New Year Seminar

How do you spend your New Year's Eve? Making resolutions? Attending a party? Analyzing the past year? However you spend your day, here's a fun event idea, one that I myself shall exercise for the third year in a row today:

Host a seminar.

Who doesn't like seminars? You don't have to invite anyone else, but you can invite anyone you like. (Chances are, though, that they won't come - they probably think you're going to preach them some self-help bullcrap.) If you're in a relationship, your partner is quite the obvious choice, and you can have the seminar and enjoy its benefits together. But you can do this by yourself, no problem.

What I mean by the New Year seminar here is that you plan the upcoming year. First, (make coffee,) you take the seminar papers from the previous year (if it's not your first time), and analyze if the past year went as planned: how many of the goals you set for yourself a year ago you achieved (if any), how was your actual lifestyle compared with the planned one, did you make the money you planned you would make, and so on. It's perfectly fine if your year didn't turn out as planned - you may have discovered a new and better way of living in the middle of the year and changed everything immediately without waiting for the New Year's (it's an arbitrary date anyway). It's also fun to think back about the set of values that plan demonstrates you to have had. You can also, regardless of what's in the paper, list achievements of the past year you're proud of, and give credit to yourself for building character in certain occasions, for example. In short, write down the main points of the passed year in terms of personal development.

After you've analyzed the past year and jotted the important events down, it's time for the fun part: plan the next year. What kinds of principles will you live up to in 2019? How will you live? How will you hold up your integrity? What things are important to you? And what do you want to achieve in the next 12 months?

You can make the plan as complicated and versatile as you want, but my experience tells me that one principle should be primary, and others just supportive to it. But you can have as many primary principles as you want - see how it works for you, and adjust the hierarchy of your principles according to your experiences in the next seminar. If charity is important to you and brings meaning to your life, make it a priority. If working insane hours every week is important, make that a priority. If watching TV is important and brings meaning to your life (for whatever reason), make that a priority.

Then, write a cheat sheet (a piece of paper separate from the seminar papers) of your plan for the next year and place it somewhere you can see it regularly, like on your fridge door. It will remind you of the plan during the upcoming year. Then, file the seminar papers in a special folder for the purpose, and end the seminar.

Congratulate yourself for a successful seminar, pop open a bottle of champagne, and head to those New Year's celebrations!