Part 8 (1/2)

The Personal Annual Reports of Nicholas Felton Every year since 2004, a New York City designer named Nicholas Felton has chronicled his life in a series of personal annual reports. The reports are extremely extensive and include a number of statistics on his activities over the past year. Felton captures the data through a series of check-ins he uploads from his phone at random intervals every day. The number of data points is amazing: He captures everything he eats and drinks, his precise location at all times, daily sleep hours, and countless other facts.

This project is more about recording than influencing behavior. As Nicholas explained, when he started compiling the information each year, he felt inspired to ”say yes” to activities he might normally decline. The reports are highly regimented in their display of data, but Nicholas doesn't believe this causes him to do the same thing all the time. In fact, it's the opposite: ”I think the reports have made me much more aware of my routines and grateful when I can break from them,” he said.

Learn more at Feltron.com.

Regardless of how it begins, a quest provides a focal point. Once you have a task to pursue, you have a new way of looking at the world, a new point of ident.i.ty. Phoebe Snetsinger, the record-setting birder, traveled to dozens of countries. But she went to the ends of the earth not for the sake of traipsing through war zones and jungles; she went where the birds were. As she put it, the quest gave her ”a purpose in my meanderings.”

The Twenty-Year Life List

In 1994, sixteen-year-old Kristen Goldberg made her first and only life list. This was years before The Bucket List had hit theaters, and Kristen didn't know anyone else who was making a list. It just seemed like a fun project.

Twenty years later, Kristen is still following the same list-no modifications permitted, even though some items might not be as important to a thirty-six-year-old woman as they were to a sixteen-year-old teenager.

The original list included twenty-three life experiences, and every year she picks two or three to work on. Some were clearly written by a teenager (”Visit a nude beach” appears on the list, an item to which Kristen now says ”Thanks a lot, sixteen-year-old self”) but others have remained lifelong aspirations. Items on her list include: * Learn j.a.panese * Take a course in self-defense * Visit Salzburg * Win big in Las Vegas * Go to a drive-in movie theater * Plant a tree on my wedding day Even though the list didn't tell Kristen exactly what to do or how to live, it has had considerable impact on her life. As part of the original project, Kristen hoped to visit all fifty states. When I talked with her she'd been to thirty-three. Her husband picked the spot where he proposed based on how it would help her cross an item off the list.

Even as she works as a teacher, Kristen relies on the list as a guidepost. Every year she teaches a freshman seminar for her fifteen-year-old students. At the end of the cla.s.s she shows the Bucket List film, shares her story about the list she made as a teenager, and invites students to create lists of their own. Item by item, year after year, she continues to complete the original list from two decades ago.

The Yearlong Quest

A. J. Jacobs popularized an entire genre of modern-day short-term-quest literature. After his book on reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, The Know-It-All, became a bestseller, he found a pattern he could replicate for other projects. Another book, The Year of Living Biblically, was also a huge hit.

Since A.J.'s popularization of the short-term quest, a countless number of followers have trod the same path, and many have chronicled their explorations in books or movies. A very partial list includes: * Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. Julie Powell sets out to make 524 recipes in a year-every recipe from Julia Child's cla.s.sic French cookbook.

* A Simple Act of Grat.i.tude: How Learning to Say Thank You Changed My Life. Lawyer John Kralik is on the down-and-out, struggling with divorce and a failing career. Over the next year he practices grat.i.tude by writing 365 detailed thank-you notes to people he encounters.

* Dream On: One Hack Golfer's Challenge to Break Par in a Year. John Richardson has a full-time job and a family, but does everything he can to improve his golf game over the course of a year. Will he make it? Spoiler: He does. But as with any good memoir, the joy is in the struggle and the lessons.

* Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. Judith Levine and her partner, Paul, spend a year without purchasing anything except that which is completely necessary for living. Along the way they learn various lessons and question society.

* Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk. Robyn Okrant, a ”thirty-five-year-old average American woman,” devotes a year to following all of Oprah Winfrey's advice. What happens when the advice conflicts? You'll just have to read the book.

Are these kinds of pursuits really quests? Perhaps it depends on your motivation. If you pursue the project primarily for your personal development or curiosity, it's a quest. If your primary goal is to write a book, produce a doc.u.mentary, or otherwise publicize your quest, maybe it's more of a career move. There's nothing wrong with doing something for your career-but it's not really a quest, since a quest requires sacrifice and uncertainty.

