The Perfect Month
Luca Barcellona / Flickr
How to make perfection out of improvisation
One of my favorite people in the world, Buster Benson, spends a fair amount of time trying to understand motivation and how it connects to health and happiness.
One of my toughest mentors, Brad Feld, is pretty well convinced that it is nearly impossible to have enough data about how we live our lives and how it connects to health and happiness.
One of my greatest inspirations, Aaron Batalion, is rapidly learning how to temper his entrepreneurial ambitions with the importance of family and how those two connect into health and happiness.
In each case, they are searching for some version of perfection.
Over the past couple of weeks, I started challenging myself to think about what “living perfectly” meant to me. Could I do it?
Frankly, I have spent the better part of my life being a fuck up. Any success I have had has always surprised me in that its occurrence was clearly less because of hard work and more because I realized the moment at which getting out of the way was most beneficial.
But perfection? Possible?
Perfection, by definition is “the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects.”[1] and is derives from the Latin “perfectio”, and “perfect” — from “perfectus.” These expressions in turn come from “perficio” — “to finish”, “to bring to an end.” “Perfectio(n)” thus literally means “a finishing”, and “perfect(us)” — “finished”, much as in grammatical parlance (“perfect”)[2]
Perfection isn’t about not having any flaws, it is about being as free as possible from flaws, and more importantly, finishing.
The Perfect Month? Was it possible?
Yes.
The two conditions that I would have to measure success or failure against were simple:
Did I finish the month?
Was I as free as possible from flaws?
The first was easy. I am using the month of January, and January 31 will be the end of the Perfect Month.
The second took more thought.
It is easy to make it easy, but easy doesn’t always add value. It is easy to make it hard, but hard would only increase the potential of failure to an uncomfortable level. This wasn’t an exercise in perseverance and tolerance. It was an experiment in happiness optimization.
Several years ago, I built a simple goal setting protocol. Basically, you set 4 — 8 daily goals. One or two in each of the quadrants: Personal, Professional, Physical and Psychological. So it could be: Do laundry (personal), Ask for a raise (professional), walk for 45 minutes (physical), call mom (psychological). Once those goals were achieved, your day was accomplished, and the rest was up to you.
I stopped doing it because it just seemed to simple, and there always seemed to be more than just a few goals in the day, there was a lack of prioritization, and it was way to easy to take it easy on yourself.
But as I continue to think about happiness and write (and write and write about it…) maybe that is the trick — simplicity.
Back to The Perfect Month.
My friend, Dale Emmons, pointed me to this post about a productivity hack that Jerry Seinfeld uses. The TL;DR of it that by setting your goal to complete days, months become easy.
Yes, another indication of the power of simple.
If one were to synthesize this into actionable chunks, it would seem that creating a simple framework to follow for a short period of time would enable a few things: achievable mini-goals, a profound opportunity to properly frame actions whose limitation reduced the potential for failure, and repeatable actions that had a high potential to transform into habits.
Here are my rules.
For this Perfect Month, the theme is “Focus on Me. No Ha.”
There are some basic things I want to accomplish daily:
Set two alarms in the am. The first one is to remind me to spend the next 30 minutes on me, and just on me.
Meditate for at least 10 minutes every morning.
Either do yoga or walk a minimum of 10,000 steps.
Write every night.
While just accomplishing these four things would create a day that is “free as possible from flaws,” it would not be complete. On top of these three thematic goals, I am going back to setting 1-2 goals in the Four Quadrant system each night (for the following day) before I go to sleep. I am going to use Day One to write a short nightly update and then brush my teeth.
The key to the Perfect Month is allowing myself to be free as possible from flaws. This is probably the one thing I fail at continuously, and learning how to fail is a resolution of mine.
So what are my first goals?
Personal: Put away all my laundry, including the clothes still in boxes from the move; Call the junk people to haul away all the junk in my garage.
Physical: Walk for 45 min on the treadmill; go to yoga
Professional: Send an offer letter; finish up a presentation
Psychological: Sage my house to chase away the ghost that is trying to kill me; Make one person laugh.
The trick to living a Perfect Month is understanding and creating limitation to ambition and driving measurable goals that are both possible and achievable.
At least that’s what I hope. See you in 31 days.