New Year's Resolution

Making 2017 My Best Year Ever

07 Jan 2017 View Comments
#newyear #resolution #year2017

Last year, as the year 2016 was beginning, I only had one resolution. To be physically strong for my wife to stop worrying about my health! In the year 2012, right after my new Job at Global Relay, I was extremely ill and hospitalized for about a month. I remember the tears streaming down across my wife’s face and my wife and I both prayed hard to recover from that situation. In the year 2014, I realized how important it is to stay healthy as a married couple. Then I started going to the gym. Before this, I never went to any gym ever in my life. I always have been one of the people who hates to exercise. I always asked this question to me: life is short, why would I go to the gym and waste 2 hours of my life every day? The answer was actually simple even though it took over 30 years for me to realize. The real question I should have asked myself: Why wouldn’t you prolong your life by years and stay young by spending that 2 hours a day? It is probably the best decision I made in my life. I am healthier than ever before and my wife and I are happy as we were dating before marriage. I am going to keep this as a hobby rest of my life. Going to the gym also changed so much of my diet. Even though I eat most kind of foods, I’ve started to manage myself of all the intakes and monitor/control what I am consuming.

Year 2016

2016 Gym Usage

The year 2016 is a quite memorable one for me. I think I accomplished a couple of things.

1. I continued going to the Gym around 4-6 days a week. See screenshot above for my Gym usage
2. I began writing my Blogs. I am not a good writer, nor I enjoy writing. However, writing blogs is what helps me the most because often times, in order to prepare for a certain blog, I would need to do quite a bit of research on the topic. There is also a promise I made to myself, to write a blog every Saturday. It has been around 3 months of writing so far. It is going quite well as an article once a week gives me enough time to do my research and gather the stories. As a nonprofessional writer, who works 8 hours a day as a Developer during the week, it is definitely not easy to write a blog once a week. I struggled many times writing blogs in the beginning. However, I started to get this great achievement feeling after I complete a post. That achievement is what drives me to write a blog once a week.
3. Algorithms Projects is on the go! for multiple programming languages (Java, Perl and Python) in Github. I will continue building up more and more interesting algorithms in the future. I find this not only beneficial to others but it is also a great reference for me to go back and look for that algorithm.

Year 2017 Resolutions.

Let this post be a reminder for me. Hopefully, I can review whether the following resolutions are accomplished next year.

1. Consistency, Consistency & Consistency

1. Continue writing a blog every Saturday
2. Continue building algorithms in GitHub
3. Continue going to the gym

2. Dress Clothes Well

If you know me well, you probably have seen me wearing hoodie+sweatpants all the time. I would like to give it a try to change that. Here is at least what I am going to do. Friday and Weekends as my casual dress day. I will probably continue to wear sweatpants. I would like the other 4 working days from Mon-Thurs to be my dress day. I know I am a terrible dresser and I would like to at least put some effort on dressings this year. I do not have specific reasons for doing this, it’s probably something I would like to do in my life. Stay Neat, Stay Sensible! Who knows? I might be a fashion expert!

3. Improve my technical skills

When I say improving technical skills, I do not mean the language itself. I mean the skills of programming in general such as Algorithms, Architecture/Designs, Computer/OS details, etc. I do not wish to be tied to programming languages. If I know the right complexity for the right task using right data structures. I shouldn’t have any problem coding in any language. I will continue to expand on my GitHub Algorithms projects and further expand my knowledge in this area.

4. Be a Better Listener

I may not be the best listener even though I tried to listen to others. My opinions are usually too strong and bold, and sometimes even hurting other people’s feelings. It irritates me when that someone does not know/understand my point. However, that someone also has his interesting world on his side. It is actually quite fun to hear their story. I have to understand that their opinion is also very valuable and meaningful. To further extend to this point, I would like to be generous toward praises/compliments to others. I am one of those people who just compliments inside and never says it out loud. It was all kept inside of me which the others will never know. This is bad because I am essentially building a single-direction relationship. For example, I may think the other person is great at certain things, but the other person won’t know my feelings and may think that I am not appreciating all his hard efforts at all. This isn’t the behavior I want! Anyways, let me be more humble, stay put and listen to others patiently in the year 2017.

5. READ, READ and READ some more

I hate reading. I hate reading even more when someone tells me to. To be honest, I disliked almost every single teacher in Korea for their compulsory education including reading materials. In Canada, things were more relaxing and free, yet I just did not like studying at all. I graduated from the university 10 years ago and I realized within that time of 10 years, I only read 7 books including the computer programming language ones like Effective Java. My plan is to read at least 10 pages on averager per day which is around 2-300 pages a month then I should be able to finish around 10 books a year. Even when I was in university, I never read 10 books in one year before. This should be a good challenge for me, hopefully it will gradually better as time goes by.

6. Beer tasting

I love beer. I love tasting beers. I love tasting craft beers. At first, I thought I was drinking beers solely to interact with people. That still is a big part of me drinking beer. It is exciting to make conversation with people. However, I also love the taste of different kind of beers. It excites me and I am eager to hunt for a different kind of beer out there. I also love to try out different micro breweries. I like micro breweries for pretty much 2 reasons. 1. Microbreweries are usually clean and well organized. 2. Beer is usually far cheaper than anywhere else, even liquor store. I try to check in my beers in Untapped to have a good track of my beer tastings and see how others rated a certain beer. Since my old cell phone, Nexus 5, crashed a while ago, I have been reluctant to update untapped. As I am tasting more beers, it’d be nice to make some recordings on them as well One more thing to add as a part of this resolution: I really should stop drinking beer to get drunk. There have been many incidents in 2016 where I was drunk heavily. I was very ignorant about it because it never really bothered me. I wake up the next day after getting drunk and feeling great. So it did not bother me at all. However, the lesson here is, I should stop getting drunk, not for me, but for everyone else!

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