The Motivation: Begin

It is done. It's 9:09 pm, a bit late, but I decided to stay up as long as necessary to make sure I got all my ducks in a row to start this experiment tomorrow.

Sai Baba, one of my favorite spiritual teachers, wrote a play when he was little, maybe... 10 years old? not sure exactly. The title and subject of the play was "Do you do what you say you will do?" And I think that is kind of the essence of true virtue. Do you do what you say you will do? It's rare. And when you DO, you start feeling really good about yourself, and when you don't, you slowly ooze into feeling bad about yourself and not trusting yourself or respecting yourself, sinking into a cloud of distraction and rationalization to avoid facing the stark fact, because you don't feel very good about yourself when you realize you are not being true to your word. (It should be common sense to add, your word must also be true to your thinking. If you don't think something is actually good, but you say it anyways, you probably don't feel good when you act in accord with your word. You need your true thoughts and values corresponding to your words corresponding to your actions.)

I said I'd have it ready by the end of this weekend, and dag nab it, I'm going to be true to my word if it means I'm staying up all night long.

I have a few administrative tasks to do that will further enhance my focus, but I have my goals, and I've put real cash-money on the line if I don't deliver on them. I'll be sharing those tracking graphs so you can all check on them in real-time, along with some other links to the rest of my goals that I also want to accomplish, but am not putting to quite so strict a criteria for success and failure, for now, since I want to follow proper habit formation and motivation science guidelines, and not try and do too much at once. But I also want them all visible to people I know and care about, so I have a little bit of additional motivation to stick with them. However, it is getting late, so those additional helpful boosts can wait. Let's say they're due tomorrow, along with an extra blog post with all the links proving it has been done. ;-)

Looking forward to it :D

See you tomorrow,

-Isaac