I have decided that this year, for the first time ever, I will be participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I first heard about NaNoWriMo during my senior year of college. For various reasons that often resembled excuses, I did not sign up that year, nor have I any year since. But no more excuses! This year nothing will be an excuse. From my messy house to the impending doom of the holidays, nothing will dissuade me from trying to write 50,000 words.

Now that the first week has come and gone, I realize that even if I do not reach my goal, I still will have learned much from my NaNoWriMo experience. Apart from the personal insight gained from attempting something like this, I have also noticed five things that NaNoWriMo can teach us about the pursuit of sustainability.

1. New Habits

They say that it takes anywhere from 21 to 66 days to form a new habit. While I have already seen some incredible word counts (some people are already at 40,000+ words!), for most of us NaNoWriMo will be an exercise in perseverance for the full 30 days. It will require daily writing, tapping away slowly towards that 50,000th word. Whether we are forced to employ guerrilla writing tactics for fifteen minutes here and there, or are able to block off several hours at a time, we’re all going to be getting in the habit of writing.

Living sustainably is also about habits, no matter where you are on the spectrum. From the person who just realized that glass can (and should) be recycled to the homesteader who has gone completely off the grid, sustainability is about forming new habits.

But it’s not only about the external, physical habits like recycling, utilizing public transportation, and eating less meat. It’s also about internal and intellectual habits. Reading the news, raising your awareness, and looking at things from different angles is a key part of sustainability. Forming these kind of internal habits puts you in a position to participate in big picture societal inflection points from a conscious and informed standpoint. Engagement is one of the most important habits you can develop.

2. Community

One of the things that makes NaNoWriMo awesome is the community around it. Thousands of people around the world are working separately but together towards a common goal. Just look at #NaNoWriMo on Twitter or meander through the NaNoWriMo forums, and you will see an outpouring of support, commiseration, advice, sympathy, humor and compassion.

As a world, if we are going to move towards a bright green future, or any future, we need to re-familiarize ourselves with the concept of community. The problems we face right now are global problems. They will affect each and every one of us. They must be addressed with global solutions. No one person, no one country can address these problems unilaterally with any hope for success. It is going to take the commitment, the innovative power, and the cooperation of communities, locally and globally.

3. Accountability

NaNoWriMo is great because it gives you a thousand ways to hold yourself accountable for doing what you said you were going to do. One of the specific strategies they recommend is to tell everyone you know that you are going to write a novel during the month of November. That way, even when you really want to quit, you’ll keep going so as not to embarrass yourselves in front of everyone else. From the little word count widget that now lives on my blog’s sidebar to spamming my Facebook and Twitter friends with daily updates on my progress, I am trying to make full use of the accountability mechanisms for NaNoWriMo.

Accountability is necessarily a part of any achievement. Whether you are accountable to your boss at work, your spouse, your kids, or even just to yourself, being accountable matters. We need to find a way to quantify and be held accountable for safeguarding the future of our species and our planet. This will be no easy task. As we’ve seen with the international and even the domestic climate change policy negotiations, it is very difficult to reach a consensus on how we will measure and enforce accountability for issues of common goods.

But, difficult or not, it is imperative that we find a way to hold ourselves, our companies, and our governments accountable for building a sustainable future.

4. Do Something Hard

It seems like somewhere along the line, we got the idea that everything was supposed to be easy. I’m not sure why we think things are supposed to be easy, or when we developed this societal aversion towards challenge and hard work. But the truth is that if you really want something, you’re gonna have to do the work. And it’s not always going to be easy. In fact, it’s probably going to be pretty damn hard.

No one said that writing 50,000 words in 30 days was going to be easy, and no one said building a sustainable future would be easy. But guess what? We’re doing it anyways.

5. Show Up

NaNoWriMo is all about showing up for 30 days, for 50,000 words.

Sustainability is the same as anything else in life. You can’t get something from nothing. You can’t just sit back and assume everything is going to take care of itself. If you do, you forfeit your right to whine when it doesn’t turn out the way you had hoped. The first step to anything meaningful is showing up.

You can revise a bad first draft into a great book. But you can’t revise a blank page into anything but a blank page. And you can’t succeed if you don’t show up.