Sunday, January 27, 2008

Force Strategies Versus Personal Growth

Earlier this morning I was waiting for my son to finish his shower so I could drive him to church. I knew I had about three minutes so I went to FreeRice.com and played their vocabulary game which is sort of like SAT preparation. You pick (or guess) which answer is correct our of four options. I could describe more, but you can click the link and simply go there and see it and play it within seconds. You score points with correct answers and rice is donated to feed the hungry. Each correct answer is worth 20 grains of rice. My top level was 47 and I ended up on level 41. (You automatically level down when you give a wrong answer.) I won/helped donate 840 grains of rice and over 100 MILLION grains were donated yesterday. One day. That's really good. People are having fun. Learning. Maybe humbling themselves. And hungry people are receiving food. A survival need is being met. Check it out!

When I got back just a bit ago, I read Ian Ayres's editorial, You Bet Your Life, in the Sunday L.A. Times Opinion section. He wrote about people making commitment contracts to keep themselves on track toward their goals. He had $500 on the line every week if he failed to reach his goals and he never had to write a check on his way to losing 25 pounds. Ayres teaches law at Yale University and if he had missed a goal, he would have written a check for $500 that week to a charity chosen by his colleague, Dean Karlan, who teaches economics at Yale. They co-founded stickK.com, which you can visit by clicking on the title of this post. Their method is simply one strategy for reaching a goal, meeting a need.

In my opinion, the reasons for you or I not reaching a goal are part of what personal growth or self-development are about. I believe that dealing with the underlying issues in your life and your unhelpful and unhealthful belief systems is the better way to go in the long run. Forcing yourself to pay money can definitely work in forcing yourself to reach your goals. I'm sure you can find ample evidence on their website or in their writings. I'm suggesting that it's not the only strategy that works. The threat of paying money may force you to take certain actions, but it doesn't necessarily tell you WHY that threat is necessary. Self-development can take away the need for using that strategy. We'll see if FreeRice.com's educate and entertain yourself strategy (what I might call elementary personal growth or self-development) works in the long run. But it's working now and I expect that if you visit FreeRice.com and tell others about it, soon they will be donating 1 BILLION grains of rice per day and maybe, soon after than 100 Billion or even 1 TRILLION.

Now I'm going to go for a walk.

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Visit FreeRice.com and then visit Lime.com and register (use a pseudonym if you like - I'm Dr. Network there AND Leftcoastman here) and keep tracking of your steps and your minutes and your miles.

Every Step You Take

Every step you take.

Increases fitness. Increases bone density. Increases quality of life.

This is the slogan of Optimal Health Products. I'm not vouching for their products nor am I taking a stance against their products. I do like their slogan very much. Every Step You Take...

I encourage you to walk. Always. Every waking hour. Before I sat down to this laptop I walked, on purpose, 101 steps inside our home. You might be surprised how many steps you walk in an hour. (Although it's possible you'll be surprised at how few you are walking, too. A friend from Toastmasters said she was sure she was walking 10,000 steps a day, which is what her friend told her to do. She got a pedometer and found out it was 900! She walks more now.) I urge you to walk at least 33 steps an hour extra, which is in the neighborhood of an extra quarter mile a day. My 101 steps repeated every hour is in the neighborhood of three quarters of a mile a day. Slightly more than 1/4 of a mile extra a day is 100 extra miles a year and three quarters of a mile extra a day is three times that or 300 extra miles a year. My 101 extra steps took me about a minute. I keep mentioning extra because we need to do MORE than we are currently doing.

One of our needs is for exercise. Almost anyone can walk, which is a strategy to get exercise (and to increase bone density and quality of life). 101 steps an hour is a strategy to make the exercise/task doable and memorable for you. My hope is that over time, you will do more. Or you can walk a half marathon or full marathon today - IF you're prepared. I'm not prepared for that today. One of these days I will be. A little bit more and then a little bit more and pretty soon I'm there. Or you're there.

I am walking. You can walk. Please walk today. No matter what.

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Visit an awesome website - FreeRice.com - to help feed people while teaching you by clicking on the title of this post. Did you notice the Free in front of rice?