Category Archives: Goals

Design, Goals, Learning, Programming, Sleep, Technology

Things I would like to (continue to) learn this year

Leave a comment

I like to be continually learning new things. Or at the very least get better at the current things I am doing, or relearning old things I have gotten rusty at. This year is no different, except I am pushing the boundaries of what I am comfortable with a little more than I am used to and also experimenting a lot more with new and ‘cutting edge’ technology. I really feel that this year has a bunch of “game changers” coming out that I am really excited for. The following is a brief list of items I’ll be devoting various degrees of time and focus towards:

Spanish
I’m still sticking to memrise and duolingo, though I am admittedly doing very little duolingo and not as much memrise as I used to. I still practice everyday, but I do see myself sliding on this a little bit. Truthfully though, I am ok with letting this slide a bit as long as I replace it with something else with a high potential gain.

Web Design
Web design is evolving. For many years, to make anything remotely decent it was a complicated beast usually involving Photoshop, followed by a pain in the butt PSD to HTML conversion. If you couldn’t afford Photoshop or a designer you were mostly out of luck. But things are changing, fast. New UI toolkits have popped up offering responsive layouts that work on desktops, mobiles and tablets that don’t look half bad and are easy to use. My favourites are Bootstrap 3 and Semantic UI, which are both immense time savers. And now there are new tools coming out that will automatically turn your designs into HTML and CSS. Webflow is one that lives in the browser, which I spent a week messing around with and was very impressed. Google has a beta one out that was pretty junk when I tried it and have since uninstalled. However, I am most looking forward to the standalone desktop app Macaw which is scheduled for release in the next couple of months.

Web Development
Meteor is amazing and has been a game changer for me (and I believe will be a huge one going forward for many). It makes server and client side coding so much easier on so many fronts that I don’t even know where to begin. They really nailed so much of the framework down that it really makes coding so much faster and more efficient. It hits version 1 in the next couple of months, which means there are breaking changes coming. That’s what I mean by ‘cutting edge’, there are still warts that you have to work around and deal with, but nothing insurmountable and so far it’s easily been worth it.

Noflo looks interesting. It’s a visual drag and drop interface far, far different from the conventional terminal style used in programming for over 50 years. The paradigm shift is huge from traditional programming and could prove to be extremely interesting and even better. A game changer? Perhaps. I would love to give it a fair shot but the learning curve does appear to be quite high and there isn’t much information, demos or documentation out there. I’m definitely keeping my eye on this as their hosted UI recently got successfully funded on Kickstarter and is scheduled to launch sometime this year.

Famo.us rendering engine has got me excited. It promises to make the UI fast and responsive in a way that the browser is not able to do or handle because of limitations within HTML5. We’re talking native application performance but in the browser. I will likely spend considerable time on this when the beta becomes publicly available sometime in the first quarter of this year. Combined with Meteor, I think cross device web and mobile apps will be a treat to build.

Body and Health
I had a fitbit for a while and was never really impressed with the data it provided. But since then, a lot has changed and a ton of new and improved gadgets have surfaced. I would love to find something that provides more useful and accurate information, such as the basis, amiigo, or w/me. There’s a new strength one called Atlas on Indiegogo right now that looks interesting, too. Why? Cause data is good, yo.

I need better sleep. Or just better napping. Or faster time to sleep. Or better quality of sleep. Lucid dreaming would be cool, too. I’m still toying around with sleep because I know for a fact I could do it better and the importance of sleep is greater than anything else I have in this list. I tinker with it a lot. Take napping, for example. I know that if I nap for an hour, the last 15 minutes I’m just lying there wide awake. If I nap for 45 minutes, I wake up groggy. 30 minutes seems to be the sweet spot for me. I know that between 2-5 pm is when I take a dive in energy and that is the optimal time for me to nap. When I do, I wake up refreshed and I am ready to roll. There are a whole new bunch of sleep masks, gadgets and apps that promise to help promote better sleep. I think I’ll wait and see what the verdict is on any of these before I consider purchasing one.

