Why You Should Challenge Yourself? 💪

Vatsal Shah
4 min readMar 8, 2021

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I’m a big fan of Lax Fridman and watching his podcast for the last few months. If you don’t know about him: He’s an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT.

He invited Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Jason Calcanis, and other experts as researchers, scientists, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, engineers, mental health, and many more!

I found a common pattern as he talks many times about taking challenges weekly, monthly, and annually to improve, grow and challenge himself.

He’s part of a very famous challenge with David Goggins4x4x48 challenge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x02fjnpqiyA&ab_channel=LexFridman

It is so much inspiring in this time, and focus on improving and becoming the best version of yourself to empower your surroundings with positive vibes and energy.

  • Life is loaded with a lot of noise, drama, and chaos.
  • Even if you find a balance, the difficult part is being creative and engaging with some activities and commitment to improving yourself.
  • I crave to advance technically as one aspect, but mentally and physically is another. I found it tough as everything is mostly work-from-home nowadays.
  • Pandemic affects everyone’s life. We’re looking at a world with a different landscape as our day-to-day changed in many ways.
  • It was easier before as you can go to the gym on your schedule(But we used to find excuses, right! 🤷‍♂️) and have some motivation to see people around you in a workout room.

So, I need to take some actions to improve, grow and give some challenges to myself:

Here’s a screenshot of my LinkedIn Post and shared about the challenge from the 1st of March 2021, this month.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6772229643408867328/

A goal is to take different challenges every month, find my blind spots, and work on improving every day by only 1%.

Simple math is:

“Improve by 1% a day, and in just 70 days, you’re twice as good.” — Alan Weiss

So, what’re my challenges for this month?

  1. 1000 push-ups
  2. 1000 minutes of yoga
  3. Publish 4 blogs for a month

If you breakdown these challenges weekly to track and make them measurable; it is:

  1. At least 35 Pushups / Day → 35 * 30 = 1050 Pushups
  2. At least 35 minutes of Yoga (Same Math!)
  3. Easy to track as I have to publish every week! 😀

🎉 Week 1 Review 🎉

I want to take this moment to share my numbers of workout and updates on this week:

1. 1000 Pushups (Completed 250/1000) ✅

I recorded all my pushups videos on my phone for my own satisfaction and fun. I learned a lot and realized that I was making a huge mistake on the position while doing pushups, so I found and watched the video on YouTube.

If you’re doing pushups and not sure about positioning, I would recommend watching for few minutes and improve your body language for pushups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IODxDxX7oi4&ab_channel=Calisthenicmovement

2. 1000 minutes of Yoga (Completed 235/1000 min) ✅

I use FitOn App for my daily exercise or yoga, and it has fantastic trainers and an awesome list of videos On-Demand. My favorites are HIIT, Stretch, Kickboxing, and Yoga!

https://app.fitonapp.com/browse

Moreover, the greatest part of this application is that they have different target area groups, time duration, and intensity so that you can choose and focus on each target area as per your schedule and availability.

https://app.fitonapp.com/browse

I completed in total 59 workouts so far, but as you can see, this week’s progress and knocked every day. (March 1st — 7th) 💪

FitOn Profile and Activity Tracker

3. Publish 4 Blog / Month ✅

This is part of a first-week blog series, and I tried to provide more quality content with all the resources I use, why, and how every day!

A challenge is neither physical nor mental; it’s with our mind, so if you can manage and control your mind to achieve your challenges, that will change everything.

I will check in every week on my progress if I am on track or not. If you want to join me, send me a message, and we’ll set up something to share our progress and do more moving forward!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EF-tX20uqU&list=PLEHFlUrcF6066Xod0iK339DMmWCsrIhji&ab_channel=VatsalShah

Author

Vatsal Shah

PORTFOLIO | GITHUB | BLOG

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Vatsal Shah
Vatsal Shah

Written by Vatsal Shah

Intrapreneur, Machine Learning | AI | Software Engineer | IoT | Voice Applications