The year 2009 was both phenomenal and challenging for me personally.

Most importantly, I learned how different life is from college. It’s been almost two years since I’ve graduated. I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that universities excel in providing context for life; but do not teach one how to succeed in life. And that shouldn’t be an expectation. Nothing but actually living life can teach one how to excel in life. Specifically, items like handling interruption, reacting to life’s curveball and keeping focus in a land of constant distraction.

During my college days, I was the only one involved in the daily agenda. I could hit the books on my own schedule. When you’re in the real-world and married, you have to hit the books on your family’s schedule–whether you want to, or not.

Distraction:

The year 2009 will be remembered for distraction. The year of Twitter, Michael Jackson’s death, Tiger Woods, gadgets and Facebook. For me, I was distracted, as well.

How? I got an iPhone.

Good news: My iPhone was destroyed when I jumped in a pool to save my pug, Winston.

The iPhone was great for distracting me. Waiting in line was wasted reading news stories on the iPhone, instead of observing my surroundings. The iPhone did help me find the latest tech stories via my google reader. However, what I’ve found is that blogs and books are different beasts.

Broadly speaking, the purpose of tech/news blogs are to glitter up interesting story titles so that more eyeballs will observe advertisements.

The purpose of books are to communicate stories, wisdom and lessons. They’re not a substitute good.

My Forecast: Those who succeed in 2010 will be the ones who succeed in battling constant distraction. The distraction of twitter, facebook, myspace and the TMZ’s of the world.

My 2010 Plan to Battle Distraction:

In 2009, my device for getting email, phone calls, book reading and blog reading:

iPhone

In 2010, I plan on breaking these up into different functions so that I won’t end up surfing football scores when I intend to read:

• email and blog reading: laptop
• phone calls: a phone
• book reading: Amazon Kindle