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I've made a lot of plans over the last six years. Dozens of times I've made a plan only to change it later, or discard it entirely. I've finished maybe 25% of the things that I've started. That's not a good record. Yeah, I've got ADD, but that's not excuse in my opinion. It can perhaps explain the problem but it certainly doesn't help solve it. On the plus side of these failures, though — I start lots of things. Probably 3-4x as many projects as the "average" 20-something. So I've probably had a similar number of successes as the average person my age.

Looking back over all the discarded ideas, I've noticed a trend: I've always planned for what my ideal self, rather than my real self.

In short, I've planned to fail.

Having a fairly simple life over the last 18 months, I've had a lot of time to do self-inventory, assessing my own weaknesses and strengths. I'm happy to report that my strengths more than outweigh my weaknesses, but to be truthful, consistency is not one of these strengths.

I'm getting better, but I'm nowhere near my ideal. Which brings me to the point of this post — every time I have planned to:

• Return to school
• Be consistent with my finances
• Start saving money on a set schedule
• Go to the gym or exercising regularly
• Et cetera

I have not accounted for my own inconsistency in the original equation. I am great at digging myself out of holes, but I suck at climbing mountains.

So for someone who is largely on flat ground now — neither in a hole nor on top of Mt Kilimanjaro — how do I proceed? I'm at a crossroads in life right now, in a very real sense. I have two paths before me: one leads to great wealth, and one leads to a lot of hard work and an uncertain future.

The path to great wealth is the path of least resistance, ironically enough. But I don't care to choose this path. The other path requires much more work, but the personal rewards are far greater.

I don't have any solutions to my conundrum. How does one build in mechanisms to overcome one's own shortcomings? Wanting something badly clearly isn't enough. I have some possible solutions, but I don't know how well they will work in practice. In this regard, I am looking for some advice from people wiser than I am, who learned at some point how to get out of their own way.

Accountability

I like building systems. Systems take the thinking (and sometimes doing) out of everyday tasks. This can be simple: write down the instructions on how to program the garage door code so you don't have to re-figure it out every time. Or it can be complex: set up an automated task to execute which removes 1) doing the task by hand and 2) remembering to do it on time.

I like systems. Building systems in my personal life has helped me overcome many of my weaknesses in the last 18 months. But I never build in accountability, so I have failed at the Hard Stuff.

I always accomplish more when there is an outside force compelling me to do or accomplish something. I succeeded in high school simply because you'd get detention if you skipped class. (No, I never really studied.) College, of course, is a different story. Hence my spectacular academic implosion since I graduated from high school — I never went to class and barely studied.

But accountability is uncomfortable.

Inconsistency

I blow with the wind. This doesn't mean I follow the crowd, it just means that I'm not consistent about doing anything. Whether that's backing up my computer, or going to the gym, or writing for Ars for an appreciable length of time — inconsistency is my biggest weakness. I am starting to chip away at it with the help of the people in my life, and by immersing myself in positive media, but I'm still far from where I'd like to be, and I am afraid that this inconsistency coupled with a lack of accountability will continue to haunt me moving forward.

So much so that I am almost afraid to try something new, or plan something truly ambitious, because looking at my past, I know what I will do: give up about 3 weeks in, or at least start seriously slacking off. This is a new feeling for me, because I've always been one to jump in with both feet, probably because easy come, easy go, right?

I don't want to be that person anymore, and I am about to embark on something that is *completely* outside my comfort zone.

I thought I'd write down a list of my heart's desires. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but I've not done it for some reason, even though doing such things is motivating.

All of these desires are near and dear to me. Some of the items on this list I've wanted since I was a small boy (possessions, mostly), and some of them are newer desires (higher-level desires like love and fulfillment). Many of the list items appeal to my vanity, but they aren't the most important things on the list by far. The traveling is more important to me than owning a Ferrari and a helicopter, for instance. The people I travel with are just as important as the destination, because it wouldn't be the same without them. Things like that.

