Let me start by saying I don’t believe in New Years resolutions, and doubt if I ever will. After all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t resolve to change yourself immediately when you want to, instead of waiting until the annual arbitrary commitment pledge date. Plenty of studies and gym enrollment vs usage rate support the results of said pledges.

However, one tactic for self improvement i really do believe in is goals. Consistently setting and achieving goals will let you achieve more than your heart’s greatest desire. For me, setting goals via big dreams allows me to challenge and exceed my own limitations daily, thus achieving bigger and better things. My goal list also lets me reflect on my weekly pursuits, so that I know my time is being invested well.

Here are some of the pursuits I’ll be investing my time in during the next dozen months:

Art Prints – I’ve recharged my creative batteries and am excited to get back into art print production. I’ll be focusing on stamp-based designs, including experimenting with a series of large scale stamp & spraypaint fusions. I’m looking forward to the coming weeks when I can show some progress on this project!

Web Sprucing – Just as with a closet of unused winter gear, online web presences can use some tidying up of their own. Now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I can finally tame and better present the somewhat wild accumulation of blog posts and content I’ve generated these past years, including doing a long put-off task, my own website design! I can also use this time to join and engage with communities related to my pursuits.

Photography: This is going to be a big year for focusing on my photographic skills. Everyone knows I’m not someone who desires physical items, however I am indeed working towards acquiring one critical item: my own DSLR camera. I’ve spent years learning the basics of advanced photography with my mom’s Nikon D70s. I now know that the next step is to make it mine, find a special tool of my own that I can cherish and love, and together the two of us shall create beautiful art for years to come. I wonder if I could create a Canadian Kickstarter project to help fund my camera purchase: Donate dollars and  get a few framable limited edition hand-signed prints? I could go on a valley road trip and capture the lovely sights with my lenses! FYI I’m still leaning towards a Canon, solely for its additional video functions.

There are, as always, plenty of other secret projects in various states of completion that I haven’t talked about. Life is much more fun with secret projects! I look forward to sharing the progress and results of these endeavors with you, victory is far more sweet when shared.

One of my fun minihobbies this year was to collect Starbucks cards. There are hundreds of them out there, many of them being country-specific. Here’s the definitive fan listing for all the cards. Thanks to some very generous customers, my collection includes a few older and interesting cards. Thanks to my own hard work, I have a super unique card in my collection: my own custom issued partner card. My Gold Card will be coming once I get the required stars using my now-registered Partner Card, and as I travel around the world in coming years I’ll be adding more and more cards to my collection. Now to think of a cool way to display them all!

“To express yourself needs a reason, but expressing yourself is the reason.” – Ai Weiwei

Over the past months I’ve been nose-to-the-grindstone busy. I’ve been working just as hard as I was while on the farm, just retooled back here in the city.

I have to admit, it’s taken me some time to get over the sudden transplant shock of farm to city life. I guess in retrospect it’s clear: it’s always easier to embrace something new and exciting, as was my city-to-farm transition. The newness of the animals and the many adventures was intoxicatingly delicious. It was a feast for my brain and body, and both were well nourished throughout the year. I gave myself an opportunity I never had growing up – the stereotypical “uncle/cousin lives on a farm and I spent some time there too”. I learned so much about myself, the world, and life in general, often at the strangest and most unpleasant times like mucking out the barn! I know now that farming was and is one of the missing pieces in both the puzzle of life and my heart. As with each year, my purpose in the here and now becomes more clear.

Of course, with the good comes the bad. Every silver lining has a cloud, or however that strange saying goes. It was the inevitable challenge from the universe: my true and final test into the realm of adulthood. I went through the classic 5 stages of grief, albeit with a much longer bargaining period (greatly facilitated with another similarly lost soul) and a hastily tacked-on acceptance phase. In reality, who else wouldn’t when faced with the hard sell that your tolerably comfortable life will now radically and uncontrollably self-destruct.

As I always do, I’ll not lie: the process was the most painful experience I’ve had in my life; hands down the toughest challenge my emotions and pocketbook have ever been met with. However I see now that everything was the result of choices I made either consciously or subconsciously, and I stand by every one of them, with two large caveats: I wish I had made these choices more consciously, and more quickly.

These two key points are life lessons I have already integrated into my existence, and I am bewildered by the sheer effectiveness. With each passing day I further free myself from what my emotional and primitive subconscious self desires/is told to desire. Each step away from that is a step towards the polar opposite: directly channeling my conscious self towards achieving the goals and dreams I’ve always desired.

And what’s even more bewildering is this: it works.

I guess I expected it to not work, because, well, if it’s this simple, why hasn’t everyone else figured it out? …Maybe I’ll have more of an answer after hours/years of reflection.

Throughout this past year I set a goal to learn about business and the way the financial world works. My reasons were many: to understand the reasons for my farm venture’s lack of success; to mute the subconscious emotional banter in my brain; to prepare myself for my upcoming decades of achievement. On all three grounds my efforts have been met with great success! I’ve gained a much greater value from my farm enterprise after reflecting back on it with lenses of entrepreneurial knowledge; I’ve found many ideas and quotes which will continue to help me understand and enjoy the emotional rollercoaster ride known as life.

