I’m starting this year with a mix of pessimism and optimism, both because I can’t help it.
I’m pessimistic about the pandemic and the vaccine rollout. I think it will happen very slowly, partly because it already has and partly because there are just so many people to vaccinate. Israel is crushing it, with 10% of their population vaccinated in just two weeks - but that means it will take 5 months to reach everyone. My county happens to have roughly the same population as Israel, meaning if we were extremely efficient, I could have my vaccine by June. Therefore, I’m accepting that there may be another lost year, another year when we can’t safely travel or visit people in person. This sucks, but not as much as dying of COVID-19. (Or COVID-21?) I’d rather assume that 2021 will be more of the same, and be wrong, than get my hopes up and have to keep resetting expectations. The optimistic part is that I’m still alive, and there don’t appear to be any vaccine refusers in my immediate family. That means all I have to worry about this year is staying safe and keeping busy enough to manage my disappointment. Making my goals and resolutions is my favorite part of the entire year, even when I don’t reach them all. Many years I’ve hit all of them, or 90%, and that’s enough reason to keep trying and keep planning even when the outside world is a mess. I have some hunches this year. I have a super strong hunch that we’re going to wind up moving. There is a non-zero chance that we will wind up relocating for work at some future point, and it’s absolutely impossible to guess when that might be, but this year is more likely than last year. I dreamed I was driving again, so I think it will be outside of SoCal. (Several years ago I had a premonitory dream that we moved to Sacramento, and then we did). Some people would be horrified at the prospect of moving, especially a sudden move to a new city. For me, at this point, in many ways it’s less hassle than packing for a camping trip or... going to Costco. Mainly this possibility will inform whether I hang stuff on the walls or make bulk purchases. I also think this might be the year I manage to get back into school in some way. This would impact whether I commit to any other large-scale projects. I’d like to keep my dance card open. Now for my 2021 goals: Personal: To expel my math anxiety. [uggggghhhhhh] Every year I like to take on a massive personal challenge, something that intimidates me to the point of making myself a little ill. It started with running, then public speaking, then martial arts, and now I don’t have all that much left that freaks me out! The only thing that really and truly gives me dread and trepidation now is mathematics, by which I mean, algebra and beyond. The deal here is that I want to go to grad school, which likely means the GRE, which means I have to master calculus, and that is something I’ve never done. I did a math placement test that had me stuck on some 5th-grade math things, so I guess this fits the bill. Try to always work on something that keeps you humble and it can help from having your ego balloon out of control. Career: Become a futurist. It’s plausible that I can move in this direction without grad school, and it’s also plausible that this can happen through my current job. I really love the company where I work, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now, so I’m going with it. This promises to be a very lively and intriguing year at work. Physical: Back to my goal weight. I was shooting for this last year, but I got COVID instead. I’m at the point where I feel like my weight gain is actively interfering with my respiration. Strangely, I was in the same position in 2004-5, so I have reason to believe this will work. It’s not that I regret learning to box, but the weight I put on that year has been disastrous for my health and energy level. Home: Probably move to a larger home. We’re waiting until the pandemic winds down, because it just doesn’t make sense to move right now. But we are ready for a place with a washer and dryer and a proper kitchen. Probably also a second bedroom, so we can shut a door between us when we’re both on conference calls. Couples: Save for a house. We’ve decided that if we buy a house here, where we currently live, it would have to be after a slightly improbable series of events. (Start our own company etc). Maybe we’ll buy a house elsewhere. We’re learning a bit about remodeling and interior design, trying to figure out what style of place we would like. Stop goal: Stop hoarding reading material. Okay, this one is painful but I feel it has to be done. My husband looked at me and asked, “Including digital?” I nodded and he winced. It is a key part of my job to Read All the Things, but I don’t really need to have absolutely thousands of articles in my queue. Do I? I don’t even know how to do this goal other than to quit putting library books on hold. The point of all these goals and resolutions (this is a resolution, BTW) is to explore and learn new ways of doing things. Lifestyle upgrades: New bed. Our bed went like this: Years 0-10, glorious. Year 10, lumpy. Year 11, terrible. If only we’d known to replace it before the pandemic... Do the Obvious: Assume another year of WFH. I might work from home forever and I like it that way. Ultralearning: Data visualization - Tableau, Excel, etc. This is a goal that is inevitable, due to my job responsibilities, so I might as well give myself credit for it. By this time next year, I’ll know all sorts of things that I don’t know right now. Quest: 50 for 50 ultramarathon (2025). A quest is quixotic and I’m not ready to let this one go. If I can ever run any decent distance again, I’m sure I’ll cry so hard I’ll soak my shirt. Wish: To visit my family safely! 2021 Personal: To expel my math anxiety Career: Become a futurist Physical: Back to my goal weight Home: Probably move to a larger home Couples: Save for a house Stop goal: Stop hoarding reading material Lifestyle upgrades: New bed Do the Obvious: Assume another year of WFH Ultralearning: Data visualization - Tableau, Excel, etc. Quest: 50 for 50 ultramarathon (2025) Wish: To visit my family safely Categorizing these, the math anxiety thing is a challenge; the futurism career is a mission; reaching my goal weight again, moving to a larger home, saving for a house, and getting a new bed are goals; and it is a resolution to stop hoarding reading material. Ultralearning is a project. A quest is something big that probably takes more than a year to do, and a wish is something that you can’t simply make happen through an obvious action. I like to be clear with myself about how I’m going to go about making something happen in my life. That’s all this is: pick something and do it! Choose a resolution you can finish in one day, and you automatically get the same bragging rights as the people who choose something more complicated. If you never make resolutions because you “know” you’ll let yourself down, change the rules! You are invited to look over this list of one-day resolutions. Pick one if you think it could make your life better, easier, more fun, or more interesting.
