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In Habitually Living on Purpose, I mentioned how I am focusing on habits this year in an attempt to live according to my Life on Purpose statement: My Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

Previously, I wrote about working on habits to help me work on the “powered by a healthy body” aspect of my purpose statement, then switched to focus on the “continuous learning” part. Today I’ll talk about living a life of “insatiable curiosity.”

Years ago, at my last day job, I attended a corporate event on creative thinking. At the time, I was working on a project that was late. I was in crunch, and I was working long hours. I figured taking off a couple of hours to see a famous author talk about how to be creative wasn’t going to make a major difference to the project’s timeline, and this was one of those once-in-a-blue-moon events, paid for by the company, so I went.

I later found out from my project lead that my producer at the time was unhappy with that decision. He thought I should have been spending that time working on the late project.

To this day, I do not regret having gone to the event anyway.

Michael J. Gelb was the featured speaker. He’s the author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, a copy of which was given out to each attendee of the event. Part of the talk mentioned a learning process that incorporated failure, which I wrote about when I was trying to learn how to shoot a basketball through a hoop after years of not playing.

Anyway, I’m rereading the book all these years later because one of the “seven steps to genius every day” is part of my life on purpose statement. Gelb says that Leonardo da Vinci was insatiably curious, and so curiosità is one of the seven da Vincian principles of the book.

Leonardo’s inquisitiveness was not limited to his formal studies; it informed and enhanced his daily experience of the world around him.

One of the exercises to help you cultivate an open, questing frame of mind is to keep a journal. Leonardo carried one with him everywhere, and he would write down all manner of notes on any topic, usually all on the same page. He meant to organize them later.

Two years after I met Gelb and had a chance to talk to him, I finally started my own journal. I took a regular composition notebook, and on the front I wrote “Da Vinci Curiosità.”

Unfortunately, I don’t write it in it daily. If anything, I write in it once a month, although never on purpose. It’s not a real habit, but in an effort to cultivate my curiosity, it might be the next one I try to instill.

My early posts are fascinating to reread (at least for me). I can see plenty of notes from books I was reading, such as Life On Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life. In fact, this notebook is where I kept plenty of my thoughts about the book and where I wrote down my answers to the questions and worked out the exercises.

On November 9, 2008, I was jotting down some notes in preparation for a week-long vacation in Iowa, which I would spend with friends I haven’t seen in some time. My intention was to use this time to get away from my usual environment so I could think hard about my future. I wrote three goals for that trip:

• figure out how to quit job
• figure out business plan
• figure out what I want out of life

What just amazed me was that November 9, 2009, exactly a year after I wrote those notes, was the day I had finally made the decision to quit my job. It could mean that that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance, almost as if it were the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.

Now, as I said, I don’t use it daily or keep a regular journaling schedule, but perhaps I should make it a regular habit. Instead of dumping all of my thoughts on a semi-monthly basis, perhaps it would be more beneficial to write weekly or even daily.

Normally, I write to get my thoughts collected. What I usually do is reread at least the last few entries to give me some more context, and then I write updates on the past notes while recording recent events and developments. It’s like having a mini-retreat for myself, giving myself a place to step back and see how things are going in the grand scheme of things, or even analyze some aspect in minutiae.

I have to make time for it, which can be difficult to do when there are a billion other things to do, so I usually go for more than a month between entries. If I make it a regular habit, however, time is scheduled for it by default.

One thing I wanted to do was start documenting things I come across that I want to learn more about. For instance, if I’m reading a book and there’s a word I don’t recognize, I normally try to get the context from the rest of the sentence. Recently I’ve started looking up words I don’t know as I came across them, and it makes all the difference.

The great thing is that I am not limited to using just this notebook. I could blog, tweet, post on Google+ or Facebook, and suddenly my insatiable curiosity becomes a social event, inviting other people to help in the search for more knowledge.

Even if a small notebook isn’t convenient to carry around, my cell phone has an app called “Tape-a-talk” which I like to use when I’m on my daily walks and an idea or thought comes to me. I hit the record button and start talking, and later when I’m at my desk, I can listen to the recordings to make action items out of. What if I used it more often to ask myself questions about the nature of the world? “Note to self: Why can’t you look directly at a solar eclipse?” “Note to self: Where can I find a clean, reasonably priced motel room?” “Note to self: I saw some fantastic, majestic trees today. Ask the sheriff what they are called.” Stuff like that.

