On self-improvement
New Year’s resolutions are a strange beast. The self-reflection that the passing of another year brings causes us to vow to change ourselves into better people. This year, we think, will be the year where we will become the people that we want to be.
Unfortunately, while our intentions are good, we treat major life changes as things that we can make happen if we just try hard enough. So we exert an unsustainable amount of effort in an attempt to change ourselves overnight. But life intervenes. We slip up, and get discouraged. Without a concrete plan for dealing with the challenges, we all too often give up, finding ourselves in a similar place the next time a new year rolls around.
For just over a year now, I’ve been in the process of finding out what’s important to me and what I’d like to work towards. Just as important, though, I’ve also learned a lot about the process of personal development. The major takeaway for me has been that I need to integrate these changes into the way that I live. No matter how intensely I may want some sort of change in my life, if it doesn’t become a part of who I am, I’m not going to stick with it for the long term. It’s this mindset that has allowed me to incorporate fitness into my life over the last 13 months, something that I’d repeatedly tried, and failed to accomplish, in my teenage years.
One of the people that has most informed my thoughts on this recently is Leo Babauta, who writes Zen Habits, a blog focused on “simple productivity.” Leo has a new site, 6 Changes, that distills this philosophy into a concrete plan for making incremental, positive changes in one’s life. A central part of the approach is accountability: telling people about your goals up front, and checking in regularly with them, to force yourself to stay on track.
This is tough for me because, if I tell people about my goals in advance, they’ll know if I don’t achieve them. I have a strong tendency to hide my struggles from just about everyone, sharing only my victories. While I’ll leave a full discussion of the merits of that approach for another time, it’s obviously counterproductive in this situation: if I don’t tell anyone else what my goals are, I’m not going to get the support that I would if I were more open about them. So I’m going to break my normal public silence and tell you about my goals ahead of time.
One of them (I’ll talk about the others as they come) is to express myself more. I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my mouth shut and staying out of discussions on where my voice would be valuable. In addition, my writing skills aren’t what they once were. So I’m going to start regularly writing about an area where I think I have a lot to contribute. I’ve chosen to focus on the intersection of computer software and real life. I’m hoping to create something that engages everyone, whether they know much about technology or not. I want this to become an online identity for me, something that I currently lack.
I already have a more general blog, but it’s sat mostly dormant, and doesn’t have much of a focus. Meanwhile, I’ve owned morgangrainger.com since November 2001, and it’s sat pretty much unused for most of that time. So I’m going to shut down the old blog and create a new Tumblr blog to use for my main domain. My plan is to publish a post each week at a predictable time; in order to make sure that things stay current, I plan on having a couple of completed posts in the queue at any given time.
So what’s the plan? I’m going to spend the next week getting the site designed and brainstorming ideas. I’ll spend the three following weeks writing a couple of posts per week to give me a good buffer. Look for the site to go live in February.
I’ll keep you up to date on how I’m doing with it, and if you have any suggestions or comments, let me know!