Some of them won't happen until I'm much older. Some of them are ongoing things and can never really be checked off.

Dreams are goals with time limits attached. I have time limits attached to many of these things, I simply didn't put them into the list. I've struck off the goals I've already accomplished.

1. Fall in love and get married
2. Stay married
3. Have a son
4. Have a daughter
5. See them both become self-actualized, successful people at whatever they choose to do
6. Meet my grandchildren
7. Never stop moving towards self-actualization and always make forward progress in self-improvement
8. Own my own business
9. Start my own financially-successful website
10. Open 12 VA offices in NY
11. Be out of debt by age 26
12. Have a net worth in excess of $1 million by age 30
13. Have a net worth in excess of $50 million by age 39
14. Have a net worth in excess of $1 billion by age 65
15. Be on the cover of a prominent business or news magazine
16. Write a fictional book
17. Go to South Africa with my dad
18. Visit Egypt and the pyramids with Fabien
19. Own a collection of fine watches. (God I love watches!)
20. Get my helicopter pilot's license
21. Own a Robinson R44 helicopter
22. Go to a professional driving school
23. Drive an open-wheel (Indy) car
24. Design my own home and have it built for me.
25. Own a new Ferrari
26. Order and pick up a brand-new Porsche 911 Turbo in Europe
27. Participate in a Porsche event on two seperate continents
28. Buy a Dodge Viper for Rich. Just to say "Thank-you."
29. Visit Australia, Fiji, and New Zealand with my dad
30. Visit Antarctica
31. Visit Iceland
32. Visit Norway
33. Go on an African safari (non-hunting)
34. Get my SCUBA license in Guam and go diving with Nick there
35. Dive the Great Barrier Reef also with Nick
36. Spend two months in Europe back-packing
37. Go to China and see the Great Wall
38. Throw a huge birthday party for myself when I'm old since I've only had one in my life.
39. Get rid of the bittersweet feeling that the holidays brings by having my own family where we stay home and celebrate and people come to us, rather than having to figure out where I'm going on what day. Be the center rather than participate in other people's centers.
40. Own a beautiful home somewhere in New Hampshire
41. Contribute something meaningful to a great charity or organization
42. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox-Yankees game
43. Take my grandmother to a Red Sox World Series Game
44. Go to the summer Olympics in another country
45. Go to MacWorld with David and/or Paul (Nerd alert!)
46. Do something truly extravagant with my close friends, just for the hell of it.
47. Create a full college scholarship to a worthy institution based on need and merit that can only be won by a white male.
48. See a Josh Groban-Charlotte Church duet. Live. In the front row.
49. Start a news-media company
50. Touch the lives of 5 children less fortunate than myself in a meaningful, personal way.
51. Start an angel/venture capital fund for startups
52. Retire and run my own (or someone else's) charity.

I was going through some old image directories the other day, just to see what I had., and it turns out that I have pretty much every screenshot I've ever taken from 2002 until the present. I was looking through some of them, and I came across some screenshots of Outlook 2003 — specifically of the "To Do" list functionality. (I used to be a huge O2K3 junky.)

Looking back then, to see what I had to do (I was a second year in Pharmacy school)… man it's a freakin' joke. I used to think I was so overwhelmed back then. Now it's like "Hmm, I'd take me maybe 2 days to get all that stuff done now.") The 4 screenshots span 12 days, and most of the stuff didn't get done in the timeframe that I wanted it done in.

Click each thumbnail for a larger view.

Seriously, the amount of stuff in screenshot 1 would be done in literally three days at the most today. I waste so little time now, it boggles my mind. Even compared to just six months ago.

I guess starting your own business will do that to you, though, won't it?

Outlook 2003, GTD

Despite what TechCrunch says, Gmail is not perfect.* It's missing two more key pieces of functionality that I (and many others) would likely use. They are:

• Sort mail by attachment size
• Delete attachments (but not the entire email message)

I'd like to be able to sort by attachment size, so I can delete attachments which are large, and/or I've already downloaded to my computer, which is the second bullet on my list. I just sent out an attachment that didn't work as expected, and I wanted to delete the attachment from my email, and leave only the working version. Can't do that the way that Gmail is currently set up — I can delete the whole message, but I don't want to do that.