When you’re a child, you are constantly trying to learn about your world and how to move through it. When you get older, it’s common to “put away childish things” and stop looking at the world with a child-like wonder. \

Who has time to figure out how or why things work? You’re too busy! We have so much information available to us that it’s easy to want to shut off the spout. I know that I could get sucked into Wikipedia if I start clicking links within an article, so I make a conscious effort not to in order to get productive work done, but I’ve also unwittingly stifled my curiosity.

Also, people don’t like you being so nosy, and you can get into a lot of trouble. After all, curiosity killed the cat.

But as my friend likes to say in response to that line, “But satisfaction brought it back.”

Six years after attending that talk by Gelb, I’m still finding inspiration from it. Imagine if I would have spent those two hours merely doing more crunch work. In satisfying my curiosity about what the presentation on creative thinking would be about, my life is better for it.

In Habitually Living on Purpose, I mentioned how I am focusing on habits this year in an attempt to live according to my Life on Purpose statement: My Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

Last time, I wrote about working on habits to help me work on the “powered by a healthy body” aspect of my purpose statement. Today, I’ll focus on the “continuous learning” part.

I once read that you should commit to learning at least one new thing each day. I decided to make it a real habit.

Now, each day we learn all sorts of trivia and minutia, and we live in a fascinating world where we could learn a hundred things a day about how an antenna works or how dogs evolved to recognize the gaze of humans while wolves haven’t or that animals can grieve.

But that seems too easy. I could just click links posted on Twitter all day, but I’m not really learning anything useful, am I? Not unless I become a TV repairman or an animal whisperer.

It didn’t quite work out for me.

These bits of trivia and data are cool, and they probably help me with being creative in ways I don’t see yet, but I’m more interested in learning something personally useful. Learning when chess was invented doesn’t count, but learning how to do the Alekhine’s Defense in a chess game would.

On February 29th, I started writing “Yesterday’s lesson” posts on my Google+ account. That first post was about human proportions, since I was getting back into doodling.

And somehow, without fail, I have posted a new lesson each day. Sometimes the lessons are based on my work learning JavaScript through the Codecademy. Sometimes the lessons come from books I’m reading. Sometimes they come from observations I’ve made during game development.

So it is safe to say that I’ve instilled this habit of posting what I have learned from the previous day. What’s interesting is that the habit isn’t directly related to learning. It’s merely reporting, which is less about learning and more about accountability. So shouldn’t I have a habit that gets me to specifically learn something new as well?

I thought I needed to do so at first. I would try to set aside an hour to learn JavaScript each day, for instance. I basically blocked out some learning time, but on days when I had to drastically change my schedule due to an emergency or one-off errands that were urgent, what then?

What I found was that as nice as the blocked off time was, I didn’t really need it as much. Because I know I’ll be writing a “Yesterday’s lesson” the next day, I find myself motivated to make an effort to find something to learn if I haven’t done so in the normal course of the day. There were a few days where I couldn’t easily remember what I had learned the previous day, but I made myself write a post anyway, which sometimes meant searching through my browser history to jog my memory. You could argue that I must not have really learned it, but there’s a difference between learning a lesson and being able to recall the learning. B-) Still, apparently the pain of sitting there unsure of what to post seems to have gotten me to subconsciously seek out specific things to write about for the next day.

If I need to do research for some work I’m doing, I realized that I already had something to report. For instance, I learned how to create custom star badge for an ad I was making for ISVCon. This past weekend I had my bachelor party, and I realized that I didn’t spend part of the day reading or working, yet I learned that Jameson and serrano peppers are not a fun combination for your mouth.

Sometimes I’d stay up a little later reading before going to sleep. Reporting what I learned the next morning then becomes a review, which helps me remember the salient points instead of mindlessly consuming content. Recently in lieu of watching old episodes of “Star Trek” on Netflix during lunch, I find myself listening to audiobooks such as The E-Myth Revisited, and I recently found a very similar lesson about how vital the right metrics are for a business between it and The Lean Startup.

