I love flying. I feel as though it gives me a greater perspective on myself and the rest of the universe. I wanted to take advantage of this on my recent flight back to San Francisco after visiting my family over the holidays in the midwest. It was New Year’s Eve Day which might explain why after a few minutes of reflecting on my life goals and accomplishments, this introspection bloomed into a full set of resolutions for the coming new year.

One of my resolutions is to resume blogging, at least once a week, and although I initially hesitated to share some of the list below, I think it’s a fitting start to the new year and will help keep me accountable. I hesitate as I’ve shown my life goals to friends in the past (I drafted my first life goal list back in 2004 a year before my college graduation) and their responses have ranged from outright laughter to statements like, “You can’t be serious!” or “Those are silly, why would you want to do that?”

This time, however, I’m including a list of previous life goals that I HAVE accomplished, with a view toward recognizing that although my life goals may be strange and wide ranging, I AM serious about accomplishing them, no matter how unrealistic they may seem. Plus, now if I want to refer to them I can just google “Kieran’s life goals” instead of digging up a Google doc.

Remaining life goals:

• Self sufficiency – $1MM or greater in liquid assets bearing yearly interest (I proved driving a cab that I can live off of $20k/year even in SF. I should be able to get more than 2% back yearly on $1MM.)
• Drive bus for large municipal transit agency (would love to drive the electric trolley busses in SF)
• Lead a major transit system/transportation agency to positive change (Most likely this will not be a dense city and instead will be suburban agency with a history of underinvestment. Self-driving vehicles will enable amazing revolutions in transit in the next few years.)
• Work at university or hands-on learning institution (incubator/accelerator) as advisor/mentor/teacher
• Travel south of the equator: South America, Asia, Australia & NZ (did visit Japan but still have other countries on the list)
• Raise a family
• Drive an emergency vehicle
• Attend burning man
• Assist humanity to positively deal with upcoming challenge of technical innovation irrevocably changing our society and economics (eg join relevant startup, be outspoken advocate/writer, political office, etc)
• Become fluent in a non-English language – unfortunately Python doesn’t count, I’m not fluent in that anyway. French is best bet as I’m halfway there, if I’m able to live in a French-speaking country longer hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to do so. Clement do you have a vacation home I can crash at yet?

Achieved life goals to date:

• Start a tv station (done, wiki IUSTV)
• Experience living in a dense metropolitan area (done, SF)
• Work in job/industry of my studies – advertising (done, worked at OMD, thanks Sara for hiring me way back in 2006)
• Start my own company (in progress w VidCaster and going better than I could have ever imagined)
• Drive a taxi (done, thanks Greg at Desoto for making this a reality)
• Be a journalist (done, sort of, made hundreds of local SF news videos w VidSF, SFGate, SFist and SFAppeal; it’s surprisingly tough and not in the ways you might think)
• Work abroad (done, thanks to pushing by Clark I lived in Scotland for 6 mo working for NHS, and Ireland for 4 mo working for Matheson Ormsby Prentice with other side jobs thrown in)

Resolutions for 2013:

• Blog once per week – anything / no need to be work related
• Meditation at least once per week (link)
• Exercise >30 min at least once per week (biking for transportation not included)
• Dress better (buy suits, dress up at least once per week)
• Read 25 books in 2013

“Would be nice” resolutions:

• Visit extended family with kids to help them take breaks / vacations
• Enable my siblings Eliza and Zach to visit me SF
• Go camping once per quarter

Here’s to 2013!