Part 1:
Every once in a while, a friend will email me a link to someone who’s running experiments on a blogs. I appreciate this. This past week, for instance, I discovered a concept blog I probably should have known about already.
It’s called Scare Yourself Every Day (SYED). Following Eleanor Roosevelt’s oft-quoted advice, this guy decided to chronicle his journey to “do one thing every day that scares” him for a year. The blog documents the results.
As much as I hate disclaimers, I will go ahead and say I don’t agree with everything he tried. He knows some of it isn’t even legal. That said, it’s one of those crazy blog/experiment ideas that once I saw it, I was like, “Ah, man, why wasn’t I the one who did this? It’s so obvious!”
(Then of course, I remembered my Flinch experiment, but I’m not sure that’s quite as hardcore anymore.)
Part 2:
A couple weeks ago, a friend from church lent my mom a book called Kisses From Katie. Both my mom and the friend mentioned that the title probably wasn’t the best simply because it means no guy is ever going to read it.
Well, I did.
It’s about a young, Christian women who decided to take a trip to Uganda right after graduating from high school. One thing led to another, as they say, and she ended up staying in Uganda permanently, adopting 14 girls, and founding a non-profit that feeds and cares for hundreds of children each week, all before she turned 22 years old, to say nothing of the New York Times best-seller she wrote to share what she learned in the process.
You can read more about her and her work at KissesFromKatie.blogspot.com. For what it’s worth, when I heard about it, I was also like, “Ah, man, why wasn’t I the one who did this?”
Part 1 and part 2 offer some pretty high contrasts, both in the beliefs that drive these people and the lives they lead as a result. I’m pretty sure each of them would probably be disgusted by parts of each other’s work. Perhaps, , though, like I do, they might find lessons to be learned from each other too. Perhaps you might as well.
