My New Year Resolutions (2024)

Jan 22, 2024

It’s that time of the year! To make a renewed attempt at reaching out for your ideal lifestyle.

Posts like these are incomplete without a pretentious picture of pristine wilderness!

I’m a sucker for resolutions. I’m such a romantic at heart that even the first couple days of every month fill me up with renewed inspiration. Standing at the doorstep of a whole new year is a big deal for me. The dazzle of possibilities blinds me.

If resolutions aren’t your thing, you might wanna roll your eyes and skip this. This post will be dripping with cheesiness, full of links to motivational resources.

My 2024 Resolutions

Below’s a list of pursuits I wanna busy myself with this year.

Monastic focus on Golang and open source software:
I’ve always been intrigued by the power of daily practice and the magic that happens in a few years if you relentlessly keep up with your practice routine all the way through to the end. This applies to any human endeavor - be it writing, programming, music, arts and craft, learning languages, you name it.

Stephen King talks extensively about the power of practice in his memoir “On Writing”.

Guitarists and chess players also make for great examples of the power of practice. I’ve for long had an “Inspiration.txt” document where I’ve saved the below notes, gathered from the hyperlinked sources:
- A champion BMX rider, Slash put the bike aside to devote himself to playing guitar, practicing up to 12 hours a day.
- Carlsen developed his early chess skills playing by himself for hours on end—moving the pieces around, searching for combinations, and replaying games and positions his father showed him.
- It required Keanu Reeves to become sufficiently good at judo, jiu-jitsu, and tactical 3-gun shooting. Reeves was game. He trained eight hours a day, four months in a row. The effort paid off.
- While Bettencourt was slow to adopt the instrument under his brother's tutelage, his skills quickly developed when he began teaching himself, and he has mentioned in many interviews that he would skip many school days to practice upwards of seven hours a day.
You might find these anecdotes unrelatable, I do too. Most of these guys honed their craft with hours of practice when they were kids and had all the time and no responsibilities, and were celebrities by the time they were young adults.

But I do draw inspiration from examples like these. Pursuing mastery in a craft is rewarding in itself and helps keep the flame of enthusiasm for life burning. It keeps me from growing numb with the typical comforts of modern urban existence, where you try to fill the growing internal emptiness with ever-increasing materialistic consumption and conveniences.

My monk-like focus this year will be getting heads-down deep into Golang and delve into Go open-source code. I wanna clock at least 2-3 hours in the morning and another 2 hours at least during the second part of the day. More is better. I know from experience that this won’t feel like hustle and grind.

There are plenty of exciting Go projects to dive into: etcd, raft, go-ethereum, tsdb, go-leveldb, containerd, kubernetes, revel, fiber. More listed at awesome-go.
Learning German
I’ve dabbled with German in the past but never really did it justice. As I mentioned in the previous point above, the magic hasn’t happened because I haven’t put in the hours.

I always look back to the year gone past and beat myself up - “Man, if only I had spent as little as 30 minutes everyday during 2023, imagine the progress I would have made in 12 months!” The unstoppable time-train keeps chugging forward. I don’t wanna beat myself up again when that time-train grabs me and dumps me into 2025.

I wanna clock one-hour of German language practice everyday. As a parent of a 4 year old boy, I witnessed how kids miraculously acquire fluency in their native language. No lessons, no teaching, no studying grammar. Just listening to the language spoken around them and beginning to speak - broken and wrong at first, that progressively gets better.

I’ll be following the same model with German - no lessons, no courses, no boring grammar studies. I’ll just deconstruct the language by watching German movies and shows, and reading conversational German in comic-books. Add some spaced-repetition to the mix and I’ll be well along the way.

I’ll begin with the excellent Nicos Weg video series.
I doubt if anyone has read this far into my long rambling essay, but if you also happen to be a German learning enthusiast, let’s be learning buddies! Leave a comment, or DM me and let’s Deutsch sprechen! :)
YouTube
How do I measure my progress with software and German? That brings me to my third resolution for the year - Document my progress on a YouTube channel.

A few of you readers might recall that I had a “CubicleDog” YouTube channel last year which has now disappeared. For new readers that did not get a chance to visit my channel - I had a few videos up there talking about FIRE, displaying my net-worth and playing Guitar covers.

Reading, writing and talking about FIRE and finances now bores me to tears. Unless you’re still learning, or building your own brand-content around these topics, don’t you at some point wanna consider them solved problems in your life and move on to other pursuits? I suppose I’ve arrived at that point. I also began getting self-conscious about exhibiting our net-worth in full public view - especially as I came out of anonymity and the blog readers grew from an intimate group of 25-30 first subscribers to currently 250 and slowly counting up.

I deleted the channel because I didn’t see myself continuing to make videos on FIRE and finances.