For strength, 531 has been good to me. There’s also grease the groove for pullups that I just started up. As for body composition – I’m just going to try out different nutrient timings and caloric loads. Aesthetics aren’t that important to me, but it’s something I should not neglect for prolong periods of time regardless.
BJJ – Just keep showing up. This has been a huge thorn in my side. I dream about BJJ constantly. Literally multiple times throughout the day and when I close my eyes at night. And yet, every single time I have gotten back onto the mats to train I have been derailed via injury or life altering event. To say it has been frustrating is an understatement. This year, I hope to break that trend. What’s different? I’m stronger, a LOT stronger. And with that, I believe I’ve added more durability, too.

Honestly, that’s a lot and there are a few more floating around in my head (I’d love to play around with the SDKs for the Myo and Oculus Rift). I will likely fail and give up on a number of these. This is expected and part of the process. For example, last year I tried my hand at Dart and Angular, but Meteor came along and just kicked their asses so hard that I didn’t need to go down those routes any longer. It’s the process that matters to me, and the chance at discovering something awesome or getting better at something that excites me that I look forward to the most. The lesson? Try lots of things. Stick with the ones that excite you. And have patience.

Friends and Family, Goals, Habits, Life, Lifestyle, Me

2013 – Building Up Confidence

Leave a comment

Well, the end of 2013 is upon us, which means a new and exciting year awaits. Last year, in 2012, I took a leap of faith. This year, 2013, it was all about building up confidence. Next year, 2014, it’ll be all about execution.

The first half of 2013 I was still fumbling around like an idiot. My strength gains were stalling, I stumbled my way to launching Rentything, and I was still trying to transition into this new lifestyle and getting into the right habits and routines. But the latter half of the year I started finding my groove. I stopped getting injured so much, started making adjustments to my diet, to my routines, and to my environment. I stayed consistent in my activities with no expectation except to trust in the process. And guess what? The process started to work. Strength started to progress again, injuries were less frequent, productivity skyrocketed. Opportunities for growth in business, awareness of self, and happiness all improved steadily. In other words, I started to find my swagger.

I plan on taking this momentum with me into the new year. No fucking around, just consistent execution every. single. day. I really like where my head is at these days, and am in a very good place spiritually, physically, and emotionally as well. Just like 2013, I expect the first half of 2014 to be very different from the second half. There are some amazing things in technology that I am expecting in early 2014 that I am getting excited for that will have a large impact on my productivity and career for the rest of the year. It’s an amazing time to be alive, no doubt.

As for goals, I don’t really have anything concrete. I like to use goals more as a fun mental exercise rather than hard and fast guidelines to follow. I still want to continue getting stronger, and I think bigger (for a little bit while longer), but need to be careful not to neglect other aspects of physical health, such as sport specific training and aerobic capacity. I also need to do a much better job of blocking time off for important activities. This has been a huge challenge for me over the years, which causes me to spend too much time on certain activities (such as programming and reading) and not enough time on others (such as writing). If I can nail this, my activities will be less lopsided and more balanced.

Patience is something that I have spent the last few months working on improving, and I plan on continuing this practice. Even though I feel I’ve seen some big improvements on patience, I still see tons of room for improvement. Patience with myself, with family and friends, with personal and professional goals. All of it needs improving. Patience, patience, patience.

Happy New Year. Goodbye 2013, hello 2014. Bring it on, bitches!

Goals, Habits

Memrise vs DuoLingo

38 Comments

So I have been using both Memrise and DuoLingo for over a year now to learn Spanish and thought it would be fun to compare the two. I’ve used DuoLingo longer and have recently finished the entire Spanish track.

What are they? Memrise is an online memorization tool. It uses flashcards, mnemonics, and spaced repetition to help memorize things. I think anybody can create a course and the courses vary from all sorts of topics, not just languages. I use it mainly for Spanish. DuoLingo is a language learning tool presented in a gamified way, complete with leaderboards, trophies, unlocking levels, and points.

Let’s try to compare them over various criteria randomly chosen from my brain.

Design – Winner: DuoLingo
They are both nicely designed actually, but DuoLingo is absolutely beautiful. It plays out so much like a video game, or journey of sorts that you can really tell they put a lot of thought into. Memrise, on the other hand, while still nice looking, isn’t quite as polished as DuoLingo. That isn’t to knock Memrise, though, because I can’t think of many websites or apps quite as polished as DuoLingo. It really is tops for design.

