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This is the part two of my Looking back (An annual review – 2015) post. Check out the first part here.
Part 2
![Picture Courtesy - Michal Parzuchowski [Stocksnap.io]](https://i0.wp.com/himanshusachdeva.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Looking_back_annual_review_mod.jpg?resize=665%2C442&ssl=1)
Looking back (An annual review – 2015) – Part 2
Looking back (An annual review – 2015)
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From past two years I’m doing an annual review of my life. Cause I want to pause and reflect back on my successes and failures of previous year and publishing it here in this Blog keeps me accountable for the next year.
This is my third annual review, you can access my previous reviews here (2014) and here (2013). This year also I’ll answer three questions, same as last 2 years:
- What went well this year?
- What didn’t go so well year?
- What’s am I working toward?
Keeping yourself accountable is a great thing I’ve learned from several people in the last year’s timespan. Many famous Bloggers/Vloggers and authors have mentioned it, they’ve mentioned one more thing which is – “In-order to make yourself accountable, you have to let someone else be the judge”. I couldn’t do that as of yet, but it’s in my resolution list for year 2016. [I’ve compiled a new year’s resolution list as well, will be tagging that here shortly] This year I want to remove a few not so good habits from lifestyle as well. So making myself accountable for the actions i take will be a good start, so I’m gonna let some of my close friends who can be as ruthless as this task will require to punish me if I don’t do well in this task. So that’s gonna be interesting, only time will tell.
2015 has been the greatest year of my life till yet. After the last 2 Annual Reviews, this year when I kept record my doings and held myself accountable for things I was doing for myself I felt more control over my life, far far better than in any other year of my life. It was like in some way I knew where i was heading. From the learnings of the last year 2015, I’m finding acquainted with more knowledge about areas of life which were untouched earlier which eventually led me to be in a self aware mode. I was completely in the zone of doing things in the last whole year.
I’m keeping this post in 3 parts to avoid it becoming a really really long post (longer than my target of 3000 words per post). First part will be – ‘What went well this year?’ I’ll just keep the next two parts as to be continued. In-fact i just don’t want this post to read like desperately moving towards closure but want to make it really in-depth and insightful.
Lets cut to the chase. I hope you find it interesting.
Story of my first Half Marathon.
Picture courtesy — Abigail Keenan
Some people are born to be Athletes. Well, I’m definitely not one of them.
In my childhood, I was always game for sports. All kind of sports. I played badminton, cricket, basketball etc. I always wanted to take part in sports but I was more of a jack of all rather than being a specialist. I never focused on one single sport, I was little there in each of the sport.
But as I came out of college and started working on my first job in Mumbai. I realized that I needed to get back into sports. I was now too skinny and a long way from fit. Then it started getting worse. I became underweight.
The picture below is from 2010 (5 years back). Yes, that’s me. Some of you might not even believe it (Even though its all smiles but still). You had to see me to believe it.
Gratefulness, motivation and running stories!
Earlier I’ve written about my daily rituals and how I keep myself going. If you have read my earlier post, you may remember the importance I give to gratefulness in my life.
Everyday I wake up, I see the sun rise, I go for my morning run, while running the breeze comes on my face, I get to see beautiful scenes of nature – trees, stray dogs, fallen leaves, the sea flowing. All these things make me feel alive. At that time, I tell myself how grateful I am to the creator, who shows me the real beauty in everyday life.
Each day in my daily prayer I pause for a moment to think about the world we live in right now. Where we can breathe fresh air, walk and run freely, eat whatever we like, wear whatever we feel good in, go where ever we want. I feel grateful for this abundance of nature, this freedom. This habit of being grateful keeps me motivated.
Looking through the tiny keyhole
Picture Courtesy – ‘Music Smells Like Noise’ Blog
We all see the world through our own tiny keyhole.
Today we are living in a comparatively peaceful world then the last couple of centuries. We should be grateful for that. Days of literal war are a talk of the past. But everyone fights a different kind of war today. We fight it everyday. A beggar fights for a meal, a rich fight to stay rich, an artist fights the block, an athlete fights to reach their optimum performance.
It doesn’t matter how hard you fight, what matters the most is if you are consistently putting efforts. Its not about how furious you are its about how consistent you are.
How this amazing medium helped me read more than 9 hours a week?
Recently I’ve found interest in an old school medium of book and article reading, even though its old but still got its charm. It literally helped me gain more knowledge than ever before in past sometime.
This medium is Audio! by the mean of Audio books & Podcast.
How it can benefit?
While commuting or going for a run, earlier I used to listen to all types of music. But recently after reading an article from a guy who works at buffer. He shared amazing routine of his where he listens to audio books and podcasts while running or commuting. Here is a brief of the reasoning he gave.
“Often we use to put aside less time for reading articles or books than we would want due to busy life. But guess what! its not that we have less time, its how we make best of our time.”
His words gave me a reason to stop and reflect on my daily routine. Lately I’ve started 3 new books and have put many articles in my read it later app. But yet I’ve not made any significant progress in that front. Not because I’m too lazy, but because my day job and workout routine leave me rarely any time for reading books and articles. So I tried to think, where can I cut some slack and add myself some reading time? That’s where the power of this audio medium crossed my mind.
Looking back (An annual review – 2014)
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This is my second annual review but first one which I’m publishing on my blog publicly, you can access my last year’s review on my Evernote here. Last year after writing my annual review i got a sense of purpose and a reflection of whatever I’ve done in the last year. This gave me a chance to take stock of what went good and what could have gone better and the way forward.
In this year’s review I’ll try to look back on the accomplishments from the last year’s list. This way I can analyze my performance and the processes I’ve adopted. This will help me perform better in this new year and i shall try to do better on the new good habits that I’ve included in my lifestyle but also get rid of the bad ones which I still have.
After last year’s review I’m consistently tracking my progress on various aspects of my life and that way I felt more control over my life, which was merely there earlier. Last year I had adopted to work more towards the process of doing things instead of focusing on the goal. By far I’ve achieved better than ever before towards the goals I seek in my life. Last year I’ve read somewhere that to inherit good habits, one should continuously do that task for at least 3 weeks and then it becomes a part of your memory (or may be muscle memory in case that’s a physical task). So I’ve tried experimenting this with a few things i do or i want to do in day-to-day life. For example, to include exercise in my daily routing, i was struggling badly. But since I’ve started doing something (running) which i love in the form of exercise and made a process which helped me not to miss it. I formed a habit of daily waking up at around 7:30AM and run the daily errands and then slip into my shoes and reach the society (where i live) gate. By doing this i got myself out of bed and forced myself to reach till the gate. If i reach the gate then I felt less urge to go back up to my apartment and i could go to my running track and do a running session without any hesitance. I continued it for almost 4-5 weeks until i faced an ankle injury. But by this i understood how to form a habit and go on with it. Now after healing from that injury I’m continuing my running with the same habit.