The Motivation Project

Pardon me while I write three paragraphs that are seemingly unrelated and then attempt to tie them together at the end.

Those of you who have followed my Listening Project from the beginning know that I have a lot of CDs.  And by a lot of CDs, I mean almost 1200.  I had a friend ask me the other day how much space my collection took up.  The answer is, “Less than you would think.”

First of all, I am sorry for the poor quality of the photo.  This was taken with the daughter’s iPod Touch and I fear the lens was in need of a cleaning.  In my defense, without my reading glasses on, the photo looked OK to me on the iPod Touch’s small screen.  Anyway, each stack has 50 CDs in it (save for one stack).  When I buy a CD, I almost always take out the liner notes and CD and toss the case in the trash.  This saves a ton of space as you can imagine.  I had about 1/2 of my collection in carrying cases that I had picked up from here or there and the other half just sat stacked on a shelf in my bedroom closet or in boxes on the floor.  For this photo I have obviously removed the half of the collection from the carrying cases.  I now have all 1200 CDs on my bedroom shelf save for the few that the son keeps in the wife’s van for when they are out and about.  I will remind you that as I wrote the 46 blogs that comprise the Listening Project, I noted in a column if I would ever listen to a CD again or not.  The “No’s” were 60 in number.  So, one of those stacks in the above picture could represent the CDs in my collection that I will never listen to again.

We just finished a challenge at work.  I think it was called the Wellness Challenge.  They have this every year.  Basically you sign up and join a team (even if it is just a team of 1, which I did do one year).  You then decide how you want to challenge yourself.  You are given the option of counting your steps (you are give a pedometer if you choose this option), keeping track of your weight (as in trying to lose weight) or keeping track of the number of minutes you exercise each day.  You can do just one or any combination you like.  When the challenge starts, you log in each day and record your steps, weight and / or minutes exercised.  If you do this for the entire challenge (somewhere between 8 and 12 weeks depending on the year) then you earn a reward.  In years past the reward was a gift certificate of your choosing.  I think the first year was $25 and the next few years were $50.  I always participated and completed the challenge and then chose an Amazon.com gift certificate and then gave that to my pastor in Kokomo (even after I relocated to Texas).  At the end of the challenge we were sent an email to redeem our reward.  This year however an Amazon.com gift card was not an option and of the gift cards that were listed, none really interested me and in the end I just deleted the email.  This year I was able to get motivated to lose 15 lbs. in 8 weeks.  I liken it to when I got down to 180 lbs. a few summers ago and blogged about it each week.  There was something about recording my results so that others could see them that motivated me.  When I started the challenge for this year at work I weighed in at 215 lbs. and (doing the math) I ended at 200 lbs.  It has been a few weeks since then and I was back up to 206 when I weighed myself this morning.  I still want to get back to 180 and I just need some motivation.

One of my favorite authors is A. J. Jacobs.  I highly recommend his books and I feel a kindred spirit with him as he uses his life as a giant experiment (bringing his wife, and now sons along with him for the ride).  A few examples of my life experiments are the aforementioned Listening Project and also when I Outsourced My Body to my wife for (3) months.  His latest book is about health and in it he tries just about every credible health fad that is out there.  There was one small section in the book that really hit home with me and that was the 2 week timeframe where he tried to give up sugar entirely (even sugar that appeared naturally in food).  He had purchased a dehydrator previously in the book and was addicted to the dried fruit he had made.  He tried hiding the fruit to avoid temptation but that did not work.  He then tried a few other things to get him to avoid the dried fruit but none of them worked either.  Then he remembered a trick that he had read in a book on motivation.  He had to find something unpleasant to associate with giving into temptation.  He got his wife to take out their checkbook and write a $1,000 check to the American Nazi Party (he is Jewish by birth), sign it and put it in a stamped and addressed envelope and gave her strict instructions to mail the check should he eat one more piece of the sugary, dried fruit in the next (2) weeks.  This was just the motivation that he needed in order to avoid the temptation to eat the dried fruit.  When he looked at the dried fruit, he did not see a delicious snack, he saw it as a means for promoting Nazism.

OK, so there are my three, unrelated paragraphs and here is where I tie them all together (I hope).  First let me summarize here…

1. I have a lot of CDs and 60 of them I will never listen to again.  The other 1100 or so are CDs that I would like to listen to again.
2. I have gained 26 lbs. compared to 4 summers ago and would like to get back down to 180 lbs.
3. I will only accomplish this via some motivating factor that is painful enough to keep me on the straight and narrow.

So, here is my (random) thought on how to lose weight.  Starting tomorrow, for every day that I weigh in and am over 180 lbs. I will throw away 1 CD.

Here are the basic ground rules…

• I will weigh myself each morning in the same manner that I did 4 summers ago, namely right when I get up each morning.
• I will record my weight in a spreadsheet (you had to know there would be a spreadsheet or two in the challenge and I still have my template from 4 summers ago).
• If I weigh more than 180 lbs., I will select a CD to throw away.  I will do this every day until I weigh in at 180 lbs. (or lower) or until I run out of CDs.  In case you are interested, 1,188 (the number of CDs that I have) days from tomorrow is 11/19/2016.  So this project will have an end date.
• I will not allow myself to buy any more CDs (or digital music) until I have reached 180 lbs. (this might be more painful than throwing away CDs).
• For the first (60) days of the challenge, I will pick one of the CDs in my “would not listen to again” list.
• On day 61, I will have to pick CDs that I had listed as a CD that I would listen to again.
• On day 91, I will let my wife begin picking the CDs (I fear Megadeth and Klank will be the first to go).
• Rather than dig through my pile of CDs on the closet shelf each day, I will just delete the mp3 files from my main computer and at the end of this project I will dig through the pile of CDs on the shelf and throw away the ones that I indicated that I would throw away (or on 11/19/2016 I will throw them all out, should it come to this however I might sell a lot of them on ebay as some are quite rare).
• I will blog once a week with the weigh in results and the names of the CDs that were deleted.

So anyway, I just finished a coke (probably my last for a while) and am ready to begin this challenge tomorrow.  I will keep you posted.

Jon