Looking Back Looking Forward
Date Posted: January 1st, 2010
Happy New Year everyone! This year at LVC (and in life) I’ve accomplished a lot.
- I wrote a series on my experience practicing abstinence.
- I wrote a post on how to know if you’re in the wrong major or career. This turned out to be way more popular than I expected it to be.
- I wrote a post on how to keep your integrity when you make a new goal; very applicable for those of us making New Year’s Resolutions.
- In total I wrote 47 posts in 2009. Not too bad. It averages out to a little under one post per week.
- I graduated from University of Michigan in May. (Yay! It’s over!)
- I got a job at the University.
- I bought a house.
My goal for 2009 was to concentrate on writing. I had visions of me pouring over my old blog posts, crafting them into masterworks. Yeah, that didn’t happen. I did, however, write quite a bit, so I didn’t totally fail.
For 2010, I’m again going to focus on writing. I may go through some old posts and polish them up a bit. Mostly I’m planning to write regularly. None of these month long breaks like I had during the summer. I’d also like to build up a reserve of posts I can take the time to really think through a post or two. I want to provide something really valuable here. What that means is for January I’m going to move to a one post per week cycle, posted every Friday. In February I’ll probably ramp it up a bit.
Looking back on the past year I’ve had a hard time figuring out where to find readers for this site. The topics I covered were quite varied, from getting organized to taking adviceto finding the right career to sustainability and thriftiness. There’s no one place where these people could be. And it doesn’t really help my brand identity.
To combat this I’ve picked a theme for 2010: Relationships. It’s already the topic with the most posts (19 as of today), it’s an area where I have a lot to say, and it’s an area I need to work on. In case you’re wondering, the reason I think I need to work on it is that I’m an introvert and don’t really want to be. I have no problem being around people I know well 24/7, but being around lots of new people drains my energy. I do not want to have this drain of energy anymore. I have a hunch that the problem lies in some kind of mental block–it’s not like I’m anti-people or something–so I imagine some practice and some navel gazing ought to do the trick… or at least do something. Making it my focus for 2010 will be incentive to do something about it. I’ll report what I learn on here.
You’ll notice that by “Relationships” I’m not just referring to primary romantic relationships. In fact, that’s not really something I intend to cover all that much. There are plenty of books on that topic, and many of us are starving for other intimate relationships. We have friends, but can we count on them when we’re in need? How can we develop strong friendships? That kind of thing.
Also just because I’m focusing on relationships doesn’t mean that will be the only thing I write about. It’ll just be the default topic.
Looking forward to an exciting year!
