Quickly, I wanted to outline the major points of my 2017. Although I accomplished a lot this year, I feel like I wasted more time than I want to in the future.
Job Update
The first part of the year I had the opportunity to move to a new country and found a new job that’ll allow me to stay here indefinitely. I’ll be creating a new team here and managing development and staying hands on with manufacturing.
The first 5 months of this journey abroad including going through an accelerator program learning the ins and out of manufacturing as well as getting our idea to prototype. I had a chance to work with industrial designers and manufacturing personnel.
Film Making Update
While I was so spending all day at this accelerator my nights were taken up by a film project. I spent 5 whole months just about every day behind a camera filming my first feature film. I met a local expat who directed his script with an amazing group of people and was fortunate to be part of the entire process. I hope to see the film out in the US in 2018.
Photography Update
After 6 hard working months, I took my first of many vacations (really weekend trips) in this foreign land. I went to Yangshuo, Foshan, Hong Kong, Macao, and other locations I can’t remember at this time. Traveling hasn’t been one of my biggest interests but I’m grateful for all the moments I’ve create this year because of it.
During my time in Yangshuo, I had this crazy idea to create a picture book of all the doors that caught my eye. As part of 2017, I’ve added author to my list of.. random things about me. Although I’m not publishing this book in retail, I am publishing the book online. You can find it here for free (PDF):
[DOWNLOAD]
Music Update
I still have 4 days of 2017 and there’s still one more accomplishment I wanted to do. I brought my harmonica abroad and told myself, I’m going to make some kind of album out of using it. I haven’t started but I think I can accomplish it given one day this weekend. We’ll see.
EDIT: I did it, free to listen and download on bandcamp
Final Thoughts
With all the good I accomplished this year, I still feel like I wasted a lot of time. I work late often at past 2pm most nights due to working across different timezones and this causes me to wake up late for my own set schedule. I waste hours in bed that I’ll never get back and I want to change that. So for 2018, I don’t want to waste time that doesn’t need to be wasted laying in bed looking at my phone or oversleeping.
Interesting year.