Everyone needs a little challenge

[epaleocookbooks]

It feels like everywhere I look lately, there is talk of self-improvement. Steve has his great post about making habits, there was a thread about lacking motivation, my sister is talking about possibly starting a new diet, I'm trying to improve my relationship by working on some of my flaws and I just finished a great book ("The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives that Make You Feel Alive") that has me pumped for getting my awesome on!

My favorite chapter of the book was about the drive for challenge, and how without things to challenge us, we grow stagnant and bored. I think everyone here at nerdfitness can agree with that. It's why we're here, afterall.

The author, Brendon Burchard, gives a great strategy for creating challenge in your life and I thought it would make for a cool thread/group activity. He suggests making a grid of 12 squares on a piece of paper (one square for each month of the year) and writing one self-imposed challenge in each square - be it something you want to improve about yourself, a new habit you want to make (or break), something you've always wanted to try, etc. Then you have thirty days to complete that challenge. By giving yourself a limited time frame, you have a greater chance of succeeding and you give yourself 12 "wins" throughout the year. It keeps you engaged and motivated. Supposedly, he's done one challenge a month for the past 15 years and he says he swears by it.

With this spirit in mind, I thought it would fun to do this here at nerdfitness and share our 12 goals for the year. Then we can "Woot!" ourselves at the end of each month. Complete your goal, get a group high-five/fist pump/hug. So, I'll start:

1 - get my house organized and clean and keep it that way 2 - get my diet back to 100% paleo. No excuses 3 - master potty training! 4 - learn to run 5 - learn to do a pull-up 5 - increase my business traffic by 15% 6 - move my Etsy shop to a self-hosted website 7 - lose 10 pounds 8 - brew my own beer 9 - brush up on my german by complete a language course 10 - go to New Orleans and take the Creole Creamery challenge. "Operation: Forced Friendship" - make Zach come along. 11 - work on telling people I love them more 12 - run a 5k.