The 30 day trial
Monday, February 26th, 2007Occasionally I’ll read Steve Pavlina’s blog. If you’re looking to improve some aspect of your life, it will serve as a good resource.
He has a post called 30 days to success which applies the idea of the 30-day trial to the real world. For example, instead of quitting smoking, try committing to only quitting for a month. If you like the results then you can quit forever. The idea is that you psychologically might be willing to accept a certain state of affairs if it’s only temporary versus if it’s a permanent life change.
I was intrigued when I read it and I had started a few blogs so I committed to writing a post each day on at least one of the blogs. It worked well at first. Great, I might add, but toward the end of the trial I started falling. It eventually didn’t work.
That’s not a bad thing. It was a lot easier to do that then to commit to writing a post daily for the rest of my life. Now I only feel like those 30 days weren’t a success… not my entire life 
I did learn a lot.
- Sometimes inspiration doesn’t hit at 5am every morning.
- Writing on a schedule is a chore and therefore not fun.
- Writing a post a day made quality suffer.
So I learned a lesson. Of course, I did end up not writing that much after the trial either… so it’s important to know when to stop. I still like the idea of the 30 day trial, and plan on trying it again.