TED Talk - Extreme lifestyle experiment

The youtube summary of this TED talk says it all. It certainly ties in with my own series of 30 day challenges. 

Colin Wright is a 25-year-old serial entrepreneur, minimalist, and blogger who moves to a new country every 4 months based on the votes of his readers. While travelling, Colin starts up new business endeavors, manages his existing projects, and engages in extreme lifestyle experiments—from not wearing black for half a year to going completely paperless—in order to gain new perspective and to inspire others to make positive changes to their lives that might otherwise seem impossible. Colin writes about entrepreneurship, minimalism, and long-term travel at ExileLifestyle.com. "I wish that the knowledge that humanity has amassed could be evenly and universally available to everyone on the planet, allowing more people to have access to the resources that will allow them to contribute to the global conversation, take care of themselves (and others), and pursue further innovation."

He started with a project he called Circadian 3 (whic is now a cool website for his various projects). Every day he wrote a short story, made a drawing and took a photo. He talked about how it required him to take his camera with him everywhere. He talked about how it turned everything into a composition. In many ways, it sounds like it taught him to find beauty in each moment – more broadly to find gratitude – mindfulness. He said in no uncertain terms this was the most beneficial aspect of all his projects. He relays a personal story of his parents backyard that he had seen every day for a decade and how it took this project to see it as finally worthy of a project. I can relate my own very similar experience.

When I went on my cross country trip, my camera was always in my pocket. I think I took around 10,000 photos during that two month adventure. That averages out to just over one photo per mile. I certainly didn’t keep that many photos, but I did see that many moments worthy of pause. That is a great change indeed.  

From his experiment he realized his lifestyle wasn’t currently what he wanted. From there he laid out a plan to deal with those things. It’s clear from the video he is an ENTP and it’s no surprise his advice is both useful for me and addresses the common weakness of ENTPs (we need to get our alone time, identify which feelings are causing us the most drama, we need to plan [even the details], and we need structure and order – he has laid out a path to keep him (and most ENTPs) happy which is a constantly changing lifestyle. I would guess for many (though they would probably never encounter this video anyway) they continually do the things on this list anyway (but their goal would be to maintain a consistent lifestyle).

1.  Identify problems – what is causing the most drama in your life (this requires time alone and a moment to reflect on one’s feelings)
2.  Plan – lay out the steps you need and put in the necessary infrastructure to make this happen, for him it was a website. It also caused him to look at the concrete . To focus on the physical limitations that were keeping his ideas from becoming a reality.
3. Create Rules and Guidelines – This gives you a way to objectively measure the benefits of the change. Set out a list of what you will and will not do during the experiment. Also, most importantly, set an end date.
4. Jump  In – just do it (stop the paralysis by analysis). Make a decision and follow through.