Thanks for reading!
My friends, we’ve reached the end of 2016 and the end of the MTW project.
This is my final episode. I’ll still be Making the Weekend, but I won’t be writing about it. And I hope to start making the weekDAY, too.
Thanks to all those who I dragged along on my adventures, especially my wife. And a big thanks to everyone who read my ramblings over this past year.
It’s been an awesome ride (for me, anyway). What started as just something to make my weekends more interesting helped to teach me so much more. And I hope you learned a little with me along the way.
I learned about web stuff – Design, SEO, Google Analytics, AdSense, and more. I recommend getting familiar with this world. It is the medium of our present and our of future.
It also taught me to fix your attention on just one or two things and drown everything else out. Which is partly why I’m calling MTW quits for now.
It taught me that if you’re gonna say that one city is better than another, then you’d better specify the metric, because there are a hundred ways to measure a city. It taught me that by most of those metrics, Las Vegas is a kick ass city. Las Vegas ranks near the top of just about any list, and deserves that respect.
In the course of my looking for amazing things to fill a weekend, I uncovered more than I ever could’ve hoped. I’ve accidentally compiled a list that, even at my furious MTW pace, would take me years and years to complete. I recommend putting your ear to the ground, constantly keeping an eye open for what’s going on in your community, and I think you’d be surprised at how much you’ll find there is out there.
Writing regularly has made me more in tune with what’s going on inside my head.
I found myself in the midst of an activity, thinking about where I am in the context of the story. How I would tell someone about this thing. I became more deliberate, more aware. I retained more. I appreciated the weight of it more.
It taught me to find little moments of beauty everywhere.
I recommend writing regularly.
Before MTW, I wasn’t really a maker of plans. During this project, in a way, I was living my own life for the first time, not just going along in the lives of others, at least more so than ever before.
I’ll definitely be planning more in the future. (Not nearly as much as I did in this project. Holy shit, it was a lot of planning. But more, definitely.)
I recommend consciously planning experiences and trips, big or small, at least on a periodic basis. As regular as humanly possible.
I also learned to not be ashamed of who you are, what you happen to be good at, or where your interests lie. A beautiful society is one where we all have different opinions and attributes and aptitudes and interests, and yet we’re all free and comfortable sharing and expressing them with each other. When it comes to that thing you suppress about yourself because you’re embarrassed or afraid of what people might think because it’s not “normal,” don’t.
And I learned to just put your shit out there. Because people will make fun of you and fuck those people.
I recommend never hesitating, hiding, or quitting.
20 episodes. Dozens of restaurants and museums and shows and activities and surprises and musings and adventures. Hundreds of of pictures. Tens of thousands of words.
From it all, the most important lesson I learned this year was that if you want something, go get it. Fuck bucket lists. If you want to do something, go do it. If you wanna be something, go be it.
And that life can either be filled with trips to Target and Netflix marathons and those old comfortable restaurant spots, OR it can be filled with new experiences. And those two options often come at similar cost and energy, but the latter can be so much more rewarding.
That there’s so much in life to explore, and there’s little time to waste. That filling life with quality is so much better. Filling life with beauty is so rewarding. And that doing so means getting off your ass, because a successful and beautiful life doesn’t come to those who sit around and wait for it.
You wanna fly high in life? Be the best and surround yourself by the best, with no compromise. Appreciate, and demand experiences worthy of appreciation. Demand amazing.
Live life to its fullest!
For every episode of Make The Weekend, visit maketheweekend.com.
