What is this “Month of Awesome” anyway?

I have a Twitter account. I’m on Twitter. I tweet. I am, in fact, a prolific Twitterer, which means, for the uninitiated, that many times a day as I sit at my desk pounding out website code or blog entries, I also type these little 140-character status updates into my Twitter client, announcing to the world the minutiae of my life.

Allow me to show you roughly what this looks like in a web browser:

@jswo (moi) on Twitter

Here are the basics: Each line represents a blurb that I decided I had to get out of my head and out into the open. Where you see “@so-and-so,” those are replies to other tweeters. In the first blurb I was replying to something ValeriaL said. “RT” means “re-tweet.” When I type “RT so-and-so” I’m forwarding something another tweeter has already tweeted. Using the hashtag, “#so-and-so,” is used as a way to give sort of a category, or tag, to a tweet. Say the Superbowl is coming up and a lot of people are tweeting about it. Adding “#superbowl” to these tweets is a way for other Twitter users to find them (using a search feature) all in one place.

But that’s just the backstory, as this post isn’t really about Twitter. This post is about the line at the very bottom of the above Twitter page snapshot where I say, “Well, this may just end my #MonthOfAwesome.”

So what’s this “Month of Awesome” thing? I get that all the time. And when I explain it, then people get it, and people like it.

Many people make New Years’ resolutions. Almost everybody wants to improve themselves in some way; everyone can relate to this. Yet I don’t typically make New Years’ resolutions for a couple of reasons that are just as irrational as making them. One is that everyone makes them, and most people fail. The other is that I have no personal connection to the first day of the year. Everybody starts dating their checks differently on January 1, and everybody starts dating them exactly the same as everybody else. If I’m going to do something life-changing and if I require a special day to base it on, it’s going to be my day. It’s going to be a day unique to me. It’s going to be my birthday. Sure, everyone has one, but only one out of roughly 365 people share mine, and only a fraction of those people turn the same age that I turn. So of all the days, this is the most personal, and this is the one that means the most to me.

So for the past decade or so, I’ve set personal goals leading up to my birthday. “Leading up to” is very important to me, because who wants to start off their year in the crummy slump they’re trying to get themselves out of? My idea is to kick myself in the pants in the days leading up to my day, so I can begin my new year on a strong note, hopefully having reached the goal I set for myself. This year the main difference from previous years is that I decided to give it a name. That name, on a whim, became the undignified but effective “Month of Awesome.”

Another difference between this year and previous years is that I don’t have a quantifiable goal. Indeed, my goal is more about quality. This year I recognized what a slump numerous aspects of my life were in, and I decided I was going to spend a certain length of time living the way I really wanted to be living, starting down the road of being the person I wanted to be. In my case this means doing things such as exercising more regularly, eating better, waking up earlier, working harder, finding more work, actively engaging in projects that I had barely begun or pledged to begin, and generally, living each day in such a way as that by the end of the day I could say, “Today was awesome,” and add it to the tally of days that make up my Month of Awesome.

I brought up Twitter because it plays a large part in all of this. Like having a workout buddy or some kind of sponsor, my Twitter followers have become my support group. Each day I have mentioned Month of Awesome, using Twitter’s hashtag convention (#MonthOfAwesome), and my Twitter friends have acknowledged my quest and they lend me support. And this is a decent chunk of people from all over the U.S., and even a couple other countries. Do you think there’s a day that I really want to admit to all these people that today was not so awesome? That I screwed up and behaved in a way I regret and that I had wanted to leave behind?

That day hasn’t happened yet, but today is only Day 2 of Month of Awesome. MoA was planned to begin yesterday, April 8, because starting on that day gives me about a month leading up to my birthday, May 9. (It’s actually a month leading up to May 7, which is the day I leave for vacation, so I chose to start the math on May 7 just so I wouldn’t expect myself to behave exceptionally on May 7 and May 8, when all I’ll really want to do is lounge by the pool drinking umbrella drinks. But that’s unimportant.)

So, what’s been awesome about Day 1 and Day 2? Well, on Day 1, I found a penny. And on Day 2, I found two. More importantly, I completed the tasks that I set for myself, I’ve exercised, eaten well, been social, and have generally had a nice time. I set pretty high standards for myself, so it takes a bit for me to be happy with things at the end of the day. These may sound like simple things, but they’re simple things that allow me say at the end of the day, “Today was awesome.”