The constraint however, is the attention span of the reader. When the content gets longer than that you’ve lost.

Routine works. Establishing one does not make life boring or formulaic, but it does set up guide posts where true freedom and excitement can take place.

A routine I recently established was getting up at 6 a.m. This guide post has given my days structure. It has established a time where I can write this.

With the responsibility of fatherhood, I have had to change my focus from myself to my family. And having a family is a sure way to confuse and throw a wrench into any established order or normalcy in life.

However, I established this routine months after my son was born. It opened up the possibilities of being a great dad while still caring for my own needs.

The last several mornings now I woke up two minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Each time I glanced at my phone, and it showed 5:58. It’s only been a few weeks since I started, but already the routine is freeing me from the annoying buzz of the alarm.

Before I started working on this I’d be sleeping deeply and when my alarm would sound, I’d hit the snooze button two or three times. The idea, of course was that “10 more minutes and I’ll be rested and ready for the day.” But snoozing three times adds up to a half hour of frequently interrupted sleep.

On the other hand, getting up and getting going shakes off the sleepiness much faster than laying awake in bed between pressing the snooze button.

Routine has given my day something new–a beginning. Rather than drifting into the day from a haze of sleep and snoozing, establishing a routine has created a clear delineation between night time and day time.

Also, my wife and I have been working to establish a routine for our baby. We’re starting to see the first fruits of our efforts. The last several nights now, he’s slept soundly from when we laid him in the crib until after I got up.

These routines do not diminish the freedom and spontaneity of a day. It is exactly the opposite, yet still a paradox. Fixed and strictly adhered-to routines create more freedom in a day than an open schedule.

I haven’t established strict guidelines for what I’ll do when I first get up. I try to read, write, or exercise, but sometimes I surf around on the web, play with the baby if he’s awake, or spend some time in prayer.

However, no matter what I decide to spend the time doing, it is something I wouldn’t be able to do if I didn’t have the routine established to get started.

By setting up a few starting guide posts, I was able to establish much greater freedom in my day. And now I’m searching for similar opportunities in other possible routines.

It’s easy to get down on yourself when you’re not perfect. Being less than perfect admits a shortcoming, a failure. It’s humbling.

A common cliché used to make someone feel better after a failure is to remind them that no one is perfect. However, this condolence provides little or no consolation. That’s probably because it doesn’t take a perfect person to avoid the particular screw up that’s getting you down. It only takes a better person.

It is accepted that perfection is impossible, and it is. That being the case, the proposition also needs to be acceptable. However, it can be so difficult to accept not being perfect, that we sometimes forget perfect’s younger sibling: ‘better’.

It’s okay to not be perfect. However, this cannot be cause for complacency. The premise that nobody is perfect does not justify not trying. ‘Better’ is a great alternative to perfect because it’s situated directly between where you are now and where you’d like to be.

Also, each time you take a step to be better, you’re that much closer to perfect, and there’s another ‘better’ in close proximity for you to move towards.

Small steps in the right direction are acceptable. They are not preferable to lasting radical overnight changes, but they’re a good start. Besides, for most, they are far more realistic.

Some people are are able to make drastic changes overnight, or even over the course of a year. Here I use the word ‘some’ to describe a very small minority of very special and talented or very weird and crazy individuals.

For the rest of us, the walk towards perfection will be a long one. It will take a superhuman perseverance. This will mean committing to a daily goal with clear action items to become a better person, to change bad habits, to start good ones, to develop the way you think about things, and to inspire those around you by your actions.

And if perseverance, commitment, desire, endurance, and patience are not traits that you either possess or can develop, then it will be better to look for some quick overnight fixes. Unless you’re part of that ‘some’, they won’t work, but even a quick fix is better than no fix.

Part of this desire may stem from feeling that my life is becoming to ordinary, too formulaic. I want something drastic, something radical to break up the mundane. There shouldn’t be anything ordinary about life.

Spending time with my baby and being a good husband are the most important things to me. This involves time and support that I must provide.

Also, I work full time in a conventional setting. I’m not as adventurous as I’d like to be and do not have a strong enough desire to be an entrepreneur to strike out on my own. Actually, I still consider myself an entrepreneur, but I only have one client: the company I work with.

Despite all these factors that seem to point to the conventional life, I think I’ll still be able to participate in extreme lifestyle design during bit of time I have left over. And that may be what makes this journey and set of experiments unique.

Can I be an unconventional thinker and passionately pursue my ideal day and life while still fulfilling my duty in what is most important in my life: loving my wife and baby?

This is a difficult question to ask. As a husband and father, there are sacrifices I must make to care well for my family. However, I have ‘me’ time in the cracks, and I don’t think that I am, right now, the best possible version of my self. And this is because I am not making full use of the cracks.

So, my goal and mission will be to use that extra time to become the best possible version of myself. I know that writing this, and the fact the my wife reads it, will mean that I’ll have at least one person to hold me accountable and to be able to witness my progress.

Photo by Ben Zvan

I understand I have a lot of work to do to become the writer I want to be. Words and pages are not enough. Although, that would be a good start. No, thoughts and well expressed ideas are what I’m after. I am not sure that I am prepared to think like a writer. I know I don’t have the habits developed yet. One step at a time, I know. But I have in mind what I want to be: I want to be able to sit quietly and think to myself about my subject and then open up a blank document and write what I think. 

Right now, I don’t think much or write, but I am actively trying to change that. You see, I believe the world’s greatest thinkers were skilled writers, and the greatest writers were deep thinkers. It may be a chicken and egg situation, but my plan is to attack both fronts at once to make myself into what I want to be.