Get your flu shot. Apply for a passport. If you already have a passport, get it out and check the expiration date. Donate blood. Change all your passwords and find out where you can use dual authentication. Go around and set all your clocks, including the microwave and the dashboard in your vehicle. Throw out everything in your kitchen that is past its expiration date. Throw out any expired medications. Throw out worn-out socks and underwear. Cash in your change jar. If you haven’t already, find out if you can open an IRA account at your bank. Make an appointment to get your teeth cleaned if it’s been more than 6 months. Make sure you’ve had a tetanus shot booster within the last 10 years. Pull out your driver’s license and check to see when it expires. Is it this year? Oh snap. Give back anything you borrowed from someone else. If you have overdue library books, return them. A lot of libraries no longer charge overdue fines! If you quit reading a book because you lost interest, let it go. Give it away or trade it in. Match up the lids with all your pots, pans, travel mugs, and plastic containers. Make a “dump run” and get rid of the broken junk from your garage, yard, or anywhere else it’s piled up. If you have a mending pile, look it over right now and decide to fix it or throw it away. Increase your retirement contribution 1%. Get a free copy of your credit report and check it for errors. Fill out a living will and have it witnessed. Set a reminder to sign up for a first aid/CPR certification class (maybe this fall). Set a timer for one hour and spend it cleaning or filing. Go through your email inbox and unsubscribe to as much as possible. Delete some apps. Reconsider your social media engagement. Call an old friend and say hello. Apologize to someone. If you have your own URLs, look them over and decide whether you still want them all. Look through your queue of movies and TV episodes and delete anything that no longer interests you. Look at your keys. Are there any you don’t need any more that you can get rid of? Mystery keys you don’t even recognize? Think of any task you’ve been procrastinating for longer than a year. Make the decision to do it this month or let it go. Read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. Make a vow not to make negative comments about other people’s resolutions. This was the year that I almost died, but that’s no excuse for skipping the annual review. In many ways, this is the weirdest and thus most interesting year I have had since I started publicly sharing my yearly progress report.
My husband had a severe eye injury, we had to put our dog down, and then I got COVID-19. It’s hard to believe that all of that happened before the shutdown. I haven’t seen my family in over a year now. 2020 has been sad, confusing, infuriating, boring, frustrating - yet on a personal level, it’s been strangely great. Here are some things that happened in our 2020: My husband did not lose sight in his eye I did not die of COVID-19 I got my dream job, despite doing the panel interview with a secondary lung infection I gave a virtual presentation at work that was featured on our webpage and 80 people came We doubled our savings I started donating 1/4 of our grocery budget to the food bank Also funded the planting of 40 trees I learned to cut hair, both his and mine We got our own personal hummingbird who lives three feet from the feeder; we call him Brownie and he is a rufous hummingbird and he is a little savage We commissioned our first artwork, a piece from a local photographer Noelie is working on whistling the Addams Family theme song We saw an owl My personal goal for the year was supposed to be getting my weight back down and recovering my health, after a year when I got a cold or the flu easily a dozen times. I said I wanted to “get my body back.” Then I got COVID and my whole “body transformation” / “get my body back” goal became a little too on-the-nose. My career goal was to learn how to do webinars. Another goal that was a little on-the-nose. I sometimes spend over six hours a day on camera having meetings now. I’ve used, as far as I know, every available virtual meeting platform. I know how to make recordings, change my background, and all sorts of other tricks. More to the point, I got a full-time day job for the first time in over ten years, sort of stumbling into a goal 10x bigger than the one I had set. My physical goal was to get my weight back to 125 lbs. (I’m 5’4”). Lost 5 pounds, got coronavirus, gained 10. (Probably five of that was pills) My home goal was to continue our home automation project, which is related to the book I was writing when all this went down. 2020 was a great year to choose to do this, because two people who work from home for an engineering company are well positioned to automate everything in their place up, down, and sideways. Most of what we did was to organize cabinets and streamline surfaces, but we did upgrade our ailing Roomba for the fancy self-emptying one. It’s rad. Next is the window-washing robot, whenever they start shipping them again. Our couples goal was to build an app together. That did not happen. What did happen was that my hubby saved my life, nursing me through six weeks of coronavirus. Isolating together and beating a deadly illness has brought us closer than I ever could have imagined. Crossing rivers together in the