As much as I enjoy and have profited by reading Mandino's books, I have to point out that from a hacker perspective, there's a significant case of prior art in Benjamin Franklin's attempt to perfect his character by practicing each of 13 virtues for a week, cycling through them all four times over the course of a year. Not having computers, he used the technology of his time and made a chart to mark his progress. It's detailed in his autobiography and I would be greatly surprised if Mandino was unfamiliar with it. Googling "Benjamin Franklin virtue chart" will provide lots of discussion with anecdotes on the efficacy of the approach.