A Brand Spanking New Year

Jan 3, 2007

My new year’s resolution includes blogging regularly. Although that is relevant here, it is not significant in terms of how it impacts my life. But I use blogging as a tool to reflect on my life and think about where I am going and wonder about what I should be doing. If this is done in isolation, it can be very depressing. Blog helps by also showing me other fun things I’ve been doing.

The “real” (significant) resolution needs some intro:

My resolution of last year was “Take More Risks”. This doesn’t mean I wanted to pursue a career in window cleaning for high-rise buildings. I changed my work-visa from L1B to H1B. I also changed my employer and went into a more direct profit-loss consulting role from being an employee. This is definitely much higher-risk. Although it pays significantly more, if I don’t go to work for a day, I won’t be payed for that day. After all, risk = reward. So I can say that I met my overall 2006 goal. No more “bargaining” for promotion. I hated the appraisal time where “they” humiliate you using all methods possible… Now I just get a percentage of what the client is billed. But it does come with all its accompanying potential nightmares… but that is something I just have to deal with and not something I need to blow out of proportion and worry about.

This brings us to this year. Last year’s change did bring an improvement. But it was not an order of magnitude improvement or anything like that. I plan to spend my free time on entrepreneurial activities this year to hopefully bring a big improvement in my lifestyle. I had this on the radar for last year. I officially started an LLC company; dabbled with various ideas; bought lot of domain names; got started with Lisp & Python, put up some small webapps etc. But they were not intense efforts. This is what I intend to do this year. Don’t wish me luck. But on second thoughts, may be please do – my friend says LUCK = Laboring Under Correct Knowledge.

What are yours? Do you have any big plans for the year? If not, why not? Why not just try something?

[Thanks to Ruchi for reading the draft and suggesting improvements]

3 comments

mike wrote on Jan 04, 2007:

“I hated the appraisal time where "they" humiliate you using all methods possible...”

Having spent most of the post-optimistic years of my adult life being a participant in “Corporate America’s” rodeo. I read this line and had to laugh and nod my head in approval. You could do 10 things right, invent fire, solve world hunger and for extra credit bring peace to world in you spare time.

However come review time it would have been noted that you were a month late on inventing fire, there were a few hungry people who you missed and you didn’t send out a memo letting everybody know bout world peace. Other than that not a bad year and here you’re here’s 3.0 raise.

Mallik Reddy wrote on Jan 08, 2007:

nice to see that you are finally in control of your life and be able to realize a % of your effort into your pocket.. however, I didnt get what you meant by nightmares in .. "Now I just get a percentage of what the client is billed. But it does come with all its accompanying potential nightmares... " any nightmare other than loosing pay on the day you are sick or something.. and a great demotivator to take vacation.. ????

Saaral wrote on Jan 19, 2007:

i think this will make u consider ur vacations more worthy... :)
and its a gr8 feeling when you know that every single thing u do gets a reward...