Get a Tutor. They are Amazing.

After years of butchering a few foreign languages, I've developed a keen ear for them. I can't necessarily understand what people are saying, but if someone is speaking in one of the languages I can get by in, I can hear it across the room.

An older man and a younger Japanese woman were sitting in the corner of Samovar, the tea place I go to every day. And, sure enough, they were speaking Japanese. They seemed like an unlikely couple, so I paid attention and eavesdropped a bit. When the woman excused herself for a minute I dove in for some answers.

"Excuse me... I couldn't help but overhear that you were speaking Japanese. Are you being tutored?"

Where I'll Be In 2024

A couple days ago, during a rest period of a workout, Leo asked me if I was different now than I was ten years ago. My gut reaction was to say that, no, I was pretty much exactly the same, but even a quick scan of changes in that time made me realize that I bear little resemblance to who I was. I asked him the same, and he's changed even more than I have in the past ten years.

The two big themes I noticed in the changes I went through were first that they would have been pretty much impossible to predict, and second that they were all good surprises. Of course, I'm a happy person and I'm certainly biased, so I would probably think the changes were positive no matter what.

Even knowing that we would have been incapable of predicting the changes that happened over the past ten years, we couldn't resist trying to make predictions for the next ten. That's how we spent the remainder of the rest periods of our workout. I decided I'd make my predictions public so that we can marvel at how prescient I was, or, more likely, laugh about how I was dead wrong.

At the end of each section I'm going to give some odds for each outcome. That way we can see how accurate my predictions and confidences were, and I can make longshot predictions without messing up the record.