Improve My Life This Year

I’m All in This Year – Join Me!

You wake up… tired. You roll out of bed after hitting snooze a couple of times on your alarm. You shower, half awake but also already feeling stressed about your day. Commute sucks. Work sucks. Same-old, same-old life. Come home, tired. Watch whatever is on TV. Microwave some dinner. Go to bed. Struggle to fall asleep. Rinse and repeat. Days go by. Weeks go by. Months go by. Is this life?

No.

You can do so much more. You can wake up excited to be alive, no alarm clock needed.  Jump out of bed and knock out some pushups. Have a quick shower, cold at the end to invigorate yourself. Head to work excited, aiming for that promotion, confident it will soon be yours. You have plan. You outwork your peers, but most importantly, you outmaneuver them. You understand how to work faster, smarter, more effectively. People ask for and respect your advice. But the funny thing is, this job isn’t even that important to you. You have your side gig too, your real passion. Your business is growing everyday and while your peers gossip about the latest happening in entertainment, you are updating your website. It’s still small, but getting bigger everyday.

After work, you’ve always got something planned. Gym. Date. Meet-up for your hobby.

Your health is good and getting better. Your style is on point. Your bank account is growing.

You stop for a moment to think. Is this life? You smile. It is your life, and it keeps getting better.

Welcome to Improve My Life This Year. This website is my answer to the simplest but most essential question you can ask yourself. Am I happy with my life? I asked that question a year ago. Now, if you looked at my Facebook profile, my home, my car, my job – things looked fine. Not terrible, not great, but ok. But there was a problem.

Tick tock. Everyday, I get a bit older. And more and more I have been realizing, my time on Earth is truly limited. Worse, as I get older, my dreams and desires get larger. When I was in college, I was stoked to land a date with the cute girl in my marketing class. Now I want a deep and meaningful marriage. I was thrilled to score a summer internship that paid me about $15 during my masters degree. Now, I make way more but feel financially limited.

I had an epiphany. Our desires grow, but life is short. In fact, life gets shorter everyday. So we all collide with this growing realization that we are not going to win at what really matters. At first we get pissed. Rage against it a bit. Guess that we will get luckier than others. But we eventually accept and tolerate the notion that we just won’t get a lot of what we wish we could. And then we slide into this life of mediocrity. Not terrible, not great. Just okish.

One more epiphany. Humans learn to how to maximize performance in just about everything. Athletes train and world records fall. Engineers carefully design buildings to make them as strong as they can be. Scientists have adjusted farming to increase crop yields 100-fold. Human ingenuity has transformed every process on earth with an eye toward improvement. Except ourselves.

When it comes to the most important thing of all, our one and only shot at existence, our brief moment to experience the universe, this flash of life that we have, we haphazardly seem to stumble through it with no master plan, no strategies, and no carefully decided upon tactics.

That’s when I knew I had to make this site. We have important, meaningful desires but limited time to achieve them. So we have to approach our lives as something worth optimizing. That’s is the purpose of Improve My Life This Year. It is my answer to the question of how to best improve and optimize one’s life. I am no guru. No expert. No genius. But I do believe I’ve asked the right question. As to the answer? I won’t bullshit you and offer advice in areas I don’t fully understand. Thankfully, when it comes to health, finances, relationships, happiness etc., already a lot of great books have been written, ideas shared, and products created. My goal with this site is to bring them all together under one roof for you.

Join me. Walk through these pages with me. I will improve my life this year. Come with me on this adventure. Make 2018 the year you begin to change your life for better.

– James