Establishing My Minimums—Designing the Renaissance Initiative

Welcome to the first installment of the Renaissance Initiative!

I should probably start with the background of the project and the overall design so you have a little context here, but I’m not going to do that. Why? Because my kids just went back to school and I’m feeling the buckle down energy. I want to stop talking about this project and actually start doing it.

And I’m not one to ignore an urge like that.

For now, here are the basics:

The Renaissance Initiative is a personal development project I’m designing that is also essentially a new framework for my entire life. Everything important to me has been poured into a bucket—what I am calling Pillars. Health, Hearth (family+home), Learning, Writing, Sanctuary, and Reflection.

Breaking it into pieces like this makes my priorities clear and makes it easier to align distinct goals to these areas of my life. 

Which brings us to what I’m thinking about today. Today, I am identifying the absolute bare minimums that I can accomplish on a daily basis and still count myself successful in each area. Michael Smoak calls these floors, Charlie Gilkey calls them success criteria, Chris Bailey talks about shrinking resistance by making your habits so small you can’t talk yourself out of them, and though I may be the last person on earth who hasn’t yet read Atomic Habits, I believe James Clear may also have a similar idea about starting small. 

I’m SO tempted to set one of these for every single goal that I have, because each one of them does have a bare-minimum version I could aim for, but trust me…I’ve made the list, and having twelve (or twenty) different things I have to do every single day in order to count myself successful, is actually setting myself up for failure. So what I’m doing instead is establishing minimums per pillar. 

The idea here is to choose something so simple I can accomplish it even on my hardest day. Something that isn’t too rigid that it becomes monotonous and I start to rebel against the idea of it. Something simple that won’t take a lot of energy to plan or execute. Low resistance. But also not permissive. Clear enough that I can’t phone it in easily.

Here’s what I came up with:

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Health

Chose something healthy over something easy.

Hearth

Made a memory, wrote it down.

Tended my home.

Learning

Added to my commonplace book.

Writing

Engaged with story.

Sanctuary

Took a moment for myself.

Reflection

Journaled OR used my planner (whichever feels best to track these things once I get going).

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When I look at this list, I feel like each one of these things is taking me closer to the kind of life I imagine behind closed eyes. That deep dreamy place that lives as an idealized version of a life where money and obligations rarely factor in (ha). I feel like it’s important for us dreamers to understand that these ideal lives we’re imagining aren’t really attainable—mostly because the goalposts will always move the closer we get to them—but it’s also so helpful to have something concrete to have in mind when the daily grind gets hard and we wonder why the hell we’re trying so hard anyway. 

We can always do better. We can make significant changes. We can become a version of ourselves that feels impossible right now. And we can do it all the easier if we have a little bit of a plan.

I think I might take the next few weeks with just these few things in mind as the start of this project, before constructing any more rigid structures to tackle. A soft start, maybe, but still a significant one. Because this is me saying that I know what I want. That I know it’ll be hard. That some days even this will be too much for me. But I’m doing this anyway, because I believe I’m designing a future that I can be proud of. Today, next week, and ten years from now. 

If you’re in a similar space as I am, yearning for change, for improvement, for more intentionality, I’d love to connect with you in the comments. Tell me about your dreams and goals and the strategies you’ve tried to attain them or your plans to strive for them in the future. Let’s cheer each other on through this time of transition and transformation!

We’ve got this!