Challenge your behaviour

Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.

I was reading the paper today and apparently the latest fad sweeping across the world is the ‘365 day challenge’. The challenge is to do something radical to change your behaviour for the next year and ultimately improve your life.

Okay so this premise enticed me to read more (it doesn’t take much). There’s an Adelaide woman who is a self confessed shop-a-holic and is not buying any new clothes for 365 days and a guy who’s giving up alcohol for a year and is blogging his story here.

Last year there was a guy who ran a marathon every day for 365 days (that’s 15,000km across 7 countries – I’m tired just thinking about it) and the list goes on.

So then I googled the 365 day challenge and up came a mountain of sites dedicated to changing your life in a year. It’s really all about setting goals and being a better you after 365 days, much like my bucket list post only dressed up with a trendier name and with regular progress reports.

For some reason putting a number of days to it is what it’s all about – but then that’s how goals work though, they have to have a start date and an end date.

Here are some people that have been in the news recently who could perhaps follow the 365 day challenge to improve their lives:

Charlie Sheen – could challenge himself not to ‘Tweet’ every day for 365 days. The guy broke Twitter records this week by being the first person to gain as many followers as he did within a short time, all because his life is spiralling out of control. The man needs help not followers, yet he currently has in excess of 1.8 million followers.

Lissa – the mum who wrote derogatory and racist comments on the Bonds beautiful baby website about other people’s babies (appalled by this one) could perhaps challenge herself to post a positive comment a day instead.

Shane Warne – the Australian cricketer could challenge himself to not SMS lewd text messages to women who aren’t his current partner.

What saddens me is that these people are encouraged to continue their acts of extreme behaviour by the attention they receive in the media and because people on Facebook and Twitter sign up to follow this appalling behaviour.

We all stuff up and make mistakes, we're all human after all. Giving this behaviour credibility through the media is much the same as telling a baby no and then laughing at their behaviour at the same time. It's confusing and sends the wrong message.

I’m all for the 365 day challenge to improve behaviour – what do you think?