29 Things I Want To Do Before I’m 30

This past week I had my 29th birthday (yay me!).

The night before I was going over my 2011 New Years Resolutions (written in my moleskin notebook with a color-coded system in my typical OCD-like fashion) and was thinking about what I have and haven’t accomplished in the last year. I’ve put a significant dent in a lot of my goals but still have a ways to go.

So with my recent birthday, and the fact that my 20s are coming to an end, I started reflecting on where I want to be a year from now. Not just what I want to have accomplished, but what kind of path I want to be on, and where I want to be focusing my energy and attention.

Some of these things are major goals – others fun distractions.

So without further ado, here are 29 things I want to do before I’m 30:

29. Break more rules.

28. Get a tattoo.

27. Buy at least three people I admire a beer when I go to the World Domination Summit in Portland next year.

26.  Build up my web development business to the point where I won’t need to moonlight as a third year resident because I’ll be earning more money making websites.

25. Learn Ruby on Rails. Just for the fun of it.

24. Create my first paid product – a guide to finding an epic relationship online. I’ve been meaning to do this for years.

23. Pay off my car. I have 2 years left on the loan but I want to pay it back early.

22. Get a guest post on Zen Habits. I love Leo and his blog and one of these days I’m going to write him a killer pitch.

21. Do a century bicycle race.

20. Be better at remembering people’s birthdays. I never check facebook so I always forget. I made a calender in my iPhone, but I never check that either. I need to find a better system for this.

19. Cook more. Eat out less. By far my biggest non-fixed expense is food. I love eating out but spend WAY more than I need to on this. I’d love to learn how to cook simple meals so I can whip something up instead of ordering sushi take out for the 5th time that week.

18. Learn how to sing vibrato. (I have a strange, life-long obsession with vibrato).

17. Become a better negotiator.

18. Go on at least one cool trip. My vacation time is extremely limited, but I’d love to go on an action-packed vacation at some point. Maybe surfing/camping along the coast.

17. Fight resistance.

16. Take a digital sabbatical. I love web surfing, blog reading and email but sometimes feel too tied up with my computer. I’d love to take a week off the internet (possibly in combination with #18).

15. Try a hallucinogenic drug. If you work for the DEA, I’m just kidding.

14. Get massages more often. This may or may not be related to the fact that I had a masseuse show up to my door last night care of my boyfriend Peter (happy birthday to me!).

13. Do more nice unsolicited things for my friends.

12. Reach out more to bloggers I admire. Corbett Barr, Tyler Tervooren, Karol Gadja, Leo Babauta, Jonathan Mead, Ramit Sethi – I’m talking to you.

11. Go camping in Joshua Tree. May be combined with #15.

10. Stop twirling my hair. This may be too lofty a goal since I’ve been doing it since I was 10, but I’ll give it a shot.

9. Read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. I’ve been meaning to do this since my mom mailed me the novel 6 months ago.

8. Find more peace with the fact that I’m chained to a pretty brutal day job (residency) even though I wish sometimes I weren’t.

7. Be a better doctor. Even when I’m sleep-deprived, frustrated, demoralized or otherwise not in an ideal state of mine.

6. Write an EVEN FUNNIER ukulele song making fun of the medical establishment. Yes, funnier than this one and this one.

5. Do more unsolicited nice things for Peter.

4. Start consistently making $1000-3000/month additional income from my business ideas.

3. If I make enough, put a monthly chunk toward my depressingly large amount of educational debt.

2. Take a writing course or workshop.

1. Multiply this blog’s subscriber base by 10.

There you have it. We’ll see how the next year goes. Happy (belated) birthday to me!

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