3 Resolutions for 2020 and Some Aspirations
Recap of 2019 at the bottom of this post since it’s a bit long. Anyway, this post is more intended for personal accountability / for my own note-keeping rather than brilliant writing or deep insight.
2020 Resolutions
Keeping it simple for 2020 resolutions. For every day this year, I will:
Resolution 1: Do a minimum: 30 pushups, 15 squats, 1x 30 second plank every day. Stretch goal = 3x + biceps w/ resistance bands or pull-ups. Point is to keep and build on the existing daily ritual.
Resolution 2: Do daily devotional + read through Bible again. If you’d like to join me, whatever your faith tradition is (would love to have a bunch of open-minded non-Christians to join), download the Bible App, then go here to join the reading plan (http://bit.ly/BIOY2020) with me and a few friends. Point is to keep and build on the existing daily ritual.
Resolution 3: Read to the kids a Bible story every night I’m home before they go to sleep.
New thing this year — Grace Days. For each resolution, seven days I can skip. Hesitant to do this in the past but I think this is much needed without significant compromise to the hardcoreness needed to do resolutions successfully. Needed because sometimes it feels a bit counterproductive to fulfill the resolution. Let’s see if this works. Same hack as previous years: daily check-in with accountability group on WhatsApp.
2020 Aspirations
Similar to last year, in addition to the three resolutions mentioned above where it’ll be all hands on deck all year, every day (except for #3 which doesn’t apply when I’m not home), I have some “aspirations” — things I’m going to try to do. I will respectfully disagree with what Master Yoda said about trying; he’s dead and these need to be written down and treated differently since I don’t think it’s currently realistic for me to do more than three resolutions a year. Listed in rough order of priority, most important first.
Aspiration 1: Meditate.
Was going to put this in the resolutions but ran out of slots. Going to start with Psalm 139:23–24 for now. See where it goes. Hope is this will make me more loving to Christy. Main hope is to really experience grace, then the rest should fall into place. Maybe try it in Hebrew for kicks.
Aspiration 2: Get Mary and Manny to eat more normally and more healthily
They don’t do either that well right now and I want to solve this. More veggies, more regular food. Expecting an uphill battle since both parents were really picky eaters as kids as well and aren’t necessarily healthy eaters themselves.
Aspiration 3: Sleep longer and better.
I really really need to sleep more. Goal is still to increase my average daily sleep to seven hours a day counting daytime naps. Have a feeling this is going to be a big unlock on productivity if this happens. Trying again.
Aspiration 4: Build a fasting ritual.
Fasting came as a bit of a surprise / delight in 2019. Was doing these five day water-only fasts every couple months and it totally worked. Plan is to keep doing this though I’m going to do some experimentation, including this fast-mimicking diet thing that my friend Will has been telling me about.
Aspiration 5: Funnel and timebox information consumption better.
Have a decent funnel for information consumption. Just need to be more diligent with using it. Also, now that I’ve started this timebox hack for how to consume, need to be diligent in actually doing that too. Plan is to more precisely define a funnel + timebox method. Maybe I’ll do a post on information funnels later. Been thinking about this a bit in recent months.
Aspiration 6: Get to basic spoken and written competency in Russian (A2).
Now that I have a good tutor setup, just need to continue with this. Shoot for an average of two lessons a week. Hope to finish through end of A2 (CEFR guidelines). B1 = stretch.
Aspiration 7: Pick up a new academic field.
Been dying to learn modern physics and materials science. Also been wanting to brush up on analysis and algebra — super rusty. Feel like I’ve regressed to middle school level math since doing all this business stuff. Hope is to get started on something like I did with Russian.
Aspiration 8: Learn how to play chess.
I’m absolutely the last person in the world to not know how to play chess. Maybe this year will be a good year to start to learn. Might be a cool thing to learn with the kids. This is pretty far down the list so who knows.
Aspiration 9: Explore SE Asia.
Tried to do this last year with some limited success having gone to Northern Vietnam, Phu Quoc, Taipei, and Jakarta. But I can’t really say we’ve really done much exploring. Was a lot harder than expected and will be even harder with out lives having gotten busier. Only hope right now is to figure out a way to travel with the kids, say take them to one new place each quarter around SE Asia.
Next up: 8 of My Favorite Things from 2019.
Recap on 2019
Was going to put this at the top but it was a bit long so I moved it to the bottom — feel free to skip. This recap of my 2019 Resolutions and Aspirations is really just for me to have some public accountability.
2019 Resolutions:
#1 Health habit — Check. Did pushups and squats every day, though missed numerical target on some days. Need to account for sickness, emergencies, and extended travel for 2020.
#2 Spiritual habit — Check. Daily devotionals + Bible read / reading through the Bible in the year.
#3 Teaching kids — Missed it. Taught Mary and Manny all the Hebrew letters and numbers 1–10 but that’s a far cry from how much I wanted to have taught Mary.
#1 and #2 would have been far tougher if not possible without the daily accountability group. Thanks guys! You know who you are. #2 was also facilitated by the fact that I could get it done on my iPhone. Can’t do pushups on an iPhone. Have an idea for #3 in 2020.
2019 Aspirations:
Didn’t do most of them except for:
#1 Winning the kids back from YouTube. Moderate success if Netflix counts. The thing I hate about YouTube is there’s no way to filter by language easily. If anyone knows how please let me know. At least on Netflix I can get a good chunk of the content in Vietnamese for the kids (trying to keep English exposure to a minimum for now — can explain in a later post). We also built in swimming, trampolining, and Legos as screentime alternatives though I can’t honestly say they spent significantly less time on screens.
#2 Defaulting to reading. Moderate success. Rearranging my app placement + eliminating badges (AKA those annoying red bubbles with numbers on them) and notifications helped a lot. Rather than defaulting to communicating (email, text), only had information consumption apps be on the home page. Need to timebox and funnel better.
#4 Getting started on Russian. Procrastinated most of the year, partially because I kept being introduced to tutors who either didn’t have the right background (knowledge or temperament) or had the time. Finally decided to ban all friends’ recommendations and just went online. Found an amazing tutor a couple months ago — PhD in Russian Linguistics, been teaching foreigners for 25 years, and reasonably patient, at least as Russians come. At least I got the alphabet + basic phonology, morphology, and syntax out of the way. It’s been a bit annoying to find out just how non-bijective the symbol-to-sound mapping is in Russian orthography compared to most other non-English languages with alphabetic scripts. Basically, Russian spelling is a pain, though no nearly as bad as English of course. Anyway, just happy to get started. Looking forward to building on this in 2020.
#7 Eating better. If picking up the fasting thing counts then I suppose this was a small win. Definitely feel like I’m eating less. 6.5 kg net loss, 10.1% fat percentage loss — not that I believe the fat measurements. There’s no way my body fat is only 12.5%. Each of the spikes up were trips, each of the spikes down are fasts. Hmm wonder what would happen if I fasted during trips… (sounds miserable).
Okay, onwards and upwards to a better 2020.
