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Bloggers and journalists the world over have spent much of the last few weeks recapping the Aughts, the decade that is now but a memory. (Yes, I know it’s not really a new decade, but that seems to be a silly battle to fight at this stage. If we are happy to refer to previous decades by their tens place — the Twenties, the Sixties, the Eighties — and blithely attach any number of assumptions about culture and historical context to those labels, it seems disingenuous to complain now that the boundaries of these decades are wrongly defined.)

I thought about finding some way to bring my own perspective to the discussion, but I found that there was very little to say that hasn’t already been said. Instead, I decided to look ahead to what I’d like to see happen in the next ten years, not in the world at large, but rather in my own life.

As a matter of principle, I never make New Year’s resolutions. I don’t take them seriously because they don’t work, and they don’t work because I don’t take them seriously. But a decade is different from a year; while I might get lazy, lose focus, make bad choices, and so on during any given year, I’d like to think that ten years is a period over which millions of everyday decisions should, in aggregate, produce high-level results that I’m happy with. So it seems like a useful exercise to to think through this variation of that classic, loathsome job interview question, “where do you see yourself in ten years?”

With that, here are my ten New Decade’s resolutions:

1. Get married.
2. Have children.
3. Own a home.
4. Become a passably decent cook.
5. Develop and maintain a habit of exercising three times a week. (This is the only item on this list that I don’t actually want to do, but I don’t think I have a choice.)
6. Become a good and then an excellent public speaker.
7. Write professionally.
8. Work in the television industry, even if only briefly (perhaps an internship or some such).
9. Make something significant happen in the workplace that could not have happened if I were not there.
10. Teach fifty people something that matters.

Like most such resolutions, these are a mix of things I know I will do, things I hope I will do but sound hard, and things I want to do but probably won’t happen. Any ideas on how to accomplish any of these things are welcome.