“So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I’ll see you at the movies.” -Roger Ebert, film critic, screenwriter and author

Every year tons of people spend time and come up with resolutions that they plan to stick to and work towards for the next year. They arbitrarily start on the first of the year as a tentpole/flagship time to start. For years, around November/December, when the conversations of New Years Resolutions came up, I always went by the belief that the day that I think of a good resolution should also be the same day I implemented it. However this year, I am working to start on January 1st, and hopefully will be able to track progress and accomplish things.

To cut to the chase, I will just state my resolutions for this year:

  1. Read more. (Read at all)
    • Last year was probably, and almost surely the worst year of mine for reading in at least a decade. I might be able to say that I have read so few books in the last year to be able to possibly read them on one hand. Definitely on both hands, but this is a far cry from 2015 when I read 53 books. Including, one week where I had read 3 books of a trilogy back to back to back. Those were the days, now it was during University, plenty of time on my hands where I just sacrificed some video games for books and it was wonderful.
    • Now, I am working a full-time job, with a girlfriend, trying to work out, stay healthy, and just am working on other parts of my life. So I know, going into this year, that 50+ books would be a pipedream so I am targetting something that seems quite reasonable. 12. At least, read a book a month. I have a small list for now that I will read and I expect to grow as hopefully I read more and decide to start other exciting things. The list:
      1. Permanent Record - Ed Snowden
      2. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
      3. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Claire North
      4. The Names Heard Long Ago - Jonathan Wilson
  2. Write.
    • This is much more fluid. I don’t particularly have a specified goal because I came back to this idea a few days ago. I can’t set an X word per week expectations because all that matters is that I write. I want to write more blog posts, which I failed to do after the last time I said I want to. Mainly because I think I set a goal of X per week, and once I failed that, I lost some motivation because now I was playing catch up. Then playing catch up, I was stressed then I lost some inspiration and didn’t “just write” and so here I am, months and months later without having written much at all since then.
    • Additional to blog posts, I want to write more creatively, I have downloaded a writing/planning/organization app. bibisco, it’s an open-source program, free to use with an option to pay. After playing with it a little bit, I have already have seen how good it is and even downloaded the source code to see how I can improve it slightly to make it an even better application and I really love that.
  3. Get healthier.
    • The classic New Years Resolution. I have been working on it more recently, basically for the last 2 months but with new years coming around, I have got a new gym plan and with the help of a few people I have some faith that I can get in the gym, work hard, and start improving and hopefully also seeing improvements.
    • Again, I am doing my best to not nail on a super concrete goal, such as X days per week or a certain fat loss/muscle gain % per month as I know that to myself, missing even one hard checkpoint could be quite a stumbling block in my mentality and the ability for me to continue to find motivation. I just want to work harder.

I am excited to get started. I am getting started on #2 right now. I have gotten started on #3 at the beginning of this week in earnest and I have the first book for #1 selected and I am hoping to start reading this weekend.

Finally, happily, I look forward to continuing with #2 by helping grow this blog and exercising my brain by writing, learning and improving my style, understanding of English and how to get the thoughts from my mind onto paper.