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When you’re a practitioner of Every Single Day, the “how” no longer matters. 

When you’re a practitioner of Every Single Day, the “how” no longer matters. 
This entry is part 16 of 36 in the series Every Single Day

To experience the highest levels of meditation, it doesn’t matter what chair you’re sitting in.

It’s OK if the chair isn’t your favorite, if your headphones only work through one ear, and you only have half an hour before you have to wake up the kids.

When you're a practitioner of Every Single Day, the "how" no longer matters. 

ESD for Biology

To learn biology, you don’t need to sit at the table and take notes with a pen and paper. It’s perfectly acceptable–even enviable–to walk through the woods and learn the chart of arthropods while watching your dog search for frogs.

To get better as basketball, the rim doesn’t need a net, the ball can have a bulge in it, and you can wear your flip-flops.

This is part of the series on Every Single Day. Ideas being built here form the chapters of the book Every Single Day (October 17, 2017).

When you practice Every Single Day, “how it’s done” no longer matters. It only matters that you’re doing the work.

Let me be the first to say that this does not mean that “going through the motions” is the same as “giving it all you’ve got.” There’s a scale, a spectrum, and, usually, the only person who is going to know if you’re “cheating” is you.

On the other hand, after you become a gold-star rated ESDer, you have to give less and less effort to get to that same level of performance. Through your daily practice, be it in meditation, basketball, or biology, your brain has a grasp on the basics and you don’t need to learn those every time. You advance as you go along and have to do less and less work to get to higher and higher levels.

Study Biology While Walking in the Woods

My son is 13. Enough said about the harsh laboratory testing conditions.

He thinks that studying means that we have to sit at his desk and “work hard.” Good boy! But after a certain amount of time, you’re allowed (encouraged even) to change the scenery, to rock the boat, the stir things up.

After you build a foundation for your practice, it actually helps to change things up. Your brain knows that you’re going to be studying biology and can handle the change. In fact, it becomes so good at learning that you no longer have to try so hard. You can walk at the same time, throw a stick to the dog and still remember that an example of an arachnid is a spider.

If we take something like meditation or writing, it’s extremely fun to make sure that Everything is Perfect before you begin. But let’s be honest here: we’re really just looking for excuses to get started. “Oh, I don’t have the right pencil to take notes for my book. Can’t start! Oh well!” You know–and only you know–when you’re making excuses and when you’re ready to go.

The scene, the surroundings, the atmosphere matter less and less as you practice the Every Single Day method. It’s about doing the work, about getting to the basics of what you’re striving towards and everything else will fall away.

  1. Learn biology for your exam.
  2. Meditate to a higher level.
  3. Improve your basketball shot.

Force things for a while until they become habit. Once it kicks in (and you’ll just know), then you play with the variables. But get first to the core, get it down pat. Oh, and do it Every Single Day.

Series Navigation<< When you hear about how a person changed her life, it changes your life.Sneak Peak: Every Single Day Table of Contents >>

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  1. Every Single Day. You can’t just get rid of a habit, you need to replace it with something new. - […] When you’re a practitioner of Every Single Day, the “how” no longer matters. […]

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