Chris Brooks Newsletter 009
Happy new year! Late again because of the interim CTO gig with Payscale and an amazing birthday trip for my sister up to NYC. I’ve got to be careful of having a full carryover where the newsletter comes out closer to the end of the month than the beginning.
1. 🚘 Where I’ve been traveling
We are anchored in the central east coast of Florida right now, alternating between hanging at my sister’s place (usually sleeping in our new van these days) or taking short adventure trips in the area. We are enjoying our paddle boards, and especially enjoying the easy inflation with our van’s on-board air system.
We drove down to the Boca Raton / Palm Beach area to camp and visit friends, spent some time in an AirBnB in Melbourne Beach, and spent a long weekend in NYC with sister Jennifer to celebrate her birthday. We saw three Broadway shows (A Beautiful Noise, Kimberly Akimbo, and Wicked). All very good and all very different. Ate some classic NYC food, walked about 10 miles per day, and even worked in a visit to Jersey City to see son Matthew and girlfriend Lauren.
2. 📖 What I’ve been reading
Mostly books this month, no exciting articles to share. Too many “best 10 <blanks> of the year”!
- Still reading Shadows of Self, will wrap this one up soon and move onto the third book in the trilogy. I’ve been reading zero fiction outside of bedtime for the past few months.
- Paper Tiger by Tom Coyne, about his journey to play in one or more tour qualifying events by spending an entire year doing almost nothing but practicing golf. Recommended.
- Currently reading The Cup They Couldn’t Lose about the 2021 Ryder Cup and Talent about identifying and recruiting talent.
3. 🍿 What I’ve been watching
The only TV show we started and finished in December was Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Mormon murders in the 1980s. Good tension and story on many fronts.
So many movies watched! Many of these of the high brow Hallmark variety:
- A Christmas Story Christmas was much better than expected.
- Three Wise Men and a Baby was the best Hallmark Christmas movie we saw.
- We Wish You a Married Christmas was the worst one.
- Haul Out the Holly was an average Hallmark Christmas movie.
- Santa Camp was an OK documentary about recruiting and training more diverse Santas.
- The Banshees of Inisheeran was so good, and all the more so because of of time Julie and I spent on the Aran islands in 2015.
- Enola Holmes 2 continued to deliver quality mystery and suspense.
- Glass Onion was OK but nowhere near as good as folks are probably telling you.
4. 🎶 What I’ve been listening too
I got about halfway through the Bono memoir Surrender, checked out from our library, before I had to return it. Will finish it most likely next month. If you have even a passing interest in U2 I recommend this, and I suggest listening to the audiobook on normal speed. There are songs with each chapter.
Not surprisingly, I’ve been revisiting U2’s catalog, with some extra time spent on The Unforgettable Fire and War. Fire was so overshadowed by Joshua Tree coming out as their next album, and it is easy to forget just how good Fire is as an album.
5. 🎲 What I’ve been playing
- Allen and I have an ongoing game of Crossing the Line: Aachen 1944 in VASSAL, and we both love it.
- Doug and I started playing Panzers Last Stand, a game in the Battalion Command Series
- I moved on a bit from Slay the Spire, sure I’ll come back to it again eventually. Lately the games Marvel Snap (waning) and Monster Train (rising) are occupying my leisure time.
6. 🎢 My Yearly Planning Cycle
Rather than define new year resolutions, I define a yearly theme. I first did this three years ago in 2020; follow that link if you want more details on the rationale behind having a theme and the differences with resolutions.
I’m still refining my theme and will publish it on the blog shortly. I did define some goals for my golf game, and if you read those carefully you’ll see that they are a mix of process goals and outcomes goals. A process goal is where I define some changes in behavior I seek that I expect to lead to desireable outcomes. An outcome goal is a definition of a specific outcome I am seeking. Examples:
- Process goal: I will do push-ups 6 out of 7 days every week and a bench press weight workout once every week. Each will be done to exhaustion with a goal of ever increasing set size (push-ups) and rep weight (bench press) throughout the year.
- Outcome goal: By the end of the year be able to bench press my current weight.
I tend to favor process goals, but sometimes defining a hard target provides the extra motivation I need to sustain process improvement. My words of wisdom: if you want to define an outcome goal, consider coupling it with a process goal (usually a behavior change or habit you want to install or uninstall) that would likely lead to achievement of the outcome.
See you next month!
-Chris