While searching for ideas for my daily writing challenge I found a novel way to find them.
You can call it a gold mine even because now I have endless options to get ideas from.
What is the source?
Old newsletters.
I love reading them now. This has a nice side-effect of de-cluttering my inbox. This helps me to discover great stories buried deep in all these newsletters.
Currently, I am focusing on reading all the old newsletters of James Clear.
While I was reading one, I found a story about Jack Lalanne.
Who is Jack Lalanne?
Superhuman, you can say.
He was a trailblazer in the world of fitness.
He opened one of the US first fitness gyms in 1936. He was the man who first brought fitness into your living room. The Jack LaLanne Show was the longest-running television exercise program of all time. It was on television for 34 years.
Here are some personal fitness feats achieved by him:
Are you amazed yet?
Here’s one more to blow your mind:
To celebrate his 70th birthday, LaLanne swam 1.5 miles along the California coast from the Queen’s Way Bridge to Long Beach Harbor. And he did it while wearing handcuffs and shackles on his arms and legs and towing 70 row boats holding 70 people.
How did he make it possible?
Yes, to most people it will sound crazy.
Who in their right mind would believe that a 70 year old man could tow 70 row boats with 70 people in them?
No one.
But it’s true.
How did he do it?
Habits.
What was his secret?
He focused on doing small acts, daily.
Those small acts created habits.
No one can be motivated for 70 years. There’s something greater than motivation.
Routines, rituals, consistency.
Here are some daily habits of Jack that he did for 70 years, daily without fail:
What can we learn from Jack?
Do not focus on big achievements.
Focus on small acts. Perform them daily for life. Big achievements will follow.
Often when we dream, we do it big. That’s alright. That’s how it should be.
But when it’s time to act, we should do the reverse. Focus on the smallest act that we can do daily. Do it for 10, 20, or 30 years. All the goals, dreams and other outcomes that you want will follow as a side-effect.
Focus on small and big will follow.
I write daily here on my blog. There is no limit to the word count. I am not focusing on any topic here. I want to build a daily writing habit. This is Day 48 of the Daily Writing Challenge in 2022.