Maybe they'll add this functionality later on. I surely hope so. I'm not running out of space, I just don't like keeping superfluous junk in my email — I like to pare everything down to the bare essentials, and broken email attachments aren't essential.

* This of course, is ignoring the fact that some 60 Gmail users lost almost all of their email in recent weeks. Oopsie.

Google, Gmail, email, Internet

I haven't written anything in a while, mostly because I don't have much to say that others would find interesting. However, I would just like to say that printing to PDF absolutely kicks ass. I discovered this nifty little thing a couple of months ago, and I've been using it religiously ever since.

For those of you non-Mac users, and those who are but haven't noticed, OS X has a built-in print to PDF feature — made much more useful if you click the print page link, or printer-friendly link that most sites have before printing to PDF. (Click for full-size.)

For the last couple of months or so, I've been creating my own little library of research papers of things I'm interested in, or have had occasion to use:

I've actually been accumulating material faster than I can read it thanks to school and work, but I'll have time to catch up in the coming weeks. When I want to find something that I know I read, just Command-Space and I can search the contents of all of the PDFs instantly using Spotlight.

Lots of people complain about Spotlight, but it's better than anything Windows has out-of-the-box.

All of this can be accomplished on Windows, as well, but it's just easier on a Mac. I save CEs, journal articles, whatever I find interesting. It's also interesting that a lot of what you read in medical news and journal articles is 1) uninteresting 2) unremarkable and 3) useless. It seems it's always fun to compare things to placebo when it would be much more interesting (and useful) to conduct head-to-head tests of drugs.

There is no "best-of-breed" drug for a given condition most of the time, thanks to the near-infinitely variable nature of complex higher organisms. There are very few absolutes in medicine, but there are trends that usually emerge. It'd be nice if researchers started going out of their way to look for them. That's somewhat difficult, though, when most of the big studies are funded by large pharmaceutical companies with a vested interest in seeing their drug perform well. You'd be a fool to hundreds of millions of dollars for a big study only to have your drug not perform as well as a competitor's… Sometimes the NIH funds head-to-head studies — the only entity besides Big Pharma with pockets deep enough to do so — but only when there is a significant amount of money to be saved by establishing a "winner".

If I get bored someday soon, I'll post some of the names of the huge studies to which I refer in this mini tangent…

Apple, OS X, Spotlight, Tiger, Mac, PDF, library, digital library

I've got about 10 minutes to kill before I need to make a phone-call, and I've not written in a while, so I figured I would write a quick entry since I've been feeling introspective of late.

It's October now, and in the last 4 months, I have made several significant changes in the way I go about my life. I made a conscious decision back in June to stop doing things the way "they're supposed to be done" and have opted instead to do the things that bring me happiness and fulfillment. There's been some overlap, but there wasn't a whole lot. Not at first.

Bulleted lists are always fun, so here's one so I don't ramble for paragraphs:

• I left pharmacy school
• I decided to only do things that make me happy
• I have realized that sometimes it's better to bite your tongue and do things you don't like rather than trying to fight The Man. Not all battles are worth fighting. It's not worth it on a personal or professional level.
• I've gotten rid of all unnecessary overhead in my life. A concept I will go into more detail about on my blog here later. Briefly, though, that refers to getting rid of extraneous distractions in one's life, not lowering one's electric bill.

Somewhere along the way everything started to change very quickly:

• Instead of barely passing grades, I'm getting straight As.
• I've decided I want to go back to MCP. (Readers of this blog with a memory know that's a mind-boggling statement.)
• I have decided that I'd rather learn than do almost anything else.*
• I think I may go to med school when I am done with pharmacy. But not before.

