Investing in Yourself - part 1
It's probably little late to be talking about New Years resolutions but one of the ones that I decided to do this year was to make a series of investments in myself this year.
It's too easy to get stuck in the monotony of merely making a living and miss out on the opportunities that make a life. If I recall correctly - i think the book "7 habits of highly effective people" people referred to it as focusing on the urgent and not the important. So I've looked over my life and found some areas that I felt needed improvement and am spending money to improve those areas:
To improve my inner person - I'm working through these two books:
Taming Your Gremlin (Revised Edition): A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way
To improve my outer person:
Joined a gym (as most americans do every January) but to help seal the deal I've recently purchased a large block of sessions with a personal trainer over the next few months. While this may be expensive in the short term, I believe that the long term benefits of improving my health will be well worth it.
I've also added a little accountability by posting my weekly weight loss results in an online community that I participate in with others.
To improve myself as a Web Developer:
One area that I've always felt a bit weak in was in coding Javascript. Sure I can use many of the existing tools and frameworks out there to hide my weakness, and never felt shy about hacking away on some existing javascript code. But writing an advanced animation or interface feature from scratch has always felt just outside of my comfort level. Fortunately there's been a glut of new Javascript books hitting the market that seem pretty damn good - so I've purchased them and have been working my way through them a little each night. Here's the books I'm working through (for anyone interested):
The Art & Science of JavaScript
Head First JavaScript (Head First)
Well that's enough for this post. I have more to write but it's best if I wait to give those when I have more time and also I can give regular updates on my progress along the way. Besides - another one of my goals is to get back in the habit of regular posting, and I think avoiding the need to do huge monolithic posts will help with that.