interior of Iceland did one type of thing for our marriage; 2020 did something else. I would do anything for this man and I already know he would do anything for me, because he has. Oh, and then I got a job at the same company where he works. Our living room is now a sort of... field office. It’s like we’ve come full circle from when we first met. My “stop goal” was to stop procrastinating on text messages and voicemail. I still sometimes feel resistance around this, but I’m so busy now that it’s quit being a problem. I simply don’t have time to psych myself out. Also half the time it’s my boss. My lifestyle upgrade was possibly going to be getting gum surgery, since I maxed out my dental benefits last year and I had to wait. My periodontist (welcome to middle age, chica) - my periodontist put me through several invasive white-knuckle procedures, but he says I don’t need skin grafts yet, so that’s good news. The moral of the story is, if your dentist tells you to wear a night guard because you grind your teeth, pay attention. Instead of gum surgery, my lifestyle upgrades were actually good. I had the idea of making Noelie a box fort, which rapidly expanded into the four-story folly that she has now. Extremely fun. We put up a plant stand and a hummingbird feeder on the porch. There were others, as I outlined earlier this week, but either of these things would count as a significant improvement over gum surgery, am I right? My “Do the Obvious” was to plan around constant travel, since my hubby was on business travel over 50% of 2019. We sort of got the exact opposite of that. Very funny, 2020. The Do the Obvious that we actually did was to stay indoors, distance from people, and wear our masks. My ultralearning project was to learn Dutch. That went to the same place that many people’s 2020 goals went, which was into a puff of vapor. Strangely, I did wind up doing a huge ultralearning project, which was to get up to speed on several software titles for my new job. I had to learn how to use VPN, learn all the new versions of the Microsoft Office software I hadn’t really used in a decade plus Teams, learn to administer our SharePoint sites, learn to use the video editing software, learn Jira and Confluence, and of course all the procedural things like our timecard system. Next year will be much more of the same, as I’m slated to learn a bunch of advanced Excel features, Tableau, data visualization, Microsoft Project, and that’s just first quarter. This place moves fast. (Take notes if you’re looking for a job; I’ve just listed off a bunch of hot skills that you can study at home). My quest was to start training for the ultramarathon I want to run at age 50. After COVID-19, I may never run anywhere ever again. Hard to say. I am more motivated than I was before, though, because running even a mile would mean I can get my lungs back. My wish was to get a publishing deal. I fully believe I could have pulled this off. Other people did even though there was a global pandemic, so I can’t even use that as an excuse. Will I ever do this, now that I have a regular-people job again? No idea. I still want to but I don’t see how I could fit it around my current schedule. I had just finished putting together my ten-year goals for the first time, and I was pretty excited about them. They all seemed so, so possible on January First of 2020. Looking them over after this strange year that we’ve all had, they don’t actually seem completely IMpossible... I think ten years from now, all this pandemic stuff will be behind us. (Maybe we’ll have a different one between now and then, but hopefully everyone will have learned from the experience and we’ll be smarter and more careful). Anyway, in spite of it all, in spite of isolation and our tiny apartment and everything else, we did manage to put in a garden. That’s one ten-year goal, nine years ahead of schedule. Go us. 2020 Personal: Body transformation - lol Career: Learn how to do webinars - SUCCESS Physical: Weight at 125 lbs. - FAIL Home: Automation project - SUCCESS Couples: Build an app together - NO PROGRESS Stop goal: Stop procrastinating on text messages and voicemail - SUCCESS Lifestyle upgrades: Probably gum surgery - SUCCESS+ Do the Obvious: Plan around constant travel - lol Ultralearning: Dutch language - NO PROGRESS Quest: 50 for 50 ultramarathon! (2025) - NO PROGRESS Wish: Publishing deal! - NO PROGRESS 2030 - Ten Year Goals and Resolutions Personal: Silver Fox project Career: Published author Physical: 50 for 50 ultramarathon! Home: Buy a house to live in Couples: Camping, hiking, backpacking, and bicycling together Stop goal: Stop procrastinating in general Lifestyle upgrades: A garden - SUCCESS Do the Obvious: Plan around constant travel Ultralearning: Write screenplays Quest: Visit Antarctica Wish: Millionaires! If there is one single piece of advice that is true for all fields, it is: Be as specific as possible about what exactly you want to do. I heard this as a young person, and it was not helpful at all, because I had no idea what I wanted to do! It turns out, over 25 years later, that the reason for that is that my ideal job did not yet exist. But now it does. The next most valuable piece of advice is to always learn as much as possible. Even if you hate your job - even if you feel like you’re working for the worst company, in the worst field, in the worst company