Two Ambitious Resolutions
What a week! I learned many things at this year's chess.com meetup in Miami, but two hit home very hard:
1. We are very privileged to work at a place such as this, where the culture is friendly, welcoming, positive and forward-thinking, but also allows each of us to live our lives in a way that suits us. We all work from home and our hours are about as flexible as you can get whilst still doing meaningful work.
2. I am not good at chess.
The first point I already knew, it just became much more apparent when hearing about other chess.com team member's lives. The second came as more of a shock.
I'm going to make two resolutions today, linked to the above points:
1. I'm currently working on the project of my life, building our family house with my wife. It's a huge and scary project for a programmer with very little practical construction knowledge, and is really only possible because of the flexibility of my work with chess.com and the endless source of wisdom that is YouTube. At present we do not have a fully functional roof, yet I resolve to be living in it within the next year. You read that right.
The current state of my house
2. I resolve to attain a chess.com daily chess rating greater than 1700 (I'm currently 1390-ish) by next meetup. To this end, I've started chess lessons with NM Sam Copeland, and have set aside 30 minutes a day from my very busy schedule to learn and practice.
The current state of my chess
To be honest, I don't know which is more ambitious - perhaps they are equally improbable. Find out in future editions.