2015 New Years Resolution Thread

RichardKennaway aimed to not die

That was posted in late 2012, and as you can see, I succeeded, two years running! Not dying is clearly something I should make a habit of.

The new year is a popular Schelling point

It's interesting that you use the phrase "Schelling point." Strictly speaking, is there any advantage for people who want to improve themselves to coordinate their efforts to start on the same day? Perhaps, but I don't think that's what you meant -- I suspect it's about coordination among the internal factions in one's brain/mind.

A few years ago I flossed for a whole January, but then became complacent and stopped. It might have been an altogether too hard NYR for me, so this year I have one good idea and a firm intent to keep it:

• If somebody tells me I should check something with a doctor, I will.

I have a few reasons for this. I was raised to believe that if I visit a doctor more than once a year, I must be a hypochondriac. So I just didn't. Plus, since I almost never see any doctors, I don't really know what is worrisome and what is normal, I just used to ignore anything happening with my body. This is also an excercise in trust. I know I can't really trust myself in the matter of my own health, so I will consciously put trust in other people intead of waving away their good advice.

My list of goals, nice habits to have and general goodness tends to grow in length instead of shrinking for various reasons but I can make progress anyhow in implementing it. Also I know that having way too many goals at once is harmful, so here's the obvious caveat: This is a general list and brainstorming so far, with no real plan for realiable implementation, so take the goals, the length of the list and the commentary with the proverbial grain of salt. (Legend: "I vow" is certain, "I will" actually means "maybe")

• Charity: There has been a delay in forming my contract for my student's job and thus also a delay in payment, which made me think about money a lot more than usual. Since for various reasons my cashflow will improve I hereby vow to donate 1% of my income below the taxation threshold and 10% of any income beyond that to a mix of GiveWell, CFAR, MIRI and Wikipedia of my choosing.

• Health and charity: The weird case where self-interest and the public interest coincide applies for three things I have in mind

  • I will donate blood at least once in 2005. Of course I'll donate 10% of the remuneration I get.
  • I will get all my vaccinations up-to-date and take any additional as recommended by my physician. Maybe the payment from above will subsidise a shot not covered by insurance. One prick for another.
  • I will take a course and certification in first aid. It might just be one of my dearest people I can help or just the occasional stranger.

• Education: No university and no school can offer comprehensive education, it has to come from many sources.

  • I tried audiobooks via Audible for the first time less than a month ago and I was amazed. At 10€ per audiobook it is quite a bargain and ideal for any non-fiction book with low information density like biographies. So I will listen through at least one audiobook per month, totaling twelve (12) books consumed in 2015.
  • Though this will happen at university, it still gets to the same heading. I will start learning Spanish and get at least to A1 level as I am currently pre-occupied learning Russian and developing a general love for languages.
  • Speaking of learning languages, as this is very fact-heavy and I start seeing the benefits of SRS, I will use Anki every single day instead of clusters of ten interspersed with pauses of a couple of days.

• Travel: This might just as well put this under the education heading, but it deserves its own spot. I will travel to at least one country I have not yet set foot in, alone. Since I live in Germany, the bar is relatively low, but this is one goal that tends to fuel itself.

• Interviewing: I will send out applications for part-time jobs, internships and stipends. Since I can control the material I send but not the answers I receive, the goal is set to the former. For far too long I have ignored the usual advice of getting at least one of each in internships, stipends, part-time-jobs and maybe a year/half-year abroad so I am looking for ways to fix that. The most obvious is to send out applications like crazy. This obviously ties into the points education and travel.

Some ideas I had before but I am unsure of in the face of total workload are to subscribe to a higher quality publication like the Economist and read at least one article every week or to read at least one book per month in addition to the audiobooks from above.

I think that long-term goals should be qualitative and subjective, and supported by short-term goals that are quantitative and objective. I like my short-term goals to be achievable within 12 weeks at the outside, and preferably much less.

One reason for this is that as I learn by pursuing and achieving short-term goals, my outlook on the long term changes. Another reason is that the pursuit of long-term goals is hindered by getting stressed out over specific numbers or metrics, and made easier by pushing the edge of my subjective performance envelope. In other words, if I'm always trying to perform such that I feel mostly positive (which isn't necessarily the same as feeling good!) close to the point where I start to fail, I'm building a long-term positive association with my goal while incrementally improving.

This is easiest for me to illustrate with athletic goals. One of my long-term goals for 2015 is to feel physically light and subjectively strong. One of my short-term goals in support of this is to do 10 reps of the strict overhead press with 95 pounds at a bodyweight of 150 or less. Right now this seems subjectively hard, but I know from experience that I am probably less than 8 weeks from achieving it. When I get there, I'll make another short-term goal based on how I feel subjectively about the long term goal. This is probably too big a short-term bite for an area of practice in which one has little experience; I have many years of physical training experience to go on in making these goals. Some years ago when I had a long-term goal of getting back into coding, my short-term goals were things like "learn how to split a string in Python": something that I should be able to achieve in one sitting.

Self-Made Renegade: -1000 Subscribers on Email List -Launch First Product -Make Enough to Quite Dayjob

Quantified Startup: -Finish Odin Project -Build at Least One Project I Use Every Day

Speaking Liaison: -Get Over Fear of Cold Calls -Book at Least One Paid Speaking Gig

* this
* list

Nobody asked for my advice but I'll give it anyway: Don't tell anyone your new year's resolution. Because if you tell people, it will give you a feeling of accomplishment which will undermine your motivation.

Keep your goals to yourself.

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself?language=en

My new years resolution, as part of a longer-term goal to become better at coding, is to make at least one commit to github every day in 2015. Not all of these will be public, because some of them will be currently private code associated with my lab work. But, I'll post a screenshot at the end of the year.

Has anyone tried a similar thing, have advice for me, or think that this is a terrible idea?

Not exactly a resolution, but given the time of the year it is close enough.

I am also responsible to get better, because I can, and because only a better version of me will be able to solve certain problems and help in some circumstances. Tsuyoku Naritai!

Can't, sorry. The list is topped by "Be more secretive." (It continues in about the same vein.)

I'm going to stop making new years resolutions and stop behaving like i need to "overcome" myself in favour of some poorly explored goals and social stimuli.

I'm going to stop using the word "universe". Its appliation across and even within different fields of science is a fiasco.

I'm not sure what's wrong with reality, that we need all sorts of strange names for it.

I'm going to start tracking when I go to bed, and make it earlier. Nominal goal is no later than midnight regularly, 2AM on "late nights" where I have unusual reason to stay out late. No limit on emergencies - I still can, and occasionally find it valuable, to pull an all-nighter - but by staying up to type this I'm in violation of this goal as it's past 3AM here. I also don't have a good way to track bed times yet, other than manual recording; any suggestions? I know many fitness bands claim to be able to track sleep cycles but I haven't tried any of them and am not sure if any are (or aren't) particularly good for this, or if there's an alternative approach people would recommend.