Every Day

Routinely, I drop myself headfirst into a daily challenge.

There is an art to it.

There is a goal embedded within.

There is a entrenched motivation.

Why? Well…

As an example, imagine you want to be better at drawing hands. Hands are notoriously difficult to sketch. They are both familiar and complex. They are easy to draw poorly. So, what you opt to do is practice every day: each day, you tell yourself, you will draw hands. They will never be the same hands. The hands will be drawn from different perspectives in different poses and perhaps even in different media or styles.  But you will draw at least one hand every single day. Period.

You’ve just crafted a simple daily challenge for yourself.

No spreadsheets. No written reports. No accountability to anyone but yourself. You simply know that sometime each day you need to set aside a small chunk of time to sketch hands.

And you’ll do this challenge for a month. Or maybe two months. Or, if you’re incredibly dedicated to learning to draw hands, you’ll challenge yourself for a whole year.

At the end of the challenge what do you think the result will be? Yeah, you’ll be happy to take a few days off from drawing hands, but I can almost guarantee that the daily practice, the grind, the iterative epic learning will have improved your skills by a measurable amount.

Challenge yourself to do something every day.  And then give yourself a hand.