Taking the Challenge
Can I read seven books before the end of the year? Will it be worth the effort if I do, and will I regret if I don’t? Back in January I grabbed a bookmark from a local bookstore with a reading challenge on it. It promises that if I read 36 books this year, one for each of the categories listed, I can earn a gift certificate as a prize. Just to be clear, reading books is not usually a problem for me. I usually read an average of 80 books per year. I don’t need to increase my numbers and I’ve already read quite a few books not in the areas described on the challenge list. However, I have my favorite genres and authors and I’m not always good at reading beyond the areas I’m most familiar with. I thought that trying a reading challenge would be a good way to broaden my horizons and mix up my reading game. So far this has mostly worked and I’ve discovered some delightful books (I also spent a month slowly working my way through a 900-page long historical epic from the 1970s—that may have been a bad choice).
I have a mixed record with accomplishing challenges like this. Last year I decided to join Instagram and set a goal to post a photo a day for a year. I managed to do it, despite sometimes posting rather banal photos of things like my lunch or random cloud patterns I thought were pretty. I found this to be a successful challenge because it encouraged me to notice the world around me more fully and to find something memorable about each day. It also increased my connections with friends and family as I regularly used the app to share bits and pieces of my life. Now I also have a record of a year in my life, from trivial moments to some of the most profound.
Unfortunately, many of my other attempts at goal-setting in the past have fallen flat. My workplace offers a “wellness challenge” every few months that involves setting simple, consistent goals that will earn you cash rewards. No matter how many times I sign up, and no matter what the incentive is, I almost always fall down in my attempts to do simple things like stretch every day for 10 minutes or go to bed at 11 every night. In some areas of my life, attempting to do better at habits actually makes it harder to do them and produces less consistency.
And yet, I do keep trying. For years November has been NaBloPoMo—National Blog Posting Month. Back when blogging was a bigger deal, I successfully completed the challenge a few times by posting something new each day for the entire month on my personal blog. Although I think the challenge has fallen by the wayside as blogging has petered out, this year I decided to try it again as a way of jump-starting my writing. The first time I missed a day I thought about giving up, but decided that perfect was getting in the way of the good. I have not actually posted something every day this month, and much of what I have written is uninspired drivel, but the challenge of trying to sit and write consistently has been good for waking up my creative side and working through the writer’s block I’ve been experiencing lately.
I imagine that my experiences are similar to many other people’s—some challenges are fairly easy for me to perfectly complete, some seem impossible, and others produce mixed results. On my worst days, when all I want to do is eat cookies and watch bad television, there’s still a little something inside me that wants to challenge myself and stretch a little farther. Maybe someday I can figure out how to make physical wellness goals work for me—but for right now I think I’ll just read another book about it. After all, I still need to read seven more in the next five weeks.
How do you feel about challenging yourself? Did you try any reading or fitness (or other) challenges this year? Have you discovered any secrets to setting goals that you can actually accomplish?
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