100 Day Challenge starts very soon!

by CartooningGenius | Sep 18, 2009 | 100 Day Challenge

Day 1: Carpe Diem—Seize the Day(Extract from last years 100 Day Challenge.) – Gary Ryan Blair
We all know that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and the same holds true for the 100 Day Challenge.

The goal choices you make today set the pace (fast) as well as the tone (playing to win), and the actions you take today determine both your direction and destiny.

To ensure a good start, you must take that bold first step, you must identify three achievable goals and you must pursue victory throughout the day. You must start the day fast and finish the day strong.

You must have the conviction that the purpose of setting a goal must be to achieve it, as there is no purer form of success, no more exact and exacting test of what you are capable of than to seize every opportunity, and achieve everything you set out to do.

In the movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams plays the new English teacher, John Keating. During his very first class session Keating demonstrates forcefully that he is not just there to convey academic information, but also to show what students can do with such knowledge in their everyday lives. The first class session is, indeed, not so much a

lesson in English literature, but a dramatic philosophical wake-up call:

The verbal form of the call is “Carpe Diem–seize the day!” Keating tells his students to take a look at Robert Herrick’s famous lines:

Gather the rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today,

To-morrow will be dying

“Why does the poet write these lines?” Keating asks, and he eventually answers himself with a flourish: “Because we are food for worms, lads. Because we’re only going to experience a limited number of springs, summers, and falls. One day, hard as it is to believe, each and every one of us is going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die!”

To drive home this point Keating makes the students look at the old photographs of former students that decorate the hallways. “They are not that different than any of you, are they? There’s hope in their eyes, just like in yours. They believe themselves destined for wonderful things, just like many of you. Well, where are those smiles now, boys? What of that hope?” The students are sobered by what Keating is saying. Keating continues:

Did most of them not wait until it was too late before making their lives into even one iota of what they were capable?

In chasing the almighty deity of success did they not squander their boyhood dreams? Most of those gentlemen are now fertilizing daffodils. However, if you get very close, boys, you can hear them whisper. Go ahead, lean in. Hear it?

(Whispering) Carpe Diem, lads. Seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary!

Keating’s teaching methods are unusual. He does not just tell students that it is important to keep an open, flexible mind, and to look at things from different and changing points of view. Rather, he makes them literally climb on top of

a desk and take a look around.

This unconventional and physical translation of the run-down expression “changing one’s point of view” has far more effect on his students’ dispositions than any amount of theoretical explanation.

Seize the Challenge

Seize the challenge by seizing the opportunities of each day. Begin by embracing three goals that gratify your passion and which beg for your attention. The ones that say come and get me.

My goal in creating the 100 Day Challenge was to provide you with a vehicle for having the best quarter of your life and to help make your life extraordinary. You succeed in living an extraordinary life by focusing seriously on those things—goals that make your life passionate and radiant!