My Impossible List

I want to present today my own Impossible List. I heard about it for the first time at Thomas Frank's amazing blog, the College Info Geek. It is supposed to be a list in which you place every little thing you want to do in your life, every little goal you want to accomplish, even though sometimes some of them would sound crazy. Frank explains:

"The impossible list is an ever-evolving list of experiences that build upon each other, help others as well as yourself, and implore you to take action."

I think the impossible list is important to keep us reminding our goals, so I decided to start one. I used Frank's impossible list structure as a basis for mine, but in the future I want to improve my list with more items. Since I am starting my list today, I have no completed goals yet. 

From now on, the only thing I have to do is to do my best! :)

Guilherme's Impossible List (Started in September 18th, 2015)

Current focuses

• Run 10 km
• Complete One Hundred Pushups 
• Publish a translation
• Write an essay in English
• Watch a daily video in French for 50 days in a row

Last 5 Completed Goals

• Visit more than 10 cities in Japan (Tokyo, Otsu, Naha, Ofunato, Saitama, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, Hiroshima, Sapporo etc.) [2015, November]
• 
  

Fitness Health Goals

Jogging

• Run 10 km
• Run a half marathon
• Run a marathon

Yoga

• Do a full split
• Do a handstand
• Do the crow pose

Work out

• Complete a 30-day plank challenge
• Complete One Hundred Pushups 

Professional Goals

• Publish a translation
• Translate an entire book
• Publish an essay

Creative Goals

• Write a novel in Portuguese
• Publish a novel (can be a short story)
• Write a short story in English
• Write a novel in English
• Write a short story in Japanese

Language Goals

Japanese

• Deliver a 15-minutes presentation in Japanese
• Write an essay in Japanese

English

• Write an essay in English

Spanish

• Enjoy a good time speaking to a native in Spanish

French

• Read a book in French
• Understand a book in French
• Enjoy a good time speaking to a native in French

German

• Start studying

Russian

• Start studying

Arabic

• Start studying

Habit Goals

# Measured by habitica.com (also known as HabitRPG)

• Watch a daily video in French for 50 days in a row
• Listen to one hour of Japanese for 50 days in a row

Skill Goals

• Study all College Info Geek videos
• Read the Power of the Habit
• Learn to sing well (as much as possible)

Events to attend

• Polyglot Gathering Berlin
• The Polyglot Conference
• New Years Eve in NYC
• San Francisco Pride

Travel Goals

• Visit more than 10 cities in Japan (Tokyo, Otsu, Naha, Ofunato, Saitama, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, Hiroshima, Sapporo etc.) [2015, November]
• Visit Japan's 4 biggest islands
• Live in Japan
• Visit Argentina
• Visit Chile
• Visit Peru
• Visit Canada
• Visit the USA
• Visit France
• Visit Germany
• Visit the UK
• Visit Ireland
• Visit Spain
• Visit Singapore
• Visit Taiwan
• Visit Australia
• Visit New Zealand
• Tour to Tallinn; St. Petersburg and Helsinki

Blogging

• Write every week during a month
• Start a YouTube Channel

Random

• Listen to at least 1 song from each country of the World

SWY related

#The Ship for World Youth Leaders (SWY) was a life-changing program that I participated. It was sponsored and organized by the Cabinet Office of Japan. You can see more details on their site, or asking me about it :)

• Go to a Global Assembly
• Be Brazil National Leader (NL)
• Work as administrative staff (ADM)

#Day 10: listening patterns and my first week of the 60-days Challenge

Since last week I have been increasing my studies on Japanese a great deal. I keep focusing on it more than on any other daily activity, so I can say that one of my main goals is just one step from being accomplished: and it is to study Japanese every single day. What I want the most from this challenge is to keep in mind that I must study Japanese every day. I want that to be natural to me, like it is to eat and to breathe. My main focus is improving my listening comprehension, because that skill is a must for someone that is going to visit the country in less than two months and that is planning to live there soon. And in order to improve a lot my comprehension, I need to study every single day. No exception. I need to surround myself with Japanese like I was in Japan, and I definitely want the Challenge to work for this cause. Therefore I will keep doing my best from now on and try to keep studying Japanese in a daily basis.

My results until now are being quite good, even though they are still far away from perfection. However, one thing that I am proud about is my new listening patters. They consist from watching 20 minutes of Japanese grammar videos, 20 minutes of random Youtube videos and 20 minutes (one episode) of the anime Death Note. That combination is not casual, and has a reason to exist. I will explain what those activities represent:

• Grammar videos: through them I can listen to a more foreign-friendly Japanese while learning new grammar structures and vocabulary;
• Youtube random videos: those videos are in general made for native speakers to native speakers, so they consist of natural Japanese. Also sometimes they are so fast spoken that they stay far away from my comprehension (especially the ones from Ari Keita). That difficulty is good and productive in language learning because through them I can exercise my brain to comprehend the language in its most complex form. That is the part of the studies that I like the most, even though it is the part I understand the least.
• Death Note: that is also Japanese for native speaker, but because it is a fiction it is frequently easier to understand than normal Youtube videos. Also I have already watched Death Note more than 5 times so I already know the story, which can be incredibly useful to help me grasp the context of sentences I am not familiar with.

            That listening studies’ pattern seems to be working for me, so I want to keep it for a while during the 60-days Challenge.

To talk about my results in details, it was all working well from the first day of the Challenge (August 31) until September 3rd. I was struggling to complete the goals (one hour of listening, reading some grammar notes and reading a chapter of manga), but I was overcoming this. The problem was that September 4th it was Graduation Ceremony day, so I was busy from morning to night and was unable to complete any of the tasks. I tried to chase the game during the weekend, but I was just able to complete the one hour of listening task. However, this Monday everything was bring back to normality, so I am looking forward to my results this week!