The New Year Resolutions that helped me have a better 2017
Do you like New Year resolutions? I have mixed feelings, but I decided to make some as a 2017 challenge and I chose four areas in which I wanted to grow: wealth, fitness, hobbies, career. Twelve months in and I think the experiment went so well I will do it again in 2018, and I invite you to follow along. Interested?
For a really long time I thought New Year resolutions were cheesy and boring. “I want to lose weight”, “This year I will get in shape”, “From January I quit smoking and reduce alcohol intake”, we hear them everywhere. As the year begins, no one joins me for dinner and drinks anymore and the gym gets overcrowded all of a sudden. By February, everything is back to normal and by December I hear the same old resolutions, suffixed by “next year will be different”. I did not see the point of making a resolution.
Personally, I really like experiments and I wanted to set some New Year goals at least once in my life. However, I wanted to choose something that would have a meaning and will serve as a stepping stone to something bigger, something that I long wanted to do. Most important, I wanted the resolutions themselves to be achievable.
So for 2017, I chose four areas in which I wanted to grow, and for each of them I chose a resolution that would either be a first step for something bigger, or would be the final step of something I long waited for. In the order of completion, my four areas and new year resolutions were:
1. Wealth
“I will invest at least $100 into an asset that I will hold long term”
Completed: 30 January 2017
Investing into the stock market was something that interested me for a long time. However, it did not itch enough to make me actually do the research, open a brokerage account, put the money in and watch it growing or disappearing. I needed a New Year resolution to make it a reality.
There were a few challenges for this one. To begin with, I did not know much about personal portfolios, so I had to learn. If you are interested in my favorite books, I wrote an entire article on how I bought a share of TSLA and which books do I recommend.
Another challenge was my paperwork. I was in the United States at the time and I wanted to invest there, but I was technically a non-resident alien, which came with a few restrictions. In particular, I was not allowed to open accounts with Vanguard, Fidelity and almost any other broker. I was lucky to find Wealthfront which was more flexible. Their robots helped me figure out my risk tolerance, created a diversified portfolio of ETFs for me and are rebalancing it once a year, keeping in mind all the tax implications. I strongly recommend them if you like the “set it and forget it” style of investments.
This resolution was a stepping stone. I wanted it to be easily achievable, just to get my feet wet and figure out if investing is for me or not. Since then, I purchased individual stocks, crypocurrencies and invested in early stage startups either directly or through Wefunder (more on these later).
2. Fitness
“I will run a 5k, 10k or semi-marathon and get a medal for it”
Completed: 21 May 2017
When I was 14 years old, I went to a kids dash competition in my home town. I took it as a challenge and I ran the entire 1.2 kilometers without stopping. They were giving medals to the top runners and I was not one of them. The vast majority of those who got a medal took a shortcut during the run, which really pissed me off and I haven’t run since.
A decade later I decided I can give it another go as long as it is properly organized. I wanted to eventually participate in a full marathon and a 10k run would be my first step. I needed a New Year Resolution to take the step.
The main challenge for me was that I got quite bulky recently. Most of my gym routine is around muscle mass gains and all my diet is supporting that effort. I needed to lose some weight as well if I wanted to be able to run for an hour.
Another issue was that running for one hour on a circular quarter mile track is ridiculously boring. I quickly fixed that as I discovered the BiggerPockets Podcast and the Tim Ferriss Show, which helped me learn a lot about Real Estate and entrepreneurship while getting my miles in.
After running the 10 km in the Chicago spring race, I concluded that running is not for me. I managed to get injured during the training and I did not find it particularly satisfying. This was however a great experience and maybe one day I will have another attempt to run a full marathon. Until then, I am back to my old gym routine.
3. Hobbies
“I will visit Disney World — Orlando, Florida”
Completed: 9 June 2017
From my four resolutions, this is the one that was not a stepping stone. This was a goal, one that I had for more than a decade. And I needed a New Year resolution to get me out of my apartment and all the way to Florida to get a feeling of what Disney World was all about.
I hope I will at some point write a full review of my experience in Florida. For now, the highlights of the trips were:
- Florida during summer is rainier than London (or Seattle)
- Kylo Ren is the most awkward meet-and-greet character and I have the video to prove it
- Some roller coaster rides require a 5 hour queue commitment
4. Career
“I will create an artificially intelligent bot and have a conversation with it”
Completed: 3 December 2017
It goes without saying that Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic. After having a couple of conversations with people in industry and academia and after reading papers around the topic, I became sceptical about the future of AI. Maybe I needed more hands on experience to fully appreciate the current state-of-the-art.
To help with my motivation, I needed the bot to be specialized into something that I am really passionate about. This is why I created the Bitcoin Bot which I simply named Bibo. Bibo will answer any question about cryptocurrency. You can ask about the price during a particular day, current support and resistance levels, arbitrage opportunities, and the list goes on. Bibo is your personal assistant, your friend and the only form of intelligence that will listen to your Bitcoin ramble 24/7 without complaining.
I will write an entire article about Bibo if there is interest. For a quick technology overview, I used Heroku to host my bot and have a public facing IP, then a simple Flask server to receive and respond to queries, a few APIs for grabbing the market data and wit.ai for Natural Language Processing, context extraction and supervised learning, so I did not have to train a Deep Neural Network myself. Some Python glued everything together and Facebook Messenger acted as a frontend for the communication with the bot. Facebook also has really nice integration with wit.ai (which they acquired a while back) and their API is sane and really easy to use.
At the end of the exercise, my bot could accurately identify greetings and make some silly small talk. It can extract date/time information from natural language and figure out when the topic is cryptocurrency. It cannot currently remember multi-message contexts (it does not maintain state) and the only expertise it has is in Bitcoin and Ether. However, this was a really fun exercise and I will share Bibo with the world soon if there is demand.
Want to follow along?
My hope with this article is to show that New Year resolutions are underrated and to challenge you to pick something out of the ordinary for 2018. For some inspiration, check out the Impossible List.
I believe new year resolutions work best when there are stakes or when you share the resolution with someone who might hold you accountable for your words. To help with that, I am making my New Year Resolutions list public and I invite you to add yours next to mine for a better 2018. Just open a pull request.
Happy New Year!
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