So it is interesting that unlike exercising, in which the habit is directly related to the benefit, in this case, the habit I formed was indirectly encouraging me to continuously learn. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have anything to report, and even though no one else is really expecting me to do so, I would feel like I was letting someone down if I missed a day. Well, in reality, I would be letting myself down. I’m just being more public with my self-accountability.

There are ways I’d like to improve this habit. For now, it feels too haphazard, as if the learning isn’t focused enough. One day I learn something code-related, and the next I learn something about business, but there’s no connection between the two. If I really wanted to learn Italian, for instance, I’d dedicate time every day to it. I wouldn’t space it out over the course of a year.

Recently I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, and now I’m reading Hugh MacLeod’s Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity. When I’m finished with that book, I would like to follow it up with another book on creativity. Or a documentary on creativity. Or something related to the same subject until I feel I’ve sprinted enough with it before exploring a different subject.

In any case, I’m pleased with this habit so far. In pursuing continuous learning, I now feel like I more easily recognize the opportunity for a lesson when it appears. And who knows? Maybe I’ll finally figure out how to be a Cat Whisperer one day.

In Habitually Living on Purpose, I mentioned how I am focusing on habits this year in an attempt to live according to my Life on Purpose statement: My Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

Even though it is near the end of the statement, I’ll start with the “powered by a healthy body” part.

As a game developer, I find I sit at my computer a lot. In fact, most of my waking day is spent sitting in front of the computer. When I had a day job, I had the option of walking to work, or at least getting up to walk to lunch or go to a meeting. I once took a pedometer and found that in a given day, I easily maintained about 5,000 steps without trying too hard. I got a bicycle and used it to travel to and from work so I could get some extra exercise in.

When I went full-time indie back in the summer of 2010, however, I obviously had a much shorter commute to get to work. My office is about 20 seconds from my bedroom, and rush hour turns it into a 30 second commute, usually because there is a cat pile-up in the doorway. I didn’t have to go anywhere for meetings, and lunch was also half a minute away at most since the kitchen was nearby. One day late last year I decided to pull out the old pedometer to find out how many steps I took in an average day, and I was barely hitting 2,000. And I haven’t used my bicycle since I haven’t needed to.

Now, I knew I should change things. Even before the Internet blew up last year about how dangerous sitting is, I had read about the health problems you can get for being too sedentary. And yet, I never did anything sustainable to fix my situation. Joining a gym was too expensive for my indie budget, and I felt like any moment not spent working was wasted time. So I sat and worked.

Impact of an Unhealthy Body

I wrote about an experience I had with a pulled back muscle in The Perils of the Sedentary Indie. Shortly before I was scheduled to go to GDC in 2011, I was visiting family in Chicago. I have a niece, and while playing with her, I felt a small twinge in my back. At first, it was ignorable. I stretched my arms over my head, but in the end, it just got worse and worse until I couldn’t move my arms, legs, or head without feeling a lot of pain. My weekend family visit turned into a physically painful week-long bed-ridden stay. It hurt to sit for more than a few moments, so I stood, and when I couldn’t do that, all I could do was lie down. And that entire week, I wasn’t able to play with my niece as much as I wanted to. In fact, when I tried to stand up, I guess I looked so awkward and in so much pain that it frightened her to see me like that.

A couple of months later, I was going to help my fiancée’s sister move out of her college apartment after graduation, and my back started acting up again. Right when I’m supposed to help carry heavy things, I was the most useless. It wasn’t as bad as that week with my family, so I could still walk and carry some things, but I felt terrible that I couldn’t be more help.

I was also getting sick more frequently than I could recall. I would get one-day colds, fevers, and stuffy heads, the kinds of sickness that suck the motivation to work right out of you. When you’re working at a day job with benefits, they pay you to stay home and get better, but when you’re on your own, each day you don’t work is another day further from your goals.

My Body as the Vehicle for Everything Else in My LIfe

Now, I’ve read a lot about the benefits of keeping your body in shape. Besides avoiding injuries and sickness, being more physically capable, and looking great in jeans, exercise also helps your brain. You think more clearly. You’re more creative. You feel more positive, which helps with motivation. So why wasn’t I taking care of myself?

