On the Move

Currently I am at a hotel in the process of moving towards my new place. I used this opportunity of a long drive to take some photos of my trip. It was kind of enlightening to have so much time to think to yourself. I also played a few chinese songs in hopes that I would try to relearn some vocab. 8 Months is going to go quick…Food and fitness wise was not a good day…but gotta keep going forward.

Starting never seem that hard.

Travelling for me has limitless possibilities. It gives you a glimpse into whatever kind of life you wish to lead. Going to a foreign country where you are able to rebuild your image is liberating. I was never very social (yeah as if it wasn’t obvious from the stories above) but whenever I travel, I have no other choice. I can be whoever and whatever I want to be. I go out and make friends in the day and hang out with them at night. It is like having a restart button on life. If you do something stupid or have bad social interactions, you just pick up, go somewhere else and try again. In some hostels, you don’t even have to leave and can even “restart” daily. There has been no greater positive impact for my social skills than travelling. You learn so much about yourself when you travel it is astounding why more people do not take gap years. I understand that it is not financially possible for everyone, but sometimes having this break will prepare you more for your future than any college class could ever do.

So today was both a good and bad day for me. I got back some results from my class that I have been taking. I did not do as well as I had hoped. It is hard to look at a class that you want to do well in and that you are majoring in only to find out that you are not very good at it. I will have to put in more time before the final exam next week and hopefully I will be able to pass the course by the end of it. On the bright side, I have purchased all the books that I will be reading over the next 8 months. It was very expensive around 80 dollars but I know that this investment will be one of my more worthwhile purchases.

I watched for the fifth time the movie “Yes Man”. I think this show along with The Bucket List have been the most impactful movies for me in the last few years. Now I know these movies are not profound masterpieces, but they did make me think. These movies struck close to home and I took time out of my day to analyze what I want in my life. To know that there are so many opportunities that I have turned down with lame excuses just because I was scare, tired, or lazy. I need to become a Yes Man. I need to become more open to all the possibilities life has to offer. So that’s it, I will do my best to agree to try more things, and force myself into becoming a Yes Man. As long as movies impact you in a certain way, anything can be a masterpiece to you. In 2008 I made a bucket list. I thought it was a great idea. Have a list of adventures and goals that you want to try to do before you kick the bucket. Slowly I have been trying to chip away at these goals. I will try to find these old lists and post them here. I think it would be a fun little way to see what I have left.

I am going to be busy moving, taking an exam, and starting a new job all within the next two weeks. It is going to be difficult but I cannot let these obstacles deter me from my goal. I have already stopped all take out foods and have been preparing healthier meals. My biggest goal of the day was finishing The Broker. It was a great book by John Grisham. True, it was not on my list but as I was buying some of my other books, I noticed it was on sale. I won’t count this towards my 8, but I still love the fact I am getting started again.

Life in Review

High school is long gone. I realized that every time I come home I imagine I would relive the fun times I’ve had in high school. The only problem with this fantasy is that I graduated high school 5 years ago. I have moved around quite a bit whether it is for work or for school and coming back home never seem to be the same. It is understandable as all my friends from high school have moved on with their lives, but every time I come home it seems like I am just stagnating, never improving or expanding my views. It is like tunnel vision where all I want to do is hang out with people from high school as if that would make everything better. In high school you had your friends all around. True you had problems and responsibilities but they are not the same as what you have to deal with now.  It is time to move on and move forward. I am not going to ignore my friends from high school, but to stop limiting my social circles to just high school friends when I am home. I heard somewhere that you only keep in contact with about 3-5 friends, and that seems about right. People are busy, and while social media has made it easier to keep in contact, it has also made it more obvious when you grow apart.

As I have mentioned before, I have let people influence my thinking. I try to maintain the peace and have some sort of innate desire to seek other’s approval. Cliché perhaps, but that was/is (?) me. Let me give you a couple stories about how that has affected me with the opposite sex. During my sophomore year, I met this great girl. She was funny and we really enjoyed the time we spent together.  We would call each other after school and since we were in the same club we spent quite a bit of time together. She was a little different but I guess that’s what I liked about her. We talked for a long time and she was basically the reason my phone plan ran out of minutes every month. We got close and had a lot of fun. Like I said we were both in a club and part of the same social group in that club. My friends thought she was too weird and gave me crap for hanging out with her. I like the fool that I was, never asked her out because of this and by the time I wised up, it was too late. Another quick example, I was about to leave on a month trip and there was this girl who I worked with at the time. She was incredible and I planned to ask her out. I told my friends about this plan and they were wondering why I would do that right as I was about to leave. This was at the beginning of December and told me to just wait till I came back. I did not think it was a big deal but I waited. When I came back she had been asked out by another guy. I kicked myself for that one. This is only one aspect of my life where people have influenced me in ways where I have not agreed. I do not blame anyone as the final decision was mine. I guess this was the greatest lesson I could have learned, but damn did it suck while it happened. Take it from me. The sooner you make your own decisions whether right or wrong is the day when you finally become independent.

