1000 Day Challenge (1KDC) #1 - Metrics

Qualifying starts at Silverstone in a few minutes so I'll keep this brief.

Does this pic make you want to punch someone?I want to get the basics in order. That means a) get my weight down to 70kg (healthy BMI range); b) sleep 8 hours a night; and c) plan my meals so I'm getting the right amount of calories and nutrients.

Tracking is essential, and as much as I hate to say it, The Four Hour Body has some pretty good tips. Universally, whenever I mention the name Tim Ferriss, the answer I get back is, "I hate that guy!" I know, something about him demands violence. However I'm going to take his advice and do my tracking on Daily Burn.

The Pro account is $10 a month but I looked around the net and couldn't find anything better. You can track pretty much anything, and I'll go into that more deeply in a future post.

I also took Tim's advice and bought a Zeo, which is brilliant for tracking sleep and also integrates with Daily Burn. Plus I got myself a humidifier. The jury is still out on whether that was worth the money, but I think once the dry summer here arrives it will be great.

For walking, running and cycling, I'm using RunKeeper. I listen to audiobooks and podcasts while I'm out running so I have my iPhone with me anyway. RunKeeper tracks your movement with GPS and uploads it to the site when you get back home. I hear Daily Burn integration is in the works.

I'll post more about this tomorrow. I'm off now to watch Mark Webber take pole at Silverstone.

How not to be shit - 1000 day challenge #0

If you followed a link here for a tutorial on not being shit, I'm sorry. I really have no idea.

I registered this domain name presumably before anyone else in Australia knew what blogging was, in July 2002. 9 years ago! And i just started blogging last week. If that's not a world record for negligent procrastination, it has to be on the list of nominees. Surely.

The MannI'm going to give the credit for finally getting started to Merlin Mann whose new podcast Back To Work has taught me a lot. It's probably pretty obvious stuff to a lot of people, but it's really about the basic wisdom behind getting anything done. So according to him, why has this taken me 9 years to get going? Not Caring. And Fear.

Exactly.

Or perhaps it's something even deeper. Tomorrow I will be turning 34, so let's take a look at some other stuff I haven't done all this time, shall we?

I dropped out of Law, then later, I dropped out of Engineering. I've had 1000 great tech ideas but I haven't executed on a single one of them. I never learned to program, even though I got a C64 and programming tutorial software for my 7th birthday.

I never properly learned a 2nd language, even though German was spoken at home, I studied Chinese at school for 5 years (I remember about 7 words), and various friends have enough Japanese that I could have picked it up. I never learned to play an instrument, despite taking violin lessons at school and later owning a guitar for a few years.

I spent my twenties abusing my body in terms of bad food, alcohol and lack of sleep. I've lost the hardcore fitness I had in school when I was racing bikes on Saturdays and doing triathlons on Sundays. I had a million dollar job ready to slide into; all I had to do was show up every day and not be shit. So I lost that too.

So basically I'm unemployed, unqualified, unhealthy, uninteresting, and single. Shit.

Now before you get all sympathetic on me, let me assure you I am fine. I am way more than fine. For the amount of stuff I haven't done, I am in a disgustingly good position. I have a nice house to live in, a fast car to drive, food on the table, and no debts to pay. I am beholden to no one. But of course, total liberty does not necessarily imply total fulfillment.

What should I do with the rest of my life?

Well what am I really good at? And what do I really, really love to do? The answer to both of those questions is the same: driving, and video games. It's too late for me to make a living from driving, and there's no way I can make a good living from computer games, right? Or is there? We do happen to be in the epoch of gamification, and it does happen to be a pretty good time to raise money for a business.

So I have a plan.

I am setting myself a goal: My current status is unemployed, unqualified, unhealthy, uninteresting, single and shit. Over the next 1000 days I will turn that on its head. I will optimize my health, wealth and wisdom and tell you, faithful readers, how I'm doing it. And the real headline? I will create a successful web startup in 1000 days.

Or I will fail and it will be a terrible, flaming burnout. Either way, you win, because it will serve as a valuable lesson.

How not to be shit.

More Harris goodness

Not Sam this time, but Monkey Harris. His latest blog is from Goodwood.

My best friend lived in Europe for 3 years not long ago and we talked about me joining him for a few weeks in June/July to take in Le Mans and the Goodwood Festival of Speed but, very sadly, I didn't make it. Basically I was an idiot and didn't get my shit together.

This is a situation we will need to rectify soon.

Sam Harris - more controversy

I promise this will not become a Sam Harris blog, although I do admire the man quite a lot.

His blog post today is the kind of thing I wish I could write. It's wise and it's insightful, although there will be those who don't read it all the way through and therefore assume he's advocating drug use.

He opens with:

Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment—and even in our dreams—we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition toward states of consciousness that we value.

This reminds me of a quote of Ayrton Senna's:

We are made of emotions, we are all looking for emotions, it's only a question of finding the way to experience them. There are many different ways of experience them all.

I believe you can't really understand how to drive fast until you've had a car out of control, because you don't really know where the limit is, or what will happen once you go over it. In the same way Harris is saying you can have a more complete understanding of your own mind once you get completely out of it.

Cadel wins

Stage 4 of the Tour de France goes to Australia's Cadel Evans.

Le Tour is difficult to explain to those who don't follow cycling. "3500km in 3 weeks on a bike" doesn't really do it justice. It's the toughest sporting event in the world.

Cadel deserves it this year, and with the photo finish over Contador on this stage, he's won the early psychological sparring match. I hope he can press his advantage home into Paris and prove that a clean rider can overcome the odds in the "dirtiest sport in the world."