culture, with the meanest boss, the most awful coworkers, and the worst commute - learning new things is the only way to get out and do something else. Another way to look at that is that if you’re going to work at a terrible job that doesn’t pay, make sure it’s in a field that you find interesting. And if you’re not sure what that is, you’re just sure it’s not where you are now, then learning new things will help you figure it out. I’ve started to look at my job as a kind of internship where I am continually paid to build skills. I started a new job in May, and it is not an exaggeration to say that I have been learning new things every single day. I don’t know if I’ll ever be “caught up.” As a person who is motivated by curiosity, this is great news, because it means I’ll never have a chance to be bored. I hadn’t had a traditional day job in over ten years. I knew all the basic enterprise software; in fact, I’d been a trainer for some of it. In the meantime, I hadn’t had much cause to use this stuff, and it turns out that a lot of features had popped up that were unfamiliar to me. My first order of business was to reacquaint myself with all the basic Microsoft Office tools. For those of you who haven’t had to use these things on the job, that means Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. I also had to bone up on SharePoint. Next, I had to get used to using videoconferencing tools. We use all of them. We were using Skype, until a few months into my new job, when it was announced that Skype will be discontinued and we will be moving to Teams. I might use Skype, Teams, Zoomgov, and something like GoToMeeting on the same day, and then my boss will FaceTime me. Then I had to get up to speed on a bunch of corporate tools, including our timecard system. I have payroll-adjacent duties, so I have had to learn to adjust other people’s timecards as well. Right now I’m learning how to edit videos in Camtasia and upload them to Microsoft Stream. I’m also learning more advanced Excel skills that I never had to use before. Those include conditional formatting, pivot tables, macros, and a bunch of new formulas. For 2021, I’m going to learn Tableau. This is the most complicated new tool on my list. What it really means is not the technical aspects of the software, but data visualization in general. An easy way to stand out in a data-driven field is to be even marginally better at presenting the story behind the data. Or: can you make boring things interesting? When I first joined Toastmasters, everyone said that presentation skills will help you in your career. I didn’t care about that - I was just done with my intense public speaking phobia and I wanted liberation. A few years down the road, with a DTM under my belt, I know it’s true. A lot of brilliant people are terrible presenters. Even a couple of months of coaching could lead to an almost magical transformation, but nobody wants to do it. These are my broader work goals: To be seen as a go-to person for solving problems; to be regarded as a dynamic presenter; to observe and absorb what it takes to go to the next level in my organization. Broad goals can either be very useful, or not useful at all, depending on what you choose. I find broad goals most helpful if I am having a crisis or a low-energy day. I just remind myself of what I’m trying to accomplish by the end of the year, and it helps to put it into context. “Remember, you said you wanted to be a go-to person, and this is probably what that looks like.” A goal that is too broad or vague, though, won’t get anybody anywhere. This is why it’s helpful to have a list of very specific things to learn, like “Excel filters.” Some of our goals come down from the top level. We have division goals, and subdivision goals, and department goals, and goals that are assigned to us by our boss. I love this! If I’m going to “check the box” on a goal, I want to make sure it’s the thing that matters most to my superiors. Rule Number One: Make your boss look good. Even if your boss doesn’t deserve it, even if your boss is an orc, everyone else probably knows that. It’s good for your reputation if you show that you can do a good job getting along with a cave troll. People are the biggest issue in most jobs. That means it’s not usually a specific individual person who wakes up every day ready to cause friction and deliberately be irritating. Usually it’s some kind of systemic issue that, if discovered, could help everyone get along. The best way to have people like you at work is to be good at your job. Get stuff done and be responsive. I have worked with people who didn’t wash their clothes, had plumber’s crack, or fell asleep on the job. In each case, they continued on for years and years, because they were good at what they did. Also in each case, if they fixed that one little problem (doing laundry, wearing a belt, getting a standup desk?), their reputations would have been all the better. For the brave, ask someone else what your work resolution should be for the New Year. Put an anonymous suggestion box out. Actually that might be the worst idea for the worst reality TV show of all time, but it is an interesting thought exercise. What would you wish other people around you to be doing differently, and what do you think they would ask of you? I realized, when I clocked out today, that nothing went up on my blog this morning.
