A few years back I felt sort’ve stuck in a rut.
I wasn’t living up to my potential. I wasn’t producing anything of consequence to myself, my family, or society. I wasn’t living anything close to a fulfilled life. I had what seemed like few consequential hobbies outside of cruising facebook religiously. I hadn’t quite mastered anything – only dabbled really.
I still haven’t.
I’m not a failure – I’m on track to succeed. But I have to actually make things if I’m going to do that. I have to work my ass off to succeed at getting places. I have to have clear cut goals, and they need to be balanced.
A few years ago, I decided the thing I wanted most out of life, out of myself really was clear, accurate judgement. I wanted to have the ability to think through things, systematically, logically, and come to accurate and elegant/intelligent conclusions.
I still want that, but realize that you can’t just wish for things and have them, they must become priorities that you develop and work on. I also realized that I have/had a lot of things on my plate.
I still do, always will. I just need to work on making sure my priorities and time management mesh…seamlessly if you will.
So I have a list of aspirations this year. In part inspired by the movie Julie and Julia…
1) I want to master my professional trade – medicine. I am going to create, over the next year – about 3,500 patient scenarios with multiple choice questions, answers, and references. I’m going to then create a website and put it out there…people will begin to access it and I will make money from advertisements/revenue sharing deals…
2) I want to make things. I’m a person who needs to work with his hands and learn new crafts. I want to start by making things that I can use right now – which includes clothing and shoes. Ultimately, I’d like to make things like furniture – but I have plenty and cannot really do too much woodworking here where I live. I’m going to learn to sew, and I’m going to learn to sew shirts and ties first, pants (mainly jeans) next, and then finally once I’m good at what I’m doing, I’m going to learn to sew SHOES…mostly because I want to. Then I’m going to sew custom messenger bags. Again, I will sell them…
3) Over this weekend, I saw two movies which couldn’t have been further apart from each other. I saw Inglorious Basterds first, and then I saw Julie & Julia. They both managed to provoke a lot of thoughts, mostly opposite sentiments about the human species and our condition as a society – but something else they both managed to do was spark a desire to learn some more languages…other than English…I’d like to be able to communicate with the world – effortlessly really. So I’m going to take it upon myself to learn five words a day and one sentence structure per day. I can do it, it’s just going to take some practice and effort. The languages I’d like to know ultimately: Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic…I think that’s a good start. I may go further – I may not. The way I see it, if I can learn the 200-250 most common words in each language, and a total of 1500 words in each language, as well as the sentence forms, I can manage to be okay with communicating in those languages. Then I just need to manage to continue to use the languages on a weekly basis. It will be challenging, but I want to learn for sure. Communication is important in this life.
4) I’d like to upgrade from this blog to a better website – one that has some funky stuff – one that is flashy and attractive. So I’m going to learn XML (another language) and Flash programming. I’m going to make amazing web-documents – it’s something I’ve sorta wanted to do for a while…Again…communication is important.
5) Finally, I’m trying to figure out how to lose about twenty pounds and get stronger/leaner. I have 1 year to do it. I think I know how to lose the weight intelligently. It’s going to take exercising diligently, as well as eating well – again, diligently. 20 pounds of weight loss is exactly 1.6 pounds per month…which is a little less than .5 pound per week. I’ve already started with the “dieting” which really just entails looking at food that isn’t good for myself and associating it with feeling disgusting – associating the bad food with negative body images and feeling bloated and physically poor. When I think of feeling tired and unwell as I’m looking at what I know will be a marginally delicious snack, I find it much easier to pass on the snack. If I pass on two or three snacks a day – then I can manage to lose 1.6 pounds a month. It’s just going to take me sticking to my guns…that’s all…that’s really all it’s going to take…
But I can do this…wish me success…
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