Usability – Winner: DuoLingo
Slight edge here, but the controls on DuoLingo are just slightly more intuitive. You press Enter or number keys or hover over words and DuoLingo just responds exactly the way you’d want it to respond. Colors change and sounds are triggered appropriately if you do something right versus wrong in both programs. If you get something right, things turn green and you hear pleasant sounds. Things go wrong, and things turn red. With Memrise, you don’t quite have the flexibility in controls like you do in DuoLingo, in my opinion. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes you are forced to use the mouse only in certain exercises versus being able to use the keyboard, too. With DuoLingo, it is a more consistent experience.

Effectiveness – Tie
Tough to tell. Memrise is simply memorizing words and phrases, with little helpful mnemonics to help you better understand whatever you are trying to memorize. DuoLingo, on the other hand, has a larger focus on the traditional way of learning languages, with nouns and verbs and sentences and all of that fun stuff. It’s hard to tell if one is better than the other, but I will say that without a doubt they complement each other very, very well. Many times I’ll be doing a lesson in DuoLingo and know words I have already memorized from Memrise, thus helping with my understanding of the lesson.

Fun – Winner: Memrise
Memrise is just more fun, period. Because when you are done “planting”, aka doing a lesson, there isn’t a pass or fail. You get a message, some stats and a percentage of how accurate you were, and you can’t fail and are never forced to do the lesson again. You just simply get more practice on the words and phrases you struggled with during your next “planting” session. And when you are ready to “water the plants”, aka refresh lessons, you conveniently get more practice on the words you struggled with, and less so on the words you breezed through. With DuoLingo, not so much. I can’t even tell you how many times I cursed at the screen because I’d accidently spelled a word incorrectly, thus losing a heart. Three hearts is all you get, and then you fail and have to start over. So many times I was on the very last stage of a lesson with zero hearts left, only to fail because of something silly. You ever play a video game and are right at the end only to get stymied? You know how frustrating that is, right? Well DuoLingo is like that x1000. They have recently improved the three hearts rule by letting you fix your mistakes in a stage, thus only removing half a heart, but it is still nowhere near as fun as Memrise. This one isn’t even close.

Replayability – Winner: Memrise
Now that I am done the Spanish track on DuoLingo, I’m not sure what to do. I still do the daily practice, and I try to do the timed practice and fail miserably, but aside from that and the real life translations, there isn’t much to do except for try and pick up another language (which I don’t want to do as I still haven’t even gotten Spanish yet). Memrise, on the other hand, has so much material on Spanish alone it is staggering. I won’t be done with it anytime soon. I recall reading something recently about DuoLingo opening up their platform to allow others to contribute courses as well, so their limited language courses/materials might change in the future.

Innovation – Winner: DuoLingo
Overall, I think DuoLingo is moving at a quicker pace than Memrise. They both have mobile apps, but DuoLingo keeps rolling out features like crazy. DuoLingo is actually really cool, because it not only helps you learn Spanish but it also helps translate real articles and websites into different languages. That’s the innovation from DuoLingo: take an article from the interweb, let 100 people try to translate it into a different language, if they can come to an agreement with a certain amount of accuracy, chances are the translation is pretty good. Genius! Memrise also has a pretty innovative approach. Take a word as a flashcard and add a mnemonic to it. Let anybody add a mnemonic, thus you have a crowdsourced version of flashcards. I have found that looping through various user submitted mnemonics helps reinforce words quite well. Anyway, I’m rambling. Bottom line, DuoLingo now has courses, practice – both regular and timed, immersion of real world articles, forum discussions, and vocabulary practice, and they keep on coming. Memrise still goes with the flashcard and spacing approach, but they are mixing it up a little bit with different ways to interact and answer questions.

