Tag: Commitment

Personal Growth

I started and sustained my fitness habit for 30+ days. Here is what I learned

by MQDuong1 Comment on I started and sustained my fitness habit for 30+ days. Here is what I learned

Yesterday marked the 34th day in a row that I completed my workout targets on the Apple Fitness app. To those who aren’t familiar, there are three rings. The red ring shows how much calorie is burned in a day, the green ring records how many minutes you work out and the blue ring refers to the number of hours in which you stand at least for one minute. I set my goals as 550 Calorie, 50 mins of workout and 11 hours of standing. Here are the lessons I learned after the last 30+ days

My challenge has been going on since 4/25/2021

A sprint or a disciplined marathon

While I could have gone for 1200 Calorie a day, I knew that sort of target wouldn’t be sustainable. I wouldn’t be able to keep that level of commitment for 30+ days. Hence, I set a target that is both challenging enough for me to put in real effort and realistic enough for me to maintain it for a month. Think of it as a choice between a sprint or a marathon. You can run at a high speed, but that burst of energy won’t last for long. After a couple of days of heavy workout, I’d probably take it easy the next day and completely fail the challenge. In some cases, rest would be precisely what my body requires. But I chose not to give myself that excuse. So, before you embark on a similar challenge, think of an appropriate goal for yourself. You can slightly low-bar it in the beginning and raise it gradually in the process. Just don’t start too big and fail too soon.

Pulling through the moments of demotivation matters

There were days when I woke up feeling energetic and couldn’t wait to start a workout. On the other hand, there were days when my level of motivation was low. You know what it feels like: a bad sleep, mood swings, effect from a gloomy weather, stress from work, fights with your loved ones. I had plenty of that during my challenge. There were times when I had to pull late workouts or put everything I had into a HIIT because I was behind. It’s tough to force your mind to go through those moments and commit to the mission at hand. But. I guess it’s one of those things that can help me mentally deal with other aspects of my life. As I am fully vaccinated, it increasingly becomes difficult to stay here and not to be able to return to Vietnam to visit my family, friends and girlfriend. It’s tough, but I definitely feel this little challenge helps a bit.

Yoga or HIIT

At 550 Calorie, I couldn’t sit around all day and meet the quota. Usually a long yoga or at least 20 mins of HIIT is necessary to get the job done. The question now becomes whether I am up for spending an hour on yoga or sweating out with maximum effort for 20 minutes. When your days are overburdened with commitments, a HIIT is a better option, but do you have the mental fortitude to go through 20 minutes of hard work? When your energy level is high enough for a HIIT but your body is sore from the day before, are you patient and committed enough to complete an hour of yoga? The same applies to real life. I am sure my writing would be a lot better if I spent 10-12 hours a day without a job on writing. The progress in a short period of time would be significant. On the other hand, I could choose to write less intensely but over a period of time and with a financial cushion from a day job. The progress would take more time obviously. What then is your preference in that case?

Sometimes it’s just too late

Here is how the Stand ring works. To record one hour on the ring, you have to stand for at least one minute straight during a clock hour. Somehow the motion tracking on Apple Watch can see if you are standing or sitting. It means that if you set your goal at 11 hours of standing like I do, you can’t load up everything by standing for 11 minutes straight in one hour and call it done. You have to stand for at least one minute between 7am and 8am, another between 8am and 9am, so on and so forth.

I have a friend whom I am doing this challenge with. One time, he texted me around 8:30pm and said that he still had 5 more Stand hours to go to meet his daily goal. I told him that he wouldn’t meet it that day because he only had 4 available hours left at most. The lesson here is that if you don’t consciously plan and start your standing early enough during the day, you likely won’t be able to succeed. It’s like coming into a 60-minute exam whose questions require at least 25 minutes to complete, when there is only 20 minutes to go. Or if a flight is about to take off in 30 minutes and you are still at home that is about 30 minutes or less away. Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much money or effort you put in, time’s not available to buy.

Book, Personal Growth

Book: Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and Life

by MQDuong1 Comment on Book: Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and Life

If you love writing, but get stuck at not knowing how to write better, this book is for you. It’s a light-toned therapy session that consists of practical lessons on how to write better. I found it reassuring to learn about the struggles that even great writers faced. It was equally reassuring to know that writing is tough, but if you keep at it, eventually you’ll get something out of it.

The book can get dull as it drags on, if you are not that interested in the author’s personal anecdotes. The main take-aways for me include:

  • Just sit your ass down and force yourself to write. It’ll come
  • First drafts are always horrible, for everyone. Just let it all out at first
  • Little by little, just write. Or in the author’s father’s words: “bird by bird”!

Below are few great quotes from the book:

E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard

“Do it every day for a while”, my father kept saying. “Do it as you would do scales on the piano. Do it by prearrangement with yourself. Do it as a debt of honor. And make a commitment to finishing things”

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do – the actual act of writing – turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said. ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird’.”

One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do—you can either type or kill yourself.”

This blog is my “tea ceremony”. I don’t know what I would get out of it. I just enjoy it.

Bonus: Below are the four blogs that inspire me to write as often as I can