I had forgotten how much I loved the Art of Manliness blog until I visited it for the first time in several months on Monday. While there, I discovered I had just missed the "30 Days to a Better Man" project, which ran through the month of June. But after reading the first challenge, I reached the last paragraph and read the following:
Remember, these posts aren’t for passive entertainment! The 30 Days to a Better Man Project is about action! You have 24 hours to complete this task.
I knew I had to do it. Not just the first task, but the whole project. And since I'm more than a month late on it, I've decided the accountability group on the AoM forum probably won't do much to motivate me. Instead, I'm going to post my progress here. I read the Day 1 post at 6:00 pm, so every day by that time I need to have my assignment completed, though I'll grant myself four hours after that to post about it. This means that I want you, whoever you may be, to ask me what's up if you wake up one morning this month and I haven't reported progress the night before. E-mail me, text me, call me, or talk to me if you see me. But make sure I'm keeping up, all right? Even better, you can check in here and see just what it was that I was supposed to do.
Ok. Now here's my first report: I missed my first deadline. And my second one. I received a last-minute invitation to Springfield on Monday night and didn't get back until today at noon. I vaguely considered simply pushing back the whole thing by one day, but I knew that wouldn't cut it. I would just have to catch up.
Day 1
And catch up I did. This afternoon I locked myself in a closet with my little red Google Open Source Office moleskin notebook until I had completed the first task: Define Your Core Values. I came up with the following list, in order of importance:
Integrity
Close Relationships
Self-Improvement
Trying New Things
While I was listing them, I tried to decide which of my potential values were ones I actually found important and which were ones I just thought should be important. I think I arrived at an accurate result, but I'll be thinking about it a lot this month and reserve the right to make changes if it seems correct to do so.
Day 2
I finished the first assignment shortly before my parents came home from work, and decided to wait for my dad before tackling the second one: Shine Your Shoes. After retrieving his shoe-shining kit, I sat down to work on my two pairs of dress shoes, asking questions about some of the instructions I had read on the blog.
As I was working, I felt like the experience was exactly what Brett McKay was hoping for. First, my dad's kit is little more than a few cans of Kiwi and old rags, but it is exactly was was prescribed on the blog. Second, as I was putting on the polish, my dad told me how when he was growing up, people used to polish their shoes every week before they went to church, and that his family would all polish their shoes the day before they went to town. He went on to comment that it seemed most people don't shine their shoes at all any more. It's true. I never had until today. It's just this kind of generational difference that is frequently pointed out in AoM, and this kind of interaction that it encourages. While things like shining your shoes or shaving with a single-blade razor may seem somewhat unimportant or even antiquated, looking to past generations of men as examples certainly is not, and is one of the reasons I like this blog so much.
Today's song: Have You Got it in You? by Imogen Heap
The note about lyrics at the beginning of the video is only true of the YouTube page.
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