Starting This Year For Better You

To take care of yourself. What things do you have to look back from here? What would you be grateful to have started this year? Start today? Here’s some of mine.

Last Year - 2019

It’s a bit difficult to wrap my head around sometimes. But my lifestyle has changed drastically from June 2019. To the point where some people even felt strange around me. I’ll take these over how it was before.

• Lost Weight:
  Since early 2019 I’ve lost 12 kg of weight. My weight has been stable for the past 6 months. Health check this year yielded the best results ever. This is done with portion control. No special diet or exercise. Going from slightly above average weight to slim does mean that much of my wardrobe had become strangely loose and funny.
• Get Up Early:
  From someone routinely going to bed at midnight or past that. Getting up later than 7 in the morning groggily. For the past year I’m up around 4 in the morning and go to bed not later than 10. This is from going to bed early and not closing my curtains. It’s like the natural night sky shifts my sleeping pattern.
• Quit Alcohol:
  Up until 2019 I’ve been drinking a lot. At least every other day and pretty much everyday. In social situations and alone. I don’t even know why. So in the spirit of losing weight, I cut down a lot because alcohol is very high in calories (just second to pure fat). Then with practice, I figured out I don’t really enjoy drinking anyways.
• Meditation & Spiritual Practice:
  After June 2019 I started looking into spiritual development and it seems all road pointed out a meditation practice. Starting from 1 minute sessions. Getting into positions with difficulty. Hyperactive mind racing. With support on the spiritual side providing fulfilment that I’ve neglected all my life. I can say with confidence now that I’m much more grounded and happy than ever. Routinely I now spend about 90 minute in sitting meditation every day. To start and end the day. I try to add in more sessions during the workday too.
• Yoga:
  Another thing that surprised me how it can eventually become a natural practice. Like an extension of meditation practice. I got started and still train with a teacher. This made sure that I start off with good basics. Turns out that the basics are always around. Right now I’m quite pleased with my strength and flexibility. Positions that were unthinkable can now be eased into naturally. The best effect is that I now don’t get any ache and zero office syndrome at all.

This Year - 2020

The theme this year seems less physical and more creative development. I do look forward to how it develops over time.

• Writing:
  There’s just so much more writing done this year in so many formats. Coming from someone who only consumes content. Even adding any content production at all is a big change. Every morning I write morning pages (free writing) by hand. Type up an entry on CoWriters. Try to write blog posts or on Indie Hackers a few times a week. Tweets everyday. Comments on Indie Hackers. Maintaining a weekly newsletter. Finish the day with journal on paper.
• Internet Entrepreneurship:
  Circumstances turned my direction online from a more traditional offline background. Technically I shouldn’t even call myself that yet cause I don’t really earn anything online this year, let alone make it a career to earn a living on. There’s still much to learn in practice and the only way to practice is experience. I’m developing my entrepreneurial compass and I hope to enjoy the journey following where the heart points.
• No-code:
  It’s pretty cool to have so many tools at our disposal to build so many possible projects. From learning no-code that I’ve discovered that I actually enjoy working with spreadsheet and automation. If I see Airtable + Zapier anywhere I press like. From wants to revenue there needs not be any code at all, so for a non-technical entrepreneur there’s less barriers than ever.
• Code:
  And yet I’ve just re-enrolled in a serious computer science course to build up my technical foundation again. The past few days have been about putting together, breaking, debugging, improving, putting together again programs in C. So actually I’m trading some time writing words to writing code but it’s also so much fun! A background in programmatic thinking will be useful to build in no-code too. It’s a mindset that I’m cultivating to add flexibility to my problem solving toolbox. Coding being fun is a nice bonus.

So what about you? What have you started last year? What have you started this year? What will you start this year?