If you’re new to Daily Prompts, you may want to start at the beginning of the series here.
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this post for a PDF version and other notes.
Year______ Month_______Day______Consecutive Practice Days_____Missed Days______
Day 59
Gratitude: (Spend a few moments writing about the things you’re grateful for. Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Vision: (Write out your vision for the future you want to live. Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Affirmations: (Write out 1-5 affirmations of who you want to be. Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Action: (Write out one simple action step you can take today that brings you closer to your vision Lined pages are on the PDF below)
Yesterday we explored the idea of creating more consistent practices by mixing up the practice itself. This helps avoid the monotony that might lead to inconsistency, but there’s another powerful benefit to implementing variety; evolution.
The evolution of a species can’t work without two critical components:
1: Lots of tries. This is your Daily Practice. Each day of your Practice is like another generation of a species.
2: Lots of variety. If every organism is exactly the same, then there’s no way for any particular one to have an advantage over another. Evolution would stop if our genes were perfect. And so it is with your Gratitude, Vision, Affirmations, Actions, and Daily Practices.
By introducing variety into your approach to Daily Practice, you’ll be able to more effectively evolve your Practices to be more and more potent. Mixing it up is not only a boredom buster, it’s a way to test out alternatives, allowing you to keep what works best for you, and discard old ways of doing things.
When I compare The Lyceum Method to the traditional Goal-setting models, I often criticize goal-setting for its assumption that you should know how to get somewhere you’ve never been. Goal setting requires you to anticipate future results, something that humans have been proven to be terrible at.
So why would we assume that your Daily Practices would be any different? The Lyceum Method would not be any better than traditional goal-setting if we assumed that your Day 1 Practice is already the best approach or format that you should stick with for the rest of your life. That’s absurd. In fact, if your Day 60 Practice looks exactly the same as your Day 1 Practice, something’s wrong.
The Lyceum Method is a form of A-B testing. Practice A. Then Practice B. Which one is better for you and gets you closer to your vision? If it’s B, then find a new A and repeat the test with the original B. Keep repeating this experiment as you go and your Practices will evolve to ever more advanced and effective methods.
The consistency needed to get you closer to your Vision is in the Daily attention to Practice.
How you Practice can and should change dramatically as you go.
Daily: (The pdf version below contains three lined pages for your daily journal)
NOTE:
The above is an excerpt from the upcoming The Lyceum Course Journal. We will be releasing it here for free as a Daily Prompt blog post. If you would like a physical copy, we will link to it here once it is released.
Suggested Use:
I realize a daily journal prompt on a blog is a little weird. This is how I would suggest using it: Open your favorite note-taking software such as Evernote, copy and paste this post into it, and write your daily entries there.
OR
Download a PDF version of this post here. Feel free to print it out, or access it through a PDF editor where you can type in your daily entry.
Collaborate With Me!
This post series is a first draft of the future book. If you have suggestions, comments, or see errors, please reach out so that I can make the final product more valuable for you and the rest of the community. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
