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Happy New Year!

I had a big year in 2004. The short list is I went on some good trips, continued to raft, and most importantly lost a lot of weight and got in great shape. You can read about it all in more detail in my annual holiday letter:
2004 Holiday Letter

I'm not a big fan of New Years resolutions, I think it comes from my lack of enthusiasm about holidays in general. The reasons for that are pretty complex and I haven't bothered to try to understand them. I think the key is people often use resolutions as a motivator to change behavior, but big changes in behavior are typically not sudden things that happen with arbitrary dates. In my experience sudden behavior changes are rare, and happen after a long process of coming to terms with them. Those processes typically do not conveniently fall on New Years.

That said I do tend to be very reflective around the Holidays. Work slows way down, most of my recreational activities take a break for a few weeks, I write a big letter about the last year, and I go visit my family for a week. All of that adds up to a lot of time for me to think about what's going on in my life and reflect about what I've been doing and what I'd like to do in the future. In doing this I notice certain themes from the past year, and my version of resolutions is to try to decide on themes I want to work on for the year. Then because I'm insane I think about how to achieve those.

For some of them I just need to continue current behaviors, others I need to do new things (or do things that have been on my to do list I just haven't gotten to.) But the key is I don't try to set goals that involve immediate severe behavior change. Remember, you have all year to make the themes a reality. Let that behavior change come gradually, build new habits, and then it will be around for a long time.

And for the record, my themes for 2005 are (subject to change):
- Continue the good stuff I'm doing which has me thinner then I thought I could be and in the best shape of my life.
- Travel internationally (a hold over from last year.)
- Get more responsible with my spending (a continuation of last year.)

These will likely change as the year goes by, but that's what my reflective time over the holidays came up with.

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