Goals for 2024

I invite you to join on my below goals. My hope is that the reader takes inspiration for their own 2024 goals.

Fitness:

Achieve sub-35 minute unweighted murph (1 mile run, 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, 1 mile run) and sub-40 minute 20 lb weighted murph and maintain fitness to be able to do this any time, any place.

Everyone can run, pull up, push up, and squat. Children to world champion athletes train these basic movements. I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some of the world’s best athletes and military special operators (through my work at H.V.M.N.), and I always like to cross-train in their domain. I am not competitive in any specialized sport or physical skill, but the specific block of run, pull up, push up, squats, run is universally recognizable and I can be competitive with anyone if I specialize in it. If I can hit these goal times, I’ll be able to beat most world champion athletes at murphs, not because I’m more physically gifted, but because I’ll have trained for this specific set of functional basics. It’ll be a good flex and a good personal base line for physical fitness. This goal was inspired by Mark Zuckerberg, and it is such an impressive feat that the internet haters don't believe him.

Focused study on the nature of reality:

The reflective humans of antiquity and in modernity ponder the nature of reality. The two best approaches are physics/mathematics and religion/philosophy.

As a computer scientist, I have affinity towards a description of the universe as a computer. We know that the universe demonstrates non-intuitive attributes like quantum phenomenon, observer effect, and the uncertainty principle, and to me this feels like God wrote the universe in a way that is computationally efficient. I’ve been spending time going through Stephen Wolfram’s computational approach to fundamental physics. I’ve also been watching MIT open lectures on quantum mechanics and have a few books lying around. I would like a more structured approach to better grok both the math and intuition for this, so I’m open to a tutor or working group to work through the formalism, notation, and calculation and do problem sets. I’d also want a tutor or working group (could be same) to discuss conceptual applications. In short, I’d like to speedrun through undergraduate level physics, so I can better understand modern physics.

I did not grow up religious. But in recent years, I have grown to appreciate religion’s foundational role for underpinning culture and civilization. Religions that have stood the test of time across generations and revolutions have a conceptual product-market fit as primal as written history itself. In other words, religion is a worthy effort to describe reality. Instead of mathematical and abstract formalist, religion uses natural human language and emotional resonance. The symbol set of allegories, stories, and traditions ultimately teaches one step further than physics: how to live a well-lived life.

So I want to spend focused effort on studying foundational religions. I like reading Zen koans, but also want to better understand Christianity because its the foundational symbol set that spawned Western Civilization, the Enlightenment, and the cultural values of America. To a lesser extent, I’m also interested in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Judaism, in no particular order other than these are some of the richest and most enduring traditions of humanity. I’m open to a tutor or working group to discuss doctrine, theological philosophy, and anthropology, probably an expert theologian in each versus a religious studies generalist. I am less interested in specific practical application and worship at this time. I’m not searching for divinity, but rather master the symbol set and anthropology. I am also less interested in “new age” post-modern or shamanistic, word-of-mouth style traditions which I view as prone to sophistry and ultimately untested by time.

Mathematics for machine learning and physics:

Day to day life including reading business P&L and forecasts and underwriting investment pro forma models require basic middle school arithmetic and algebra, which means we’re all atrophying math ability. AI will be the biggest shift in human capacity in our lifetime, and AI is built via applied math. I want a structured way to learn the underlying mathematics in addition to practical application already being exercised (through my role at archive.com). In short, I’d like to find a working group or tutor to speedrun me through the state-of-the-art in literature and the associated math since I was last in academia in 2011.

Stacking time and energy:

Every winter holiday, I deep dive into a video game, and this year it was Diablo 4. (Elon Musk somehow had hundreds of hours to invest into this game in 2023). It’s a fantasy dungeon action role-playing game where you play a character going around killing demons. There’s hand-eye coordination skill required for controlling the character, but most of the skill is about selecting and stacking the right configuration of gear, skills, buffs, and playstyle for maximum effectiveness. It ends up essentially a statistical optimization problem across each degree of choice to stack and synergize specific character effects and attributes.

This is a good model for the real world, in terms of our degree of choice in stacking our scarce time and energy into various personal, family, friend, community, and business interests. The lesson is the same with Diablo 4 as in real-life: stack and synergize as much as possible with the scarce degrees of choice you have. So I’m writing to remind myself to not arbitrarily add new projects, people, hobbies, and interests. Default say no to everything new. Actively consider how new things stack and synergize with what I already have going on. Be creative in re-configuring and re-allocating existing resources, relationships, and infrastructure to meet the new world meta.

Business:

I have a lot of business goals, but these are non-interesting outside the context of the business itself. In short, they can be summarized as some variations of adding value to customers; being more efficient; growing faster; and making a lot of money for employees, partners, and investors.