What had been a fairly successful workday suddenly turned into a sense of crushing defeat. Not only did I have no blog, I hadn’t sorted the laundry, I hadn’t sent an important personal email, and I had also missed a social check-in I had been looking forward to for literally months. This may have been the first time in my life when my work life was the only thing that seemed to be going well. Something else is on my mind. COVID. A key person in our division traveled for Thanksgiving week, and got the coronavirus, and has been quite ill, and as a consequence nobody has been able to cover their work. Apparently 9 people on our staff tested positive in the last week, even though we have all been strictly working from home. Do you remember I mentioned someone I know whose parents were planning an “open door” Thanksgiving? The good news is, they called that off. The bad news is, the dad lied about getting tested for COVID and instead had his own elderly father over to visit. In that time, he convinced him that “it’s just the flu” and everything is fine. (Like “the flu” is all right for a man in his seventies...) Either he has a very high level of confidence, high tolerance for risk, or high hopes for an inheritance... Like most people, we’re hanging out at home with little else to do. Outdoor dining has finally been closed in our area. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do other than wander around outside, hoping not to get within breath zone of any of the wandering mask refusers who populate our town. Try to think of them as NPCs (non-player characters) A year ago, I was all like, Hey, I’m going to write a book! Then the world changed and the premise of my book sort of blew away in a puff of vapor. ...and then my life partner came home and our living room became a conference room. Currently our posture is mandatory WFH until at least 3/31/21. After that it all hangs on a “widely available vaccine.” I think we aren’t going back in until, as individuals, we can document that we have that precious inoculation. So that’s it. For now, my most obvious and best option is to keep working at my tiny little desk in my tiny little corner of our smallish living room in our itty-bitty apartment. While the rest of the world outside spirals into pandemic hell. I had another idea to distract myself, which was to go back to grad school and get my PhD. I have no idea how I could actually make that happen. When would I study?? Right now I am having enough trouble maintaining a reasonable sleep schedule, much less my personal priorities. It feels like a choice point. I can either: Crush it at my job and probably promote upward within the next couple of years Go back to school and get a PhD Quit and write a (different) book OR Be well-rested and rebuild my physical stamina. CHOOSE ONE I realize that over a million people around the world lost that option because they died of COVID-19 this year. Seven billion people don’t have the array of choices that I do. The way I look at that is, it does not serve anyone if someone passes up an opportunity. If you (or I) get a promotion, there is an opportunity to influence projects and company culture that was not available before. What if we were the good guys, what if not every boss had to drive people to stress and burnout? If you (or I) get an advanced education or write a book, there are opportunities to influence and teach others, others who may be hungry for that information. Who does it serve if I ever finally rebuild my physical strength and stamina? Well, me, of course! And thus my ability to contribute at... whatever it is. Same with you. This is why it’s such a disaster that so many people seem to be shrugging their way into a case of COVID. They think “if I get it I get it” in the same way that they might think “if my house burns to the ground” or “if I get t-boned in my car and become paralyzed.” Yet for whatever reason there is no real sense of freak-out. Yes, these things could happen, and don’t we not want them to? I was right when I decided that getting a job would make the time pass quickly during the pandemic. It really has done what I wanted it to, which was to give me a way to keep busy instead of climbing the walls with dread and anxiety. What I didn’t realize was that it would do more than fill a standard workday. It’s essentially swallowing everything, including my ability to hit pause and eat a sandwich. What I thought I wanted was a simple, no-brainer job that would give me a bit of a social outlet. It may be that I have passed the point where I can disguise myself as a Petite Lebowski. Fortunately, it is now December, which is traditionally my month to think about goals and resolutions and ambitions and visions and all that sort of thing. Time to revisit what a typical week looks like and where the heck I think the world will look like over the next 1-5 years. I’ve started taking the idea of going back to grad school seriously. This is when I do a bit of recon and try to work out a strategy. What is the quickest, easiest, cheapest route to a doctorate?
I didn’t do any of this when I went back for my bachelor’s. I was such a blank slate, I didn’t even realize that the numbers after the course name represented what level the class was. I didn’t know what the Dean’s List was. I didn’t know what ‘undergrad’ meant or what ‘grad school’ was. Looking back, it seems like a miracle that I ever managed to get my degree. The first question to ask about a project like this is, WHY am I doing this? For the heck of it? Or do I have a specific goal that this will help me to reach? This is an important question because it’s common for people to attach to a plan that does not actually move them toward their ultimate goal. For instance, I want to get Rosetta Stone/ so I can learn a new language. Does that step actually follow? The most useful question is, How do people who are successful at this get it done? In this case, there are two questions. One, who actually completes the work and gets the PhD? Two, who gets a PhD and uses it to get a job in their field? Corollary questions would be: Do I want that type of job? Does that job pay what I think it does? Are there as many openings as I suspect there might be? Or, moving on to hidden goals: Am I doing this to prove something to someone? Am I doing this because it seems like the most obvious next step from what I’m doing now, and I don’t have any other ideas? Am I doing this to delay or avoid something