When a habit becomes a quest

Over the last few days I have been reading the wonderful book by Chris Guillebeau called “The Happiness of Pursuit”. Yes, it’s a fantastic title for a book, and the contents live up to the title. Chris set out on a quest to visit all 193 countries in the world before his 35th birthday. Although actually that’s not quite accurate – it didn’t start that way. The quest he ended up on developed over time. And that is the theme for these thoughts.

If Chris had written about his own personal quest that would have been an interesting book. But what makes this a much more absorbing book is the research he did to identify a whole cast of people and describe their quests. They very from impressive, to emotionally engaging, to the downright bizarre. In each case they stretched the person such that they were different in so many ways for doing the quest.

This is the sort of book that inspires us to think about a quest ourselves. There are plenty of ideas to get us started.

Whether it’s running, taking photos, visiting countries, walking, being in silence, making charitable actions – whatever the quest, in so many cases that he describes, it all started on a relatively small scale and then, depending on your perspective it either “scaled up” or “got out of hand”!

So, I finished the book early this morning (you can tell it’s a fantastic book when you avoid finishing it just 10 pages from the finish, because you don’t want it to end). Now I have turned my thoughts to building a quest for myself. And that’s when it occurred to me. All the work I have done in recent years which has been aimed at building new habits or setting small challenges for myself – any of this could develop into a quest.

Some of these challenges were:

1. Exercise every day for a month
2. Write a journal entry every day for 30 days
3. Produce and record a piece of music every day for 30 days
4. Write a whole booklet of poems in a day – 15 poems in total (see ‘November Suite’)
5. Meditate for at least 5 minutes every morning
6. Read at least 5 books a month for 3 months (I’m in the middle of this one)

There are loads more of these kinds of challenges. The question is – how do I choose one of these and scale it up into a quest?

Examples in the book include Thomas Hawk who is aiming to take and publish 1,000,000 photos, or the Vogel family’s quest to cycle from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, or John Francis who walked in silence for 17 years, or Sasha Martin‘s quest to cook a meal from every country in the world, or Phoebe Snetsinger‘s quest to have seen the most species of birds of any woman on the planet. The list goes on.

It’s all deeply inspiring, and I have some thinking, planning and getting started to do!