Challenging myself

I know what you’re thinking. Or, at least, I have a general idea of what you’re thinking. It’s probably something along the lines of, “Oh. Another blog post about a New Year’s Resolution. Another person who’s trying to ‘better’ themselves.”

And, in some ways, maybe you’re right. This whole idea of challenging myself does sprout, in a way, from the idea of trying to make myself better than I was before. But, I don’t necessarily consider it a New Year’s Resolution, because I wasn’t inspired by the new year. I’ll admit, I don’t know exactly what inspired my challenges. Not all of them, anyway. But most are things that I’ve been wanting to do for a while and that I’ve been putting off.

Which brings me here, today. I don’t want to keep putting these things off. I’m ready to see what I can accomplish.

I won’t get into too much detail about all of my challenges. Some of the biggest, after all, are things you may not be interested in reading about here or that I simply can’t tell you about here. Things like my career, eating healthier, and exercising more–though I do promise to post any recipes that turn out well.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about how I’m going to challenge myself in relation to this blog.

To start, I’m going to take the plunge and upgrade. I want to take the “wordpress” out of my URL, and I want to customize my blog’s look. I may even use some custom graphics, if I’m happy enough with how they turn out. But it won’t all happen right away. If everything goes according to plan, the change in the URL will happen this week. Everything else will gradually follow.

My next blog-related goal is kind of a two birds, one stone situation. I want to post more often, and I want to do more photography. So, I’m challenging myself to take more photos, and to post at least one of them here each week. Part of me is afraid the pictures might start to get repetitive, but that’s exactly where the challenge comes in. I’m hoping that the more I let myself experiment with my pictures, the better I’ll get.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’m going to start neglecting my writing. While I have some behind-the-scenes goals in relation to writing, there is at least one thing I want to start doing on my blog: I want to, occasionally, post some fiction. Just short pieces, and maybe only once per month. It may not even turn out to be that often. But the point will be that I’ll make the effort.

Accomplishing everything that I’m challenging myself to do is going to be… well, it’s going to be a challenge. I’m definitely going to have to start managing my time better. But however it all turns out, at least I’ll know that I gave it a good effort. And I’m sure that I’ll see at least some success.

How about you? Is there anything you’re challenging yourself to do, whether it’s part of a New Year’s Resolution or just something you’d like to take on?