Fifty Dates in Fifty States

Alicia Ostarello had recently seen a promising relations.h.i.+p come to an unexpected end, and was once again looking for love. Frustrated with online dating in San Francisco, where everyone she met seemed similar, she thought about exploring her horizons. At the same time, she was unhappy with her job writing copy twelve hours a day for a startup. The time for change was ripe, and she hoped to combine travel with an experiment in relations.h.i.+ps.

Alicia would hit the road and visit all fifty states, having one date per state and journaling about the experience. She would see the country and meet new people. ”Not to generalize too much,” she said, ”But I was fairly certain that farmers in North Dakota would be different from tech guys in the Bay Area.”

It was the perfect short-term quest, with a clear goal and end point and the chance for plenty of self-discovery and spontaneity along the way. The project turned into a doc.u.mentary, with a young filmmaker traveling along with her.

Initial progress took longer than expected. ”I was ready to hit the road right away,” Alicia told me, ”but getting things in order for the doc.u.mentary and travel plans required that we reset our initial calendar.” They finally agreed to travel throughout the lower forty-eight states in a Honda Fit, then fly to Alaska and Hawaii to complete the journey.

Surveying the romantic possibilities of fifty states wasn't a lifelong quest, but it was meaningful and interesting. On the road Alicia and her filmmaker companion dutifully met guys from Alabama to Wyoming and every state in between. Every day one of them would post a blog entry about the events of the day and what they had observed.

Level Up Your Life

Steve Kamb is a real-life Clark Kent turned Superman. Growing up in Atlanta, he earned a degree in economics and was headed for what he described as ”a normal, boring life.” Nothing was wrong with that life, he says now, but it just wasn't interesting.

Until a couple of years ago, Steve had never been outside of North America. He ate the same food every day and was uncomfortable in social situations. Emerging from a phone booth one day-or at least rolling out of bed at the crack of nine a.m.-Steve set out to make a series of real changes. Having grown up glued to the TV and computer screen, he modeled his quest on a video game. Here's how Steve explains it: I'm on an Epic Quest of Awesome to level up my life in all aspects: travel, personal health, wealth, language learning, and more. The entire quest is structured like a giant video game in which I'm the character. I earn ”experience points” every time I cross an item off my list, whenever I complete five items I ”level up” (I'm currently up to Level 10!), each continent is a different ”level,” and there are ”master quests” that are more difficult than the others.

The first items on Steve's list were easy. He had to get off the couch and get in shape, beginning a new lifestyle of living actively and looking past the potato chips at the grocery store. As he gained confidence and experience points, the tasks become harder-but also more fun.

One of the tasks was ”Complete a James Bond weekend.” To accomplish it, Steve used hotel points to check into a luxury casino resort in Monte Carlo. He changed out of his usual outfit of T-s.h.i.+rt and flip-flops, rented a tuxedo that required the purchase of fancy dress shoes, and strolled into the casino. Not used to the life of the ultrarich in the French Riviera, he wasn't sure what to do next-but he knew that projecting confidence was an important part of being James Bond. He walked over to the blackjack table, slapped down $200, and said ”Deal me in.”1 The structure of Steve's ”game” made it fun and rewarding. ”By a.s.signing point values and structuring the whole list like a game,” he told me, ”it tapped into that part of my brain that loved to level up in video games. But instead of playing a game, it got me addicted to crossing more things off the list and always working toward the next quest.”

Steve's quest has inspired a legion of followers, who post their own goals and progress on the forums of NerdFitness.com, a website he started after pursuing the quest on his own. As his exploits became popular, Steve began to receive offers for support from all over the world. The offers were great, but they also presented a dilemma: His goal wasn't to freeload. He'd started the quest as a DIY project, and it was important to prove that he could do it on his own. If he had sponsors, he suspected it wouldn't feel as personal.

One day he realized that there were important distinctions among the offers that were coming in. He didn't want to be funded by Nike or travel the world with an obligation to write favorable articles about companies that were paying his way. At the same time, offers to stay with readers seemed more meaningful.

Once he thought about it in those terms, it was easy to split the difference. When a reader offered him a couch in Singapore, he gladly accepted. When a tourism department offered a ten-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Jordan, he politely declined.

The quest has continued to the point where Steve strives to achieve higher and higher goals. He learned Portuguese and attended the carnival festival in Brazil. He piloted a stunt plane and went on an African safari. At the top of the list: ”Purchase a small island.” It's a big goal, but Steve's level-up structure keeps him motivated and on track.

Your First (or Tenth) Life List

What if we could come to the end of our lives and, looking back on our rich history of experiences, relations.h.i.+ps, and accomplishments, feel truly fulfilled? Either metaphorically or literally, what if we could point to a list of steadily pursued dreams that had turned into accomplished goals?