I now plan on taking another shot at YouTube, but this time I’ll keep the theme open-ended, with the focus for this year on documenting my progress on Golang projects and learning German. With software, I wanna ocassionally tackle a complex subsystem of a project and maybe do a source-code walkthrough, like this guy does. With German, I wanna show up and talk for a few minutes, scripted or improv, doesn’t matter. The point is to just speak German.

It’s gonna be a very boring channel, and I won’t promote the channel here. You obviously don’t wanna pick topics like these if you’re chasing popularity metrics like views and subscribers. It’s only a way for me to hold myself accountable and document my progress.

The hurdle to YouTubing is that it’s hard - remarkably harder than writing. The amount of work required to create the right environment for making videos is non-trivial. Speaking to a camera also doesn’t come naturally to a lot of people.

I could write sitting on my bed whenever I have the time, while my wife and her parents chat out in the living room and my son runs around kicking his toys, while the news anchor on the TV yells in the background. Making YouTube videos on the other hand requires that I put myself in a perfectly quiet room with nobody around that could interrupt me. We currently have way too much foot-traffic in our house that this is a challenge. I’ll have to do this late at night when everyone is asleep. This is one resolution I’m not very confident about making progress in this year. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s a sustainable strategy to find the time to build a YouTube channel, or create content in any form without burning out: The Half Day Rule.

YouTube For Virtue-Signaling

Let’s take a quick digression on how your YouTube channel can be a great means of virtue-signaling that could work in your favor.

Might I make a confession that I’d like to utilize my channel as a passive-aggressive middle-finger to those condescending people that I ocassionally keep running into?

I have a friend who’s otherwise a nice guy. A regular software guy working a regular job, and he’s been telling me for the last 10 years that he wants to “start his own company”. The guy lacks the self-awareness to face up to the reality that he’ll never do shit beyond talking. He keeps soliciting me with stupid SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) “ideas” and I’m too polite to give it straight to him that his ideas are trash. I’m not teaming up with some delusional guy that wants to hack up some app that calls a bunch of fintech APIs, processes the response JSON, runs some basic-ass AWS machine learning models on them, and then parade his cardboard-box lemonade-stand as a startup.

And I’ve run into a few acquaintences that think I’ve been laid off from my job and haven’t been able to find a new job in 3 years. I can tell that they’re thinking - “Boy, he must suck real bad as a software developer, right!? I wonder how much longer he can go on with his savings before he has to start begging on the streets for food!” Some of these buzzwords-spouting guys have solicited me with advice that I could upskill myself with the latest hot-stuff like AI and Machine-Learning. These fad-chasers would have recommended me to level-up with crypto, blockchain and NFT technologies a couple years back when those were the trending topics.

Pointing people like these to my YouTube channel where I discuss the internals of the Golang garbage collector, or to a video where I walk through the source code and data structures of the Redis Bloomfilter, will be a solid punch to their faces, letting them know that I’m so much better than what they think of me, so they don’t insult my intelligence again.

YouTube, or for that matter any work that you publish in the public domain won’t likely make you rich and famous, but it greatly helps to set context on what you’re good at, and what you suck at. New people that you meet and have any business with will already know a little something about you if you consistently keep putting yourself out there.

Few More Resolutions For The Year

Fasting on the 15th and 30th of every month: I don’t have a lot of experience with fasting and don’t yet have the courage or the strength of character to go without eating for a whole 24 hour cycle. I’ll take it easy and fast only from morning till evening, with only water allowed during fasting hours.
Getting off social media: This is one area I’m proud to already have made a lot of progress in over the years. I barely spend any time on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and other social media anymore. I use Whatsapp only for 1:1 communication, no pointless group chats and mindless consumption of funny forwards.

YouTube was one of my last remaining distractions. The recommended videos sidebar was a black-hole that frequently sucked me in, and I’d watch video after video for what seemed like eternity. So I was utterly delighted when I recently found this plugin that wipes clean my YouTube home-feed and recommended videos side-bar. This has turned out to be such an effective distraction-busting machine that I donated the developers $25 out of sheer gratitude.
Reading longer books: I’d like to be very mindful of my video consumption and begin gravitating more and more toward the universe of words on pages. I’m not trying to pour the kool-aid of “reading books is superior to watching videos” down anyone’s throat, but I personally wanna see myself with a book during my evenings and nights than staring at a screen. And as always, I turn to my hero Cal Newport for advice here, and he suggests to implement the Phone Foyer method.

That’s my list of resolutions for the year! I don’t have any major fitness goals for the year because I’m in decent shape. An ocassional workout once every few days combined with healthy eating habits should keep things going fine.

Wish you all a very happy new year! If any of you has their own resolutions for this year, I’ll be very interested to read about your plans. I so love reading such everyday-stories from everyday-people, but dammit, everyone wants to pick a niche non-personal topic and write only about it. I’m starved of stories around everyday life!

Talk soon,
- Dog

Buy Me A Coffee