Steve Pavlina completed one year of daily blog posts during 2020. I used to read a lot of his posts, bought his book and even signed up for a couple of his courses. His site was the first personal development blog I found, back in 2008 during a particularly boring day at work and I happened to search for “How to live without a job” (Spoiler alert, 10 years later I pretty much achieved that)

With the Lockdown in the UK looking like it’s not going anywhere, I thought I could do with a new challenge that I can do from home and I was always meaning to get round to actually updating my blog, so by committing to a challenge like this I think it will fit in with my lifestyle now. Who knows, I might even make some content that someone else in the world might actually find useful?! Or slightly amusing at the very least.

As for a very quick recap of my life ‘recently’, my job finished up in London finished up in October 2018 (company went bust.) The plan was to take 6 months out for doing my own projects for a while, before getting another job, but I realised I actually liked not working, and my rental flat in my hometown was actually paying my living costs, so I thought I would try to live the FIRE lifestyle I had been reading about. I moved out of London in November and then went to Kyoto, Japan for 3 months. During this time I worked with my friend doing app and website development in exchange for free accommodation while I explored Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka) and also went back to Tokyo for a couple of weeks. I returned to my hometown in February, just in time for the UK Lockdown and I’ve been here since then. Going out for my ‘allowed’ exercise and food shopping. From what was supposed to be ‘no more than 3 weeks’ has now turned into a full year and no signs of ending!

I must admit I reckon I’m in a significantly more privileged position than many others, whereby I’m staying at my Dad’s house rent-free (My costs extend to buying and making food for us, and cleaning the house) Have decent internet, my own room, Playstation, regular income from my flat and still work remotely for my friend in Japan. The FIRE dream looks like it might actually be taking shape! Absolutely not how I envisioned it, but the dream of waking up each day whenever I want to, doing what I want in my own time, and have my health.

So here’s what I’d like to do. Every day a year, a new blog post. I have no idea what I can write in a whole year, especially when I don’t get to go out and travel, but I’m sure that’s part of the challenge, to find something worth writing about?

In addition, I’d like to have a daily recommendation for a mobile app and a youtube channel. 

I spent most of my last year doing nothing but messing about on my mobile phone and watching youtube!

I’ve also got a youtube channel with 30 whole subscribers! These days it looks like making vlogs has more visibility than blogs (Its more a social platform) so maybe I should make a blog video every day too.

The main content I put so far has been holiday videos, and I really suspect that I’m the only one who watches the videos. But I do actually find the video creation process enjoyable and rewarding.

Also, I’m still working on keeping my own mobile apps up to date. I’m aware of just how much effort goes into these ‘free apps’ so I’d like to spend some time to appreciate the work that other people have done.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be running out of recommendations after a week, but that’ll give me incentive to spend time and ‘expand my horizons’ to find more interesting content. You never know, if anyone besides me reads this, they might even get a new suggestion and find something new!

Youtube recommendation:

My own channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOlh23qNe8V0KAme0Htz2Og/videos

Why not be shameless from the very outset. I have a youtube channel. LAIK AND SUBSCRAIB! Mostly it’s little holiday videos I made during trips in Taiwan and Japan. I started it in 2018 for my Dad as a souvenir for our holiday to Japan together. Turns out I actually quite enjoyed making the videos and the post-editing process to make something slightly more watchable. (I used an app on my phone to stitch a whole bunch of small videos together, so you know the keyword here is ‘quality’)

App recommendation:

My own app! Lets Have Coffee. (iOS / web https://letshavecoffee-22e70.web.app/   Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.martinogg.coffeepro&hl=en)

I’ve talked about this idea for a few years with friends, and never really made any progress on it until the end of last year when I finally got the finger out to start up. It’s a platonic online meetup app. The premise is that users search for others based on Hobbies and Interests. My initial idea was that you could search for people based on location and then use the app to meet in real life to chat about an indicated Hobby or Interest (hence the name Lets Have Coffee) However as Lockdown means meeting up physically is impossible, this is just an Internet meeting app. I’d like to go in further detail of the development of this app, but I’ll save that for another day.

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