Every once in a while I get this surge of excitement, a passion for life. This usually happens when I’m incapacitated in some way, like being stuck at work or the seconds before I fall asleep. And then it’ll disappear along with all of my ambition and drive until I once again get inspired. It’s like all of those people who make New Year’s resolutions and completely forget them until December rolls around and they make the same goals again and again never really accomplishing anything. I always disliked resolutions for this reason. I like to think of my life as a video game, every time I achieve something I level up. I need goals to accomplish, challenges to beat, time constraints to abide by and that’s why I can make web layouts in less than a day for a class but it takes me 4 months to make one for myself.
So I’m giving myself one calendar year to complete challenges in each of the following categories and I’ll use this blog as a way of tracking my progress.
Music
I’ve been playing the guitar on and off for about 8 years and the ukulele for 4 and quite frankly, I suck. Like really bad. After all this time, I still can’t play a full song. I have the habit of learning a song, getting bored and starting all over with another song. One way to prevent my boredom is to sing along with the song which is way more difficult than I thought it would be. My challenge is to sing and play a song on either guitar or ukulele and upload it to Facebook. Not only is this challenging my music playing skills, but I have to be confident in myself enough to do this.
Craft
I mentioned before that I wanted to make this a primarily crafting blog. I love crafting and other people do it all the time so why not? Well, crafting is a lot more time consuming than I thought. I also only make things when I need it, which is hardly ever because I live off nothing. I didn’t want my challenge to be one big project because the difficulty isn’t in creating something it’s in creating something on a regular basis. So for the entire year, I would like to make and post something I’ve made once every 3 weeks. That might be a walk in the park for most crafters but for me it’s a big improvement.
Photography
Taking pictures is easy. It’s literally just pushing a button. But I want to do more than take pictures I want to take good pictures. The best way to do this is practice, practice, practice. Like crafting, this is something I want to do regularly but I can’t lug around my camera all day every day. My goal is to complete a 52 project. That’s like the 365 project but for people like me who can only dedicate one day a week. Top 3-5 pictures of the month will be printed and either displayed on my wall or in my photo book.
Fitness
Honestly, I don’t really care about fitness. I know I’m weak as all hell but I don’t find running around to be much fun. But I see the importance and thought I should add it to my list anyway. My friends want to do the Color Me Rad 5K run and I thought it was the perfect challenge for me. It’s difficult enough for me to feel like I’m accomplishing something and it’s fun. I really wanted to make this challenge about biking or rock climbing, things I actually like, but an event seems more objective.
Cooking
All I know is that I suck at cooking and I want to be better at it. I’ve been making my own lunches, observing people cook and reading a bunch of things on the net. Not sure what this challenge will be but I thinking an Iron Chef competition amongst friends. Any suggestions are welcome!
Design
I’ll be working on a number of design projects but my biggest one would be to create a professional WordPress layout for ThemeForest.It would have to be something extremely comprehensive. Any money I make would just be icing on the cake.
These are my goals for the year! I aimed low for some of these to start off because I know how busy I’ll be, but they’ll get more and more challenging as I go on.
What are your goals and how are you planning to achieve them?