My first post went live seven years ago today.
A lot has changed since then. Aside from not writing here regularly, I’ve moved, married, changed job roles and have expanded the family with kids. It’s a good opportunity to take time and reflect on how far I’ve come and where I’d like to go next.
Anniversaries are only arbitrary if you don’t put in the work to make them significant.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
I uploaded my post last week without much thought. When I went back to draft some ideas for a future post, I saw that Beachhead was my 301st post. I missed the opportunity to both celebrate the milestone and reflect on its significance.
Earlier this year, I missed the 5-year anniversary of this blog. I let the milestone pass by, unlike years past. I think part of the lack of enthusiasm for these significant milestones is due to general pandemic-induced apathy (we’re all feeling it). But the optimistic side of me also thinks that these milestones are less important than the work itself. I used to be more metrics-driven with my blog, excitedly noting the passing of the first year or the first 100-posts. However now I’m not concerned with reaching a future target but instead focus more on ensuring I’m keeping up with the weekly schedule and trying to come up with decent thoughts worth publishing.
That’s not to say that all of my posts are worth reading. I wouldn’t say I take a lot of pride in the final product of what goes up weekly; I’m not ashamed either. It’s just that the quality of the final draft isn’t as important as sitting down to do the work. Of taking an idea from brainstorm to coherent narrative. I find more satisfaction in putting in the work than the bragging rights of the final product. I try to think of it as more of a craft-mentality rather than creating a masterpiece corpus of writing.
Each post is an exercise that stretches the muscles, practices the movements, and gives me an opportunity to learn and develop slowly over time. At present, this blog operates at a loss (no income is generated to offset the nominal fees I pay for the site and URL). And I’m completely fine with that. At one time I thought about turning this into a brand and trying to monetize it. I’m not opposed to scraping money out of the endeavor, but it’s not the primary focus of this blog.
When I shifted away from the blog being an exercise in becoming a paramedic, it merely became a place to publicly share my practice of writing to meet a deadline. That’s good enough for me. It doesn’t have to seek to achieve anything grand – not everything has to be epic or monetizable. It’s still fun and I feel good shipping the work. As the mass of posts grow, I can look at the incremental progress and take satisfaction in what it represents – time well spent.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
We recently celebrated our son’s first birthday, so naturally I’ve been reflecting on the last year of being a first-time parent. If I were to summarize the most important lesson (beyond any of the technical skills you need to keep your kid alive), it’s that parenting is the largely an illusion of control. Your child is a chaos engine that you will try to wrangle, understand, and predict, but from moment to moment, day to day, week to week, things change wildly without discernable reason. Things that worked suddenly stop working.
The tighter you try to hold onto control, the more frustrated you’ll be.
As a corollorary, in accepting that your child is pure id, you must also come to terms that your child (at least for the first year) carries little intentionality behind what they do, and so you must not attribute your frustration to them. Instead, recognize that your frustration is a product of your own unrealistic expectations. If you align your expectations to this reality, I find it’s much easier to weather the physically and mentally taxing moments.
This isn’t to say that you won’t feel anger or frustrations directed toward your child. I’ve accepted that I will feel these feelings and there isn’t anything wrong with them so long as you don’t act on those impulses (physically or verbally). As the adult, you are expected to have learned to understand your physiological signals and adjust accordingly. As your child grows, and as they experience new feelings in themselves – feelings that they won’t have the context to understand – it’s your job to guide them through the experience so that they can learn as well.
In sum:
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
I hit a new milestone on Sunday with learning German on Duolingo. I hit 1,111 consecutive days of practice.
I’ve discussed before how I’m a little skeptical of the learning process, especially with how easy it is for me to mindlessly snap off a quick lesson by repeating modules so that I preserve my momentum. Still, I am pleased to hit this milestone after 3 years of consistency. While we can question whether I’m gaining true fluency in the language, we should at least acknowledge when we stick with learning habits.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
Last week, I created a video training series for the ethics board I’m on to help with onboarding new board members. Prior to COVID (the “before-times”), I would book out a meeting space on a Saturday morning to train new board members for 4-5 hours at a stretch. However, since we have been unable to meet face-to-face for the last year (we moved to remote in March 2020), it’s been difficult to help new members get up to speed. On the one hand, we could have accomplished the same training agenda using a video conferencing platform, however on the other hand, sitting on a training call for 4-5 hours is not a great experience for anyone involved.
