Your choice of sidcha isn’t that important. Just do one.
Following up yesterday’s post about the subtle value of sidchas, I want to lower the bar on choosing what activity to base your sidcha on. Doing one or two sidchas means you can say no to all the others and know you aren’t missing out.
Still, if you want to do an art-related sidcha, an exercise sidcha, a personal development sidcha, and so on, aren’t you missing out on others. Maybe you’re missing out by choosing the wrong one.
Not a problem.
All sidchas give you incredible value
Doing a sidcha gives you some value. I’ll represent it with this bar:
I’ve done three sidchas for several years now—my burpee-based exercises, posting on my blog, and cold showers, not counting things that I don’t consider challenging enough to count, like flossing my teeth.
You get value from the structure of the sidcha—that is, that you do anything self-imposed, daily, challenging, healthy, and an activity—and some from the specific activity. For example, burpees give me exercise, strength, fitness, and so on, but not much art-related, business-related, and so on, except secondarily through what I get from the sidcha structure. Meanwhile, writing on my blog develops my writing skills, helps me speak more authentically (I think), identify ideas worth developing to write about, and so on. Cold showers help develop my resolve, overcome internal resistance, and so on.
I’ve written about people whose sidchas are artistic and have made and shown art in the past. None of my current sidchas work on art, so I’m not developing myself in that area, at least not through my sidchas. Am I missing out?
In my experience, the value from the sidcha structure is much greater than from the specific field. Your impression may differ from mine, but my subjective feeling is that the ratio is like this:
That is, the overwhelming majority of the value of a sidcha comes from doing anything self-imposed, daily, challenging, healthy, and an activity. The value from the specific field is minor.
The sidcha structure gives you
- Discipline
- Diligence
- Knowing your values
- Acting on your values
- Self-awareness
- Personal development and growth
- Integrity
- Passion
- Skill
and more. Plus all those benefits cost nothing, depend on no one else, have no risk, and so on.
The specific field benefits for burpees include
- Muscle growth
- Fitness
- Cardiovascular development
- Strength
- Form
- Balance
- Confidence
and more. They’re important, but at least to me, smaller than the sidcha structure benefits.
Say I switched from burpees to drawing a picture every day to develop my artistic skills. Then the value I got from it would look like this:
In other words, the sidcha structure value would deliver the same quantity and quality of value. That is, any sidcha gives you this benefit. The specific field value would give roughly the same quantity of value, illustrated by that part of the bar being the same size, but would give a different quality of value, represented by its different color.
Compare with the first sidcha:
Similar!
In my experience, and sidcha improves your life nearly the same as any other, with small differences from the specific area.
Lesson: do a sidcha!
The benefit of doing any is great. The choice of which doesn’t affect the overall value and barely affects the total quality. If you’re worried you might not pick the best one for you, you can always change later. You’ll probably choose more wisely for the experience, so all the more reason to start soon.
Are you different?
Maybe the relative values from the structure and specific field differ for you. Maybe your relative benefits look more like this:
This bar shows more relative contribution from the structure and specific field.
A lot still comes from doing a sidcha at all!
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