12 Months. 12 Skills. Day One.

A chess amateur my age recently challenged Magnus Carlsen to a chess match. Unsurprisingly, Carlsen crushed him, as he does most foes. But it's mind-boggling that his challenger, a virtual novice at chess who gave himself but one month to prepare, thought he had even a minute chance.

Had he succeeded, he would've completely changed the face of chess. He didn't make it, but he certainly deserves kudos for attempting to. So why'd he even try? What pushed him to the heights of chess folly?

A month to do the impossible.

The answer is a challenge he designed, the Month to Master (M2M), in which he tasked himself with 12 nearly impossible skill goals, and gave himself a month for each. As part of it, he learned to solve a Rubik's cube in 17 seconds, memorize the order of a deck of card in under 2 minutes, and develop perfect pitch. Until Carlsen, he was 11 for 12.

His name is Max Deutsch, 24, a self-described obsessive learner whose vaulting chess ambition was written up in the WSJ, none other. He planned to have a computer that would have Carlsen for breakfast at chess (i.e. Deutsch's laptop) learn how to teach a human chess. Such a fascinating, innovative approach - which I've grossly oversimplified here - was simply required to match the height of the challenge.

Needless to say, this story inspired me. I love the idea of meeting impossible tasks halfway, and accomplishing great things along the way. So I plan to dedicate my free time over the next 12 months to the same. Call it a pre-New Year's resolution.

My own attempt.

I'll master 12 skills, one for each month:

1. December: Reading
2. January: Blogging
3. February: Guitar
4. March: Callisthenics
5. April: Triathlon
6. May: Book writing
7. June: Filmmaking
8. July: Bouldering
9. August: Mountain climbing
10. September: Machine Learning
11. October: Comic drawing
12. November: Cooking

I'll go into why I picked each skill when the relevant month starts. For each month, I'll set myself a goal based on my performance at the month's start. These goals will each take the format of a task with a time limit. I'll fail to accomplish some, else I wouldn't be aiming high enough.

Month one, day one.

For the first month, I simply want to improve my reading ability. I hear tales of people who read 300 page books every day. I hope to do much the same, and better. At the end of December, I hope to read three 600 page books in three days, a stretch I'll attempt around Christmastime.

I have no real strategy yet, except to roughly aim to double my reading every week. The main hurdle is going to be endurance. I can already read 50 pages an hour, which in a day of non-stop reading can mean 600 pages. But I certainly can't sustain that pace for a whole day. It's gonna be hard.

Hopefully, some of Deutsch's principles will help:

1. Take a daily hour-long walk to set tomorrow's goals.
2. Write about my progress (almost) every day. This will keep me honest.
3. Get enough sleep!

And on that last note, time to hit the sack.