Create and Fill Your Jar of Awesome: Lifestyle Practice

Create and Fill Your Jar of Awesome

Simple Instructions:

1. Create a “Jar of Awesome” — a mason jar or something like it is perfect. Leave it plain or decorate it like crazy. It may also help to keep a small scratch pad and pen right next to it.
2. Each day, write something down on a scrap of paper that you think is awesome — about your day, your life, or the world in general — and put it into the jar.
3. The minimum is one item each day, but you can add as much awesomeness to the jar as you like.
4. Some people like to keep the jar sealed for all time as a capsule of awesome and some people like to open it from time to time to read and be reminded how awesome things really are. It’s your jar — it’s up to you!

Watch this video for an explanation of this Lifestyle Practice from Whole Life Challenge co-founders Andy Petranek and Michael Stanwyck.

Why Is This Practice Important?

The world is awesome, and sometimes that is pretty easy to forget. There is awesomeness right under our noses — in nature, in the things people do for each other, and in the things we accomplish against the odds. But awesomeness is a funny thing. It doesn’t demand to be noticed, at least not the way crappiness does.

With the amount of not awesome things we get told about every day, you often miss the flowers growing between the cracks in the pavement, the stranger that stops to help someone who dropped their bag of groceries, the dinner that is on the table when you get home. There is a good in the world that continues to survive no matter what happens, and it thrives on being celebrated.

With a smile, a wink, or a nod, awesomeness can be fed. It’s like stoking a fire that burns inside. The more you feed it, the bigger it becomes. The bigger it becomes, the more people who are warmed by it. By insisting on noticing, you can become the keeper of the awesomeness flame for your corner of the world.

And if there’s something the world needs, it’s more awesomeness keepers.

Michael Stanwyck

Michael Stanwyck is the co-founder of The Whole Life Challenge, an idea that developed during his seven years as a coach and gym manager at CrossFit Los Angeles.

He graduated from UCLA with a BA in philosophy as well as a degree from the Southern California School of Culinary Arts, and feels food is one of the most important parts of a life - it can nourish, heal, and bring people together.

Michael believes health and well-being are as much a state of mind as they are a state of the body, and when it comes to fitness, food, and life in general, he thinks slow is much better than fast (most of the time). Stopping regularly to examine things is the surest way to put down roots and grow.

He knows he will never be done with his own work, and believes the best thing you can do for your well-being starts with loving and working from what you’ve got right now.