Microwaving another bag of broccoli
That was the 1 habit I wanted to work on.
The rest of the 1-1-1-1-1 pact
- 1 habit
- 10 pages
- 100 reps
- 1000 words
- 10000 steps
Which adds up to 11,111 and maps to - Habit building
- Reading
- Weightlifting
- Writing
- and Walking
Initially I’m aiming for 500 days but I want to do these daily for the rest of my life. Which means the intensity is lower than other challenges you might come across. Which are great, which I’ve definitely tried and strayed off of.
The PACT idea is from Tiny Experiments. You decide “I will ACTION for DURATION”
It stands for
- Purposeful: it’s about the daily behaviors
- Actionable: I know these are doable
- Continuous: I’m going for daily for… hopefully decades
- Trackable
I already do most of these on various days but now I’m trying to be deliberate about getting all of those in every day.
So what’s with the broccoli?
1. One habit every 21 days?
This is probably Video-idea Driven Development.
I’ve long wanted to do some kind 10k, 1000, 100, 10 thing but could never figure out how to round out the “1”
- 1 minute meditating?
- 1 gratitude?
- 1 video posted?
But last week I realized 1 could be a flexible thing I could use to represent an experiment to try. The 1 also reminds me of the BJ Fogg thing of “Floss 1 tooth”:
“Think of it this way: You can keep many tiny plants alive by giving them a few drops of water a day. It’s the same with habits. There are still days when my motivation is unusually low for flossing. On those days, I floss only one tooth.”
I want to document this whole thing through vlogs so, yes, I did think this might be a way to make the videos a littttle less repetitive.
I’ll be able to align the “1” to some shorter-term goal I have. Right now? Lose some weight. It starts in the kitchen, etc. so I want to eat a bag of broccoli every day.
Why this goal? First, it’s not an all-day goal. All-day goals become hard.
- Tracking food every day takes a lot of effort initially and I always fall off.
- Avoiding snacking is another all-day thing
- Avoiding anything as a whole is an all-day thing
So with these habits I’ll aim to make them things I add to the day and can very clearly say “I’m done”
With the broccoli I can cook it, eat it, say “I’m done”, then feel slight discomfort for 2 hours because I should probably split it into 2 meals.
2. We don’t have walrus meat so we need to add hard things (10 pages)
Earlier this year I read The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. It’s about Captain James Cook. It was an extremely hard life with not so great food on the ships:
Midshipman George Gilbert had stronger words for walrus flesh. He described the elaborate procedure the men improvised to make the “disgustful” meat palatable. “We let it hang up for one day that the blood might drain from it,” Gilbert wrote. “After that, we towed it overboard for twelve hours, then boiled it for four hours, and the next day cut it into steaks and fried it. And even then it was too rank both in smell and taste to make use of except with plenty of pepper.”
But Captain Cook loved it because of the goal: make maps of the world
He was finally doing what he loved and knew best: serious cartographic fieldwork, on a big scale, in an unfamiliar place. There wasn’t time for laying down much precision—the minute details would have to be filled in by later explorers—but the general idea of Alaska, its outline, was coming into focus.
Anyway, it was a reminder that life can be kind of easy compared to centuries ago. We seek out these hard things because we don’t have to hunt for food anymore. Shaan Puri had a great phrase for this sort of content: “toughness influencers”
So anyway. Speaking of books, that’s what the 10 represents: 10 pages of reading every day.
I want a daily practice for building back my ability to focus and concentrate. I know I’ve read consistently in the past. I can do it again. So I’m aiming to read 10 pages a day. A 300 page book every month.
3. “Wake up at 5am and work out”: James Altucher & Sahil Bloom (100 reps)
It is why the first thing I say, whenever a young person comes to me looking for life advice, they’re feeling lost is wake up at 5am and go work out for 30 straight days.
That’s Sahil Bloom, author of The 5 Types of Wealth, on the James Altucher podcast.
I’ve worked out regularly for more than a decade. But you wouldn’t be able to tell!
I’ve spun my tires for too long. As mentioned I want to lose some weight and I’ve bought into weightlifting being an important part of that.
I did sort of shoehorn it into the “100” here because I wanted weights to be a part of this. It sort of works:
- 100 kettlebell swings is 100 reps
- 5×5 w/ warmup sets is around 100 reps
- 100 burpees in a hotel room
100 reps is flexible.
I am not. So maybe I need a 100-rep mobility routine.
4. Amplify patterns (1000 words)
The 1000 is for 1000 words and it’s a writing habit. Good things seem to happen creatively during periods where I’m writing regularly.
From, Tiny Habits, Anne-Laure Le Cunff talks about amplifying existing activities:
Finally, for activities that are already part of your life but which you wish to engage in more regularly, a three-month pact helps reinforce and amplify patterns so you can collect better quality data to guide your journey. Incidentally, three months is roughly the length of the #100DaysofCode challenge and my own challenge of writing 100 articles in 100 workdays at Ness Labs.
She amplified things with 100 articles in 100 work days.
I already write daily in private. These are just journal entries or notes on my info diet. I don’t know if journal is the right word either. Anyway I write in Obsidian or Google Docs or Evernote or whatever app I’m using at the time is. Many days are already 1000+ words.
I want to amplify it by measuring it and steering the writing more to writing I’ll publish. Scripts for these videos or for Shorts or for blog posts.
Daily writing is great in so many ways so I want to keep it up.
5. Distract the distraction with another distraction (10,000 steps)
10,000 is for steps. You’ve probably heard of walking 10,000 steps as a goal already. You might have paced around the room trying to get 100 more steps before trying to do this sort of thing.
Walking is good for mind and body so I want to have that as a habit. I also can’t do 10,000 reps weightlifting or read 10,000 pages in a day. I might be able to blab into a microphone all day to write 10,000 useless words.
One thing I really want to use walking for is to relieve stress.
In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about Dr. Trevor Kashey suggesting he replace food as a reward with light exercise.
He recommended that I distract the discomfort of reward hunger with another form of discomfort: light exercise. “Find some ‘calorie negative’ ways of dealing with stress,” he said. “Walking is my number one. It relieves more stress and is health promoting. It leads you to burn calories rather than onboard them. And it removes you from the situation and adds time for reflection, where you can realize that you weren’t really hungry.”
Walking is the greatest thing to pair other things with.
I have a treadmill desk set up. If I use it and just brain rot with the laptop, I still don’t feel as bad as I would have if I was melted on the couch doing the same.
But usually I do find myself actually reading and writing when I’m on the treadmill. I can type totally fine.
10,000 steps is also a nudge to get outdoors.
All 5 of the things in this 1-10-100-1000-10000 plan are daily nudges toward something broader in the long term. I’ll do another video on that later. Like, subscribe, but most important: get your reading/writing/walking/lifting in!
Thanks for checking this out.
