Hel­lo again, brave souls!

We’re now on our sec­ond week of our 4‑Week Series.  If you’re just join­ing us, wel­come!  I invite you to have a look at Part I of My Best Month Series before you get start­ed with Part II.

Okay, friends.  Let’s start with this sim­ple ques­tion:  What are you most grate­ful for today?  As you think about this, feel free to let your mind real­ly get into it.  Don’t gen­er­al­ize; be spe­cif­ic.  Think of every small detail that comes to mind.  Start with your lit­er­a­cy and your abil­i­ty to read this post.  So many peo­ple in the world do not know how to read, and here you are read­ing away this heart­felt rant.  Can you agree that your cur­rent health is in much bet­ter con­di­tion than it is for so many oth­ers?

To the bare­foot man, hap­pi­ness is a pair of shoes.  To the man with old shoes, it’s a pair of new shoes.  To the man with new shoes, it’s more styl­ish shoes, and of course, to the fel­low with no feet–he’d be hap­py to be bare­foot.  Mea­sure your life by what you have, not by what you don’t.”

By now you should be feel­ing pret­ty darn good about your life.  Sure, it isn’t where you want it to be, but my gosh, you’re so ahead of the game and you know it.

Part of hav­ing the most fab­u­lous month is find­ing ways to be and feel hap­py, now.  Last week I kind­ly asked you to think about what makes you hap­py.  For us to con­tin­ue on this jour­ney it is imper­a­tive that you know what you want.  So if you haven’t done so already, or if you’re just join­ing us, do this now.  Take a sheet of paper out and jot down what­ev­er comes to mind.

2)  Cir­cle the top 3.  This is not easy, I under­stand.  They are all impor­tant to you, that’s why you wrote them down.  But go ahead and trust me on this one and pick your top three.  These are the most impor­tant goals–these three beat the oth­er dozen.  You can’t become a super­star by focus­ing on every­thing at the same time. The good news is you can repeat this process once you com­plete your top three as many times as you’d like, and I tru­ly hope that you do.

3) You should be spend­ing at least 30 min­utes every sin­gle day on your goals.  By now, you should have sliced your goal into small­er more man­age­able tasks.

For exam­ple, your over­all goal is to become a front-end devel­op­er.  Among oth­er things, front-end devel­op­ers must be pro­fi­cient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and if you want to be a real­ly, real­ly good one, you should also know graph­ic design (Adobe Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor and InDe­sign).

You would want to break down this goal and pri­or­i­tize all the skills you would need to learn to become a front-end devel­op­er.  This is going to take longer than a month.  So your pri­or­i­ty should be to learn HTML first before you move on to CSS or JavaScript.

You’ll want to break down HTML into 4 dif­fer­ent phas­es: Fun­da­men­tals, begin­ner, inter­me­di­ate, and pro­fi­cient.  Lis­ten­ing, research­ing and watch­ing tuto­ri­als is fine, but in order to real­ly learn a new skill, you have to actu­al­ly put it to prac­tice, that is, you must actu­al­ly “poke” at it, oth­er­wise you will nev­er real­ly learn it.  So down­load a code edi­tor and work along­side your tuto­ri­als.

4) Here’s my guar­an­tee:  If you have been work­ing every sin­gle day on your goal for the past week you should be mak­ing some seri­ous progress.  Let’s assume your goal is to write a man­u­script.  If you have been writ­ing for 30 min­utes every sin­gle day, with­out interruption–not just research­ing and read­ing, but you’ve actu­al­ly set time aside to write non­stop for at least 30 min­utes, by now, on day 7, you should feel real­ly good about your­self.

5) Eval­u­ate your progress in a pro­duc­tive way.  This is impor­tant.  If you have done some­thing towards your goal every sin­gle day this past week, you should be real­ly proud of your­self.  Con­tin­ue doing this for the rest of the week.  Track your progress in your jour­nal.  At the end of your day, ask your­self the fol­low­ing three ques­tions:

1.  What are three things you did well today?
2.  What is one thing you would like to improve tomor­row?
3.  What is one thing you can do dif­fer­ently right now that can help make that improve­ment?

The goal is to have a real­ly, real­ly great month, hope­ful­ly your best to date!  There is joy, my friends, in work­ing on a worth­while goal.  This week, do what you’ve been doing, but do just a lit­tle more, spend an addi­tion­al 10 min­utes or more, if you can.  But do a lit­tle more.

Every sin­gle day is a start.  Your good inten­tions are often not enough.  You want to be hap­py and you do every­thing you can to remain pos­i­tive and then a bird shits on your win­dow shield.  It hap­pens.  There will be dis­trac­tions.  You will make mis­takes.  Peo­ple, events and your own atti­tude will throw you off course.  You’ll fail.  But you know that this is more than like­ly to hap­pen.  So the ques­tion is, “so what?”  Start again.  Start every day.

Dar­lings, you have a big week com­ing up.  Make sure you write in your jour­nal at the end of your day.  Make sure you focus on your top three tasks before you do any­thing else.  And make sure you do a tad bit more this week.  I look for­ward to see­ing you next Mon­day for Part III of our 4‑week series!

Xoxo,

Irís