Day 77 | The 7-40 Challenge
I found a document on my computer yesterday that I wrote in 2003. I was twenty-four years old. I’d wasn’t too far out be leaving my ministry job. I may have been selling Thomas Kinkaid paintings, or managing a Pizza Hut— I honestly can’t remember when I wrote it but I know it was 2003. I was lost. I needed to find my focus.
The document was called “My Goals for Success.” Here’s what it said:
Exercise every day. Run four days, lift the other three. Log your progress. No soda — juice and water are your friends. Read your Bible first, then the news, then a topic of interest. Engage your mind as much as possible. At the beginning of each day, lay out a list of what to do. Once a month, take four hours to redefine your priorities. Make sure you’re headed in the right direction. Reflect on the good and the bad. Make adjustments.
It ended with this: “You can do it. You can prevail. In just a few short months you will be where you want to be. Do it.”
I realized when I read it today, that is the 7-40 Challenge. Written in Microsoft Word on a work computer twenty-three years before I started it.
Daily exercise. Bible first. Hydration. Reading. Daily task lists. Monthly assessment and course correction. A young man talking to himself, trying to build a framework for a life he didn’t know how to live yet.
I didn’t follow through. Not then. Life happened — cancer, career changes, a son, a move, a second cancer, a pandemic, twenty years of notebooks full of “someday I’ll” goals in different handwriting.
But the system I needed was always there. Sitting in a file I forgot I had. Waiting for the man to catch up to the plan.
I’m seventy-seven days into the 7-40 Challenge now. Seven daily habits. Forty-day cycles. Everything the twenty-four-year-old wrote down, the forty-seven-year-old is finally doing. Not because I figured out something new. Because I finally gave myself permission to do what I already knew.
The notebooks were never the problem. The goals list was never the problem. The knowledge was never the problem.
The twenty-three years between writing it and doing it — that was the problem.
If you’ve got a list like mine sitting in a drawer, a notebook, or a file you forgot about — go read it. You might find out you already know exactly what to do.
You just haven’t started yet.
Day 77 of 280. Three days left in Round 2.
David Willis 