Hitting Reset & 30 Days of Building Habits
Part of the fun in a major life transition is opportunity to start from a clean slate. It’s an opportunity to engrain new habits, lifestyles, and routines. It’s a rest button on life.
For example, when I moved into my new place, I quickly identified the specific location of where I would be putting my keys every time I returned home. Why? Because if I establish that habit early and consistently, I’ll be much less likely to lose my keys down the road. It would also be much more difficult to introduce this habit later on.
Similarly, I plan to do the same with other major areas of my life.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” — Aristotle
Today marks the start of a major personal challenge.
For the 30 days, I’m going to focus on doing a few simple, important activities that I want to continue for the foreseeable future (ie the rest of my life):
- Exercise
- Read
- Write
- Meditate
Not too bad right?
I’ll be completing most of these in the mornings — waking at 5am and finishing up by 8 so I can go to work and continue helping our clients.
At night, I’ll be engrossing myself in two major areas:
- Operations at Quibbl
- Learning to program in Python

I’m ramping up pretty aggressively at Quibbl and will begin overseeing some major projects in the coming weeks. First and foremost is comprehensively overhauling our knowledge management & communication systems. We’re currently at ~25 people including content writers, and we have 300+ documents (?!?) that needs to be cleaned, consolidated, and organized. Next I will be overseeing the operations of our content team, enabling them to keep humming along. Eventually that will also branch out into user acquisition and platform growth.
I haven’t decided how rigorous the programming study will be just yet. I know Quibbl takes priority, but this is a skillset that I know is going to be instrumental through my life. It’s better to start now rather than continue to put it off and off. I would rather start slow and peck away one pebble at a time, so I’ll probably devote about an hour per day during the week and a few more hours during the weekend.
The nightly activities are less routinized — I still plan to work on those every day, but I want to allow some flexibility in my evening schedule. If I decide I need to build programming into my schedule to continue working consistently, I can do that as well.

I started 2017 with “Life Resolutions” — not resolutions for the new year, but resolutions I plan to keep for the rest of my life. This is just an extension of that but a major, focused attempt to hit a big reset button to do it right.
The next month, the hardest part of this process, is going to be 30 days treading water. I am acknowledge that now; it’s time to bury my head and come up for air at the end. This is my journey through the trenches.