However most importantly, just as with my farm, I’ve found yet another one of my Trivial Pursuit-styled heart pieces. Rather, the businesswoman/entrepreneur in me was always there, it was simply being buried underneath the endless stream of “should do’s” and “must be’s” told to us by the world (and even more cunningly, our own subconscious minds).

I now know the price for denying your true self: endless unhappiness and misery. I won’t be making that mistake ever again! It’s cosmically funny that it took going through all the pain to get to this level of understanding, and that without the pain I wouldn’t be this wiser person I am now. My life truly IS my artistic masterpiece, and I’ve suffered for it. But I’m so glad to have gone through it, as I am now stronger and better than before, and thus capable of so much more than what I’ve achieved up to date. Or another way of putting it: I shudder to think of where I’d be had I instead chosen to changed nothing on that fateful day in September.

Friends, I want this message to inspire you, to put confidence back into your shoes. I truly think that confidence and inspiration are what we need in the zany world we live in today. Our purpose in existence has been corrupted by those who would have us do nothing but buy everything, those who would have us slave away at satisfying subconscious whims instead of empowering us to rise above them and achieve greatness. Modern society has bankrupted itself selling us this twisted message: “Pain is shameful. Failing is shameful AND painful. You’re better off not even trying. Don’t work hard. Just buy this answer.”

Me and my zero dollars are here to sell you another message:
Don’t believe in no. Failure is simply the step to success. Take what you learn from it and move on to the next big thing. Learn from pain, it’s not shameful to have it, it’s human!

I know it feels weird to read this, as it felt very weird to be thinking this over the course of the past year. But I’ve come to accept that this is the message my true self has been screaming out these past few years. I’m simply glad I’ve chosen to start listening to it instead of trying to cover it up for more years.

Let this be a testament to those looking for the same.

As I’ve discussed before, one of my current challenges is finding enough time in my day to fit in all the various tasks I need and want to accomplish. Reducing the task list is not an option – dishes need to get done, and you must always budget time to reflect on your dreams and progress. The only viable option is to make my pipelines more efficient, so that’s what I’ve been working on. I’m glad to report that I’ve found a few new tools that help make my day much easier! Sharing is caring, so here they are.

Pinterest   http://pinterest.com/     My userpage
Pinterest, a fusion of pin and interest, lets you easily create a collage of inspirational source materials. You simply click on the “Pin It” bookmarklet tool on the page with your inspiration, a popup lets you write a quick note and you select the board you want to pin it to, and voila, there it is for you and all the community to see. The nature of this tool allows you to browse other people’s boards, which can offer a trove of further inspiration and sharing!

Up until now, I’ve had a problem in my life in that I encounter so many cool and interesting ideas but I don’t have enough time to blog about each one. Pinterest lets me keep a hold of these inspirations without requiring the overhead that a blog post does. This tool helps solve my problem of keeping my inspirations on file, accessible, and visible to help inspire others.

Workflowy  https://workflowy.com/
Workflowy is one of the most simple yet powerful tools I’ve seen. In a nutshell, it’s a glamourized Notepad to-do list. But oh the glamour it has! It takes a node-based approach to to-do items, allowing each item to itself be the title of another to-do list. This recursion allows you to pre-plan and list out each element of your brainstorm. It also has #hashtag capabilities as well as a completed indicator and user sharability/editability. These features help take it from a simple to-do list into a powerful project management tool.

For me, The phrase “I love lists” is a gross understatement. I believe so strongly in lists! It’s simple: if you write down your desires and the steps it takes to get to them, all you need to do is that first step. There are no excuses when you have a list. You can see why I highly value a tool that helps me make and share such lists.

Of course, I continue to use Google Reader as the way to catch up on all the many blogs I read, although I’m disappointed with their new interface redesign. The first rule of design is “Don’t impede the primary purpose”, but they broke this by allocating less screen space to the blog posts and more to the menus around those posts… A silly mistake. A novice mistake, actually, one that leads to competition beating you.

Another tool I use to keep up to date with friends etc is the very popular Facebook. I’ve noticed with their recent improvements, more people have been sharing more diverse content, so in a way it acts as an information hub now more than it ever did before. I love the convenience it offers me in keeping up to date with friends, but as a tool for new discovery, I find it’s completely lacking. Facebook is for friends you already have, not for meeting new friends. That saddens me a bit, as I do love to meet new people and see new ways of thinking.

For that, I find Flickr is an excellent tool. There are tons of pools of content dedicated to certain topics, like cupcakes, home design, graphic design, photography, etc. Its community aspects are some of the best available. I find Flickr is very lacking in embracing new development ideas though, for example uploading video still has many limits (format, time, etc) despite how common video capturing is nowadays.

Over the past weeks my learning has included a focus on leverage and how important it is in being successful in business and life. Think about a lever – by using a stick (a tool) and a fulcrum (a certain piece of knowledge in a certain position), you can move a huge object with little effort. You literally do more with less: leverage. This principle can be applied to other areas in life, such as in business: by having an employee use tools and knowledge to create huge effects with little effort, you leverage them and create value. Of course, you already have the best tool possible: your brain. You simply need a fulcrum to let you use it to its maximum potential.

The tools I’ve listed above let me do more with less, they let me leverage my time and energy into something more than just seconds and potential. They let me capture and streamline the processing of information, and as I’ve come to re-learn, information is knowledge, and knowledge truly IS power. By using tools like this, I’m able to make myself stronger, do more with less. What more could a busy person ask for?