2018 - A Year of Learning

Jan 1, 2018 12:00:00 AM by Patrick Eng

As the new year began to approach I realized that I hadn't come up with any new year resolutions that I would share with people but then never follow through with. I honestly can't recall any year where I actually set a firm resolution and stuck with it the entire year, and to be frank, I don't even remember what my new year resolution for 2017 was. I don't even know if I made one…

Regardless, since I am now at the mature and wizened age of 21, I thought that I might be at a point in my life where I could actually come up with something good and then stick with it. I knew that I had to do something big though, and also find a way to be held accountable.

And then, like a flash from heaven, I realized something.

I realized that I could rely on my two daily average visitors to my website to keep me accountable. If you are one of those two visitors, don't freak out, you don't actually have to do anything extra. These two visitors are going to keep me accountable because I am expecting you all to come to the blog and want to read what I'm going to write. My imagination has always been pretty good.

I haven't even said what my resolution is, so feel free to skip to this part if you want.

The New Year Resolution

I've decided that 2018 is going to be a year of learning. For those of you who don't know, I am still in school (graduating in May) and working 38 hours a week. But when I say a year of learning, I don't mean in school or at work. I mean, obviously I'll still be learning in school and work, but it's a different kind of learning.

I want 2018 to be a year where I broaden my understanding of the world, specifically on topics not related to my major (IT) or job (Marketing Technology).

After talking with some friends and thinking about what I wanted to accomplish in the new year, I finally settled on how I would accomplish this year of learning. I will be spending one week researching a specific topic, then writing a blog post summarizing what I learned as well as a LinkedIn post linking back to the blog post. I will do this for 52 weeks, so by December 31 of 2018, I will have published 52 blogs and LinkedIn posts on a wide range of topics.

To be clear, I'm not publishing all these posts for any sort of search result reasoning. I am doing it as a record-keeping method and a way to be held accountable.

And when I say being held accountable, it really boils down to this: you will find a handful of topics below with links to their respective blog post. If you're reading this around the beginning of the year, don't expect too many to be done.

Learning Topics

So, without further ado, here are the topics (subject to change) that I will spend 2018 learning about:

I will be coming back to this post frequently to update the links and topics though as I continue to publish posts and brainstorm new ideas.

Also, if you know of a cool topic that isn't talked about too much, or you're just really passionate about it, feel free to tell me about it and I'll see about adding it to the list.