Post 16: Resolve

How many blogs have been written about resolutions? A billion? Probably more than there are blogs in the world. Especially New Year's resolutions. I often wonder if other cultures have such inane customs. China probably doesn't, since they celebrate a different New Year and they're busy building the world's fastest growing economy and using it to open American theme parks.



See?

This year I resolved to do two things and two things only: write every day and lose weight. Yes, these are near-cliche, but I thought my creativity would be better put to use in my writing.

Writing every day is a method that is currently attributed to comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who gave a very simple piece of advice to a young comedian: write every day. This man is worth hundreds of millions of dollars because of things like that.

Life Hacker posted this on their site a couple years ago and despite it's simplicity, it's pretty awesome. You can read about it HERE.

Basically, the idea is to just keep a calendar and mark off every day that you've written. Once you write for a few days in a row, you've started that chain and you then have one goal: DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN.

As of this entry, I'm on my 12th day in a row of writing. Not just stringing together a few choice words, but actual, thoughtful, sincere, delicious writing. Here's the proof:



In these 12 days, I've finished two scripts I've been working on, started on a third, and written two blog entries. No thanks to the wi-fi antenna on my computer, which picked a great time to crap out on me. Thanks a lot, pal.

Now it's working. The point is, thanks to this calendar, I'm holding myself responsible to write every day until it becomes a habit, like brushing my teeth or promising myself I'll never watch Outsourced again and doing it anyway. I've applied the same approach to losing weight, using a website and iPhone app called Lose It! The concept is simple: put in your information, your target weight, the rate at which you want to lose it, and the app gives you a caloric limit and the date that you should reach your goal, if you stay diligent. I'm proud to say that in 22 days of counting my calories, increasing my exercise and being smart about what I'm eating, I've lost a grand total of...2.2 lbs!!!

That's it?! I give up.