Resolutions: Recap and Recommital

Well, 2010 has come and gone and as I look back, I didn't do all that badly (although admittedly I was a far cry from doing well).

Below I give a little recap of how it went for 2010 and what I'd like to do for 2011.

• Physical

Lose 30 lbs (bringing me below the 200 lb mark)

Unfortunately, I didn't lose 30 lbs. But I did lose 25 and I feel better physically than I have for quite a while. My secret: running my guts out. I've actually started working out on my lunch hour which for me reduces my appetite significantly. Sure, I'm a little smelly when I get back to the office but that just means fewer interruptions and shorter small talk conversations.

For 2011, I'd like to drop another 20-25 lbs...get down to my “playin' weight" and see how that feels. I'm also going to do some weights this year where last year was exclusive cardio.

Run the 4th of July 5K in Grantsville (and humiliate all of my younger brothers and children)

I participated in my first Ray Barrus Memorial 5K and had a great time. Two of my younger brothers beat me, but one of them is a cross-country coach (or was at the time) and the other is twelve years younger than me and lost control of his bodily functions in beating me...for reals. So that means I only beat one of my brothers (because two were too big o' wusses to participate) but I handily beat my three older boys, their dad (fist pump), my sixty year-old dad, and my sixty year-old mom (although she was pushing a stroller). I also beat my little sister, but she had to quit because she was going to be late for work.

I went on to do a half-marathon training plan later in the year, which I completed and by the end of the year I was down to about a 22 minute 5K (where I think in July I got 25:30 or something).

For 2011, plan to do a marathon training plan. I didn't get into the Ogden Marathon so I don't know if I'll even do a "real" marathon but I do plan to run 26.2 miles in a row at some point.

Oh, and I'll be back at the Ray Barrus Memorial 5K as well, with a vengeance!

• Mental

Read one book per month (I read long books for the most part, ok)

I didn't read 12 books, but I did read quite a bit. I finished Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. I read The Blind Side by Michael C. Lewis, How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins, and worked my way through all of Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker articles. I'm currently reading Andrew Jackson by Brands and am 1/5 through the unabridged version of Les Miserables.

For 2011, the book a month goal still seems reasonable. I'll shoot for it again.

• Spiritual

Read the Book of Mormon all the way through

Made it through Helaman while reading the Book of Mormon Institute Manual concurrently and most importantly got back in the habit of daily personal scripture study.

For 2011, plan to finish my current time through plus reread again.

Read all of the Old Testament selections from the Sunday School student manual

Not even close. We'll try again in 2011, but this year it will be New Testament.

100% Home Teaching

83%

Spend at least two hours a week on my Sunday School lesson (I feel like this should be more, but don't know where to find the extra time. You're right, I could give up Idol).

Ummm, maybe...sometimes. I did give up Idol but for unrelated reasons.

• Social

Weekly blog post

Does one count? Dropping the expectation to monthly for 2011.

Organize a get-together with old friends (these are friends I haven't seen for some time, not friends that are advanced in age)

No, in fact I don't know if I even saw any "old" friends.

Send out a Christmas letter (Thanks to Jeanell, we do pretty well at sending Christmas cards, but I'd like to use that opportunity to bring people up to speed on what we're up to).

No Christmas letter either.

A last thing I'd like to improve on is becoming more involved or at least aware of politics and the important issues facing our country. If anyone has good recommendations of websites, blogs, books, etc., please post as comments.

I've done a little bit better here. Just try to read from a variety of papers on a variety of topics. I've liked the Economist app on my iPhone. Every issue, there's a set of "Editors' Highlights", usually about 4-5 articles, that I can read for free. Usually, that's about all I have time for anyway.

Well, I guess that's about it for this blog post. Wish me luck for 2011 and best of luck to everyone else in their quest for continual improvement.

The Futility of My New Year's Resolutions

I am a very firm believer in New Year's Resolutions. Each year I start to think about all the areas I need to improve in and formulate goals that will help me to improve in those areas. Unfortunately, I am much better at thinking about and making resolutions than I am at following-through and achieving them. I sat down and looked at my list today and already I am failing miserably (and we're barely a month into the year).

