[This post is part of a series on the Self-Imposed Daily Challenging Healthy Activity (SIDCHA). If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

Here are two videos of people who learned to dance by doing it every day. So much more photogenic than burpees and writing here daily.

I don’t know about you, but watching them brings tears to my eyes. I suggest seeing these videos not about dancing but about freedom and joy achieved through mastery. Recognition from peers and the public comes with it. And about the effectiveness of Self-imposed daily challenging healthy activities (SIDCHAs).

This video has almost five million views:

This guy came later. How much do you love something that you do it outside in -20C? I believe that love and joy comes from discipline and practice.

Now here’s Queen Latifah interviewing the girl, Karen Cheng:

Her own video:

Here’s her project to get people to do something every day for one hundred days, called Giveit100.com.

And her TEDx talk:

Freedom and spontaneity through discipline

As I’ve written before, Martha Graham said it best:

The dancer is realistic. His craft teaches him to be. Either the foot is pointed or it is not. No amount of dreaming will point it for you. This requires discipline, not drill, not something imposed from without, but discipline imposed by you yourself upon yourself.

Your goal is freedom. But freedom may only be achieved through discipline. In the studio you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that you may finally be free.

…

And when a dancer is at the peak of his power, he has two lovely, powerful, perishable things. One is spontaneity, but it is something arrived at over years and years of training. It is not a mere chance. The other is simplicity, but that also is a different simplicity. It’s the state of complete simplicity, costing no less than everything, of which Mr. T. S. Eliot speaks.

…
Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance. Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

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