1000 days project

"We are what we repeatedly do"

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926)

The 1000 day project is my attempt to steer myself consciously towards the things that are most important to me.

Every day for 1000 days I will work towards my goals in a structured way. I will be posting daily updates on this website.

The 1000 day project runs from 26th December 2015 to the 21st September 2018, which is my 30th birthday.

In the past I have successfully completed two 100 day projects (100 portraits in 2010 and 100 blogs in 2011). In 2012 I spent 1000 hours drawing and painting.

Day 0286


Crazy with boredom and inertia, broke it with social interaction, meal out and jazz night. Brief half-hearted scrawl.

Day 0285


More nightmares, felt low-spirited and didnt get out of bed until midday. Driving lesson, walk. No independence, human contact, girls, wearing me down. Booked hotel in London at weekend to reclaim an iota of dignity and not have to sleep on someone's sofa.

Gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all.
Daniel Gilbert - Stumbling on Happiness

Day 0284


Really struggled with myself today, spiraling anxiety and low self esteem. Applied to a bunch of jobs.

Day 0283


Seems my anxiety and stress moved from my consciousness to my unconscious mind; woke up from a nightmare, where I let people down and where I was running from my past.

Difficult day.

Day 0282


Gradually feeling the benefits of consciously moulding the way I think and act. Getting enough activity, deliberately taking myself out for a long walk, eating well, restricting the hours I work. Learned a little about mindfulness today, which seems to be a structured, tested extension of what I have been slowly exploring on my own. Very interesting.

Enjoy the cycle of interests and thoughts, suggesting a robust core of my personality that surfaces again and again over the years.

Want to read up about the empirical studies of happiness and codify the action points into a daily, weekly schedule, and maybe build some technology to make it easy to stick to.

Practice makes permanent; no good to practice doing the wrong thing. Fear this is happening with my art; not measuring or sketching in the whole, repeatedly, and suffering the consequences.

Day 0281


Exalted in a lie-in with warm bed and cold room, listened to an album. Many thoughts about a potential business idea, too little time. Beautiful, quiet walk on my own; peaceful and contemplative.

Rowan berries, rosehips, hawthorn berries, a sea of red against the blue sky.

Day 0280


Lovely day in London with friends from university, all impressive, happy people whom I realise now I admire much more than I ever admitted to myself. Very easy to take richly and diversely talented people for granted when surrounded by them all the time; now I spend most of the time on my own it is a tonic to see them again. Also I find it very easy to unconsciously minimize other people's successes and talents when they're not consonant with my own, protecting myself from feeling inferior by not caring about the things they're good at. Occasionally I have the clarity to see beyond my own ego and see people in their best light, which is often dazzling.

Day 0279


Beautiful walk in the sun, huge massed clouds, ploughed fields, red and black berries in the hedgerows. Still the agony of dog walkers, familiar cars and house windows shattering my illusion of isolation.

I never stick to my conclusions, and waste significant amounts of time going over the same problems multiple times. I have categorically decided several times before that I need a good job and stacks of cash, but I still haven't done anything about it and keep arriving afresh at the idea, then backing away from it. It's because I know the reality will involve arduous and difficult work, and I'm fundamentally lazy, short-sighted and comfortable.

Day 0278


Days are too short for all of the undirected cogitation I feel is bubbling away in me.

Walk with Jess, fields full of tractors, digging ditches, harrowing, sowing.

Day 0277


Mock driving test showed me how much work I have left before I'll be able to drive on my own. It's slow, difficult and frustrating, and I hate being bad at it. Feeling like I'm letting my instructor down.

Walked from Clare to Cavendish, discussed the benefits of understanding the building blocks that make up everyone's personalities. Accepting that people are fundamentally different and need to be dealt with differently to be most effective. Like everything I'm understanding lately it is nothing more than common sense, but I'm finally beginning to understand that it might have utility and relevance in my own life.

That said, I heartily agree with Montaigne's analysis of the ultimate futility of learning, in that all it can ever do is confirm our profound ignorance.

Finally, should I examine whether it be in the power of man to find out that which he seeks and if that quest, wherein he has busied himself so many ages, has enriched him with any new force, or any solid truth; I believe he will confess, if he speaks from his conscience, that all he has got by so long inquiry is only to have learned to know his own weakness. We have only by a long study confirmed and verified the natural ignorance we were in before. The same has fallen out to men truly wise, which befalls the ears of corn; they shoot and raise their heads high and pert, whilst empty; but when full and swelled with grain in maturity, begin to flag and droop. So men, having tried and sounded all things, and having found in that mass of knowledge, and provision of so many various things, nothing solid and firm, and nothing but vanity, have quitted their presumption, and acknowledged their natural condition. Michel de Montaigne
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