Frankly, your health just isn’t that urgent…until it is. When you’re bed-ridden due to an injury or a germ, you can’t help but realize that if you had taken the time to take better care of yourself, you wouldn’t be in this mess. I imagine that the same could be said for people who have suffered heart attacks or other major setbacks. For years, you feel “fine enough” until you suddenly feel horrible.

Still, knowing that you should take care of yourself when you’re capable of doing so isn’t enough. We’d all be exercising regularly and eating right if that were the case.

For me, what changed was when I sat down and came up with my Life on Purpose statement. There was a lot I wanted to be and do, but I needed my body to be healthy. After all, it’s the vehicle of my life. A broken down car without any gas in it isn’t going to get you to where you want to go very fast. I can be the most creative person in the world, but if I’m sick or unable to sit down at my desk without being in a world of pain, I couldn’t channel that creativity into game development.

Habits for the Body

I’ve been doing yoga three days a week, although I wasn’t always consistent. Still, since I started doing yoga, I’ve yet to pull my back muscles. Even when I could feel a pain in my hip (probably from sitting too long), a session of yoga helps tremendously.

Earlier this year, I decided that to start, I would walk every day. I found that a path near the cemetery is about a mile, so I walk two miles by the end of the return trip. In January, I took a walk a total of five days, which was not a great start. But in February I did 13 days. In March I did 15. Both are still a far cry from walking every day.

In April I did 19. I was surprised because I felt I was doing very well last month. I checked, and I found that the only days I missed in April were a few days at the beginning of the month and weekends. So while I wasn’t walking every day like I wanted, I was walking five days a week consistently before the end of the month. It was progress.

So far this month, I have missed one day of walking, which was last Saturday. Weekends require more discipline because weekends have a lot less structure than my regular weekdays do. It can be hard to plan a walk when I don’t know what is happening. My goal for May is to make sure I don’t miss any more days.

Ok, so my habit isn’t quite perfect. I’m not walking every single day like I said I was going to. But it is still my goal, and progress towards that goal is still beneficial. I have probably walked more in the last few months than I have in the year prior.

I’ve even taken up running. A friend told me about the Couch to 5k program, and while I don’t have a strong desire to run in a 5k, it did sound like a good plan to follow to get back into shape. Walking is nice and all, but running will get my heart beating faster and get me ready for the days I have to keep up with my nieces (they love to run around in circles).

I installed the RunKeeper app on my phone, programmed in the first couple of weeks of the plan, and off I went. It’s like having a digital coach telling you when to switch intervals, so now along with walking on Tuesday and Thursday, I run Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Since starting at the beginning of April, I haven’t missed a day of running yet.

So between yoga and regular walking and running, my body is healthier than it has been in a long time. I’ve lost a bit of weight, feel and look stronger, and no longer worry as much about getting hurt just from picking up my nieces or playing games with them.

Starting

Looking back, I’m glad I started these habits. At the beginning of the year, I was an amateur yoga practitioner. Today, I’m a walker and a runner, too. Today, I have months of progress behind me. When I started, I was struggling with a lot of issues, such as finances and work, as well as worrying about my health. I realized that no matter how good or bad things get, or how much I can’t control, I can dedicate time to those things that I can control.

And no matter what my goals are, no matter how my purpose might change, I was going to need my body. And I can control how much exercise I get. I can control what I allow myself to eat. I can control the time I spend on maintaining a body that will help me achieve my goals.

By creating regular exercise habits, I make it inevitable that I’ll have a body capable of powering the rest of my life on purpose.

Earlier this year, I realized I had once again forgotten to keep sight of my goals, and I finally did something about it.

Two years ago, after reading Life On Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life, I came up with a purpose statement:

My Life on Purpose is a joyful life of freedom, continuous learning, encouraged and supported creativity, insatiable curiosity, and prolific creation, driven by passion and a desire for excellence, powered by a healthy body and soul.

The statement was supposed to help me identify what I wanted in my life and in the lives of other people, as opposed to coasting through my life in what the book refers to as my “Inherited Life Purpose.”

Now, by itself, it’s just a statement. I printed it out and had it framed, and it sits on my wall across from me so I can see it daily. But even then, just seeing it daily isn’t useful. I have to actively remind myself of it, while avoiding the danger of it becoming a memorized yet meaningless statement.

