Experimonth 2010 for October was to dance 15 minutes a day. Participants included @jeffreymstern, @worksnows and @ernbrn. The lack of revolution was tweeted, and those tweets are archived here. Along with a few additional thoughts from Jeff
The last 10 days of October, I fell off on my dancing, but also on the recording/microblogging aspect. There were definitely some days that I danced, including a couple of times when I took my 15 minutes where I could and when I was inspired (which meant that I counted the 15 min “seat-dancing” in my car while listening to some jamz – there was definitely one memorable moment when I was “caught” and laughed at by a couple of ladies leaving the Locopops parking lot and another when Ludacris came on the radio as I was driving to Raleigh). I figured that dancing while driving was marginally safer than tweeting while driving, and gave myself permission to not tweet those episodes. More important, I recognized something about myself those last 10 days – once I missed a few days in a row, I started telling myself stuff like “ah well, it’s almost over, it doesn’t matter, it’s silly to worry about” which was fine for the days missed but I realized was also an excuse not to continue and try to finish out the month in a participatory way. And that can lead to lots of unfinished projects – the tragedy being that many, like this, were 2/3 of the way done already. I’ve worked hard to push through the “it’s not as good as I hoped” and b-school really helped with that – it taught me that anything worthwhile is going to be an iterative process and the most important thing is to get *something* done – you can always edit and improve later. I pushed through the “oops I forgot a day” early days, but was still going through the end of the month without following through to completion. I came to a realization at one point that “it’s just a silly thing” should not be an excuse not to do it – it should be even more motivation to do it, because if I can’t just do this one silly thing, how to I expect to follow through when it’s really important. I also notice now that my tweets prompted others to participate, and my lack of tweets might have had a similar effect. Finally, I didn’t expect this month to be one that affected me at all. However, I do now find myself more willing to dance in public. I know there was one Museum happy hour at the pinhook when Slick Rick came on and I started dancing and singing, to much amusement. Spontaneous dance at friends’ houses and in the grocery store is also more common, and that Waka Flacka Flame “No Hands” song always gets me moving in the car (especially the Roscoe verse). So hey, looks like I’m more open to dancing in private and in public thanks to this one - a habit a wasn’t quite looking to form but surprisingly don’t mind acquiring.
