Year in Review: 2015

This post is very late too, but better late than never.

2015 was a busy year of transitions (though it's nothing compared to how 2016 is looking): Suzanne's pregnancy, promotion and moving to a new team at Google, and lots of reading and magic practice and performance. It was pretty much the last year of one phase of my life (pre-parenthood).

Favorite books

Non-fiction:
1. Secrets of Consulting: So much folk wisdom in here about life, work, and solving problems.
2. The Art of Asking: Interesting and inspiring stories about the power of asking for what you want and believing in your supporters.
3. Elon Musk: A nice overview of this extremely accomplished and productive man's life and approach to business.
4. Lean In: Had the pleasure of listening to this with Suzanne and discussing all our observations together. Opened my eyes to a lot of issues around gender in business and taught me some important lessons based on the life and accomplishments of Sheryl Sandberg.

Fiction:
5. Ready Player One: Awesome, fun, gripping read about virtual reality and the 80s. One of my favorite works fiction/sci-fi of all time.
6. The Graveyard Book: Amazing writing, fun story -- so sad when it was over.
7. Zorba the Greek: So many life lessons and adventures.

Magic:
8. Five Points in Magic: Lots of practical, concrete advice for presentation using the voice and the body. 
9. Scripting Magic: So many excellent examples of effective scripts and awesome interviews with magicians about their processes for writing scripts.

New experiences

• Visiting Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks. 7 lessons I learned from trees.
• Learning to BBQ with my first ever grill. Now I'm a real man.
• Seeing the Endeavour Space Shuttle and meeting an astronaut who's a Stanford alum who flew on it and did some space walks from it (Steve Smith, '81).
• Putting together and performing my own 15-minute close-up magic set for several groups in formal settings.
• Preparing for the birth of my first child. (None of that preparation even came close to preparing me, though.)

Things that were good

• Lots of sustained progress and accomplishments on my hobbies and projects like magic and setting up my home.
• Fun travel experiences with my family; lots of time outdoors.

Areas for improvement

• More focus on completing what I start and iterating quickly.
• More patience in dealing with big changes and difficult, grueling work.