else? My strategy, when I went back for my bachelor’s, was to get out a calculator and see if I could pay for my loans at my current wage. Even if it never got me a better job, I wanted to do it just to have the experience. That helped me to quit worrying about what I would do after I graduated. Then I got a better-paying job doing basically the same stuff I did before, and my degree paid for itself in the first year. The trick with grad school, if the rumors are true, is that you can get it paid for. Arrangements can be made such that you work for free, helping grade papers, teach classes, and do research for someone else. It’s also possible to apply for fellowships and maybe get your employer to pay for all or part of it - depending on where you work, of course. I told my boss during my performance review that I was thinking about going to grad school to get a PhD in strategic forecasting. He listened carefully. I told him that if I went back, I was willing to stay in my current position for the next, say, five years. I don’t want to overtax my mental bandwidth pushing for promotions while trying to write a dissertation. My boss said there probably wouldn’t be a position for me in his subdivision, but then he listed off other departments that might make a place for me and gave me the names of some people to talk to. Name it and claim it! Now there are some additional obvious questions: Where will I apply? Can I attend remotely or would I have to relocate? How do I get in? What year do I start? I’m looking at academic year 2022, because that’s what I’ve had in mind. As a COVID survivor, I’ve been pretty tired, and I wasn’t confident I could handle the load yet. I was poking around looking at a particular school that was recommended to me, and it looked like I would have had to apply this summer to go next fall. That’s more than a year’s lead time, which is why I’m planning now. The other issue is the GRE. My understanding is that this is a big standardized test, the scores of which determine whether you can get accepted to specific schools. More questions: Can I get in without taking the GRE? If I have to take it, how do I prepare to get the highest score? Answers: Depends on the school and the program. Yes, there are schools and practice exams and workbooks and tutors, a whole cottage industry. What’s in the GRE? ...Apparently half of it is... calculus. Here we have my first stumbling block, because not only have I not been in a math class since 1993, I never got as far as calculus. This is... well, it isn’t necessarily a Pons Asinorum, but it is an obstacle. A high GRE score is a golden ticket that would definitely make my life easier. I “test well” and I find the idea of a four-hour exam interesting and exciting, rather than intimidating. On the other hand, I’m strictly average at math. I tried to take a practice GRE a while ago, and I didn’t even know how to approach any of the sample math problems. [Then I did a math placement test and... it looks like I’m going to have to repeat that part of 7th grade]. I have the feeling that this may haunt me for the rest of my life unless I do something about it. The real challenge here isn’t to earn the doctorate. I’m pretty confident I could get a fellowship and some letters of recommendation, get accepted to the school of my choice without taking the GRE, and walk out with the degree debt-free five to seven years later. PhD = challenge Learning calculus = risk In my mind, getting the PhD is like training for the marathon. I knew I would do it, and I did, even though I was quite slow and walked with a limp for months afterward. Learning calculus might be more like my experience of learning to drive, which involved a lot of sobbing in a lot of parking lots. I also failed twice and had to face the same instructor who had already flunked me before I finally passed. Why do I want to get a PhD? Six months ago, when I was lying in bed contemplating my imminent death from COVID-19, I thought about what was left on my bucket list. What would I do if I got a second chance at life? What did I most regret not having done? One of the two things that immediately came to mind was to go to grad school. I don’t have to ask myself what I’ll regret at the end of my days, because I already know. I thought I was already there. I’m already 45, and so far all I have done is get a year older every year. The next 5-10 years will pass whether I accept this challenge or not. The worst-case scenario is that I pay $205 to take an exam, and then fail it. All right then, let’s do this thing! The way I deal with stress is to look ahead five years into the future.
This was challenging when I was sick with COVID-19, because I wasn’t even sure I had five days in my personal future. Even at the time, though, I was positive that the pandemic would be over by then. Maybe things would end badly for me, but it was likely that my friends and family would be doing okay in five years. A lot can happen in five years. It seems like a long time to a kid, but the older you get, the more you start to realize that what adults have always told you is true. Time passes more and more quickly, or at least our subjective, experiential sense of it. I just had a conversation with my boss in which I mentioned possibly going back to school in academic year 2022. That seems like a minute from now, because I know from past experience that the application deadline for that year will come up so quickly that I’ll barely have a year to study for the GRE. It seems entirely likely that it will take five years or more to get my PhD, and that doesn’t even feel like a big deal. At 45, I know that I’ll either be five years older anyway... or I won’t. Might as well plan for what is the most likely future. A lot can happen in five years. I started running as a complete amateur and non-athlete, unable to run around one block in my neighborhood without stopping to walk. Four years later I was chugging along in my first marathon. It never even occurred to me to aim for such a thing when I started. All I wanted to do was to run a two-mile loop, and I thought it would take me all year to train for it. Five years is a long enough span of time that conditions can completely change. I met my ex-husband, moved in with him, married him, and signed the divorce papers in less time than that. I haven’t laid eyes on him in twenty years now. What was once the epic drama of my life is something that I now rarely think about at all. What