Regulars here know of my interest in all things related to leading a happy and meaningful life. Research has repeatedly pointed to 3 things that help –
1. Excellent Habits – e.g. exercise, reading great books, deliberate practice to improve skills
2. High willpower – to develop great habits
3. Self awareness and reflection – to keep perspective, stay upbeat, and keep learning from our experiences
Applying these principles in my life has meant an often-painful but always-rewarding set of experiences over the past 3 years. You are never “done” on this journey as the success lies in enjoying the journey but you do get better at it the more you try. The hardest challenge amongst the 3 has been embedding good habits into my life. I am still a long way from where I’d like to be – the exercise habit, for example, is one I’m working hard on.
I am, as a result, very interested to see if an intense 6 week burst that involves sticking to these habits for an external reward does result in sustainable long term change.
Hence, the ALearningaDay scholarship challenge. The ALearningaDay scholarships are 2 scholarships worth SGD 600 (around USD 485) for students applying to the RealAcad entrepreneurial leadership program in 2013. I attended my first RealAcad camp at Stanford university as a young university student and learnt a great deal. I’ve been fortunate to go to a few more camps following my first and continue to work with RealAcad as an alumni contributor.
The scholarship challenge will work as follows –
Round 1 – Paragraph
1. All interested 2013 applicants will register by submitting their name, email address, and a paragraph explaining why they feel they deserve the ALearningaDay scholarship (in less than 150 words).
Registration deadline is 11:59pm GMT on Friday, 17 May 2013
2. A panel of anonymous judges will pick 3-5 students for round 2 and the successful students will be notified by email on Sunday, 19 May 2013
Round 2 – 6 week challenge
1. For 6 straight weeks, the participants in the challenge will have to do the following every weekday (Monday-Friday) starting Monday, 20 May 2013 –
a) Post a book byte on The BookBytes Project from one of the 4 recommended books.
(So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, Willpower by Roy Baumeister, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg)
b) Keep an exercise log and exercise for a minimum of 20 minutes 4 out of 5 weekdays.
c) Create a learning blog/use an existing blog and share one learning from the day.
d) Compile the book byte, learning, and a simple 0/1 exercise score on a google spreadsheet tab to make it easy for the final judging.
2. The challenge will end on Friday, 21 June 2013. The anonymous judge panel will shortlist the final 2 winners and announce the winner on or before Monday, 1 Jul 2013.
FAQs/Questions/Other Notes
· The assumption with the book byte is that you’d have to do a substantive amount of daily reading.
· The applicants will be judged on the quality of the content they put up and their ability to keep up these habits.
· The submissions will be treated with 100% trust. We will make sure the participants are reminded of the dangers of marginal thinking.
The going-in assumption is that this exercise will be beneficial to participants whether or not they win the cash amount. In fact, I am sure that the resulting habits would be FAR more valuable in the long run the scholarship amount.
It will also be a very painful process if my attempts at embedding these habits into my life are anything to go by. But, nothing is good accomplished without pain. It will be a real challenge.. And I’m looking forward to seeing how many decide to take the challenge head on.
If you are one of those applicants who’s ready for the challenge, please click here to register. If you haven’t applied to RealAcad’s 2013 programs and want to participate in the challenge, you have 1 week to get it all done. ;-)
And, to the rest of the community, updates on this experiment on living well will follow! :-)
A Learning a Day 