First week of 52 New Year’s resolutions 2021 – Jan 1-10
Background
Before New Year, I decided to take a different approach to 2021’s new Year’s Resolutions. I know I always want to do too much and that I inevitably would fail in most intentions. It takes time to create habits, and concentrating on too many things to change makes it too difficult. So I settled for one Big Goal – the sub 3h Marathon -which shall require a lot of planning and starting new habits. Apart from this, I am testing one new thing every week. All is explained in my last blog post last year.
Week 1. Birdcalls and Facebook Marketing
On January 1, I started with what was to be the first of my 52 weekly resolutions. One of the 52 challenges was study birdcalls.
It was a good start and something that would serve for the upcoming trip to Northern Peru. I got started with downloading a bunch of calls from Xeno-canto.
Come Jan 1st, and the first bomb is dropped. A 14-day quarantine for all arrivals from abroad from Jan 4. Obviously, a response to the new, more contagious strain of COVID 19 in the UK. Two of my clients had to cancel their trip.
Oh well! One client was to arrive on Jan 2, so I would still go birding. On Jan 2nd, the next bomb dropped. My client could not get his PCR COVID results to arrive on Jan 3 before the quarantine and had to cancel.
All this meant there was little reason to study birdcalls just right now, so I decided to switch focus and make the weeks Monday to Sunday. And a new challenge every Monday.
I had bought a Udemy Facebook marketing course a year ago that I had not even opened yet. Fortunately, there had been a timely 2021 update, without extra cost.
I had time to go about it Monday-Sunday, knowing I would not learn all but perhaps a fair bit in a week. What remains would be consumed in short bursts the following weeks whenever I had time.
What I learned about Facebook Marketing this week.
It has been a good course so far. I am learning how to funnel cold public into warm and later hot leads with various strategies that I am trying one by one. One interesting idea is running a FB ad first in a country where clicks are less expensive to get more post-likes and conversations.
I made a try by posting this FB video of a Diademed Sandpiper Plover to bird photographers in India. You be surprised how many people in India are interested in Bird Photography.
The same post will later be reposted for birders in the US/Canada as well as Europe. Already having a lot of likes gives the post more clout and is more likely to be noticed. Smart!
Please help out by commenting on the post for it to stick out even more. And if you like, please share it. I will also do some A/B testing in future ads and very likely set up some evergreen ads that will bring birders to our blog and mailing list.
One particular idea is to make some pillar blog posts to promote. I am currently working on a blogpost for 7 Wonders Birding Tours called “Overseas Birding and Bird Photography Tours for Beginners” to be promoted on the 7 Wonders Birding Facebook page is screaming to have more followers.
I shall also write up the blog posts about each of the New 7 Wonders and the birding possibilities at each place, such as this blog post about Birding Machu Picchu as well as broad poll-like posts on the FB page making questions like “Which is New 7 Wonder is included in your next birding trip?”.
Additionally, I am playing a bit with promoting my band’s (Guran Guran) YouTube channel on Facebook with this video.
Here, I learned some tricks on a YouTube tutorial. For instance, one should only promote YouTube channels on the desktop and provide the Subscribe button link directly rather than just the URL to the channel.
Other interesting things the past week.
- Starting over on the Sam Harris Waking Up meditation course. 🧘♂️ Will try to stick with it every day from now on. It is such a great reset.
- Ran every day. Did 70K last week. I have been running every day since Dec 14. Still all very slow piling up the kilometers. There is no rush—still 38 weeks before the marathon. I will gradually increase to do 100K plus running weeks. However, in the coming week, while fasting, I am doing much less. I hope to reach 45km by the end of the week, so it is much of a recovery week in many ways.
- Still doing Yoga. 🧘♀️ The app on my phone is called Pocket Yoga. There are probably more elaborate apps, but this one works for me for a fast guided yoga session. I use the Sun Salute A – and two rounds of that takes about 9 minutes. More is better, of course, but little is better than none.
- Read the 10th installment of the crime series by Norwegian Jo Nesbø – called Police. I read it in Swedish on load as an ebook from the Stockholm Library. I only have two more books to go in the series. The Thirst, I started immediately and am reading it now. I guess by next week, I will likely start the last one called Knife.
If you want to start from the beginning, the first one is The Bat. - Listened to a Tim Ferriss podcast and an interview with Jim Loehr – a legendary sports coach who has carried over his knowledge of sports coaching to apply to other business goals, personal life, health, and purpose. I immediately got his book The Power of Full Engagement for kindle and started listening on Audible. Precious lessons learned, which will help me both with my marathon and work/life balance. Get up to two free audiobooks when you sign up for Audible Premium Plus.
- Reached a new all-time high for the Puzzles on Chess.com app. 2065 I am quite proud of that achievement.
- Signed up for Tony Robbins “MAKE 2021 MY YEAR” 5 DAY CHALLENGE“. It is totally free. Tony Robbins is one of the world’s best motivational speakers. A five-day course of 90 minutes or more live – for free. Unbelievable. OK. You will find plenty of purchase options along the way, and it may well be that some of those will resonate with you and for sure will be good value, but the value of the free stuff will absolutely blow your mind in any case. Believe me. He is that good.
This week’s challenge. Fasting and Ketosis.
First on the list was Fasting and ketogenic week with resources from Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss and The complete guide to fasting by Jason Fung. I am already on the second day fasting, as you are reading this. The results will be presented in the next blog post.
What challenges have you tackled this past week?