There were several catalysts for some of these changes in action and attitude. The main one has been that my mom told me that she won't cosign on all my student loans any longer. That made me angry at first, but now I'm grateful for two reasons: I already have a mountain of debt; and it has really made me get my priorities right in a more meaningful way than "gee maybe I should stop clowning around in school."

* In terms of "learning" I mean that I have taken to reading my physiology book for fun. Really. I took our therapeutics book home from work, and I'd take Drug Facts and Comparisons home too, if I could get away with it. I spend all of my free time not occupied with work or school reading and researching things. Because I want to. In fact, I have a list of things that I want to learn about on my Desktop.

In my Facebook profile I have said that "Rian is feeling spongy" or "Rian is a sponge". This is because I have re-developed the ability to read and retain almost all information after only reading it once: an ability I lost somewhere in the early stages of high school. Along with this has been an ability to study and absorb heavy information for long periods of time. On Saturday I worked hard for about 13 hours straight with no artificial help save 2 cups of coffee in the morning. I haven't done that since I was taking t, I didn't know I could do it without stimulants.

Suffice it to say that I'm happier now than I've been in a long time. Most of my days are spent in a state of autotelic flow, and it's not even a battle to get to that point any longer.

Bumps in the road aren't a problem any longer, either. I spent a significant chunk of free time with someone whom I love very much this past weekend who needed company. This meant having to re-arrange my remaining free time drastically to accommodate. I didn't mind at all, but six months ago, I wouldn't have been able to adapt like that. It's a refreshing change.

Flow, psychology, self-actualization

One of the modules I have on my Personalized Google Homepage is the Quote of the Day. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's stupid. And sometimes it speaks to me. This is one of those rare times.

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.

- Frank Tibolt

As I writer, I've found that to be more true than almost anything else.

QOTD, quote of the day, Frank Tibolt

When I'm writing, I'm very conscientious of the words of I'm using. Generally, I choose each word specifically for a reason. As I'm taking online courses, most of the work is written, which is good for me. I don't have to drive to class 3 days a week and sit and be bored out of my tree. It's a lot more efficient to sit at home and do the reading and writing all at once. 3 hours of work condensed into 1.

Anyway, I read other people's work sometimes — it's encouraged — and sometimes I wonder if people know what the words they're using actually mean. In OS X, there's a little dictionary built-in. If I don't know all of the subtleties behind a given word, I won't use it, or I'll look it up just to be sure. And then I'll re-work the sentence or paragraph until I like it. (Blog entries excluded sometimes. ) There are similar tools for Windows. And about a million Internet dictionaries on top of that.

My writing is a lot like my speaking. I've been told in the past that I speak "like a book" — whatever that means. I've always taken it as a compliment because I choose my words carefully both in speech and writing, and I strive to have my writing be as much "like me" as possible. I try to be authentic.

But when you read papers — even at the college level — it becomes apparent that people cannot write nearly as coherently as they can usually speak. They use words that they wouldn't if they were talking. This is bad because it's usually painfully obvious. It's okay to be plain-spoken. You don't need to have a Shakespearean vocabulary to get your point across; no one's going to look down on you for not using flowerly language. Yeah you might not be able to be a "professional writer" — whatever that means these days — but you won't look dumb, either.

This begs the question… why not simply speak your mind on something and then transcribe what you've said? It's real, it's usually not bad, and it's probably quicker than trying to bridge that disconnect between speech and written communication that seems to exist in some people — and it'll sound genuine AND intelligent.

Really, it's just better.

communication

It's been a long time since I've gone a full 24 hours without having any AdSense clicks on any of the 3 sites I run. I don't really mind since I've demolished my earnings goals for the month, but I thought it was interesting anyway.

In fact, it hasn't happened since… June 24. Hah!

I suppose that's actually pretty good for just getting started. OTP, as usual, remains my biggest earner by far, despite having been slashdotted here on rianjs.net. Now that IS surprising, even though tech-savvy traffic typically doesn't click on advertisements.

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