Upgrade Your Life & Career With Our 30-Day Habit Challenge (Starts November 1)

For years, I’ve enjoyed testing new and different ways to live and improve myself via the fun and strenuous 30-day habit challenge.

The concept is simple:

  1. Pick a habit you’d like to instill in your life
  2. Find a small but meaningful action you can do to reinforce it
  3. Repeat that action every day for 30 days, recording your progress

I’ve tested myself with various habit challenges for years. Some have become powerful habits (writing every day). Others were fun but eventually abandoned (eating vegetarian). Others, still, started with a daily challenge and morphed into a similar but different habit (“exercise every day” turned into “run three days per week”).

Unless you regularly give it conscious thought, it’s incredibly easy to slip into a rut with your life and routine. Applying yourself to a 30-day habit challenge is the perfect way to force yourself to take a look at your daily routine and start to find and reinforce better ways to live because they’re simple, require only a little commitment, and they build confidence as you progress through them.

Today, I’m excited to announce we’ll be making 30-day habit challenges a regular part of The Riskologist Community, and I want to invite you to join me in several that will be starting on November 1.

Image courtesy of Tim Norris
Image courtesy of Tim Norris

30-Day Habit Challenge: No Alcohol (Starts November 1)

This is our first life-hacking challenge. Join me in abstaining from alcohol for a full 30 days. I’ve done this challenge once before, and the results were great. Here’s what I expect to gain by cutting alcohol from my diet for 30 days:

  1. Increased energy. When I don’t drink alcohol, after a few days, I naturally start to wake up earlier and find the sleep I get to be more restorative.
  2. Increased willpower. Abstaining from any vice will give you a better sense of your own willpower. I drink only socially and in moderation, but it’s important for me to completely abstain from time to time to remind myself I’m still fully in control.
  3. Weight loss. Drinking comes with a lot of extra calories you don’t often think about. For me, it also comes with mindless eating. I expect that abstaining will cause me to lose a little weight.
  4. Better focus. Even a little alcohol the night before can affect my ability to focus the next day. I expect cutting it out for 30 days will make it easier for me to focus on my work.

I encourage you to take this habit challenge along with me and track your progress. You might learn some interesting things about yourself.

To participate, join The Riskology Lab and subscribe to this thread.

30-Day Habit Challenge: Build Connections Every Day (Starts November 1)

This is our first career hacking challenge. Join me in building new business relationships and fostering existing ones.

For the month of November, I plan to spend at least 5-10 minutes every day connecting with people who can help me expand my career or furthering an existing relationship.

I plan to do this in a number of different ways to keep it interesting. I might:

  • Attend networking events
  • Set up coffee / tea meetings
  • Email someone I know but haven’t connected with in awhile
  • Email someone I don’t know but I’d like to get to know
  • Chat with a mentor
  • Etc. etc.

I don’t have any preconceived notions about exactly what I’ll get out of this except to make “building connections” a more regular and fundamental part of my day, every day. As an introvert, this is something that’s important to me, but often gets set aside because I’m not naturally inclined to do it.

To participate, join The Riskology Lab and subscribe to this thread.

Want To Do Something Else? Start Your Own Habit Challenge!

No alcohol and building connections are just two of an endless number of habits you might want to build for yourself. Not interested in either of those? I’d encourage you to join The Lab and start your own challenge. You can challenge yourself and others to do anything, and you can start any time you like. There are only 3 rules:

  1. It should be 30 days long.
  2. There should be a simple and specific action (or inaction) to take every day.
  3. It should be tied to some sort of meaningful goal in your life, career, etc.

Can I Actually Build A New Habit In 30 Days?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is maybe. There have been all kinds of studies trying to learn how long it takes to create a new habit, and they’ve all failed to pinpoint a specific timeframe. But, the reality is that how long it takes to create a new habit depends on the habit, your own circumstances, and a number of other factors.

The good news is, for a 30-day habit challenge, none of this matters! The real benefits of a 30-day challenge are to:

  1. Test new ways of living to keep your brain sharp and agile.
  2. Increase your confidence by proving you can change things about yourself if you want to.
  3. In our case, find a support group that can help you navigate important challenges in your life.

The 30-day habit challenge is one of the best things I’ve implemented for myself, and I’m excited to share it with you. I hope I see you in The Lab, and I hope you join us for a meaningful—even if brief—transformation. Hey, who knows who you’ll be in 30 days…