Overall – Winner: Memrise
Fun and replayability go a long way. Despite many of DuoLingo’s advantages, I still much prefer Memrise to DuoLingo. With DuoLingo, some days I actually don’t want to do anything on it, but never with Memrise. I almost always look forward to plant and water in Memrise. However, there are some things I absolutely hate about Memrise. For example, the word for car has many alternatives in Spanish (like 3 or 4 that I have run into so far). Well the answer it is expecting is only 1 (or 2, at best). So even though you are right, it isn’t the answer Memrise is expecting and you get the question wrong, wtf!! Super annoying, but at least you get to keep playing unlike DuoLingo which fails you and forces you to start over if you run out of hearts.

So which should you choose? Well, none, if language learning isn’t your thing. But if you have the time, and like free, and prefer to learn at your own pace, then do both. Like I said earlier, they complement each other quite while. It does take a little bit of dedication and consistent practice, though. Dabblers beware, you’re just wasting your time if you can’t get into a routine with them. Also, I definitely wouldn’t say that either of these programs are the best way to learn a language. There are paid alternatives such as Pilmsleur and Rosetta Stone, as well. Are they more effective? Perhaps, but again they do require some dedication. I still think the best way to learn a language is total immersion – that is, move to the country that speaks the language, and only speak that language and not your native tongue (I have never done this so this is a very light opinion). However, for practicality purposes, I think that DuoLingo and Memrise are very attractive choices.

Goals, Habits, Life, Mindset

1 Year Later

Leave a comment

It’s been over a year now since I started on my entrepreneurial journey, and boy have I learned a lot. I’ve made a ton of mistakes, learned from them, and gotten just a tad wiser. At least, I think. I’ll continue to make mistakes, of course, and that’s par for the course. So many unbelievable opportunities have opened up because I finally had the courage to start believing in myself. But man, was I ever nervous as hell. To an extent, I still am from time to time, and I don’t think that will ever go away. But I sure am glad I took that first step over 1 year ago. I’ll never look back.

 

My life is so much different now. Faster, better, happier, more resilient, more courageous, more patient. I’m a lucky dude. Great friends, great family. That decision to move back to where I grew up was one of the toughest decisions I ever made. I sacrificed a lot, left a lot behind, and made some tough and unpopular decisions. And now I’m better for it. Looking back over a year later, it seems like a no brainer. Why the hell did it take so long?

 

My $80,000 tuition bill is paid. I’m debt free now. Feels good, feels real good. My Spanish has improved tremendously. In fact, I am almost done the entire Spanish course on Duolingo. I sure am glad I started learning Spanish over 1 year ago (probably closer to 1.5 years actually).

 

And my strength? I started barbell training late July of last year. I had no clear goals in mind. I wanted to be stronger, not superhuman level but not pathetic either. Now I’m squating over 300 lbs and deadlifting 2.5 times my bodyweight. And I remember at first I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend all of that money buying a power rack and barbells and weights last summer. Idiot, one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

 

Am I where I want to be with my entrepreneurial pursuits? No. Am I where I want to be with my language learning? No. Am I as strong as I want to be? No. But fuck, I am leaps and bounds ahead of where I was 1 year ago.

 

My point is in this moment we all have our doubts, and they never go away. Those doubts are there for your protection, but often times they do more harm then good. If I listened to them, I’d probably be stuck in a dead end job working for the man paying off my debt for eternity and living in slow and silent misery. But every time I felt that doubt I simply decided to act inspite of it and in spite of my reservations. I watch this awesome girl do her thing and I’m convinced that that’s how it goes down

 

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daC2EPUh22w

 

You see, at first, you look like a moron. You just do. And you probably feel silly, too. But sooner or later, things start to click. Sometimes it takes forever. Spanish, for example, is not something I pick up quickly. It could be my material or my methods, or it could just be I am not really gifted in linguistics (or a combination). But strength has accelerated beyond my wildest expectations. I wasn’t particularly good at rock climbing, but first person shooter games like Quake 3 I excelled at very quickly. Some things you’re just going to be naturally gifted at, and other things not so much. But what matters the most is consistent, deliberate effort.

 

This summer I started running. For years I’ve told my friends how much I hated running. I thought it was deathly boring and repetitive and I never got into the zone while running and I never felt a runners high. Well I’ve been at it for 4 months now and I still find it boring and repetitive and I still haven’t gotten into the zone or felt a runner’s high. But I can feel it starting to make sense. It might not come anytime soon, but if I keep at it, it will. It’s an inevitability.

