My daily video journal hits day 100!

You may wonder, what’s that?

A few months ago, I watched some YouTube videos by my public speaking hero Darren LaCroix, a Toastmasters International World Champion speaker. He started a project called “17 Minutes to Your Dream” — he spends at least 17 minutes every weekday working towards his goal and reports on YouTube end of the day.

What a great idea! I don’t know what my dream is, but I’d like to do something towards it. Making it public is a great way to make myself more responsible for my progress.

That’s how it got started.

I decided to report my daily progress on these four areas, learning to do/be better in: teamwork/leadership, design (I’m a designer), karate or workout and public speaking.

Format is flexible as long as I can learn something in the areas.

First few days did not go as smoothly as I planned, but it gets better and better:

• First day: went ok. I made progress, but I was not very comfortable recording using my webcam; I felt weird speaking while looking at my own image; I used excuse that English was not my first language. Anyway, video was recorded and uploaded via YouTube on Aug 31, 2013.
• Second day, I fell asleep during reading at night. I had to upload a video report right after I woke up next morning, feeling awkward.
• Third day went as planned.

…

• 99th day: I was very excited about the next day and mumbled about my progress.
• 100th day: progress made and video uploaded on Dec 8, 2013!

It’s hard to work on all the subjects every single day, but I want to do as much as I could. Some days, I spent time working to improve all the areas; most days, I only had time for two or three; and I had several hiccup days, duh, no progress at all — I’m not too proud of that, and to remind myself, I reported it too.

I did have some great progress that I would never have made without this video journal thingy — 10 books read, I become stronger and a better designer and public speaker. By the way, these books are worth reading, check them out: Influence, The Long Tail, I’m Malala, To Sell Is Human; for designers, Picture This: How Pictures Work, Web Form Design.

As I continue my video journal, here’s my progress on day 104:

• Continued reading a nice book Blue Ocean Strategy, which talks about exploring new business models based on a different perspective to outcompete others
• Attended a lecture at Wharton SF called Design Means Business, learning some great history on design in Silicon Valley
• 40 pushups, 60 situps. (Sometimes I review karate techniques I’ve learned, but I want to keep pushups/situps as my routine)
• No progress on public speaking

If you would love to give me a little encouragement, feel free to comment on my daily YouTube report at here.

Now, what is it that you want to do? What can you do to make it a little closer to your dream?