Nine Weeks Left

There are roughly nine weeks left in 2020 and if you haven’t yet, now would be a good time to make good on those new year’s resolutions! My resolution for the year – and probably every year for as long as I live – will be to live a happier and healthier life. Happy and Healthy: that’s my definition of success. Of course it isn’t always easy to keep this in mind, and often I’m distracted by the pleasures society dangles before me: money, fame, women, riches… but when I’m able to see clearly, when I’m able to sit still and just be, I understand with the deepest part within me that it’s the simple things that matter. Simple things like loving myself, my friends, and my family. Pursuing my interests for curiosity’s sake. Helping others whenever I can. And being liberal with my laughter.

If I’m lucky, I’ll have a solid 80 more years to master simple living. So to start – or to restart, rather – I’m spending the rest of 2020 developing three habits that are important for me (and probably for everyone) to live a happier and healthier life: reading, meditating, and exercise. Now the usual advice is to only work on developing one habit at a time, but I’m comfortable tackling these three simultaneously because I’ve already established all of these habits at some point in my life, even as recently as this past summer. Towards the tail end of the summer, however, I went through a bout of existential angst, which is nothing new for me, but it means I let go of my discipline for a short while. Now I’m back and ready to bring some order to the chaos, and I’ll be doing so with the help of The Tamed Course, a video course focused on teaching you how to effectively build up better habits, and to let go of your not-so-good ones. This course was created by the YouTuber, Improvement Pill, and he generates a lot of personal development type content for his channel, so check him out if that’s your jam. It’s certainly my jam, and I’ve been inspired by his work and hope to produce similar content over the course of my own creative career.

The course is made up of 13 videos and I’m about halfway through. They say the best way to learn is to teach, as such, for the rest of the year I’ll be sharing any key insights I’m learning, as well as my overall experience and progress with developing these habits. Yes, I understand the critique that I’m simply parroting information, but I think good information should be disseminated anyway, and I think I have access to a different audience than Improvement Pill does. Plus, I’m not just sharing the same info, I’ll be sharing how that info is influencing my life. Since this blog series will mostly consist of any “a-ha! moments” I’m having, I recommend you watch the videos for yourself if you’d like to learn the material in a step-by-step fashion. Also, if you do choose to go through the course, please let me know in the comments; perhaps we can support each other in some way!

I actually started implementing lessons from The Tamed Course last Sunday, so it’s been a full week of execution, and so far everything has been running smoothly. I’m proud to say that for the last nine days, I’ve performed my “Keystone Routine” successfully. In future posts, I’ll share what my “Keystone Routine” is, as well as discuss concepts I’ve learned like automaticity, the low/high bar method, what the word “keystone” means in the first place, and more.

And I think I’ll end it there for now! If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. Thank you for reading. I hope you have a stellar week. Sending you all the good vibes and love.

Until next time,

Q.