(Click here for the original post with explanations of each goal)

Three months into 2011, here are some updates on my goals.

1) Accumulate $22,000 in savings. On payday this coming Friday (and after paying my bills and withdrawing food money for the month) I will be up to almost $8000 in savings. Getting there. Slow and steady. I’ve also picked up a few private lessons on the hush-hush, for about $40 an hour. This should help, but makes my week pretty busy.

2) Write and record a 5-song EP. Pretty much on track with this one. See #4.

3) Revive my blog, Project Hitchhiker. I had mentioned adding a post every Sunday, and so far I’m on track. To be honest though, I’m not really impressed with what I’ve been writing. The last post about stress, for instance, felt like a cop-out because I didn’t feel like writing. Working on a few bigger posts at the moment that should make up for it.

4) Write and record rough demos of at least 2 songs per month. In March I finished writing 2 songs, but haven’t recorded them yet. I’m waiting on buying some new music gear – a new travel guitar w/ pickup (the intonation on the Martin backpacker is driving me crazy — looking at a new Baby Taylor or similar), a new microphone (I’m currently using the built-in mic on my Zoom H4N), and a new Audio Interface for my laptop (as I write this, I’m thinking “Ouch, that’s really going to hurt my bankbook…”)

5) Exercise regularly. I’ve slacklined a few times, and my diet has gotten much healthier since I’ve last written (I’ve cut out added sugar and processed foods almost completely), but as far as exercise goes, I’ve been falling behind. My new apartment location, however, has forced me to bicycle to work and back every day (about 15-20mins each way) which is good.

6) Become a better teacher. A lot of my classes have just ended and I have some time to look at using new textbooks, which will be good for the new semester. I’ve been focusing on giving my students more fluency exercises rather than grammar.

7) Start a songwriting lodge in Hamamatsu. I arranged two songwriters meetings with two other guitar players here in Hamamatsu, but for various reasons they canceled. I’m finding it easy to sell the idea of a songwriter’s lodge, but in practice, people don’t want to spend a whole 12 hours on a songwriting session. I’ll go it alone if I have to…

8) Learn Live Looping with Ableton Live. Have to say I’ve only opened this program 3 times since I wrote about this goal. Fail.

9) Do a long walking trip during my summer vacation. No ideas yet. I’m thinking I might hitchhike instead and camp along the way. Would be good for my Japanese.

10) Write and publish an ebook or self-publish a book in print. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I’m contemplating something along the lines of Tynan’s Life Nomadic book, about independent travel. Still in the brainstorming stage.

Overall, I give myself a 7 out of 10. Meaning, at this rate, I won’t achieve everything, but I’m pretty happy with my results.

New Goal:

Improve my Japanese. Since coming to Japan, I haven’t really spent a lot of time on Japanese study. It’s so easy as an English teacher to just live in an English Bubble that I neglected it.

After the recent earthquake and tsunami, it occurred me that my Japanese really sucked. I could only understand about 60% of the news on TV and 40% of the news on the radio. Not so useful for an emergency. After that experience I read a book on language learning (Language Learning Hacks – some good info, however overall not recommended) and decided to at the very least try for 2-kyu (level 2) on the Japanese Proficiency Test by next December. Right now my Kanji reading is about 3-ku, so I need to crank it up a bit. This means I’ll be using free time on the train, between classes, etc. to study Kanji and grammar.

At my friend Derek’s suggestion (thanks Derek!), I’ve been watching a lot of anime (Bakuman is pretty great and inspiring, despite being aimed at teens; Kino no Tabi was a great story – it helped that it was about motorcycles and travel) and Japanese soap operas (Orange Days isn’t too bad) to improve my listening. I’ll also be trying to speak to the office staff more in Japanese – they’ve been very helpful with correcting my Japanese in the last week. Pretty excited about this goal.

Thanks for reading and keeping me accountable! Cheers.

Some great things I’ve found recently:

-This inspirational post on Seth Godin’s blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/03/are-you-making-something.html

-New episode of Radiolab talks about extreme ways of quitting smoking and more: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/mar/08/

2010. The year of half-baked plans, false-start projects, and half-finished songs. It was not a good year for me and productivity. We had arguments. We threatened each other (“But you need me! You’ll see!”). And for a long time we didn’t speak.

My passion and hobby of writing songs (something I started in 2009) fell by the wayside to watching downloaded episodes of Top Gear and late nights immersed in Japanese animation series.  My promises on the blog homepage to restart writing were continually extended – “I’ll write again when I start traveling” became “I’ll start writing when I’m working again”. Any regular readers I may have had are long gone, I’m sure.

But I let it happen. And sometimes it takes reaching a certain level of dissatisfaction to be able to make a drastic change in your life. In the past, writing on this blog has helped keep me motivated and accountable for my goals, something I sincerely miss. So, I hereby reclaim Project Hitchhiker, and commit to writing one post per week for the next year. To be clear, this is a promise to myself, and to any readers willing to trust me again: I will post every Sunday, for the next year.

What did I actually do last year? 2010 in Review

Despite hardly accomplishing anything of note, I did have a great year. I had fun and traveled a lot – and there were certainly periodic intervals of awesomeness.

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February is my month of French in the Power of Less Challenge. I committed to studying French at least 30 mins per day for the month. This goal in particular, is really important to me, as I want to come away from this job with a working ability in French.

But first, a quick thought about the language learning tools I’ve chosen. I recently had a discussion with a friend about why I gave up using Rosetta Stone for learning languages. My reasons for stopping have to do with effeciency and adherance.

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“I’m going to quit smoking, lose 20 pounds, give up drinking hard liquor and run at least an hour every day.”  How many people out there have ever actually succeeded with New Years Resolutions? Why does it always fail? My theory is that it’s too much all at once. It becomes more painful to continue with the extreme lifestyle makeover than the short-term pleasure you would get reverting to your old habits.

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(photo: New Years 2007 in Nha Trang, Vietnam)

2009 is going to be fantastic. But first, a cliche look back at 2008:

Most important lesson learned in 2008

The number one rule: Do what you love. Don’t give a *** about what anyone else thinks about you.

Top Non-Fiction reads of 2008

Vagabonding by Rolf Potts and The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. These two books are required reading for anyone who wants to travel or doesn’t like the idea of spending their life in an office cubicle.

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Self-help, personal development, call it what you will – it has a bad rap. Cheesy guys running around on stage in 2-star hotel lounges with audiences of hundreds of guys who have lame lives. These are the pictures that come to mind when someone says “self-help”. That, or those Chicken Soup for the Soul books…

If people were to get around the stereotypes and open their minds, they would find that there are some fantastic, potentially life-changing products out there.

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Last month I moved into my house in this small Eastern Labrador town of about 500. It will be my home for the next 10 months. In a CBC newscast in 2007, the town was referred to as “the End of the Earth.” A slight exaggeration — it is, at the very least, the end of the road: the Trans-Labrador Highway (a sometimes-paved, mostly gravel windy road that starts at the Quebec-Labrador border) ends here.  The other night, a colleague and I watched for an hour as the green and yellow northern lights danced across the sky for us. Aside from the cold (which for the record, I hate), I’m falling in love with the place.

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