One Day, One Goal. No Distractions, No Excuses.

What's a Big Day?

To knock off anything ambitious you generally need two things: unbroken time and sustained focus. But nobody has the first, and we’ve lost the muscle for the second. The solution – one solution, my solution – is Big Days. I’m suggesting you carve out one 24-hour block of time per month and devote it to a single task. When you clock back into your life the next day you’ll have put something significant in the books – be it soul work or work work. And no one will even know you’ve been gone.

One Big Days

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One Big Day Journal

Do you want to experience your life, or remember it?

[greg rakozy photo] Here’s a conundrum that has emerged for me: Big Days that are fun to do — or useful to do—are not always interesting to write about. Imagine you’ve been working your butt off day and night: a Big Sleep Day to follow? Righteous! But nobody wants to hear about it. Makes me…

Couldn’t be stupider … that’s why it’s so smart

One Friday not long ago, it occurred to James Altucher that he ought to buy Greenland. To keep it safe. Because “the most northern country on the planet could be the most important for our survival.” James didn’t have the cash on hand, so he decided to crowdsource the purchase. He went to the bank…

The one night that cracked open a hundred years of solitude

(photo El Colombio; Marquez (c) and Rulfo (r)) In a recent issue of the New York Times Book Review, the writer and literature professor Valeria Luiselli served up a rapturous essay in praise of the great neglected Mexican novel Pedro Páramo, by the great neglected Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo. She opens with a shot of…

A day in your future life

(Photo: Patricia Prudente / Unsplash) Debbie Millman, a graphic artist and former head of AIGA, has an exercise she assigns her students at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She learned it from her mentor, Milton Glaser. It goes like this: Describe a day in your life 10 years from now. One whole…

The all-nighter that changed global geopolitics

It’s an exaggeration to say Jeffrey Sachs sparked the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, ushering in the end of the Cold War, in a single day. But maybe not as much as you’d think. Sachs, a developmental economist, was reminiscing recently with an interviewer about how it all went down in summer of 1989.…