Your Challenge of the Year

I know, it is already late March, more than three months since the year kicked off, but I am going to ask you to recall that day of January when you sat to set your goals and objectives for the fresh new year, learn French, lose weigth, gain strength, start that blog your own blog or maybe, finally accomplishing your dream of setting your own shop, Name your own.

Now, assuming you are still sticking to the path of achieving them (which I must doubt), compare them to the ones below:

“This year, my challenge is to meet a new person outside of work every day,”

“In 2010, my personal challenge was to learn Mandarin.”

“This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.”

“My challenge for 2015 is to read a new book every other week — with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories and technologies.”

“My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man.”

Yes, you have guessed it. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg set, seven years ago, a policy for himself of setting a new personal development challenge every other year. Although they range from the bizarre to the quite difficult to achieve, they all hold two things in common: they will probably put yours to shame and they are quite specific, namely measurable. How does your get in shape or learn english statement get measured?

How do you know whether you reached your goal? You basically do not. And that is because, most likely, you do not even want to know when you have not accomplish it or, worse, quit trying all together.

How does it work for Zuckerberg

In case you doubt it, the Facebook wunderkid has done it. Seven years in a row striking his personal challenge is no minutiae, specially if your goals include (but not limited to) learn and decently speak the most difficult language for occidentals or kill a lambfor your own dinner.

It is no secret that he has massive resources within its reach to make things happen, we are not going to deny how that helps. However, the resolutions he sets for himself are not that money or resource-heavy. Contrarily, they involve a great dosis of personal consistency and effort.

Then, what is the reason why he consistently reaches his challenge of the year? After investigating and reading a dozen of articles on the matter, I came up with a set of 3 factors that can make or break your success towards achieving your resolution:

1. Make it public: Studies have shown how publically communicating a difficult goal, drives a much higher commitment towards its achievement. The shame of failing (or at least heavily trying) to accomplish an objective you put in public knowledge, derives in a much higher and consistent effort. For you, making your goal public might involve a few dozens of people, for the CEO of the most used Social Network that means several millions of followers and quite a few headlines.

2. Keep up the heat: That force coming from making a public announce of your yearlong goal also derives in a higher chance of you sticking to your word, being precisely, that the key to any longlasting achievement.

One might tend to thing that a particularly succesful professional, wether a writer, engineer or tech CEO achieves its goals and gets his success thanks to his intrinsic genius, his innate creativity and his waves of spark. However, the reality is quite different. A genius writter becomes genius by showing up everyday, sitting at his desk and writting, no matter if he is in the mood, he slept on a great idea or the weather is adequate. What distinguishes a real professional from an amateur, is showing up every single day and getting shit done.

3. A sense of positive change: Crushing your resolution year after year shall be enough to keep you from giving up on the next. However, there is a factor, probably the most important, that keeps Zuck on mantaining the tradition: the sensation of improving himself as an individual year after year. Setting out to accomplish something challenging, something requiring effort and discipline over time, will change us. That change for the better is probably what can get us coming back for more when a resolution is crossed. That sense of being a better you.

Why can it work for us

The factors stated above are not, in any way, related to ones wealth or resources. In fact they do not belong specifically to any successful business field or position. Making your challenge public, sticking to it and getting reinforced by perceiving its benefits can all of them work for non tech-stars.

To give example, I thought on quite a few for the present year, maybe learning french or deeply get into code. However there is one that in fact i have been pursuing for some time know, building my own thing, constructing my own business. For this year I set myself the objective of being a sidepreneur, design and build a great tech product that could eventually grow into something worth pursuing full time.

So, say it here, make it public know in the comments below. Which is your Personal Challenge of the Year?