Challenge

12 Challenges I can do everyday

Challenge, Ideas · November 9, 2017

I am a fan of James Altucher‘s writing and he is one big proponent of the practice of “writing 10 ideas everyday”. He claims that coming up with ideas is like exercising a muscle and you need to keep doing it everyday to not let it atrophy. You should read his “Ultimate Guide to becoming an Idea Machine” which explains the process. I used to follow this for a few days, but then coming up with 10 ideas everyday was very very hard.

I have decided to combine this 10 ideas along with my daily challenge. To give some context, I have started to challenge myself to do one task everyday for a month. My previous challenges were taking a cold shower and talking to strangers everyday. My current challenge is to write one blog post everyday

I am going to write 12 challenges that I can do everyday for a month each. Here are the ten ideas, in no particular order:

1. Smile at a Stranger

This is a variant of the “talk to a stranger” challenge. I got the idea for this challenge while I was walking home from work. I walked past lot of strangers, but no one had a smile on their face. Maybe it was after work hours and everyone was tired. But a better explanation would be that we Indians don’t generally smile/speak to strangers. We have been trained to not do it from an early age.

When I see a stranger, I want to just acknowledge them, nod and smile at them. No expectation of any sorts. I think this must be easier than maintaining a conversation.

2. Meditate for 5 minutes

I have tried meditating before and have failed miserably, numerous times. I just want to see whether it really has all the mental and physical benefits. I have a lifetime subscription to Brain.fm which has special tracks for meditation. I would also suggest the Headspace app to learn train.

3. Walk more than 10000 steps everyday

This was a challenge I took last year – to clock in an average of 10000 steps for a year. Didn’t work out for even a couple of weeks. I want to try walking 10000 steps everyday (not average) for a month. Of course, 10000 is just a psychological number and has no significance.

4. Wake up really, really early everyday

I am a night owl. I can easily stay awake till 2 or 3 am and work on anything. I do want to slowly try out an early morning schedule. I want to experiment and see if it’s possible. It is going to be very difficult, unless I prepare myself by slowly increasing my waking time by 15 minutes every week. My goal is to wake up by 5am.

5. Learn a new language

I tried to learn a new language – Spanish, when I was living in Chile for nearly an year. I tried various mp3 lessons and then found Duolingo to be a good app to learn any new language. If you want to learn a foreign language, check it out.

What language should I learn? Maybe Spanish itself? Or something really obscure and having non-latin characters like Japanese or Chinese?

6. Draw something on paper everyday

I am not an artist. The maximum I can draw are very basic stick figures and repeating patterns and doodles. I want to see what I can doodle everyday. Doesn’t have to be too complex or even have a story. But if it does, bonus points.

7. Provide one helpful suggestion to a colleague or person

Not everyone knows everything. This challenge involves helping out someone with something. It could be a piece of code they are working on, a design review or even something personal thats been troubling them. Just help them out by providing some suggestion. Sometimes, the best help would be to just listen to them talking. If so, listen.

Would be difficult as not everyone would be having an open mind to listen to suggestions. But you have to try right?

8. Take one street photograph everyday

I am not a photography enthusiast, even though I have bought all the equipment and try to take some interesting photos. But I do want to take local street photographs. I should take photographs of local places and people everyday.

9. Maintain a daily journal

Maintaining a daily journal is something I have been trying to do for many years, but haven’t been able to. The recent time I tried to maintain a journal, I started tracking all the negatives that happened in a day for a change. Even that didn’t work out. I just want to try journaling for a month and see if I am journaling kind of person or not.

10. Use only public transport

I usually travel by Uber or drive my own car. Some days I travel by train or walk. For a month I will challenge myself to use only public transports or walk. On weekdays it would be easy. But on weekends, when I have to take my kid out, I prefer driving my car. Those days, it would be difficult. Also whenever I travel outside for any conferences, I have to use an Uber. Will have to schedule this in a month when there aren’t many conferences.

11. Watch one informative video everyday

Our daily entertainment time is filled with Netflix. Of course, it is addicting and interesting to binge watch a series, but we should also have time to watch some informative videos. There are lot of interesting channels in Youtube. There are also interesting TED Talks to watch instead of Stranger Things (yes, I said it).

12. Write 10 ideas everyday

There has to be a meta challenge in this post right? I want to restart writing 10 ideas everyday. It would be difficult to write 10 or more ideas every day, but only if you try doing it everyday, your idea muscle grows.

Oh, it’s already point № 12 and I have listed enough ideas for an year. What are the other challenges you think I should do? Leave them in the comments below.

I challenged myself to talk to strangers everyday and learnt a lot about myself

Challenge, Personal Growth · November 1, 2017

It is the first of November, which means end of the October Challenge. As mentioned last month, I decided to have a conversation with a stranger every day of October. When I mentioned it to some of my friends, I received varied reactions. Some said it was interesting, some didn’t understand why I was doing it and some even asked what is so hard in it?

