2014 in the hindsight

2014 has been a great year for me with few excep­tions.

I did not have any grand res­o­lu­tions to start with. I instead chose to inten­si­fy the tiny habits method I stum­bled upon in 2013. As a self-reminder, I forked some markup on Codecad­e­my and cre­at­ed a three point man­i­festo for myself. I think I lived it very well.

In the sec­ond half of this year I put in a lot of effort towards my next major life chang­ing pur­suit. I am hope­ful, but regard­less of the result, I am proud of my work.

We had a love­ly hol­i­day in Queen­stown to cel­e­brate our 7th wed­ding anniver­sary in March.

I shook hands with Matt Mul­len­weg and had a 15 minute phone con­ver­sa­tion with BJ Fogg in June.

Besides these, there are quite a few tiny things: I can now touch type, I am fit­ter than ever as a result of 110 hours of train­ing, com­fort­ably swing 20 KG ket­tle bell, last front plank for 2 min­utes, side plank for a minute, rid­ing 123 day streak on Ele­vate, removed Face­book on my phone. I went sug­ar free in Jan­u­ary and Sep­tem­ber. I also let go of meat and did not tweet in Sep­tem­ber.

Through­out this year, I uti­lized my com­mute to lis­ten back to back to two major San­skrit epics of ancient India, Mahab­hara­ta and Ramayana. I nev­er got a chance so far in my life to lis­ten to these spir­i­tu­al­ly enlight­en­ing epics. I am pleased to learn that the prin­ci­ples taught in these epics — integri­ty, con­duct, giv­ing, grat­i­tude etc.- are more uni­ver­sal than a reli­gion.

In the ongo­ing effort to edu­cate myself with tiny habits, I attend­ed Habits work­shop and GTD course on Skill­share. I con­tin­ued to work on improv­ing my writ­ing apti­tude.

I also read some inter­est­ing books, pledged lit­tle mon­ey to fund Zen Habits book on Kick­starter, and became a mem­ber of EFF.org.

It is not all hunky dory though. I am deeply dis­turbed by the plane acci­dents this year, MH370, MH17 and QZ8501. I still strug­gle to digest these mishaps. I expe­ri­enced some per­son­al fail­ures too. An idea I had for anoth­er life event did not quite work. I failed to put in the required effort to pur­sue a six pack abs. I had to drop out of a cou­ple of online cours­es I hoped to attend. I could not do more than one Toast­mas­ters speech project.

There were a cou­ple of per­son­al near miss­es. In April, I drowned in the deep end of the swim­ming pool and was res­cued by a life guard. In June, some­one crashed into my car’s rear bumper while I was wait­ing for the traf­fic lights to turn green. In both these inci­dents, I was with my lit­tle boy. By God’s grace, we escaped unscathed.

Over­all this has been my great­est year ever. Hope your 2014 has been large­ly great as well.

Here’s to 2015.