Why I’ve come to believe in the 30-day challenge

I first heard of the 30-day challenge in high school when a friend sent me a short TED Talk video by Matt Cutts. This Google-employed computer scientist had made a habit of trying out a daily challenge for 30 days, from biking to work to taking a photograph each day. Impressed by the adventurous spirit the challenge had cultivated in this self-described “desk-dwelling computer nerd,” I agreed to try several challenges with my friend.

The first challenge I accepted was to take the stairs whenever reasonably possible. This meant skipping every single one of the seven lengthy escalators I normally took to commute back home from school.

In the Toronto subway system, there is this one stairwell with only an up escalator and stairs. This means that when the train at the upper level platform arrives, the stairs transform into a torrent of downward-headed commuters. My friends joked that I looked like Moses parting the sea of bodies as I rushed headlong against the crowd.

Over the next 30 days, my cardio improved by leaps and bounds. I managed to build enough leg muscle that my jeans were noticeably more fitted. But in the end, I didn’t convert the challenge to a regular habit because I just wasn’t a fan of fighting the crowd and inconveniencing others (very Canadian, I realize).

My second challenge was to make my bed every day. At first, this seemed like a rather mundane and not particularly difficult challenge. That is, until I factored in the fact that I was waking up at ungodly hours three to four days a week for sports practices.

Never have I ever experienced such intense physical inability to move as when I am snuggled under a warm comforter at 4:45 a.m. on a Monday morning in the dead of winter. After about a week of struggling, I compromised to making my bed upon arriving home after school instead of during the cruel, pre-dawn mornings. Amazingly, even though I semi-copped out on the original challenge, I have hardly missed a morning of bed-making since I arrived at college.

One of the most interesting but definitely most effort-filled challenges I took on was to keep a dream journal. At the time, I was interested in experiencing lucid dreaming — a state of consciousness where you are dreaming but fully cognizant that you are doing so. As part of the learning stages of lucid dreaming, one has to master dream recall.

For the average person, the memory of a dream supposedly fades within the first several seconds after waking up. The purpose of keeping a dream journal is to form a habit of remembering dreams in increasingly vivid detail. After all, what’s the point of doing all kinds of awesome, reality-defying shenanigans in your lucid dreams if you can’t remember them later?

I never got past snippets of dream lucidity in which I merely stood in mute amazement or flew around, but my dream journal remains one of my favorite things to look back on.

The most recent challenge I took, and by far the most impactful, was to go meatless. One of my friends is vegan and randomly suggested I become vegetarian for a month, just to try it out. At first, there were some real pangs of grief over giving up prosciutto and cha siu bao (Chinese barbeque pork bun), aka heaven. I’m talking just short of broken-spirit, crushed-soul kind of pangs of grief.

But on the whole, considering I had previously spent a solid few years deprived of all refined sugar, white rice and flour (wrestlers go hard to stay at the right weight class), eating vegetarian wasn’t bad at all.

Since January, I have officially been vegetarian with fish as an occasional supplemental protein source, otherwise known as pescatarian. Now, if someone asks whether my dietary choices are for ethical or health reasons, I can tell them quite truthfully that I became pescatarian on a dare.

In the end, the bigger point of the 30-day challenge is not to “win” in any sense. The point isn’t even to avoid failure. Really, the idea is to cultivate an explorer’s spirit when it comes to doing all the things you’ve wanted to try and, by extension, being the kind of person you’ve always wished you could be. It doesn’t matter so much whether you made it through the 30 days or not. It only matters that you were willing to put in the effort to try.