We decided to go about the problem differently and embraced a flipped classroom format. By having training videos available, members can go through the lecture material at their own pace, then we can have a shortened video call to answer questions and do practice scenarios. Once I make the videos, they are always available, so there is no further cost to my time, except when we want to update content.
I was able to marry my experiences on the board reviewing ethics applications with my experiences vlogging over the last 7 years. Side note – our first podcast episode was released 7(!) years ago, on March 10th, 2014. Time flies!
Thanks to the time spent filming, editing, and publishing video content, I was able to put together an hour and a half series of short videos to go through the main points of being on the board and reviewing ethics applications. I had done something similar when I created a short onboarding video for my work at the college a few years back, but this was the first time I plotted out a multi-video series to create something resembling a course.
Admittedly, the fact that I did it myself shows in the quality. I don’t have the hardware to easily read scripts naturally, so I spoke extemporaneously with a set of notes, which shows in the final versions. Also, I don’t have a lot of experience with graphic design and after effects, so the shots can be a bit static. Nevertheless, it’s hardest to go from zero-to-one, from nothing to something. Everything after this point can be incremental improvements.
It was an interesting experience to marry these two different parts of my life. Vlogs, even the podcasts that I did with Jim, are more personal, with little actual expectation that people will see it. The videos Jim and I made were more for myself as a creative exercise. But these videos I’ve created are intended to help pass on some of what I learned while on the board and prepare them for the work we do.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
Here we are at the dawning of a new year, which for me means it’s time to post an update on my reading over the last year. For my previous lists, you can see them here: 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016. It’s hard to believe this is my fifth reading list!
| Title | Author | Date Completed | Pages | |
| 1 | Creative Calling | Chase Jarvis | 22-Jan | 304 |
| 2 | The Age of Surveillance Capitalism | Shoshana Zuboff | 25-Jan | 704 |
| 3 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | 27-Jan | 112 |
| 4 | Alexander Hamilton | Ron Chernow | 02-Feb | 818 |
| 5 | Range | David Epstein | 12-Feb | 352 |
| 6 | The Bookshop on the Corner | Jenny Colgan | 29-Feb | 384 |
| 7 | Call Sign Chaos | Jim Mattis | 12-Mar | 320 |
| 8 | The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | 19-Mar | 208 |
| 9 | The Alchemist | Paulo Coelho | 22-Mar | 208 |
| 10 | Guns, Germs, and Steel | Jared Diamond | 06-Apr | 496 |
| 11 | Upstream | Dan Heath | 16-May | 320 |
| 12 | Symposium | Plato | 18-May | 144 |
| 13 | Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift | 25-May | 432 |
| 14 | Anything You Want | Derek Sivers | 11-Jun | 96 |
| 15 | Extreme Ownership | Jocko Willink & Leif Babin | 18-Jun | 384 |
| 16 | The Code. The Evaluation. The Protocols | Jocko Willink | 23-Jun | 93 |
| 17 | How Will You Measure Your Life | Clayton M. Christensen | 28-Jun | 236 |
| 18 | The Last Wish | Andrzej Sapkowski | 05-Jul | 384 |
| 19 | The Expectant Father | Armin A. Brott & Jennifer Ash | 06-Jul | 336 |
| 20 | The Coaching Habit | Michael Bungay Stanier | 14-Jul | 234 |
| 21 | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | Rebecca Skloot | 23-Jul | 400 |
| 22 | Working | Robert A. Caro | 08-Sep | 240 |
| 23 | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | 15-Sep | 544 |
| 24 | Every Tool’s A Hammer | Adam Savage | 18-Sep | 320 |
| 25 | Love Sense | Dr. Sue Johnson | 20-Sep | 352 |
| 26 | Natural | Alan Levinovitz | 22-Sep | 264 |
| 27 | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | 06-Oct | 363 |
| 28 | My Own Words | Ruth Bader Ginsburg | 10-Oct | 400 |
| 29 | Kitchen Confidential | Anthony Bourdain | 20-Oct | 384 |
| 30 | Stillness is the Key | Ryan Holiday | 06-Nov | 288 |
| 31 | The Oxford Inklings | Colin Duriez | 07-Nov | 276 |
| 32 | The Infinite Game | Simon Sinek | 14-Nov | 272 |
| 33 | The Ride of a Lifetime | Robert Iger | 21-Nov | 272 |
| 34 | As a Man Thinketh & From Poverty to Power | James Allen | 26-Nov | 182 |
| 35 | Medium Raw | Anthony Bourdain | 06-Dec | 320 |
| 36 | A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | 06-Dec | 112 |
| 37 | The Little Book of Hygge | Meik Wiking | 12-Dec | 288 |
| 38 | Nicomachean Ethics | Aristotle | 30-Dec | 400 |
| Total | 12242 |
Overall, I’m happy with how the year went for reading. In reviewing the list, a few things stood out to me. First is that I surpassed my total books read for the year over 2019 by 13 entries. While we can certainly have a discussion about the merits issues of using the number of books read as an accurate key performance indicator of comprehension or progress, it was nice to see that I stepped things up a bit. I was fairly consistent in making my way through the books, with only a dip in April (likely because of the life-adjustment that came from working from home) and the silence seen from mid-July to the start of September thanks to the birth of our son in early-August.