 

After a long hiatus, I am back training jiu jitsu again. My timing is coming back quickly and the muscle memory is there. And I’m a whole heck of a lot stronger now. I’ll give it a year of consistent and deliberate practice, and have another look back. I bet I’m going to be better.

 

So what’s that thing you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t gotten around to it? Start today, because 1 year from now you’re going to be +9000 at it. Go ahead, give yourself permission.

Goals, Habits, Life

Practice Your Craft

Leave a comment

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle

Bah. I suck. I’ve been hesitant to write lately and seem to have a mental block. Trying to come up with content to write about for Rentything has been a challenge. There’s a reason for this. I haven’t practiced, and I haven’t been consistent.

If you want to get good at something, you must must must practice consistently and deliberately. There are no shortcuts. It is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for success. Anything less simply doesn’t cut it. The path to mastery is littered with failure and setbacks, but this shouldn’t stop you from trying. There are skills that I believe have a huge return on investment and are definitely worth learning. Some of these include:

 

1. General strength training

Not being generally strong is a terrible thing. There are so many reasons to be strong that the list is exhausting. Some of the reasons include being functionally useful in a variety of activites, such as helping friends move, gardening, playing with your kids, and so on. Strength makes almost all activites better and very few worse. And the best part is strength is something that can be earned, significantly, if you are willing to put in your time, probably more so than most other types of physical activites.

 

2. Social skills

This is the one that most people believe is either you have or do not have, which is simply a FALSE belief. Social skills are a game of practice and encompass a huge variety of skills including the ability to listen, to empathise, to connect, to understand, to adapt, and so on. And believe it or not, going out and meeting people and trying different things will improve your skills. On the flipside, not going out consistently and generally hiding from people will make you more socially inept. This is my current situation and is something I am fully aware of. Social skills take consistent practice, just like anything else. And the skills will get rusty.

 

3. Writing

Writing a lot will get you better. I’ve never heard of any writer any time in the history of writing who wrote masterpieces on their first try, it simply doesn’t happen. And when you don’t write frequently, it is a struggle, kind of like what is happening to me write now. Typing these words on this keyboard is very unnatural and coming up with the right words is difficult, and yet I have nobody else to blame except myself.

 

4. Programming

This is something very important to me at the moment, and so is something I spend the majority of my days/time on. I notice if I take days off, it takes a while to get back into the groove of things. Just like many skills, the more consistent the practice the better you get.

There are an infinite number of skills you could spend the rest of your life trying to learn, but you won’t be able to learn them all. I would say getting relatively good at a skill isn’t too difficult if you are willing to put in your time, but obtaining mastery requires extreme dedication and time. Two ways of getting good at a skill are to go full immersion or to spend a little bit of time each day practicing. If we take the full immersion route, there is not much room to learn other skills for the time being. Spending a little bit of time each day allows you to develop other skills without getting overwhelmed on one specific skill.

There are skills you’ll get good at throughout your life. Some, such as driving, will become second nature to you. Others you’ll naturally let die due to lack of interest (like that one time you tried pottery). Others you’ll get rusty on due to lack of practice. This is my current situation with skills such as rock climbing, writing, and jiu jitsu. If you don’t want those ones to go away, start practicing them again. Generally they come back pretty quickly. Having a variety of skills in your repertoire is important, and having a few with full mastery is even better. I think they call it becoming a T shaped person (generalist in many areas, expertise in a few). In my opinion this is a good strategy and one I strive for myself. The skills you get better/worse at will likely be constantly in flux, but don’t worry about it. That’s part of the ebb and flow of life. Just remember to practice consistently.

Goals

Focus on Process, Not Outcome

Leave a comment

I forget this one all the time, so I am writing it down here so I can come back and read it from time to time, then bitchslap myself for forgetting again. Too often we focus far too much of our desires on the shiny object at the end of the road, running past everything so quickly that we don’t even get to stop and smell the flowers. That sucks, and it’s unfortunately ingrained in our culture. Having an end goal in mind isn’t necessarily bad (although some argue that it is), but a dogged fixation on it isn’t the healthiest thing for you.

