A few years ago, I decided to do something I had never done before, every single day, for a year. All 365 days. I wrote it down each night so I could not cheat; everything was posted to Facebook to provide a little social pressure.
Most of the new things I did were honestly pretty dumb. I tried blood sausage, bought a fedora that was never worn again (just saw it in the closet the other day), and visited a website called endless.horse, which is exactly what it sounds like: a horse that runs forever, no explanation given. One day I tried absinthe … and regretted it. Another day it was nothing more exciting than ordering off the secret menu at Panera (try that one!).
But some of it was not dumb at all. I helped run a gun buyback and spent a Saturday driving around town picking up guns from people’s garages, not really knowing what I was doing, just showing up because I said I would. I gave a TEDx talk that terrified me for the month leading up to it. I took a job running a radio station I knew almost nothing about, on day one, from an office up 24 steps I could not easily climb (I have not always been a wheelchair user). None of that was on some list of goals. It happened because the rule said to find something new today, and that day, that was what showed up.
Here’s the thing about a rule like that — an actual rule, not a New Year’s resolution you forget about by February. It does not let you off the hook. Most of us can talk ourselves out of almost anything. “I’m not a public speaking guy.” “A gun buyback, picking up guns all over Columbia, is nuts.” The rule didn’t care. It just said: new thing, today, go.
I think about that project a lot now, not because it was some life-changing spiritual thing — at least half the days were genuinely silly — but because of what happens to people once the world stops handing them new things automatically. When we are young, novelty gets forced on us constantly. New school, new job, new city, new people who do not know our habits yet. Nobody has to manufacture that. Life just does it to us.
That tends to stop around our 50s or 60s. The world quits coming up with new experiences. It hands us the same booth at the same restaurant and the same drive to the same places and lets us sit there for the next three decades without a single interruption, if we let it. And a lot of us let it. Not because we are lazy, but because there is nothing forcing the alternative anymore. Nothing makes us push. Nothing makes us try new things.
That is the whole point of doing a new thing every day, or something like it. It is not about the fedora or the dumb horse website. It is about creating the interruption ourselves, since nobody is going to create it for us anymore. We have to be the ones who say, “Today, I will do something new, even if it is small, even if it is a little embarrassing, even if it sometimes turns out to be nothing more than trying a weird snack I will never eat again.”
You do not have to do 365 days of it. Most will not do that, and so many of my 365 new things were absolutely not worth doing. But pick one thing this week you would normally skip right past. Then do something else the next week. Growing older happens whether you cooperate or not. Growing better is the part you actually have some say in — and it starts with refusing to let every day look exactly like the last one.
