I was listening to someone speak the other day and they mentioned they frequently orient their years around themes or broad goals. I've actually been doing this for years without knowing or having structure to it. Several years ago, I quit Facebook and other new feed type social applications. The information quality was too low and I wasn't getting novel interesting things to read or see. I setup my first RSS reader (Stringer) and promptly followed a bunch of blogs that I had seen posts from recently. Since then, I've added some and removed some but the overall quality of information has been consistently pretty high.

I thought a bunch about the theme of focusing on what you read for almost two years. I started reading more long form journalism and started reading novels again. Overall, I would rate this as having been one of the highest impact changes to my life. Many thing I never would have seen without following content sources directly. One posit, some of the most interesting content is by authors whose popular posts get on aggregators/social media. However the content from them is the content that doesn't blow up or go viral. Content that is widely shared and spread is often diluted or byte sized because people just don't have the time investment to put into reading it and thus the most interesting content is not shared.

So to circle around again to broad themes or goals for 2019, my primary one is a goal of execution. When I look at 2018, I did a bunch of prep work for a variety of things throughout my life. I took a break from committing to as much work and relaxed for the year. It was a lovely break but I'm ready to get on the move again. So my theme for 2019 is execution. I have so many projects that are half finished or are incubated that need to get finished and shared. I do this because it makes me personally happy. My internal mood is pretty strongly linked to what I've gotten done recently. However I also do it because I ultimately hope that other people like the work I've been doing and find it either pleasing or valuable.

One minor theme that I'll note is that I would like to start writing more essays on this blog. This is the first but won't be the last by any means. Have a an excellent 2019.