1. Most personal development coaches recommend the 21-day rule, as originally suggested by Maxwell Maltz. Do an activity for 21 days straight and it becomes an easily-adopted habit.

2. Steve Pavlina has always recommended 30 days. He’s done it for everything, from trying out vegetarianism to sleeping like Frank Sinatra.

3. Gleb Reys from Personal Development Tips suggested giving the activity a name that means something to you to help personalize it and give it more weight for transitioning into a habit.

4. Various authors recommend visualizing and NLP work. I think a lot of us have done this at one time or another with varying degrees of success.

5. My current personal preference is to combine several activities all geared towards developing the new habit.

a. Perform the new action for 21 days. Like many, 21 days has been a magic number for me. I’ve always liked the number 13 so I actually started out doing things for 13 days but it never quite worked out as well.

b. Read 1 hour a day about things that will reinforce the new habit.

c. Write about it. I found I learned and internalized things faster the more I turned it over in my head.

d. Throw some appreciative love towards it. I like imagining how much quality the new habit will add into my life. It makes it more powerful, more real and brings me closer towards really wanting to fulfill it.

Just wanted to let off some steam.

Google just dropped one my sites from the index, leaving only two pages - the index and the very first post. What the fuck?

The site had some backlinks - to internal pages even - and shit.

Also, they just fucking dropped my most search-engine trafficked page on this blog last week, which has been indexed and ranking for about 4 months already.

Ay kabayo!

Anyway, thanks for the good times, Google. Hope we can make sweet love again someday. Hello MSN and Yahoo!!!! Love you guys!

Oh, and one more thing. Fuck you Google! WooohooO!

I used to frequent a personal develoment forum where a guy posted pretending to be a famous European rocker posting hilarious comments to personal development threads like “I read self-analysis by the poster and it cause me head explosion in both complexity and rigor! ”

None of the moderators banned him because he provided a breath of fresh air from all the overly serious threads that personal development forums tend to encourage.

The image of head explosions pretty much stuck with me - even dreaming about it at times - and I remember it everytime I get into long, winding self-analysis. Anytime I find myself acting out theoretical events, I imagine a head explosion as a metaphor for an unnecessary excursion into events that can, may, and could happen but no one really knows.

It’s a great reminder how we can sometimes, during the course of our personal development activities, get too locked up in our heads and away from what really matters - how are the things we engage in enriching our lives and the lives of those around us?

I’ll end this now as further thoughts suggest the cartoony image of my head blowing up like a New year firecracker.