Well, I'm regrouping and thought sharing some of my resolutions here would maybe help to steel my resolve (besides, one of my resolutions was to do a blog post at least weekly...two birds with one stone).

A few of my resolutions, by category:

• Physical

Lose 30 lbs (bringing me below the 200 lb mark)
Run the 4th of July 5K in Grantsville (and humiliate all of my younger brothers and children)

• Mental

Read one book per month (I read long books for the most part, ok)

• Spiritual

Read the Book of Mormon all the way through
Read all of the Old Testament selections from the Sunday School student manual
100% Home Teaching
Spend at least two hours a week on my Sunday School lesson (I feel like this should be more, but don't know where to find the extra time. You're right, I could give up Idol).

• Social

Weekly blog post
Organize a get-together with old friends (these are friends I haven't seen for some time, not friends that are advanced in age)
Send out a Christmas letter (Thanks to Jeanell, we do pretty well at sending Christmas cards, but I'd like to use that opportunity to bring people up to speed on what we're up to).

A last thing I'd like to improve on is becoming more involved or at least aware of politics and the important issues facing our country. If anyone has good recommendations of websites, blogs, books, etc., please post as comments.

Outliers

Finally finished the second Benjamin Franklin biography I've read in the past year. Enjoyed it and loved Isaacson's concluding analysis of how appreciation for Franklin has ebbed and flowed based on the cultural climate. Since Franklin was more practical than romantic, many of the romantic era writers didn't express a high opinion of him. On the other hand, during the Great Depression, Franklin's sayings regarding frugality and hard-work caused him to be highly regarded.

After finishing that, I quickly read the latest by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, which I found fascinating. Some of the highlights:

• An inordinate number of hockey and baseball players are born in the months immediately following the "cutoff date" for their particular sport. For example, if players born within a calendar year are grouped together, those with birthdays in January - March are more likely to become professionals in that sport. The theory is that since nearly a year separates the players, the physical maturity of those older players is enough to get them selected for the all-star and competitive teams, which leads to increased opportunities to practice and better coaching, which increases the separation even further. This same type of pattern can be seen in education.
  
• Research shows it very hard to find someone who is naturally great at something and the magic amount of time that seems to be required to be excellent at an activity is 10,000 hours. The players with the early birthdays mentioned above get a leg up on reaching those 10,000 hours of practice.
• Bill Gates, despite having a brilliant mind and determination, came into some very fortunate situations that allowed him to get in 10,000 hours in computing/programming at a very early age.
• Cultural history plays a big part in our behavior. Rice farming which is very intricate and time-consuming in comparison to farming wheat or corn, helps explain a lot of the Asian work-ethic and success in mathematics. Gladwell talks about the TIMMS test that compares math scores between nations that is accompanied by a very involved demographic questionnaire. A researcher found that there was perfect correlation betweeen how thoroughly the student filled out the demographic questionnaire and how well they scored on the exam.
• Many plane crashes are caused by lack of communication between the co-pilot and the captain or the pilots and air traffic control. This lack of communication can vary culturally based on the power-distance index of the country, which is basically the respect for authority.
• Many of the differences in test-scores between higher-income and lower-income students can be attributed to their respective summer vacations. In other words, both groups of students are shown to progress equally during the school year, but during the summer, the higher-income kids progress significantly more than their lower-income counterparts.
• Advantages from having a high-IQ diminishes significantly past level of IQ needed to successfully obtain a four-year college degree. Once you are "smart enough", other aspects of intelligence come into play more.

This just a sampling of the book, but it really gets into how just restructuring some parts of our society could have a dramatic impact on how many people could be successful. I highly recommend it.

Also, you can access an archive of Gladwell's New Yorker articles here. I particularly enjoyed this one.

For those of you that follow the Sports Guy on ESPN.com, he's also had a couple of email exchanges with Gladwell over the years. You can access the most recent here. And one from 2006 here.

How Lucky Can I Be?

I am glad that I've been able to keep updating my blog with as much dedication and hard work as I put into the rest of my life.

For those that follow our family blog, which Jeanell maintains (and does a much better job than I do), you know that Jeanell gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Lila Rachel, a couple of months ago. When Lila was born, our plan was for Jeanell to be off work for as long as possible. Unfortunately, things haven't gone quite as planned and Jeanell had to go back to work earlier today.

