First of all, happy New Year to all of you – 2013 has started!
Every year I make at least one resolution, some I do for the public on my blog. The reason is simple – if I declare something in front of all of you, there is a good chance I will be held accountable to it. Without my readers, no one will check up on me and it will be easy to fall off the wagon. But this year I am making more than resolutions, I am making commitments to myself, and I want to follow them. In fact, I want to finish them in six months, not a whole year. A few of my 2013 commitments are professional, and some are for my personal life. I want to see how I progress over the year.
Write More Books
My first professional commitment: I want to write a few more books. The reason is simple, in 2011 I wrote three books, and they gave me tremendous satisfaction. Writing books is totally different from writing a blog. The blog is like a sprint, writing a book is a marathon– one you have to win. The blog is a different game – you only need to focus on it for one or two hours a day. A book takes a whole year. So in 2011 I wrote three books, and in 2012 I helped write few books as well. This will be hard to replicate in 2013, but I have some ideas. I want to rewrite a lot of books. I want to write huge book to help someone learn SQL Server from the beginning. I want to write a book that will hold their hand through the whole process. The kind of book that every single person who reads it feels they learned something. A quality book that changes people’s lives. I already have a head start on this book. I am only writing this resolution to make sure it gets out and that I am held accountable.
Go Beyond SQL
My second professional resolution: I want to learn more than SQL Server, and author a course for Pluralsight. SQL is my career – but technology is a bigger world. Everyone should learn something new – piano, guitar, skiing. I want to learn something new, too, and I want to learn more technology, and be able to do a course on it. To be able to teach a course, I need to have the confidence I learned it completely. If you can’t train someone, you didn’t learn properly.
Attend SQLskills Training
My third professional resolution: Attend professional SQL training – specifically the training course taught by SQLskills Team (Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp). This is more than a resolution, it is a dream that in 2013 I am able to attend that course. They have a course offered through Pluralsight, too, but want to go in person. It will be expensive to attend in the USA all the way from India, but sometimes it’s not about money. This is about making my dream come true; I want to make it happen. The courses I want to attend are Immersion Event 1 and Immersion Event 2.
Reduce my Weight
And finally, I have a personal resolution that I am posting here: I want to reduce my weight. I have been working on it for two years, but haven’t lost any weight, only gained (I am sure many can sympathize with this phenomenon). However, this year I want to commit. I will be going to the gym every day, and next year at this time I will report how much I lost. I started this resolution last month and lost 10 pounds, but I want to lose much more than that. Every month I will post about my weight loss, what I did and what I learned. Let’s see how far we go with that.
Looking forward to 2013
These are four commitments to myself. Every year I post these resolutions. One resolution that I followed through on from last year is that I was able to spend more time with my family. Luckily I was able to spend more time with them and am able to do more things. My family is happy with Pluralsight and how it allows me to set my own schedule. My colleagues are awesome, and both my family and I really appreciate it.
For 2013, let’s see how I do! Meanwhile, post your resolution here. Don’t do something simple – pick something challenging, which is the fun way to do it.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)
We all can be very busy but we all have one minute of time. We can find 60 seconds of the time waiting at the gas station, using an elevator, waiting in line at Starbucks, or any other common place. Honestly 60 seconds is not a big thing if you look how much time you spend doing other things. The goal of the series was to build interesting something quick which one can learn in a single minute. So far there have been more than 35 episodes of this series and all of them are very well received. Almost all the the episodes have more than 1000 views and some are watched by tens of thousands. I am just honored that the audience is really loving this new concept.
I have been writing this blog for Seven years. I tried to post one thing every day – sometimes it is technical and sometimes it is personal but I make sure that I write something which interests me. In recent times when I start to write new topic and when I tried to search over it – I end up on my own blog post. I quickly realized that there is so much material I have posted on this blog that it is not possible to remember it. I just can’t remember everything. To avoid reputation and bring back the old content which was lost in time..jpg)
