[LOW-EFFORT POST]
Alternatively, do you have strong opinions on New Year's resolutions?
There are usually tons of crows around near my work... have only seen a few so far but maybe it’s just early still. Keep thinking I should bring them some peanuts. I have so many things I would like to put into a scope but I am gonna have to get a new one before much of that happens. Good luck on your endeavors!
It went well, but only because I completely annihilated my plans! My sister and I are moving into an apartment together - she needs the help with rent, I need help when I'm not feeling okay - and we intended to meet there so I could get a key before we headed in separate directions for the night. Instead, we ended up killing a bottle of peanut butter whiskey while we talked about how we'll arrange furniture we haven't actually bought yet. The whole time we could hear our neighbors down the hall having a party. Emboldened by the alcohol, we went over and introduced ourselves. Turns out they love hiking, and they love stories about getting severely injured while hiking! They were very welcoming, and we ended up going out to some bars with our new friends instead of going to parties neither of us really wanted to go to. A girl at the party had only one leg, and we joked about how badly we hate crutches. She said, "I've always wondered what it'd be like to break my leg!" and I said, "I imagine that'd be pretty inconvenient for you." Thank fucking god that she laughed. It was a great night.
Resolve to improve, all the time. Don’t just resolve; track and assess your progress, too. That being said, capitalize upon the new year as an additional opportunity to do so and embrace it as such. If you are repeatedly interested in self improvement, it doesn’t make sense to scorn a universally recognized opportunity to reflect and attempt to improve just because other people are also doing so. In fact, their efforts may help you! I would like to run a half marathon in 2020, among other goals. I spur of the moment signed up for a 10k on 1/5. In the best ever case scenario, it’d be cool to do that in under an hour, but I think that might be aggressive. My best 5k time is 28:25. Happy new year, hubski!
Good for you going for that 10k. The fact that you’re doing it puts you far ahead of where you’d be in not choosing to do so. I agree wholeheartedly about resolving to improve. I’ve really gotten into tracking and assessing my goals lately, say the last several years. I’d never wanted to track my progress so much before, fearing the failure of missing my self imposed goals kept me from it. I think I now see that my approach was all wrong. Rather than being disappointed in myself over not hitting a goal target, I try to keep my progress in perspective of where I’d be if I’d made no attempt at a goal at all. I’m finding that I’m free of the fear of facing my failure and I’m making pretty good progress. I have been running regularly now for the past 5 years, coming from the belief that running was always some form of punishment. My goal this year is to run a sub 23 minute 5k. I’ve gotten as close as 23:30, and I think I can get there in time. Either way, I’m far beyond where I’d be without the goals/resolutions. Hope your 10k goes well.
Read more poetry. I kinda hate New Years resolutions, and the type of things one typically resolves to do, like exercise and whatnot, I started working on in mid November. Last year’s reading goal was 20 books, I made it to 28. None of them were particularly long though. I think I will go for 35 this year and see if I can manage.
My goal was 12, I made it to 27. I'm going to up my goal a little bit this year, but I find that length + content = variable amount of time to finish a book (what a shocker, my pleasant little equation, isn't it?). I am in the midst of an 800-pager right now. Christmas/winter holiday break was a good time to choose something of that magnitude, tbh.
Exactly! Most of the books I read this year turned out to be shorter than what I normally read so I got through extra stuff. I could definitely do more but I tend to hit points in my year where my work melts my brain and I have no extra mental capacity for reading. Makes me sad. Maybe I should switch to something really easy during those periods?
Resolutions suck balls. They're too big and the deadline is too far away. They're almost always of the "do more" or "try harder", without ever addressing what to do less and how to do things differently. They're almost always goals with a pass/fail state, which isn't at all helpful with long-term changes in your life. Personally I much prefer a yearly review to end with a general theme or direction - a (few) answer(s) to the question "which part of my life do I want to focus more, even at the cost of other parts" - and a list of short term actions to put on my to do lists so I know they'll actually get done. My 2020 theme I've dubbed the Year of Free, with the idea that I want to spend less time committed to meetings, take more time off and excercise more during work hours, and further improve how I spend my free time.
That boils down to quantisation, though. Learning something like a new skill can be split into tens of small, week-long goals or steps, but (at least for me) that's harder to focus on than "I want to know how to do X by next year reasonably well" and meander toward the desired outcome. Failing one step along the way doesn't feel like such a huge setback, ya know? For each their own, and, though I appreciate introspection you share, I probably couldn't follow your recipe for success and vice versa. Good luck with your goals!Resolutions suck balls. They're too big and the deadline is too far away.
Reading! I've followed the typical path of reading a ton in elementary school until Middle / High School where it becomes an intollerable chore and the only books you are allowed to read are "classics" which no matter how good they may be, are very difficult to appreciate when your grade is being held hostage by memorizing character's names and major themes. I've finally gotten to the point in my engineering degree where I never have to read another book again and kinda miss it now. Anyways, point is - one book a month. Easy, punchy, measurable. Trying to make this my first new year's resolution that actually gets done. And if you have any book reccomendations I'd love to hear them, otherwise will be reading though previous #bookclub posts :)
I'd like to get around to The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
Gotcha covered with the recs, yo! Good luck on your journey to reading more! I started this year’s fiction reading off with Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and am finishing up Feynman’s “The Meaning Of It All” on the non-fiction front, before I start tackling the content of the post below:
Extremely relatable. I'd love to hear what you're reading as you go, maybe it'd help me rekindle the same passion we've both lost!I've finally gotten to the point in my engineering degree where I never have to read another book again and kinda miss it now.
right now i've thought a lot, worked through some stuff, gotten past other stuff, and i'm in a good place to jump back into the swing of things - i talked a little bit about some plans a bit ago, but basically the basic principle is that i have a good starting point and i want to build on it, so the thing now is actually doing it which all means i have a lot of "resolutions"/things i want to do in 2020 but very broadly speaking it's "do the things that i've always wanted / needed without worrying about them or needlessly delaying" simple right