else has happened within five years? In a five-year span, I dropped five clothing sizes. Within five years, I paid off two credit cards and my Pell grant. In five years, a new baby could be conceived, born, and grown enough to ride a bike with training wheels and write her own name. It took our dog four years to learn to roll over. But by then, he could also do a bunny hop in a circle and play Red Light, Green Light. I keep reminding myself of these things because sometimes, looking backward is soothing. In retrospect it’s often easier to recognize good times of relative peace and tranquility. In the moment, any kind of stress or drama feels major. Looking back makes it clear which were high mountain peaks and which were merely mild rolling hills. Looking forward involves more guesswork. We aren’t always very good at that. The thing about predicting the future is that some things will remain precisely the same - like my parents’ dining room table; I’m pretty sure that will be the same in another five years, just like it was five years ago. Other things will change in a radical way that we never could see coming. Some of these changes from my own lifetime include voicemail, racecar-shaped VHS tape rewinders, refrigerators with ice makers, Wikipedia, Twitter, streaming Netflix, Crocs, the Instant Pot, and a commercial space industry. We won’t be able to predict everything about daily life five years from now, in 2025. We can, though, do a lot to predict our own daily lives, by making decisions about how we will live them. This is why I like the five-year span, because it’s long enough to be ambitious but near enough that Future Me +5 is somewhat recognizable. I can ask myself, what is Future Me 50 going to be like if I do this, that, or this? If I choose to go to bed now or two hours from now, night after night? If I choose to eat more greens or more sweets? If I schedule that dentist appointment, or not? If I save this amount or if I spend it all on random stuff from Amazon? Is Future Me +5 going to fit in these clothes I’ve been saving, or not? Is she going to want to wear them at all? Is that version of me ever going to [clear out the storage unit or keep paying for it] or [pay off that credit card or not] or [finish my degree or not] or reach Inbox Zero or go on the vacation I dreamed about in high school? Most things happen to us when we live in default mode. I recognize this tendency in myself, to hold my phone in my hand and scroll, scroll, scroll. Fortunately, I set my algorithms to include a lot of reptile news, so I probably read more about gator-related events than a lot of people. How many hours of my life, though, am I going to fritter away getting three-minute updates? When we’re distracted in this way, we forget to reset our strategies for all the major things in life. Are we going to keep working at the same job, train for something else, change careers? Are we going to stay at the same address or pack and move? When are we going to retire? Do we have backup plans for when our parents or kids reach a certain age? Are we ever going to finish our passion projects - or start them? It’s a mistake to get sucked too much into current events, passive entertainment, and shopping. What I mean by that is that research shows that it doesn’t make people any happier. It also doesn’t change a single darn thing. It’s up to each of us to find interesting and constructive ways to spend our time. My recommendation is always to look ahead five years and ask, if things keep going along like this, what is likely to happen? Is that what we want for ourselves? Or is it not? And if not, what are we prepared to do about it? I’ve had the pleasure of reading Benjamin Hardy’s work for several years, having stumbled across his writing before he published his first book. I was utterly blown away by Slipstream Time Hacking, and he has only improved since then. I would call him a “must-read” author, and he’s given us an instant classic with Personality Isn’t Permanent.
I read this book literally in one sitting and wanted to review it immediately. Aha, so this is what someone can do with a doctorate in psychology! The premise is that Personality Isn’t Permanent - we can determine what character traits we want to develop, we can change our behaviors and beliefs, and we can design our own lives. Hardy backs this up with psychological research and examples of various people’s life experiences, including his own. He describes himself as a loser who played World of Warcraft 15 hours a day, until he decided to change his life. Now he’s a married father of five kids and he has a PhD and a couple of best-selling books. There are a couple of points in this book that a lot of readers will find challenging. The first is that personality tests are worthless. The second is the idea that it’s possible to transform trauma, using traumatic experiences as material to build a better and stronger self-image. My suggestion would be that most people can finish reading a short book even when they don’t automatically agree with everything in it. I’ve been through the process of reexamining personal trauma, and Hardy is right, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to accept! Personality Isn’t Permanent, and this is a fabulous finding. It’s the path to freedom. This is an inspirational book, one that is worth pondering with full engagement. Favorite quotes: When you decide who you’ll be and the life you’ll live, you can have anything you truly want. You can become an outlier. If you experience resistance through your reading, take heart. You’re on the brink of facing the truth of who you are. Right now, you don’t truly want what your future self wants. Your future self is an acquired taste. Peak experiences are rare for most people, but can happen regularly. You could have a peak experience today if you choose to. You must be intentional. You must be courageous. You must move your life in the direction you genuinely want to go. Thinking about yourself, what would happen if your future self came to you and told you that everything you want to see happen was going to happen? Would you believe them? This book came to me at a really helpful moment, a time when I was struggling with whether I had it in me to fill the role I was in. The idea of The Alter Ego Effect is basically to pretend you’re someone else when it’s time to do something that doesn’t come naturally to you. I really think Todd Herman is onto something here.