I’m also happy to see that I read fewer self-help and business books last year and instead dove into more fiction, memoirs, and books about history. In my previous roundup, I had commented about wanting to be more intentional with my reading after feeling burnt out on certain genres of books.
One significant change in my reading habits this past year was that I joined a reading group/book club. A friend organized it just as things went into lockdown in March. We meet online every few weeks to discuss books selected in a rotation by the group. I commented earlier that I read 13 more books this year than last, and I’d attribute the book club to being the single biggest reason for the boost in completions (we cleared 12 by year’s end). Here are the books that we read:
I’d normally create a separate post about my top reads for the year, but I’ll include it here for simplicity. In chronological order of when I finished, my top 5 reads of the year are:
This was a pretty good year for reading. It felt good to get lost in more fiction, and I’ll have things to say in the future about the value I’m finding in reading as part of a group. In the meantime, Happy New Year, and it’s time to keep tackling my reading backlog.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
I received some sad news last week – my time as a teacher has (for now) come to a close. The Chair has decided to take the course out of the general education elective rotation and will offer a different slate of courses to ensure students have a variety of electives to choose from.
This is not entirely unexpected. I taught my first section in September 2016, and am currently in my 13th straight delivery. In this time, I’ve had a little over 300 students, meaning I’ve graded some 3,000 assignments and 600 essays.
Back in 2016, I snapped this photo of my last day in the classroom for my very first semester of teaching (all the rest of my deliveries have been online).
It has been a great experience and has taught me a lot about empathizing with students and overcoming my biases and assumptions of how one ought to teach. It was also humbling to see some student work come in that, frankly, was better than anything I could have written.
I appreciate the patience my students have shown me these last four years as I have moved cities, gotten married, graded while on my honeymoon, and when welcoming our child into the world.
I’m looking forward to a bit of a break from teacher life, but I hope to get another opportunity in the future.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
This weekend, I hit a new milestone – 900 consecutive days of practicing German using Duolingo.
Upon sharing the news with a friend, he asked how fluent I feel. Truthfully, I still feel like I’m pattern-matching. I’m fairly decent at decoding messages and generating approximately correct statements, but I don’t feel that I could carry on a conversation.
That’s not to say there is no value in what I’ve invested so much time in. Last year, my wife and I spent a few days visiting her family in Germany, and I knew enough from practicing on Duolingo to utter a few sentences and follow along on some simple conversations. However, it was a valuable lesson that just because I unlock levels, it doesn’t mean I’m gaining competence. Sometimes, what you think you are learning doesn’t match what you are actually practicing. It’s good to keep this distinction in mind.
Stay Awesome
Ryan
I normally post on Monday’s, but today is the 4 year anniversary of my first post on this site (tomorrow if the 4 year anniversary of my substantive first post, but let’s batch them into this post for funsies).
With everything that’s going on, I wanted to pause for a moment to commemorate my “Hello World” moment on this blog. Even though I still don’t have any concrete plans for this site, I’m still going strong by committing myself to consistently putting in the work. If I’ve learned anything in 4 years, it’s less about the business plan and more about putting in the work. In this case, it’s better to focus on quantity, rather than waiting for the quality to start.
Stay Awesome,
Ryan
A Paramedic's Notebook 