#1. I can do anything if I make it a game.

Today I turn 49.

What should I do with this year? I’ve been thinking about it for the past few weeks, but I couldn’t come up with anything that I wanted to do 49 of, or wanted to do 49 times. Then I remembered one of the questions from Your Money or Your Life, which I read earlier in the year: If you only had a year to live, what would you do with your time?

My immediate answer, after “hang out with elephants,” was that I would write down everything I’ve learned because maybe it will be useful to someone, somewhere. Then, my time will have been valuable.

Now, I’m in no way trying to rush away my time in this earthly realm, but the quick certainty of the answer has stayed with me and I wondered: what if while I’m 49 I write out 49 things I’ve learned? That would be about one post a week, with time off for vacations and such.

I started making a list.

Then I upped my own ante, which sounds kind of gross but I’m not editing that out. I made a kind of dare to myself: What if I wrote out 49 learnings in 49 days?

If today is my personal New Years Day, maybe this idea of writing out 49 things in 49 days will reset the clock on this year. 2024 mostly has been a gnarly year so far, a kind of ill-at-ease, wheel-spinning time. A lot of things have gotten in the way. Some of those things are me.

So, will I actually do it? Probably, because I can do just about anything if I make it a game or a challenge with rules and steps. That’s how I wrote 90+ haikus, trained for and ran a race, wrote a portfolio to get into grad school, later wrote a masters thesis, decluttered and/or moved more times than I can count, developed a meditation practice, and and and. Pretty much anything meaningful, big, or difficult. I did all those things a few minutes and one turn at a time, with star stickers on the calendar, check marks on a spreadsheet, etc.

One thing I’ve learned in 49 years is that I can do just about anything if I make it a game or a challenge.

So, game on, then.

Hi! It’s Lauren From the Future. Spoiler alert: I did it, I wrote 49 short essays in 49 days. For anyone interested in process, all of the “49” posts that follow were written and edited the day they were posted. That means no perfectionistic re-editing after the fact, even on the early posts where I hadn’t quite figured out how to write like myself now. The process is part of the story; these posts exist as they are, as an experiment and snapshot over 49 days of year 49.