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January 01, 2008
Life : Resolute
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions in the traditional sense (promising that I will/won’t do specific things in the coming year); but I do often take the opportunity at the start of a new year to think about those things I’d like, The Lord willing, to focus on in the coming days.
This year there are two things I’d like to focus on.
The first is one I have already started – getting my backlog of books cut down to size. That involves both making the time to read more and being more disciplined in how many books I purchase. Neither of these should be difficult most of the time, and I don’t plan to worry about the occasional exceptions. For instance, Anne and I may return to London in the fall of 2008, and I’ll certainly purchase a number of books while there - even though there are several books still on my “to be read” shelf that I purchased on our last London trip – three years ago. There are just too many places in London to find books that are not readily available in the USA to worry about the impact it will have on my count.
The other area of focus is to take a realistic look at the various “dreams” I have had and decide which I am really going to pursue and which I should discard. I no longer think it is feasible to do all the things “I have always wanted to do”, and making a conscious decision to discard some of these is another form of simplification of my life which will increase my chance at getting to the others.
The list of dreams to consider includes:
- Game Development. I have a large file of game ideas (both computer and board games) I have thought up over the years hoping that someday I’d have the chance to develop them. Will I ever get to them? What am I willing to give up to make the time? At a minimum, perhaps I should look through the list and pick out a few that I want to keep and abandon the rest. I have been thinking about posting the ones I discard to my blog in case someone else wants to pick them up.
- Computer Simulations. I have a smaller list of things I have always wanted to program. Some of these started as part of a game idea; but I became more interested in the question of “how would I simulate that” than the game itself. Others have interesting applications which might be profitable if successful. I justify a couple of shelves of programming books I keep in my office under the guise that I’ll need the books if I ever get around to any of these projects; but I haven’t actually written any code for any of them in over 5 years. Hmmm
- Fiction Writing. I deliberately set this aside over a year ago because I didn’t feel I had anything to write that I would actually recommend if it was written by someone else. My ideas were entertaining; but I didn’t feel that entertainment alone was worth the investment it would take to finish one of my ideas. I’m still mulling over this quandary.
- Non-Fiction Writing. In this blog at least, I seem to be able to produce a fair amount of non-fiction content; and as I have been blogging I have started to get some ideas of books I might want to write. Should I set aside the time to work though one of these projects?
There are a few others; but those are the big ones that I want to prioritize and hopefully make some decisions on this year.
Posted by Steven at January 1, 2008 05:00 AM