A better alternative is to focus on the process. Let’s go with a few examples. I’ll take them from my life since they are salient in my mind and important to me.

1. I want to learn Spanish. So what’s the desired outcome? Well, I’d like to be fluent and have conversations with people and understand what people are saying. While some people suggest moving to a Spanish-speaking country and immediately start speaking with the locals, that is a tad bit extreme for me. Instead, I use memrise and duolingo. The process is simple. I wake up, enjoy a cup of coffee, and I do my lessons. Everyday. That’s it. Am I moving forward toward my outcome? Yes, most days. Some days, a lesson will totally mess me up and it’ll feel like I just stumbled back a couple of steps. Duolingo especially drives me nuts. Sometimes I just want to put my fist through the monitor. Then I have to remind myself to focus on the process, not the outcome. Just show up and do the lesson. Sometimes I’ll fail the lesson and sometimes I’ll succeed. But there is no question I am better at Spanish now then I was a month ago.

2. I want to get stronger. I want absolute strength but relative strength is more important to me (two people who can deadlift

English: A Strongman exercise: the Deadlift. P...
English: A Strongman exercise: the Deadlift. Polski: Konkurencja zawodów siłaczy: Martwy ciąg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

500lbs have the same absolute strength for the deadlift, but the lighter person has a better strength to weight ratio and thus is relatively stronger). I’d like to pull 400lbs off of the ground by the end of the year, but trying to pull that weight now would potentially injure me so I’m not even going to bother. Instead, all I can do is show up on deadlift day. I like to use a mental checklist. A checklist written down is even better. Did I get enough sleep? Check. Have I been keeping my stress levels down? Check. Did I eat well this week? Check. Am I excited for my workout? Hell yes check. And here again, sometimes I’ll fail to pull what I put on the barbell and sometimes I’ll succeed. But again, by focusing on the process there is no question I am stronger this month then I was last month. Maybe I’ll reach 400 by years end, and maybe I won’t. By focusing on the process, it is irrelevant. I did what I could every step of the way.

I could go on with examples ad infinity. Focusing on the process instead of the outcome applies everywhere. Career aspirations? Focus on the process: Have you been updating your skills? Networking? Fine tuning your résumé and cover letter? Gotten really specific on exactly what you want, including salary, position, company, benefits, department, logistics, commute, and so on? Did you honestly do everything that you could do to move yourself toward the desired outcome to the best of your ability? If so, the rest simply doesn’t matter because it’ll come. It might not come at the speed that you want it. And it might not be the exact outcome you were going for. But the sheer fact that you put one foot in front of the other and moved towards something opens up entire worlds that were not possible when you started.

Let go of the outcome. It’s healthier that way. And take your own advice, Wong.

 

 

Enhanced by Zemanta
Friends and Family, Goals, Life, Me

The End of the Beginning

Leave a comment

Another year has flown on by, and what a juggernaut of a year it was. With the end of the year comes my traditional end of year review, of course! So here we go. For me, there was nothing sexy about this year. It was gritty, it was ugly, and it needed to be done. I grinded and hustled for most of the year and I don’t really see that changing in 2013. The year itself proved to be huge. There were three really big events that happened to me. They were, in roughly chronological order: 1) I finished my MBA, 2) I turned 30, and 3) I moved home.

1. Finishing my MBA was a relief. I learned a lot during my two years back at school, and almost none of it had anything to do with the classroom. I did manage to pick up a few things here and there while actually doing “school” (at the very least, I can say for certain I know of a lot more of the things I don’t know and am ignorant of), but the real learning came in my hours outside of school. I began to learn certain things about myself, such as what kind of work related activities I enjoy and which I don’t. I learned that no matter how hard I try, there are certain people I just have a hard time clicking with and that I’m not everybody’s cup of tea, either. I figured out the things that are important to me, such as freedom and health over wealth and riches, and prioritized myself accordingly. This year especially, in my last semester at school, I started to really feel that the pieces were coming together and that the earlier 1.5 years had prepared me for the journey I find myself on now. I feel there is so much more to write about this two-year time period that a single year-end review post wouldn’t do it justice, so I do plan on reflecting on this time in more detail later down the line.

