Wow. What a year. There were many challenges and I accomplished little. The irony that it was the year of the rabbit is not lost on me.

I’d like to thank all my friends and various associates for being a guiding light this year, as it would have been a lot more harrowing to do this one alone.

Anyways, good riddance - here’s an outline of what I intend to accomplish by the end of this year. Resolutions, if you will.

Design and Ship one real, physical product

I spent 2023 researching, reading about, and practicing Industrial Product Design. At the end of January I will have completed a course in product design for 3D Printing, which primes me to start manufacturing some of the products that have been languishing on sketch paper in various notebooks.

I’m not sure exactly what this will shape up to be, but I have a couple solid ideas that I’m ready to pursue, including a coin bank design that I’ll be publishing an article about eventually, even if I never end up building it.

📈 You can track how I’m progressing in this goal on this very blog.

Design and Ship 3 Digital Products

Making things for computers is much easier than making physical things, so I’m stretching my goal out from last year and intend to ship three different digital products by the end of the year - the first being a calendar app that I’ve been working on for the last two months, and should be ready for debut soon-ish.

This isn’t really the space to languish on it at length, but essentially the idea is a calendar with which you can only interact via writing on it or placing stickers - no notifications, no messages - just something simple to look at and update. You’ll see what I mean soon.

📈 You can track how I’m progressing in this goal on this very blog.

Read 100 Books this Year

This is the big one. To accomplish this, I need to read about 8.3 books per month, or roughly two per week. This is attainable amount with my reading speed (Roughly 500 WPM), as I can finish a novel in roughly a four and a half hours if I keep my focus on it.

When I was younger it was easy for me to finish multiple novels in a day, and my hope with this resolution is to rekindle that fire.

The secret to making this goal accomplishable is to rapidly discard any book I’m dragging through or not enjoying, keep a long holds list at my local library, and keep my eReader loaded up with books to read while I’m on the go.

📈 You can see how I’m progressing in this goal here.

Here are the first eight books that I intend to finish by the end of the month.

1. The Company by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge
2. Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
3. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
4. Blood Meridian by Cormath McCarthy
5. Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang
6. Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva
7. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand¹
8. Fragments of an Infinite Memory by Maël Renouard

Get that Chess ELO Up

I studied very hard last year to get my ELO on Lichess to around 900 in Rapid games. I’ve checked out a couple books on more advanced chess strategy and would like to float around 1200 by the end of the year.

📈 You can track how I’m progressing in this goal here

Listen to 50 new albums.

“Listening” in this concept means sitting down and focusing on an album of music from start to end. I haven’t curated much of a starter list for this compared to the book reading list, but this is the first album I’ve listened to this year:

It’s a pretty pumpy drum and bass album from a new creator, Jessiewithaphone, that also released today! I’ve enjoyed it immensely.

📈 You can see how I’m progressing in this goal here.

Develop my Freaking Newsletter

I’ve had a news letter linked to this blog for about two years now, and intend to develop it into something more useful then the occasionaly “Hey, I wrote something” email that I send out quarterly.

I mainly intend to use that Newsletter to keep people abriged about where I stand with the various above goals, so if that’s something you’re interested in tracking, sign up below

Notes