September 2019 Goals Update

Goals Still Active:

September marks 4 months left to complete my yearly goals,. I’ve completed a ton of my yearly goals, but many of the remaining goals are the sort that require regular grinding and practice in order to meet them.

While I’m happy with my progress this year, most of the remaining goals need refinement and specificity in order to be completed. Some of this will be cheating (cutting or reducing the goal) but most of them should be legitimate structures in order to tell if they were successful.

Remaining Stretching Goals
Standing Pike: I will measure my success at this movement every week going forward. I’ve learned recently that Standing Pike expects a hip hinge, which will greatly improve my reach. I falsely assumed that I should keep my legs and hips totally straight, so I think I may be far closer to this than I expected.

Pigeon: I’ll measure my success at this movement every week going forward. I need to research modifications for this stretch in order to get some good progress on this goal. Step 1: Research Pigeon pose modifications and helping stretches. Step 2: Adopt stretching modifications into normal workout routine. Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit.

Dental Hygiene
If I floss 90 times in the next 120 days I will be successful at this goal, with no multi-day flossing counting as successful.

Sleep Hygiene

What I would have done in the past: If I successfully move my phone out of my bed’s reach by the end of the year, with at least 20 days of consistency prior to December 31st, this will be successful. It will be a failure if I do not attempt consistency on this at least once every 3 days.

What I am now thinking: I suspect that creating intense goals will be useful for creating guilt, but not useful for creating success. Instead, I’m curious about what benefits I might get from better sleep hygiene and whether a more consistent and better regimen would help/has been helping. I have been consistent with getting in bed before 10 and waking before 7. I’m curious if there are other further benefits now, or if the need for amazing sleep hygiene was a result of not having as much time in the morning before I moved. I’d like to do a push in September or October to have better systematic sleep hygiene, not just cell phone usage, but same sleep schedule, same evening meditation, same earplugs or eye covering.

Toward that end, I’m going to get some earplugs and an eye mask in the next week and experiment with those as well as keep my consistent sleep schedule during weekdays going.

Wrists Healed

I have been reasonably consistent with pushing my wrists to be more flexible, but have not seen a lot of advancement. Maybe it takes even better consistency, but I think I need some PT advice and a different methodology.

Success now is 28 days of consistent wrist stretching AND talking with some medical or physical therapy experts at what I can be doing to help my wrist flexibility.

Training Partners

When I get back to jiu jitsu (see injury goal failure), I will continue to push myself by rolling with and training with higher ranked partners. This sucks and makes me feel like I’m bad at jiu jitsu, but it also makes me much better at jiu jitsu and usually in short order. It’s sharpens me in the same way that being a white belt made me a blue belt.


Nutritional Learning

I spent all of August 1) not drinking alcohol at home, and 2) doing a 16:8 split on my days of Intermittent fasting. I’ve learned so much about how my body reacts to this regimen and I’ve mostly hated it. I’ve learned that to much of my drinking at home revolves around boredom. This has resulted in more exercising, more writing and, oddly, more sleep. The intermittent fasting has been horrific and awful and probably exactly what I needed not to gain weight during my time off jiu jitsu. I’ve basically been either hungry or a eating fiend for a month and I’ll be glad when it’s over.

Food Ethics

In November, I will not eat non-fish, non-bivalve meat outside the house and leading up to this, I will not eat non-fish, non-bivalve meat outside the house during the weekdays. There will likely be unpredictable exceptions to this, but this will be the rule.

This will also be coupled with creating some rules of what counts as ethical meat consumption at home. We’ve talked recently about lowering the quantity of the meat we eat in order to pay more for higher quality, higher sustainability, low suffering meat. This is contingent on getting out kitchen fully installed in the near future.

Washington Tour
Seattle Tour

I like don’t have time to see all these things and would have to really schedule out my free time. I’d like to plan a pinball museum date with Mary, and get to Mike’s Chili Parlour this year.

Learn Piano

I think this goal is too amorphous to be successful and I have other goals I’m more interested in at the moment. I don’t think this will goal will be hit. I suspect that I need a stronger schedule and reason to learn it besides “Just do it.”


Vocab Words
This is now complete. :) I’m also rocking my Spanish learning and will probably set a vocab goal for Spanish in the near future.

Podcasts
Editing podcasts in the main bottle neck here. Before the end of the year, I want to 1) record a podcast with Tyson, and 2) find out how much it costs to get someone on Fiver or elsewhere to edit my podcast for me.

Intentional Living Community

I’d like to read one more book on intentional living communities, as well as talk to a couple folks who have actually started or joined an intentional living community.

House Repairs

I’d like all the interior work on my house to be finished before the year ends.

AI and Healthcare Reading Group

I’m going to double down on this and host the reading group twice a month during work hours. I’m also going to write a summary of the writing before every book club.

Vis Coms

I’m continuing to develop this skill. By the end of the year, I’d like to have published a checklist that I can go through for each of my presentations to declare it complete and pretty.

Healthcare and Tech Strat

I’d like to publish a blog post or commentary on Healthcare or Technology Strategy once a week for the remainder of the year. I’d also like to publish a regular weekly link round up of the content I’ve read. I will publish at least a sentence of commentary or summary on each of these links.


Meditation Retreat
The meditation classes end with an all day meditation retreat that I’m pretty excited for. I’m glad this goal is going to be met. It was one of the goals that felt the most risky and weird this year so it’s cool to see it come to fruition.

Meditation Learning
I will consider this complete following my Vipassana meditation classes in September.

Breathing
I’ve been thinking about how to manage this and I think I’ve come up with an effective experiment that doesn’t compete with my morning meditation. Going forward, following work outs, I am going to do some Wim Hof breathing and a cold shower. I think could potentially help muscle recovery, either from the breathing or the cold shower. I’m interested to find out how this does.

Gratefulness

Metta practice is now becoming a regular activity. I’m rotating from vipassana and metta meditation in the mornings. I’d like this to remain a regular practice throughout the remainder of the year.

Journaling

I’d like to get a cool small journal to write in for about 10 minutes every day. I’d specifically like to journal about my fears and emotions. I think this is more a process-oriented activity, and less a content-oriented activity, but I’d like to experiment with “today, this happened” journaling in the future.


Debt Reduction

I’m going to go calculate how much more we’d need to make in order to hit this goal so I know how much we need to spend or save in order to hit it.


Side Hustle
These ideas are generally bad side hustles. Too much work, not enough upside. I’d be better off learning to write grants for non-profits than I would developing these ideas.

Nonetheless, I’m moving forward with Luke on Good Tech and will try to develop our first cohort in the end of this year. Who knows if it will be at all profitable, but that’s the point of trying. Success is trying to get that cohort together.