I invented a persona for myself when I was 11. Her name was Veronica Vanderbilt. She was in her early 20s, she lived in Beverly Hills, and she drove around in a cherry-red convertible. She had everything a little kid doesn’t have: money, a driver’s license, the right to vote, her full height, and every other privilege that adults take for granted. Now that I’m actually an adult, I don’t want to be Veronica anymore. I don’t particularly want to live in Beverly Hills, I hate driving, and if I did drive I wouldn’t choose a red convertible. Pretending to be her - an extroverted, wealthy young blonde - gave me feelings of freedom and possibility. Though now that I think of it, I have grown up to become a blonde who lives in Southern California... Hmm... What The Alter Ego Effect asks of us is to figure out what we really want, and imagine what we could feel like if we had it. The perfect job? A conversation with someone? The opportunity to pitch? What if what is holding us back is nothing more than a self-image that doesn’t match what we want? What if we just never ask? How would the world be different if each of us stepped forward and went after our dreams? The Alter Ego Effect is a great, short, fun, approachable and uplifting guide to creating an alternative persona for yourself. If you aren’t going to go after your dreams, maybe your persona will? Favorite quote: Admitting you want something isn’t egotistical. It’s honest. What a weird darn year, am I right? It went like this:
New Year’s Eve: ALL THE PLANS ALL THE THINGS First Quarter: Guess what I have COVID Second Quarter: Never mind, I got my dream job and I’m going to grad school Also it looks like I might get a birthday this year after all! I didn’t tell you all about this at the time, but the first weekend of January I put on an invitation-only workshop. I kept talking about “The Plot Twist.” I knew there was something coming, but I didn’t know what (obviously, or I would have tried to get to the ISS ASAP). O hai plot twist I’ve given up really trying to anticipate or plan in great specificity. It both does and does not work, as I’m sure you can all agree. What I said in my workshop was that the only way to make progress on the personal level is to somehow try to ignore the news and avoid letting current events mess with your plans. How possible is this, who knows, but I suppose we are all equally positioned to find out now. This year I decided to do both annual and decade goals. My husband and I stumbled across some papers with our ten-year financial goals, and we had the funny realization that we had hit them on schedule with about a +1% margin. We were talking about making new goals for the next ten years literally the week before shutdown... and then I got deathly ill, and then the dream job opened up while I was still dissolving into the sofa. We still need to get back on that. ...or, do we? We’re making more than we ever have, either of us, and we’re also spending very little since we’re trapped in our dinky apartment. We’re living on probably less than half our income, not sure since we haven’t bothered to crunch those numbers yet. Maybe we just shrug and keep saving for a while. This Is Strategy, my friends. Make a decision and GO. Refine as necessary. Personal: This year I chose body transformation as my major personal goal. Should have been more specific. Can I have POSITIVE and USEFUL body transformation this time?? Career: Learn to do webinars. Whoa, was this ever on the nose. It seems like all of a sudden my entire life is webinars. My team suddenly had to learn to do virtual speech contests with less than a week’s notice, and we led the district in that effort on the technical side. I have now used every available web conferencing platform, and I have seen and heard probably every possible glitch and snafu, including accidentally overhearing people yell at their kids or use a toilet. The next step would be to host my own online workshops. We’ll see. My “career” goal seems to have been somewhat co-opted by my sudden acquisition of a traditional full-time job. Physical: I survived COVID-19 and that’s about all I have on that subject right now. Home: Automation project. This has new urgency, since we both are WFH now and we do a 9/80 schedule. Monday through Thursday are long days with barely the time to work out. Doing laundry and getting groceries are more complicated now than they were before. Plus we have had to find room for our extra food supplies in the second-smallest kitchen we’ve ever had. Couples: Build an app together. Not sure if this will happen now that I’m working from home as well and my hubby just filed for his sixth patent. That’s okay, though, because our lives have changed so much during the pandemic. Last year, he was on travel over half the time and we hardly saw each other. Now we’re both working out of our living room and we’re together 99% of the time. App or no app, technically we *are* working together on a technology-related project, which is... our day jobs. Stop goal: Stop procrastinating on text messages and voicemail. I was doing all right until I got sick. Now I have a backlog of DMs. Still focusing on this and trying to reframe it. Lifestyle upgrades: Probably gum surgery. Let’s just say I am forming actual friendships with the people at my periodontist’s office. I have an appointment on 7/2 where I will find out the long-term strategy and next steps. Do the Obvious: Plan around constant travel? Well, maybe. Travel has resumed at our work. The change here is that I may be the actual person booking the tickets for my hubby’s work trips now, which is ironic. Ultralearning: Dutch language. I haven’t done much with this yet. I *have* suddenly found myself in the midst of an ultralearning situation, which is the fact that I need to get up to speed with several software titles for my new job. I am still very much in the “learn something new every day” phase. I’m also looking into grad school. If I want to learn Dutch, in other words, I’d better get started quickly. Quest: 50 for 50 ultramarathon! (2025). If this happens after COVID it will be a grade-A miracle. Wish: Publishing deal! I literally just took a publishing workshop. I think I’ve figured out a new angle for my book proposal post-COVID. This is going to be challenging to do, now that I am working full-time again, but I haven’t written it off. Wishes are for wishing. As for our ten-year goals, the financial aspects are probably more achievable than ever, but the travel/outdoor goals may be less so. We’ll just hope that these things can be back on the calendar within the decade. How are you doing on your own goals? Are there any areas of your life that are going unexpectedly well right now? Are you as glad as I am not to have died of COVID-19? 2020 Personal: Body transformation Career: Learn how to do webinars Physical: Weight at 125 lbs. Home: Automation project Couples: Build an app together Stop goal: Stop procrastinating on text messages and voicemail Lifestyle upgrades: Probably gum surgery Do the Obvious: Plan around constant travel Ultralearning: Dutch language Quest: 50 for 50 ultramarathon! (2025) Wish: Publishing deal! 2030 - Ten Year Goals and Resolutions Personal: Silver Fox project Career: Published author Physical: 50 for 50 ultramarathon! Home: Buy a house to live in Couples: Camping, hiking, backpacking, and bicycling together Stop goal: Stop procrastinating in general Lifestyle upgrades: A garden Do the Obvious: Plan around constant travel Ultralearning: Write screenplays Quest: Visit Antarctica Wish: Millionaires! |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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