New Year’s Resolution

My top New Year’s resolution: Sustain Positive Routines

New Year’s resolutions are difficult! Year in, year out, I make them, and forget about them. Make them and break them. Make them and change them. It’s a routine that I hate come December 31st. This year must be different, thus I am keeping it simple. Create Positive Routines.

Routine through asking myself and the world daily questions.

I started a few projects late last year and told very few people about them. I started a few experiments, two of which are relevant to my personal New Year’s resolution. I started a lab called The Empathy Lab and another one called qdqd. The Empathy Lab (TEL) is a lab where I will try out experiments as well as read and review articles / books on empathy. The first project out of TEL is qdqd. qdqd stands for “Quick Daily Question Delivery”. It will do exactly what as it’s name says, ask the world, including myself a daily question that can be quickly answered. Here, on this blog I will answer the #qdqd.

What does asking daily questions have to do with empathy?

We gather opinions, knowledge, and empathy over time. I believe that little bits of knowledge snowball into things like doctoral degrees in physics, excellent insight for fantasy football, deep rooted racism, and amazing skills in the kitchen/bedroom/boardroom. Bits and bits of code build software, pixels build digital pictures, rocks build mountains, sand builds deserts, and cells build humans. Despite acknowledging that small things build big things, we tend to chunk and guess our way through one of the most delicate parts of life, human interaction. We assume that all liberals eat organic granola with vegas yogurt and all conservatives own AR-15s and cammo gun bags. We know this isn’t true for a majority of people, yet the 2016 Presidential Election revealed a large ignorant knowledge divide in the United States, the UK, and other parts of the world. I personally want to start a new habit of building knowledge slowly. In life and in business, we tend to chunk information together to mitigate one type of self risk, but fail to see the risk for those outside ourselves. qdqd and The Empathy Lab are long term experiments to see how I can help add context to conversations and lives.

Routine through sharing my thoughts daily.

Earlier this year I wrote a blog post on Medium that explained my fear of writing. I don’t fear having something to say, I have plenty to say, but my issue is this:

Words bring opinions, sentences contain potential arguments, and the creation of paragraphs that make up stories make me feel vulnerable to critique over punctuation, word selection, or un-substantiated opinions. These things prevent me from writing and/or speaking publicly for the most part.

In order for me to share my opinions with others, I must be asked to speak. I don’t tend to offer my opinion to anyone that will listen, I am usually on the other side, listening and observing. This is why I am using The Empathy Lab and qdqd to question to myself and the world daily for the next 100 days.

Today is in the books. Tomorrow a new question, hopefully not as serious.