least did finish which shows at least some kind of commitment.
• The sketches do have at least some "good ol' college try" in them.
• I finally finished filling up my last moleskine AND have it be populated with sketches, something that was supposed to be a regular thing but wasn't.
• It allowed me to also use some new art implements I bought out of wishful thinking last year.  By art implements I mean a special pencil and sharpener.

The evaluation

• Early on, I was discouraged because things I used to just whip up I just couldn't do.  I feel I lost what skill I had. This was very unsettling because I used to take pride in having some level of ability, it was supposed to be a life long hobby that just fell to the wayside way to long ago.
• At times I was convinced that after the 30 days, I'd just give up and never bother with doing art again.  I thought I could sustain it as a hobby but it seems like it will just eat up time and not be an amateur career (like I thought 20 years ago).
• On some days though, I was quite pleased with my 10 minute sketch, but few and far between.  I know I probably just need to keep at it, reboot the process.  It's harder to find that quite time now with a new family though.  I may have to reboot this with a future challenge again.
• One of the biggest impediments was drawers block or paralysis. In addition to stick figures, I was also not content sketching pencils, or boxes, or boring inanimate objects.  When at my computer, I could use Google images as inspiration.  On the go though, I had a difficult time finding some stationary model.
• In all, I believe I could have done it with the parameters I set forth, but my pickiness got in my way (and the traveling).  At least I finished it.

Challenge 0: embarking on a new personal campaign

I was inspired by a TED talk a couple of months ago.  It collects a number of motivational ideas but primarily the notion of the 30 day challenge, like the SuperSizeMe guy and related to many other habit creating strategies. The small spin is that he promotes the idea of using this strategy to try something new or something that you've always wanted to do for 30 days, and he used it to do some sometimes impressive things and I can see how this concept has enriched his life and can enrich anyone's.  In and of itself, I found that he did all these things to be inspiring, probably in the upper quadrant of things that I find inspiring.  Actually, it's more meta-inspiring; rather that being inspired to do something, it's a gateway into doing things I'm inspired to do.  That's all well and good, plenty of things I'd like to do, most of them old rather than new, but the sentiment is the same.

However, there was one very interesting point he made that has pushed this self-improvement idea out of the big pile of things I'd like/want/need/should do and into the very exclusive and rarified WILL do queue.  And it's the idea that doing these 30 day challenges can anchor your time, give you something to point to and say "yeh, that month I did this".  E.g. it makes your time and life more memorable.  And that drove it home for me.  I could always point to my schooling years (from elementary through grad school) and chunk them into regions and eras, and I could always tag those times with an accomplishment or sets of events. Since then it seems like the months and years just bleed into each other and pass by.  It fills with me regret and almost despair when that "wow, the year's over already" feeling hits me and I feel like I have nothing or not enough to show for it... or for the previous X years.  But with this idea, I can point to month and say "I did that", and with enough of them I may start to build the inertia to keep doing things, hopefully to enrich my life in some way.

I debated how I would proceed.  I considered changing the 30 days to 28 days (i.e. 4 weeks) for the sole reason that I could always begin on the same day of the week which has some advantages for some things I have in mind.  I eventually decided to just start with the beginning of the month, to keep it in sync with how the world keeps dates.  For a different reason, maybe setting 28 days as a "minimum" is not a bad idea if I would like a few days break between "challenges".  I'll reserve the right to make changes as need be, so long as I keep in the spirit of the program, which is to DO THINGS.

I proposed this idea to a buddy of mine and he jumped on it with zeal, in fact he's doing 2 challenges concurrently, though staggered.  For myself, I think I'll dip my toe in with just 1 and try and keep it simple for starters.  And I think I'll record the results here with some kind of evidence.