2. I turned 30. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing inherently special about the number itself, but something clicked at around the same time that my birthday rolled around. I started to take my crazy ideas very seriously. My entire life I’ve been plagued with self-doubt. I let that voice in my head scream loudly while ignoring the beat of my heart. I let well-meaning parents, relatives, friends, and guidance counsellors dictate and control my destiny. In my twenties I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who I was and experimented with all sorts of things, and now that I had the good fortune to play and discover, it’s time I got real. If there was a word for it, I guess it would be wisdom. But I am not that arrogant to think I am wise. I’m taking Steve Jobs’ advice and staying foolish. They say 30 is the new 20, but I hope not. I’d rather 30 be the same 30. It’s time I put on my big kid pants.

3. I moved home. I haven’t moved home in 10 years, and a lot has changed. Not my friends though, they are still the same dudes I remember in high school. All of them got fatter, some of them got bald and married, and a few even made some kids, which terrifies me to be honest. Regardless, I consider many of them as good friends, and a handful of them as my brothers. We’ve drifted far apart in terms of our ideals, morals, priorities, goals, and many other things over the 10 year span, but there is no denying my love for them. Just like family that drives you mad on a family vacation, that’s how I feel when I’m around these guys. But they are my family, and I love them regardless. Surprisingly, being so close to my real family has been awesome. For a person that loves his quiet time and space and solitude, it is nice seeing my parents on the regular. And they aren’t driving me mad. Heaven forbid, I actually enjoy their company!! I have great family and friends and I never wish to take that for granted. They play a huge role in my sanity and a lot of my drive and motivation comes from them.

There were other big milestones this year that I’d like to briefly write about. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Jump up and down in the air like you just don’t care. You also receive a free eHug from me. You are either really bored or genuinely care about me, so thanks either way.

I put on 10 lbs of mostly muscle doing barbell training (review of Starting Strength coming soon!). I love strength training and for as long as I am healthy will continue to train it in some form or other. After just under 6 months of training, I’ve gained a non pathetic amount of strength and that makes me happy.

I read a lot of books this year. According to Shelfari, my book count for the year was 142. See my shelf, here. That is more than 2.5 books a week. And that is an under representation as I read many ebooks that are not indexed in Shelfari. Again, reading is one of those loves of mine that just won’t quit. I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and books are just a perfect medium to feed my addiction. Although Wikipedia, Ted, and Quora are pretty awesome, too. Quora, especially, is like a new kind of crack to me.

I’ve practiced Spanish on a daily basis. I’ve gone at it for 6 months consistently now and am finally starting to not feel like a total dumbass. The sites I’ve used are phenomenal. The first is Duolingo, which helps translate the web and was invented by the same guy who invented captcha, and the other is Memrise, which was started by a memory champion and a neuroscientist. Both are super badass and complement each other very well. Not only do you learn, but it is also quite fun! Me gusta! My profiles are at here and here.

And lastly, although I am not ready to talk about it just yet, I have been extremely busy building a new web app, so I guess that makes me a founder. I wanted to get it out of the door by the end of the year, but there are just a few minor things here and there that I’m not quite happy with before I put it out there to solicit feedback from a select group of trusted individuals. As soon as I get those out of the way and get the feedback, I’ll be sure to announce it here once I release it to the general public. It’s my small contribution to the interwebz and to society, and in Seth Godin lingo, I’ll be shipping my art.

I’m not done. I’m just getting started. Doors have closed, and doors have opened. I’ve played and had my fun, and now it’s time I… still play and have fun 😉 But now I know what I like to play and what I find fun. I’m nervous, I’m excited, I’m anxious yet calm. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am excited to get up in the morning and ready to give the day hell. I love what I’m doing so I’m going to keep doing it. If 2013 is anything like 2012, it’s going to be exhausting, both emotionally and physically. It’s going to be a ton of work, it’s going to be ugly, and it’s going to be very hard. I say bring it, because that’s when I’m in my element. Let’s roll! Happy 2013!!

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” – Winston Churchill