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 0236


Train to Vienna. No panoramic scenes to watercolour, lots of austere, elegant buildings. Feeling of self-conscious grandeur. IKEA disposable apartment. Silverpoint selfie.

Day 0235


Same story as yesterday: walking around Prague, eating and drinking. Watercolour from photo.

Day 0234


Prague; walking, talking, food, drink. Easy to slip in to European city mode. Finished Black Box Thinking.

Intend to do hundreds of failed drawings and paintings, like today's. Learn through experience, get good through practice. Long road, probably a decade of work needed.

Day 0233


Worked efficiently, had driving lesson, enjoyed day in Cambridge.

Some notes from Black Box Thinking which I'm about to finish reading.

When we fail we learn. Do not insulate yourself from failure.

Break big problem down to small problems and make marginal gains.

Try, fail, learn. Avoid instinct to blame. When we engage with our errors we improve. Don't be threatened by mistakes.

Don't sabotage your progress by fear of messing up.

Growth mindset. Progress fastest when we face up to failure.

Day 0232


Started drawing as soon as I got up and worked to a schedule, which felt productive. Sadly the results are no good.

Did some work. Listened to Black Box Thinking.

Remember that there are still profound mysteries, not everything is as simple and deterministic as it jolly well seems. Remember that we don't know why or gow the universe exists, whether we are alone, what happens after death.

Day 0231


Seeing people as a sequence of inputs and outputs. Predictable products of environment, culture, upbringing. Flawed programs that are hard to rewrite. Immense importance of initial parameters that can determine entire lives. Strategies, psychological manipulations, nudges, that have measurable and reliable influences. There is a recipe for happiness, for success, but you need the right ingredients.

Finished Deep Work. Read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Both reinforce habits and insights I value. Hard work in a protected space over a prolonged time will yield results. Want to be more time-efficient with my art. Want to apply myself to improving my portaits. Worked during the day today and made art the focus of my energy, not the irksome chore to do before bed.

Day 0230


Sunny summer day in Suffolk, swallows and spitfire overhead. Distracted by bits and pieces of work. Read up on strategies for selling. Read essay by Orwell about the decline of English. Read some of Deep Work. Drew swlf portrait in pencil; haven't had the versatility, erasability of pencil for a long time and I'm enjoying it.

We are language. What can you think without words? Can you have an identity, a sense of self? If a society was conditioned to think as a group rather than as individuals, could the concept of 'I' be eradicated and replaced with 'We'? Or 'she' become the equivalent of 'me-she', expressing the oneness. interchangeability, interrelatedness of everyone?

Information is the only thing that accumulates, we are just instruments for creating and transmitting it. Convergence, optimisation. All possible thoughts will be thought.

Day 0229


The spectre of today's driving lesson loomed over all else and I consequently achieved very little. Filled time with a few strokes of work, cooking and undisciplined watercolour daubing, resulting in an atrocious mess.

Day 0228


Resent not devoting more time to art today. Need to start a big project rather than rush little things before collapsing at the end of the day.

Rambled around Bury St Edmunds. Booked trains between Prague, Vienna and Budapest.

Thought about humans not as individuals but as replaceable, interchangeable drones in a hive. How far is the concept of individuality just a received construct? Could you condition people to identify not in terms of themselves but in terms of the group? Abolish 'I' and only have 'we'.

Day 0227


Exceptionally early start today to get home from Paris in time for a driving lesson. Felt incredibly efficient and in good spirits, although tired. Enjoyed the sensation of time travel that I get when I doze off on trains and wake up in a new place.

Blundered away at a watercolour with the ignorance and gusto of the amateur artist. I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and really need to study the technique.
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