Each year I try to come up with a new years resolution, and then try to stick to it. I’ve had some interesting ones in the past few years. Last years was to go to gym 350 days of the year. Sadly, that did not happen. The year before I believe my goal was to read more, and the year before that it was to do more (Do More).

Some people scoff at the idea of a New Year’s resolution. Personally, I relish the challenge. I accept the fact that it probably won’t work out completely, so I tend to like resolutions that are scale based instead of directly quantifiable. For example, if my goal was read more and last year I read 5 books, and this year I read 6 I achieved my goal. If my goal was to read 20 books, that is a little harder. By picking something to generally focus on, I tend to increase my chances of success.

This year, I started with a list of potential resolutions. I just started writing down ideas that could potentially be resolutions. This list takes up an entire page in my field notes, almost 30 potential resolutions. Some of them are more goals. Here are some choice selections:

  • Fill my journal
  • Run a Marathon
  • Do a standing full on the ground
  • Do an Olympic distance triathlon
  • Fix my personal website
  • Blog once per week
  • Publish a photo per week
  • Make more websites
  • Take up crossfit
  • Win at something
  • Keep my apartment clean
  • Learn to cook (seriously)
  • Run 50 miles a month
  • Build things
  • Host more parties
  • Do more by hand/from scratch
  • Get my mile time under 7 minutes
  • Write more
  • No more than 1 cup of coffee per day
  • Open source my budget
  • Learn to bake bread
  • Dress better
  • Eat more vegitarian
  • Learn to draw
  • Be more creative

This is a gargantuan list of tasks. Some of them seem more mutually exclusive. I mean, if I didn’t work, could utilize all waking hours, and was partially super-human, I could probably get through all of them. I do work, need time to rest, and am not super-human (sadly). Therefore I have cut the list down.

I’ve decided to focus on one:

Be More Creative

To mean this means more than creating art. I want to be more creative in as many aspects of my life as possible. For example, I’ve been focused on Cheerleading for 15 years of my life. I train by lifting and tumbling. Instead, this year I plan to expand my athletic endeavors to include more skiing, snowboarding, running, swimming, biking (I already did this one, but yeah), rock climbing, etc. I plan to be more creative in the types of foods I eat, and where I get my finances from. I plan to redesign my wordpress blog. I want to focus on design idioms in my online and physical life.

The way I see it, being creative is a way of thinking about life. I intend to change the way I think about my days, hours, minutes, and seconds, free time, vacations, workouts, drives, photographs, and much more.