Ugh…these memories about my relationships with other people have been flooding my mind. I can’t decide if it’s a gift or curse to have a mind that keeps thinking even though you may want to change topic. One more story, time to let it all out… there was this girl in high school I met my senior year. She was amazing…athletic, really smart (higher level classes/reader/etc), funny, and really pretty. I guess I deluded myself into thinking we were closer than we really were. We talked for hours online, in class, at sport clubs, and so on. The moment we graduated (I moved to a different country), things changed. She stopped replying to my emails and basically cut all communication with me. It was sort of sudden and I was shocked. We still hang out with large groups of friends when we are both in town but never alone and never has it been where we invited each other. Hahaha…before we graduated she wrote me this nice heartfelt message about how we would always be friends and how we would both travel together. Wishful thinking…takes more than one person to build a relationship.

Looking back at these last two posts I cannot believe how I am was so pathetic. I sounded like such a wuss…time to man up. I guess this is what this blog/8 month goal is about. To look back at all the things you regret and the reasons behind it and to change it for the future. Wow…it is hard for me to go back and read that crap. If you have read it, I apologize. Time to move on…

And so we begin…

Today is the day I start to evaluate and rebuild my life. Some background about me first. Over the last few years, I have noticed that I do not seem completely happy with my life’s direction. I have been more than lucky to have had the experiences that I have but I still feel that I am not taking 100% of the opportunities presented to me. This is going to be a bit boring, but I feel I need to write this down as a record for myself in the future. My plan is for the next 8 months is to try to achieve all my goals that I am about to list. It may seem impossible and silly, but I am tired of letting people tell me what I cannot do. I have let people influence my choices and that above all else has been my biggest regret. Whether I make it or not, I will work towards these 5 goals.

In high school I was and am still overweight, but that did not stop me from taking part in sports and other activities. I did water polo and had a wonderful time for those 4 years. Friends were not that big of a problem either although, I still feel like if I went back I would change a lot. This is what I want to prevent. Five years from now, if I look back at my life, I do not want to wish that there were things I wanted to change about it. This brings to my first goal, losing weight. So many times I feel like my weight has been a factor in some of my unhappiness. This needs to change now. Never again will I let this be a limitation in my future endeavors.

I have been thinking about what I am supposed to do with my life and it sometimes just bothers me to the point where I feel anxiety. Not knowing what career path is right or if I am working on a good degree is sometimes overwhelming. I feel restless because deep down I know I just want to travel and explore the world. I have taken many trips and I have met so many people along the way. Though I may never see them again, I know that I want to continue traveling and experiencing these new cultures. I would say the largest expenditure I have every year goes towards some sort of travel. Knowing that my future will revolve around traveling is the reason I have set my second goal; learn Spanish and Chinese. My plan is to buy a motorcycle and ride around South America for a few months. Chinese is going to be valuable in my future and will also fit into my travel plans of going to Taiwan. This goal alone seems impossible to do in 8 months, but I do have some background which I hope will make it easier for me to learn these languages.

To also work towards my future goal of traveling, I would like to pick up a hobby that will help me capture the memories. My third goal is to learn how to use Photoshop and learn Photography. I want to be able to take photos of different things I see and places I visit. Sometimes during my trips I use my standard point and shoot camera, but the images I get when I come home do not seem to have the same effect. Hopefully, with this new hobby I will be able to capture the moment in a way that I can relive the experience when I look at the photos.

On my last trip which happened to be in China, I met a man who has been traveling for years. He told me that he worked hard and did his own investments which gave him the freedom to travel. His lifestyle was so inspiring and I felt like I could have talked to him forever. What really struck me the most is that I needed to learn more about investing. I needed to be able to not only make money, but make my money work for me. My fourth goal is to learn more about investing and keeping my money safe, but growing. I do accounting and business in university so I hope to build on my knowledge.

Lastly, I used to read quite a bit. I felt like books were an escape from reality and gave me the imagination and ideas that I use daily. I want to go back to this time. For the next 8 months, my fifth goal is to read 8 books. I will pick 8 random books from all genres and read them in the 8 months. They will be books I have never read before. I can’t prove that I have never read them but you’ll just have to take my word on it.

Having goals is all fine and dandy, but unless you have a plan then you’ll never know if you have reached your goals. Here are the parameters I will use to evaluate my goals over the next 8 months.

Goal 1 (Lose weight)

• C25K (Couch to 5Km)
• Swim 100 yards in under 55 seconds
• Run an 8 minute mile
• End weight 80kg

Goal 2 (Learning Languages)

• Complete Rosetta Stone (Chinese 1-3, and Spanish 1-5)
• Complete Pimselur for both languages
• Learn 3000 vocabulary words for each language
• Watch basic television shows in foreign languages

Goal 3 (Learn Photography)

• Master my PowerShot SX 20 IS
• Go out once a week to take photos
• Finish all my Photoshop tutorials
• Collect 35 photos for a “Portfolio”

Goal 4 (Learn Investing)

• Work towards a better Portfolio
• Save money towards Roth IRA (Max out for the year)
• 5 Stock picks
• Create 5 models for the stocks
• Research 5 stocks in Report form

Goal 5 (Read more books)

• Finish 8 Books by the end of December
• Write mini book report on each book

1. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium #1) by Stieg Larsson, Reg Keeland
3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
5. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
6. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
7. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
9. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

With my goals laid out, I hope to achieve these tasks by December 31, 2013. Before the New Year, I want to have completed everything. As a side note and future reminder to myself, I have bet a friend $20 through Paypal that I will be 80kg before the New Year. The purpose of my blog is twofold. I want a journal to document my thoughts and progress, and a place where I have to show accountability for my actions. With all this being said, here we go.