Six Herculean tasks in six weeks
As most of the people in this world I am very lazy and I am a master of procrastination. I was always procrastinating not to procrastinate but it happens every time. At any given sane moment I was thinking of a way to break the shackles but never executed any of those ideas because I was too lazy and this is sometimes depressing.
Lately, I found an interesting challenge executed by Max Deutsch where he did 12 ridiculously hard tasks in 12 months. Since I too has an obsessive personality and trying to figure out a way to break out of these bad habits I thought of implementing a mini version of that and complete 6 really hard tasks in 6 weeks so I will get one week to complete one task.
I have to start from scratch for most of these tasks and I will only get 7 days. I want to experiment how(or whether) I can push my limits and what and how much I can achieve during these limited timeframe. I am planning to spend at least 4–6 hours per day for this challenge ideally this means I will get 30–40 hours per each task. As Malcolm Gladwell mentioned in his book we need to spend at least 10,000 hours to become an expert in anything but as per many other authors/researchers you can master a skill not necessarily a world class performer or an expert, in 20–30 hours of dedicated practice. I suppose this time the fear of public embarrassment and fear of criticism would eventually help me to overcome that long lasting procrastination.
Following are the challenges per each week:
- Launch a product.
This would be relatively easy compared to other tasks because I already have an idea for a product which I have been procrastinating for a long time, sometimes due to obsession. Anyway I think I have the necessary technical skills but still I have to pull that off in a week an it would certainly need a herculean effort. - Memorize the order of a card deck under 2 minutes.
I have read about several memory techniques and tried out couple of them just to memorize a list of items with success but I never imposed any time limitations. However, this will be a huge challenge because memorizing the order of 52 cards within 2 minutes needs a big effort. - Learn Spanish and do a YouTube video in Spanish on any topic related to Machine learning.
Currently I speak two languages, Sinhala and English also I can barely manage with Hindi though I am not fluent. Learning a totally new language that too in a week time would be the hardest challenge in this list and it definitely a herculean task. Since it’s difficult to evaluate the fluency of a language what I will do is to do impromptu explanation on a random topic on Machine learning. - Write a book and self publish on Amazon as an e-book.
I’m an avid reader but I don’t enjoy writing. One reason is I think my writing style is not that good and I can’t gather all my thoughts in to one piece of writing because of that, this task will need tremendous effort from me to write at least 100 pages in a week. - Learn to play Ukulele and play a popular song for at least 3 minutes.
Music is something I really enjoy but I have never learned any type of music at any level. So, learning to play a musical instrument has been a one big dream of me. For this challenge first I need to buy an instrument and need to learn this from the very basic. I am planning to do this by myself may be by watching some tutorials on Youtube. - Achieve top 5% scores in 5 Kaggle competitions.
I am already a kaggler and participated in couple of competitions. Only issue with this task is that there may not be enough running competitions while I am doing this so, I will still try to achieve this even with already completed competitions and just want to get leaderboard scores which can put me handsomely in top 5%.
These will be my six challenge hope to update about my progress every week. If anyone wants to join with me feel free! let’s push the boundaries.
