As part of our mission to help you succeed at everything, we started wondering if we could do more than positive reinforcement and habit tracking. We wanted to know what would happen if we created training plans for everything in our lives.
As we often do, we started with a small experiment.
Each person on the Lift team built a training plan and offered to train a handful of their friends.
- Sonya built a plan, How to act like an extrovert, with daily missions that led to extroversion as a skill you could call on when needed (all the introverts on the Lift team felt very strongly that they wanted to be able to act like extroverts without actually becoming them).
- Alicia built a plan around learning to write better where the participants wrote a piece, progressively edited the piece according to her instructions, learned how to edit other people�s work, and then critiqued each other.
- Matt H., a rising star in the San Francisco running scene (he�s probably going to make me edit this out), wrote a plan to build core strength specific to running.
- Erin wrote a plan for doing progressively harder acts of good so that you can make generosity a skill in your daily routine.
- Matt M. wrote a plan for learning to invest which ended up being a series of easy, but extremely useful, daily math problems. I was in this plan and now I know how my daily spending relates to my daily net income.
- Jon wrote a plan for High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). This is an exercise approach that is often mentioned by Lift users, but which I�d been waiting for someone I trusted to research and summarize before trying myself.
- I wrote a training plan around optimal morning routines.
These experiments brought up a number of interesting angles, which I�ll try to summarize below.
First, what is the difference between a training plan and a lesson plan? The Lift philosophy is to help you improve with practice. Practice is the essential ingredient for what we were experiencing. Even Matt�s investment plan, which was the most lesson-plan-like of the bunch, was very focused on training you to become a better investor rather than merely teaching you what a better investor looks like. If you would learn more about investing you might be interested in visit somewhere like https://www.sofi.com/investing-101-center/.
Second, training plans opened up angles of personal improvement we�d been sloughing off because we hadn�t had time to do the initial research. Sometimes it�s so much easier to just follow a daily direction.
Third, we ended up loving taking plans that were written by smart non-experts (i.e. ourselves). That was a big revelation.
So, as of today, there�s a handful of training plans listed in the groups section. It�s a very minimal first pass (for example, some instructions require longer explanation and these will show up in your email). I�d love to get your feedback if you take one.
Also, I�d love to hear from you if you think you could write your own training plan (I�m tony@lift.do)