To give some background about myself, I am an introvert and I am super uncomfortable in social gatherings and interacting with strangers. Many people fail to understand how introverts work. Few have asked me “But you talk well with X and Y. You can’t be an introvert”. Just because I talk openly with one or two persons, it doesn’t mean I am not an introvert.

Introverts have their own circle of comfort and they allow only a few people into that circle. Roman Jones calls it the Introvert’s Hamster Ball and explains it beautifully in his infographic comic.

Conversational Decision Tree

Whenever I am going to have a conversation with someone, I mentally prepare myself with all the possible questions and answers. I start having the conversation with them in my mind and start building a Decision Tree. And I go multiple levels deep and have this complex mind map ready for any direction the conversation might go to.

Many times, the conversations doesn’t even go that deep and I would have wasted over thinking about the conversation. But I have always been prepared and I felt safer that way.

I have tried many ways to be more social. Watched YouTube videos and read books. I even paid money and bought Ramit Sethi’s Course “How to talk to Anybody”. The first week’s task in his course is to make small talk with people who serve you (who are paid to talk to you) – the barista in coffee shops, taxi drivers, etc.

And that was the reason I started this challenge. I wanted to see how I react when I go out of my comfort zone and talk to a stranger. I did learn a lot by experimenting in this one month than in my lifetime. It was well worth the experience.

Social Anxiety Disorder

Halfway through October, when researching on ways to strike a conversation with people, I came across a medical disorder called Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). There are minor differences between Introversion and Social Anxiety. Social anxiety, defined as the fear of being judged, thinking that you are going to do something stupid or make a fool of yourself.

To give you an example from my life couple of weeks back, I was filling fuel for my car and I was standing and watching the fuel attendant filling it. It was an easy place for me to talk to him about anything. I was looking at things to speak about and I noticed that the fuel pump had various lights for different sensors/meters and one had a “Battery Warning” light.

I began to be curious about the pump and many questions started coming up. Does the fuel pump have batteries? How would it work if there was a sudden power cut? Will the meter reset? I wanted to ask these questions to him and I mentally started preparing how the exchange would happen. I started practicing in my mind on what to ask and what he would reply and my question for that and so on. The Decision Tree was building in my mind and I soon guessed most of the things that will happen. And I started worrying about what he will think about me asking these kind of weird questions.

I didn’t talk a single word to him and went back to the car defeated. I was having all the conversation in my mind and didn’t let my curiosity take me on an adventure. Instead my logical brain stopped me from talking because it was content on being safe.

Am I Introverted? or SAD?

Do I have Social Anxiety Disorder? I don’t know. I guess not, as I don’t have any problem talking in front of an audience. But no one can be sure unless they get diagnosed by a doctor. And even the best psychiatrists have failed to diagnose mental health issues. So I would probably not go talk to a psychiatrist and I would never know if I have SAD.

But I do want to take small steps to make sure that I reduce my anxiety and be able to talk to strangers or people who I meet. Whatever it is I have these kind of social skills training is effective in fixing these problems. I will continue with this challenge, without any of the hard rules.

October Challenge Results

Enough about introversion and social anxiety, lets see how I performed. Of the 31 days in October, I had conversations with stranger on 22 days and the remaining 9 days I didn’t. Some days I was in home and didn’t even want to go out and some days I didn’t talk even though I had opportunities.

Anyway I am going to track this challenge even though October is over. I am sure my social skills will improve with continuous practice and following the remaining of Ramit’s course.

November Challenge

For November I had thought of a few challenges. I am working on building some small product for the ProductHunt November Month Hackathon. I thought I can have a daily coding challenge. But building a product isn’t all coding.

Then I realised that I have failed in writing new articles here regularly. And November being the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and I don’t have the skills/interest to write a novel, I decided to write one article per day for every day of November in this site.

I will be writing about product design, marketing, copywriting, and more and if you want to be emailed as soon as I publish an article, do sign up with your email address below.

Things I learnt by taking a Cold Shower Challenge

Challenge · September 30, 2017

One of my favourite podcast in recent times is Noah Kagen Presents and I have been devouring each episode back-to-back. One interesting thing that Noah does is a weekly challenge. He or his guests come up with a challenge for the listeners to complete. Some of the challenges are deleting ONE app from your mobile, waking up at 5am, asking for 10% off when you get your coffee, etc. Sounds simple, but very, very hard to do.

I decided to take up such a challenge, except to do it for a month. And the challenge I took up for september is to have only a cold shower everyday. I know it sounds easy, but I love a nice hot shower. I usually have the hottest setting than normal people.

100 Days of Code Challenge

Challenge · April 13, 2017

Update: All the individual day’s posts have been collected into this single post. All previous posts have been removed to reduce clutter on this site.

Few weeks back I was introduced to a coding challenge called #100DaysOfCode. All you have to do is work on some piece of coding project which is not your work project everyday for 100 days. Though I liked the idea I didn’t commit to taking up the challenge. I thought I could start working on a side project or an open source project whenever I wanted to.

But deep down I knew it was not true. Saying “I can work on a side project whenever I want to” is just like me saying to myself “I can lose weight whenever I want to”. It will never get done unless you start it. Remember the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time is today.