2015: Goal, Theme & Challenge – Review
At the beginning of 2015 I wrote about my goal, theme and challenge for the year. I’ve posted a few updates throughout the year but want to take some time now to do a final review.
2015 Goal: Read 26 Books
Self Grade: 5/10
My goal was to read 26 books – I finished at 12.
This was just a miserable failure. I was certainly busy but I know for a fact that with time I spent playing through a few video games and watching a number of movies, I could have accomplished this with only consumption time.
To be fair, I believe this is the most books I’ve ever read in a year. Last year I read 17 but 6 were audiobooks. I had also strived to read more fiction, which 8 of the 12 were.
The complete list includes:
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma
- Death on the Nile
- No Country for Old Men
- Fluke
- A Scanner Darkly
- Managing Brand Equity
- The Kite Runner
- 7 Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness
- Life of Pi
- The Great Divorce
- Steppenwolf
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
2015 Theme: Live Slower
Self Grade: 8/10
The key difference between my themes and goals is that the goal should be something relatively simple that I want to repeat in a measurable way to build a habit, while the theme is something I want to think about and practice, but I am not yet obliged to form it into habit.
That is all to say that I don’t think I actually went much slower this year, but I did think about it a good bit and was able to dip my toes in the water of it.
Resting is now a category of activity in my mind. It wasn’t before.
I leave 2015 having experimented with savoring moments – enjoying them deeply instead of just moving on to accomplish the next thing. I look forward to doing more of this.
2015 Challenge: Summit Mt. Whitney
Self Grade: 10/10
In August I summited the mountain along with a few friends.
This was a challenge I knew would be pretty easy. It was certainly a grueling hike and it took a lot of coordination to get permits and wrangle together three friends that now live thousands of miles apart. But of the three challenges I have done to date, this is the one where there was highest chance of success (and probably least chance of death – which are not necessarily correlated).
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