I don’t normally make new year’s resolutions, because if I notice a change I want to make in my life, I start right away. However, for 2019, I did happen to make two resolutions that started along with the new year. Since I shared those on the blog (I guess to hold myself accountable), I figured I’d do a check in since it has now been a year.
My first resolution had to do with not feeling particularly strong with rock climbing, which I thought was because I wasn’t spending enough time at the gym. I had moved to an apartment much further from the nearest rock climbing gym, so I was tending to climb only on the way to or from work, and the sessions tended to be pretty short. I resolved to fix this by having 2+ hour sessions at least twice a week. On that front, I think I fully stuck with my resolution. I’m sure there were some odd weeks where I didn’t get two long climbs in (e.g., because I was sick), but overall I have been spending much longer at the gym than when I first moved. However, I also had a checkpoint, which was that I should revisit my resolution if I was unable to climb half the V6s in the gym at the end of March. I could only climb ~25% of the V6s in the gym at the end of March, but didn’t end up doing anything to revise my resolution.
I think the challenge there is that while I stuck with the specific resolution I made (climbing more), achieving the actual goals of climbing harder problems and “feeling strong” is much fuzzier. Climbing grades can be very subjective, so even though there’s only one V6 up in the gym right now that I’ve climbed, I feel about as strong as I’ve felt at any other point this year. So on the climbing resolution, I would say I mostly kept up with the letter of the resolution, but I don’t know if I kept up with the spirit of the resolution.
My second resolution was to write one blog entry per month, with the real goal of sparking progress on personal projects. I did a decent job of sticking with the specific resolution – I’ve written 9 entries since I wrote the post on my resolutions, for a 9/12 completion rate, a solid C. It’s hard to say how much it helped with the underlying goal of working on personal projects. I have made progress on certain things, mostly related to being handy around the apartment, but I think the change in my job status has also undercut the resolution a bit. Since I’m now full time at Brilliant, I have much more ownership over projects there, and don’t really need separate things to work on to feel like I’m making progress on something that’s mine.
For an academic overachiever, a 75% completion rate might seem bad, but given my transition to full time work I’m pretty happy with how many blog posts I wrote last year. I would like to continue posting when I can, as I still have plenty of ideas I want to flesh out through writing, but I probably won’t keep the explicit goal of one post per month moving forward. Hopefully I’ll make another post before we’re too deep into 2020.