So, two years ago, I knew what I had to do. I had goals without action plans previously, and in 2010, I actually made things happen. I quit my job to start my business full-time. I found a new place to live. I found my life starting to match the shape I defined in that statement.

The trick is that you need to be continuously active about it. I wasn’t. Since that initial year, I got so caught up in my new routine that I once again stopped paying attention to my Life on Purpose statement. Or at least I wasn’t as consistent about it. When things weren’t working out for me, I doubled down instead of addressing problems. For instance, when Stop That Hero! went from being a one-month project into a chronically late project, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I just kept working. Persistence is great, but I needed to pick my head up occasionally to get an idea of where I was, and I never did.

This wasn’t prolific creation. It wasn’t a joyful life of freedom. And there’s only so many times you can say, “Well, I learned an important lesson with this experience” before it is clear that you haven’t really learned or else you wouldn’t be in the same situation.

Revisiting the Purpose Statement

So at the beginning of this year, I reread “Life on Purpose” as part of my effort to get myself back on track. I also reread my journal that I’ve been writing in since 2009. I found that I still liked my current Life on Purpose statement, and I was pleased to see that as down as I felt, I hadn’t fallen backwards like I suspected. I had improved from the person I was two years ago. I have much to be thankful for, and I wasn’t being conscious of those blessings.

Still, I felt that there was this gap between where I was and where I wanted to be in my life. And for years, I’ve identified where I’ve wanted to be but failed to take steps to get there consistently.

Some things are relatively easy, such as quitting a job. Maybe that sounds surprising, but the actual act is quite final. You can’t be wishy-washy about it. You can’t maybe quit. You just quit. You no longer have a job. It’s done. There’s very little risk of unconsciously falling back into your old job. You don’t wake up one morning with the realization that you’re working your old job.

Other things, like keeping physically fit, require more. You have to want to by physically fit, you have to have the discipline to follow through with what will make you physically fit, and you have to instill habits that keep you there. And this is continuous work. The habit makes it almost automatic and relatively easy, but until then, it’s continuously reminding yourself that you want to be physically fit.

Purpose, Discipline, and Habit

We all have habits, but a lot of them are not guided by purpose or vision. Consciously creating the habits you want is key to making sure your life is on purpose and going where you want to go, shaped how you want it shaped, and yours.

Each day, if you get home from work and eat dinner while zoned out in front of the TV, then go to bed, that’s not a very purposeful habit. Your life is guided by the television producers. You’re watching actors and actresses do what they love to do instead of doing what you’d love to do.

Discipline is remembering what you want. And if you want to be fit, and you don’t have a habit of exercising yet, you need to remind yourself daily until it is a habit. That’s the trick. When you’re struggling, when you’re feeling exhausted, when you’re wondering, “Why am I doing this to myself?” because a workout session kicked your ass, you simply have to remember your purpose: “I’m doing this because I want to be physically fit.” And that reminder keeps you going.

If you stop reminding yourself, you’ll wake up one morning when it is cold and the blankets are warm, and you’ll lose the motivation to get out from under them. You’ll think, “Ah, I can skip the exercise today.” You’ll see some sweets and think, “Oh, I can indulge just this once.”

Once in a while isn’t a problem. But without that reminder to keep you focused on your goals, it won’t be just once in a while.

In the past, I was terrible about keeping my eye on the prize, about remembering what my vision was. I fell into the above trap of giving myself a break way too often until the break was the daily reality. When I had a day job, I struggled to do game development at home on a regular, consistent basis. I often said to myself, “I’ll work on it tomorrow.” But then tomorrow never came. And eventually, I didn’t have to say it anymore because I was not doing it much at all. It was an effort to put in the time I did, which wasn’t much.

The key, the one I know exists and have been historically terrible about leveraging to get what and where I want, is that triad of purpose, discipline, and habit.

I have my purpose.

I’ve shown I can be disciplined enough to carry things out.

But I’ve been pretty bad about installing habits into my life.

This year I’ve been focusing on creating habits, specifically the habits I want to have that I think would shape my life the way I desire. They coincide with my Life on Purpose, so they also remind me about what I want. I’ll write more about those specific habits another time, but so far, the results are pretty good for the habits I’ve pursued.