This has been hard on both of us (I think more on her, but on me as well). I just need to take the opportunity to say what a wonderful woman Jeanell is. She has supported me in everything I've striven for. She tolerated me going to school in the evenings for three years so I could get my MBA. When I had a hare-brained idea to be part of a project team that would take me halfway across the country every week, she stood behind me. When I wanted to start exercising more so I didn't die of heart disease in the next decade, she told me to go for it. All of these resulted in untold sacrifice and inconvenience for the love of my life.

I just hope Jeanell (and all of my loyal readers) know how much I love and appreciate her. Not that I've amounted to much, but everything that I have amounted to is because of her unfailing love and support. She is tireless and even when working full-time, kept an immaculately clean house, prepared meals, helped kids with homework, worked on crafts and decorating, blogged, volunteered, and much more. I am truly a lucky man and am so grateful she consented to marry me almost nine years ago.

I love you, Baby. Thanks for everything.

What is the Answer?

I just remembered that I still have this blog and thought it was high time I provided my devoted readers with another highly educational and highly entertaining blog post. I guess with the economy crumbling and transitioning to a change in leadership, it seems like a somewhat scary time. I've never been too involved in politics, but am trying to be more active and better informed. I want to throw out the question, what issues are most important for us to be focusing on and what can we do to best advocate our positions on those issues.

I just read a book by Newt Gingrich from a few years back, Winning the Future and I agreed with a lot of what he had to say. Some of the things he talked about that jumped out at me were energy, creating a more business-friendly environment in America (which he feels is currently overtaxed and over-regulated), and healthcare reform. National security of course continues to be a high-priority issue as well.

So what do we do?

Thirty-One Years Ago Today...Umm, I Mean Last Week

I'm a few days late with this, but I need to pay tribute to the woman I love, who turned thirty-one on September 12.

Jeanell and I have been married for over eight years now and it's been a wonderful experience to live life alongside her, through all the hills and valleys that it brings.

Jeanell is such a wonderful wife and mother and takes such good care of me and the boys. As most of you know, I spent the major part of a year and a half traveling every week for work and she supported me through that and took care of things here, working full time, taking care of the boys, doing homework, getting kids to practices, doing meals, just taking care of everything.

I've had the opportunity to be home for a few months now and it's been wonderful to get reacquainted and to be able to spend time together.

In a few more months, we'll begin another phase in life (again) and I am so looking forward to taking care of our new baby girl with my beautiful wife. She is one in a million.



Happy Birthday Baby!

Reading and Running Update

Haven't blogged for a bit...quick update on my running and some comments on the book I just finished.

I've more or less stuck with the running and ran a total of 24 miles this past week, with a long run of six miles on Saturday. I'm feeling pretty good, but am still not really dropping the pounds like I hope to.

My brother-in-law Cam ran the Park City Marathon and is planning to run the Logan Marathon here in a couple of weeks. I have a ways to go before I'm ready for that.

Just finished The Glorious Cause and found it a bit more difficult than some of the other books I've read, but it was still interesting. Some of the main things I found interesting...

• The wide variety of issues that led up to the war that basically all boiled down to the Colonies saying, "We ain't paying taxes to Great Britain." Benjamin Franklin, who at one point was in favor of reconciliation, tried to argue that the Colonies would accept "external taxes", but not "internal taxes" although the supposed line between these two types of taxes proved to be quite blurry.
• The difficulty that George Washington had in keeping soldiers in the army (not to mention keeping them fed and clothed).
• The importance of France in the war and the unlikelihood that the Colonies would have won the war without their assistance (guess we do owe some gratitude to those cheese-eating surrender monkeys).
• The details of the Constitutional Convention and how the ratification of the Constitution was not that easy. In fact, many people of the era saw the Constitution as being in violation of the very principles for which the Revolutionary War had been fought. Namely, that it created a powerful central government, not too different from the government they'd just fought a war to be free from.

My next book will be another Franklin biography (this one by Isaacson). I might knock out Sam Walton's ironically titled Made In America quickly first.

Of the Revolutionary Era books that I've read, I'd have to say that my favorites have been by Joseph Ellis (Founding Brothers and His Excellency). I enjoy the analysis that he adds in addition to just telling the story.