Parts of these first few posts are going to come across like pages from a journal, which is not what this site will become. However, I also want my writing to come across naturally, without forcing too much onto the page. And if I’m currently an immature thinker, then that will be what comes out until my mind grows up.

I’ll develop a mature voice, I’m sure, as I write more regularly and think more deeply before and during my process. Until then I’ll have to put up with the silly kid that thinks he has something to say. My hope, though, is that this site will provide that linear path of a voice maturing. 

As it turned out, I came in first at my company, and 20th out of 150 some men. It was quite a shock to me, but in the process I learned a lot about myself and my body.
Running a race is not like other sports. It’s almost impossible to size up the competition. In basketball you can make assumptions based on height, in wrestling, based on build. But good runners come in all shapes and sizes, and when you’re lined up with 300 other people, there’s no telling a head of time where you stand.

And once you start it doesn’t matter. Once the gun goes off, it’s not a competition against anyone except yourself. It’s a contest between your body which is telling you to slow down and your mind which is saying, “Speed up!” Or at least it should. It seemed like half the time my mind was working against me as well.

This went on through out the whole race. I could look at people up ahead and tell myself that I was going to try to keep pace with them and try to catch up. However, the only time I was really able to gain any ground was when–instead of looking at other around me–I pushed aside my own negative thoughts and pushed aside the discomforts of running for the sake of a faster stride that I was able to gain any ground.

Throughout the race, I knew that I would have to overlook my own shortcomings if I was to succeed. I learned at the one mile marker that my weaknesses were not going to help me at all during the next two miles. Weaknesses were of no use. They would accomplish nothing. Only my strengths would be of use in trying to finish this race.

I have many weaknesses and shortcomings. These have no benefit in any circumstance. However, understanding my weaknesses is one of the first steps to take to corner and nurture my strengths. And that was how the second mile went. I found my pace and my stride. I focused on the energy moving me forward and not on the fatigue that would only slow me down. With this I was able to hold my position and even gain ground on the pack ahead.

In the third mile, my weaknesses were apparent. I had been sweating profusely throughout the second mile, and now my arms were becoming heavy. I would have thought that swinging them at my sides in the nearly frictionless air would be the easiest movement. My back also was becoming tired. I didn’t even know that my back was an active participant in this run. My legs kept going even though breathing became more of a challenge.

The most difficult part of the end of this race was not knowing where the finish line was. The first two miles were clearly marked, but the final stretch had many twists and turns, cutting back and across the path. In addition to that, a 5k is 3.2 miles, and each mile became increasingly difficult so I had an impossible time judging how close I was to the finish.

Many times, tasks and challenges are like that. It gets more difficult when the end of a task or challenge is near, and it’s most difficult when the end is not in site. This was no different. I wanted to keep up my pace and run steadily to the end, but with no end in sight, doubts crept in, voices saying, “You can’t do it, the finish line is still far off, you’ll have to slow down if you plan to finish.”

But, just as I was getting ready to give in and slow down, I rounded the final corner, and out of nowhere, the finish line was in front of me. The excitement of seeing the finish line gave me an extra boost of strength that I used to transition from a run to sprint. I felt light, like I was just starting out…for the first 20 yards.

Then the previous three miles shouted: “Slow down!” But I didn’t listen, and I ran as hard as I could across the finish line, passing one unsuspecting competitor as I finished.

I finished exhausted. But that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be. If I had anything left in me after I finished I would have been disappointed that I didn’t use it on the course.

At the end of the race, I knew my weaknesses played no part in my success. Only my strengths mattered. I’m now going to be looking for other ways to apply this thinking. I can, I think, be aware of my weaknesses without letting them interfere with my strengths or goals.

The challenge will be to figure out how.

My struggle is the beginning, middle, and end. I have a hard time coming up with what I’m going to write about. Once I’ve figured that part out, I have a hard time putting my thoughts into words. And after I have something down on paper, I have a difficult time accepting that what I have written is of any value.

However, this is my only obstacle to becoming a writer. It doesn’t take as much time as I once thought because, it seems, no one is out there trying to write the next Moby Dick. It no longer takes 1,000 pages to tell a story or to make a philosophical point about the human condition. I don’t know that it ever did, but the way most readers consume information now has changed, and writing has had to change to keep up.

I’m thankful. I have a difficult enough time settling on a topic for a 1,000 word post that will take me less than an hour to complete. I don’t know how I would ever be able to commit to a project whose end goal would be a five-pound tome.

This, however, does not provide an excuse for a decline in quality, even though I would be hard pressed to find someone who could argue convincingly that the quality of writing and thought in one of the new releases at Barns and Nobel or one of the books on Amazon’s top 100 could even begin to rival one of the classics in its command of the English language.


It would seem that if the scope of the work I am trying to accomplish is so much narrower, and so much shorter, that I’d be able to make up some of the ground in quality. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

How does a writer of a classic think during their writing process? How do they go about developing their story or crafting their sentences? It can’t be that much different than today. However, I suppose, garbage in garbage out. I’m sure the classic writers and thinkers had a much healthier diet of reading and information than I have today.

This is an external factor that I feel like I can do something about. There are a lot of messages thrown at me every day. Many marketers are fighting for my attention, and I’ve subscribed myself to many things that I find interesting and enjoyable, but, if this information diet is turning my stomach, polluting my mind, and hindering my writing, it may be time for some changes.

It isn’t realistic, practical, or helpful to pull the plug entirely. There is still the needed flow of input needed for processing, digestion, and good quality out put, but if so much time is taken at the top of the funnel, the second two stages suffer. 

What I need to develop is a more steady flow of information in, time to process and reflect, and written output at the other end. I need to turn this funnel into a cylinder with a fat middle. I actually believe that the middle, right now, is the narrowest part of the process.