2017 - A personal review

It feels like writing a review for the year 2016 yesterday which catapulted me towards an ever positive trend towards life, but 2017 was an entirely different beast!

As usual, let me start with some numbers on the +ve habits taken from coach.me I followed every day for the year 2017.

Meditation: First thing I followed sincerely this year was Meditation. Yep, I broke my own record of doing it 111 days in 2016 to 278 times this year with an undefeated streak of 187! This is a phenomenal feat because the last 187 streak is not meditating 5 minutes or 20 minutes a day. It is full 2 hours every day, thanks to Vipasanna. I had to thank two people for introducing that to me - Healer Baskar and my Brother Senthil babu. This is an entirely different level of meditation technique. Glad I learnt it the right way by taking 10-12 days completely cut off from the world and dedicating close to 10 hours every day starting at 4 AM from the morning until 9.30 PM at night. It was so vigorous that a lot of positive things and vibrations were bound to come and they did come! I would talk more about this perhaps in a separate post, but for 2017, this was one of the significant achievements personally.

Reading: Although I had started aggressively in 2017 (with an extreme momentum from 2016), it kind of slowed down after mid-year. But still, the number of entries I got were 275 compared to 165 from 2017. This year I completed 27 books which included some mammoth books like Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Awaken the Gaint within by Anthony Robbins, Mastery by Robert Greene. Although the pace was lesser compared to last year, I still kept this habit for 3/4th of the year. From the trend graph, I could see that it has started to decline from September, but hey, I have the power of perseverance so, I can summon this at my will to return to it! I have 3 hours dedicated every day to mental and physical practice, I need to squeeze some more hours to return to this wonderful habit which has taken me to where I am today.

Yoga/Stretching: This was kind of ON an OFF over the year with only 91 entries compared to 109 from last year, however, towards the end of the year, the steam has really picked up thanks to Hatha Yoga classes - a set of 21 asanas that gives you that extra power and flexibility. One important thing is that I never visited a medical shop or doctor and this could be termed as my healthiest year ever both physically and mentally! Ending this year at a 27-day streak! Yay!

Sports: Whatever happens, this is something I am trying to keep it up at least once a week throughout the year. No wonder the number stands at 51 compared to 44 last year. This is also the year I won the Pramati badminton tournament along with my partner Antony.

The habit of waking up on time: This I feel was the meta habit that is the source of other habits is to wake up before 9 AM. I know "before 9 AM" may seem easy for the most, but for someone like me, who has been waking around/after noon for close to 15 years, this was a real challenge. So I kept the goal a bit liberal in 2017, perhaps this I could harden by half hour to 1 hour earlier in 2018. Seeing numbers go up here was truly amazing. The total check-ins were a thumping 250! Some of those mornings were as early as 4 AM.

Because of these positive habits, I was able to

1. Improve my productivity leaps and bounds.
2. Bring down my sleep quota.
3. Stay at the peak of my health.
4. Discover myself better
5. And finally to Start a company!

2017 clearly was one of the best years so far thanks to the lots of seeding I sow in 2016. Hope I could improve upon some of the habits. Maintaining these is more preferred than creating new ones. I would not say it was easy to commit 3-4 hours every day to these habits, but I have to thank my family, especially my wife for helping me achieve all these either directly or indriectly. So, a big thanks to my family for being a rock solid support! 

2018, here I come!

May all beings be happy!

-Braga