2022 Week 17/52: Fear & Creativity, Lessons From The Longest Study in Happiness

Hi Everyone! How was your week 17/52? How did you do on your weekly goals?

2022 Week 17/52 Personal Goals

✅ Goal #1: Manage my binge eating disorder. Every day, I will track my calories to eat between 1200 to 1700 calories a day. I will record what I eat and post it to this blog to help me better understand what causes me to binge eat.

Eating 1500 Calories a Day: Week 17/52

✅ Goal #2: Write consistently. 5 to 7 days a week, I will read and follow My 2022 Writing Manifesto.

✅ Goal #3: Maintain my mental health. 5 to 7 days a week, I will sing three positive songs and sleep before 11:30 PM.

This past week, I sang my first ever Japanese language song: Yoko Hikasa – Utsukushiki Zankoku Na Sekai

✅ Goal #4: Maintain my physical health. 5 to 7 days a week, I will meditate for 2 minutes, practice 25 minutes of yoga, and do 10 minutes of weight lifting or cardio.

✅ Goal #5: Read books to gain knowledge and new perspectives. 5 to 7 days a week, I will read for 30 minutes and I will write down my favorite passage of the week on this blog.

This past week, I was reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, Melody Beattie’s Codependent No More, and Liane Moriarty’s The Last Anniversary.

Favorite passage of the week

In fact, it seems to me that my fear and my creativity are basically conjoined twins – as evidenced by the fact that creativity cannot take a single step forward without fear marching right alongside it. Fear and creativity shared a womb, they were born at the same time, and they still share some vital organs. This is why we have to be careful of how we handle our fear – because I’ve noticed that when people tr to kill off their fear, they often end up inadvertently murdering their creativity in the process.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic

✅ Goal #6: Become more organized. 5 to 7 days a week, I will spend 10 to 30 minutes organizing.

✅ Goal #7: Become more physically active. Every week, I will do 1 physical activity like hiking, table tennis, swimming, etc.

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This past week, I played 2 hours and 30 minutes of table tennis with Mark and Sure Sure. About 41 minutes of playing table tennis was actually in the zone (for fitbit this means my heart rate was in the fat burn/cardio/peak zones).

It was only this past January that I discovered that for me to get a high from exercising (by which I mean I feel like I got a heavenly full body massage) I’ll need my heart rate to be in the zone for 30 minutes or more.

✅ Goal #8: Improve my listening skills: Every week, I will listen to one podcast or TED talk, and write down what I learned in 1 to 5 sentences.

This past week I listened to Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness | TED.

Robert is the fourth director of the longest study on human happiness which was started by Harvard University in the 1930s. The study tracked 19-year-old sophomores from Harvard and teenagers from the poorest neighborhoods of Boston over the course of 75 years. Every two years, they interviewed and performed medical tests on their subjects to track the subject’s happiness levels.

They found that while many young people tend to think that fame, fortune, and hard work will bring them happiness, it’s actually the quality of close social connections that make us happy and is good for our bodies and brains.

✅ Goal #9: Emulate Krista Tippet’s (Winner of the National Humanities Medal, Peabody Awards, Webby Awards) way of speaking. Every week, I will listen to Debbie Millman interviewing Krista Tippet and record a passage of Krista’s that I want to emulate.

✅ Goal #10: Remember my late father through cooking. Every week, I will post one recipe to this blog to remember him.

This past week, I posted my Easy Cabbage and Garlic Stir Fry Recipe.

Week 17/52 Goal Summary

✅ Goals completed: 10

❌ Goals not completed: 0

This week’s completion percentage: 100%

Dear readers, how was your progression towards your 2022 goals? 😃