First Post

I am embarking on a journey to see if a five year plan can be put together in such a way that it can help me 'pull myself up by my bootstraps'. I am in my late thirties, and looking at some habits that are definitely negative. I don't love my job. I wish I was better at sticking to my exercise routine, and eating better. I recognize that exercise is an energizer, yet I easily fall out of the habit and I end up in a cycle of eating worse because I am not exercising, and then furthering the negative inertia by coming up with reasons to continue NOT to exercise. So work, diet and exercise are big in the five year plan. These are the most obvious outward aspects to it as well. I also want to put together a slant in my resume to help draw me into the world of public speaking. The challenge of speaking to a group, respecting the captivation of an audience and making it worth people's while is a challenge I really enjoy. And at a fundamental level I think I enjoy teaching--it is a give and take process, where you take your past learnings and experiences and try and help organize the information in a way that will emulate your experience. A good teacher is kind of like a syringe injecting information into a student/class--there is a little intake from the student--the body that is about to be subjected to the contents of the syringe. The backflow, which is an important aspect..it informs the teacher on the appropriate angle of entry. Like a rocket re-entering the Earth' atmosphere, the teacher must find a the window of safe and reasonable entry. The give and take is the way for the teacher to approach this entry and enact the best landing for the information. You learn a bit about your audience from all available data--sights and sounds and all other pertinent data. Every time someone asks you a question they are giving you a fair amount of information. Even in the subtlety of phrasing, a student can differentiate his or her particular coordinates relative to the topic at hand. That slight tangent aside, the five year plan has additional aspects involving my ability to direct my energy toward making speaking engagements more a part of my life. I also would like to begin a project involving biography of otherwise unsung Americans. I am thinking at first of starting with videography and taking it slow. 20-30 minute episodic stories from people I know or have easy access to. At some point, in the next 6-12 months, I would like to branch out to a larger undertaking with a larger time commitment and more productive sessions. Once I cut my teeth in the video interviews, I would like to start embarking on more in-depth studies of people. I am not sure if 12-24 months would be overreaching, but I would like to complete one, two or even three full scale written biographies, probably of people I know. My initial thoughts are that my father, my mother's father (deceased) and my mother in law would be three great subjects, given my proximity and knowledge of them. Years 3-5 I hope to create a process where videographies are being amassed online, building to a tagged catalogue on a variety of subjects that can be accessed by the public to hear short anecdotes from historical events from perspectives previously only available to tiny fragments (only the spouse, children and friends of the subject have heard the story, for example, etc). Using this catalog as a springboard, I would like to move towards full-life encompassing, written, collaborative projects. Collaborators would be participants in the life. And by the end of year 5, I hope to have a boilerplate system that will allow me to encapsulate lives thoroughly and interestingly enough in an efficient manner so that I may repeat the process quickly--perhaps at some point working on a half dozen at once, completing a certain number of projects every month. I am not sure what that might look like at this point, but the ultimate goal is to be able to create an accurate, fully fleshed out memoir of a person of no public importance; instead a person who's life will be important to his/her descendants in a way that only descendants can place importance. In addition to this importance, will be the importance to posterity the detailed recording of the reaction to these 'normal' individuals in the face of major events) 9-11, WWII, Reaganomics, the Iraq War, etc), and in the face of common or uncommon normal life events (moving, marriage, mourning, child-rearing, etc) Other aspects of the five year plan involve my trying to take conscious strides to being a better parent, working towards gaining a better relationship with my wife and with my entire family, and lastly, increasing my ability to manage and run a household. Some of these are less tangible and may be harder for me to measure and therefore, to gauge the success of within the context of something like this five year plan. However, these aspects of my life are extremely important and I need to maintain their relative importance at a conscious level to ensure the remaining elements are able to improve for me at a moderate, reasonable and appropriate level and way. I recognize a lot can and will happen over the course of five years, and so this is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of undertaking. There are continuous regular checkpoints along the way. The plan calls for monthly check-ins, quarterly check-ins, bi-annual check-ins, and annual check-ins which at any time will have to be adjusted for any short term or obvious long term unseen issues. In my experience, taking stock of a given issue, and taking the time to think more about it always brings about positive results. That is the thinking behind this. I have read several business books recently that all seem to mention that 'good things' do not just come to those who wait; but more likely they will come to those can visualize the path to those good things, and take the decisive steps to go to them, rather than waiting. I hope this plan will serve as a push to start me moving towards something.