Looking up the
stairs

#5

Ready, set, go!

07 Jan 2024

If you didn’t notice, during December I did a Blogmas advent calendar. I ended it with the following quote:

Until Sunday, the focus is on preparing for a great New Year. Please expect some reflection on my 2023 goals and some planning for 2024’s goals.

Being the lazy boy that I am, I did no such thing. Well, at least not in 2023, but here I am to make amends. So without further ado, let’s begin.

2023 in review

These were my goals for 2023:

Physical

Starting things off with the physical goals, and no, it’s not a bug, I didn’t achieve any of these. But I have a pretty good excuse, I couldn’t do any of these because of my knee and back injuries. All things considered, I might’ve set myself up for failure, since I already had these injuries at the beginning of the year.

The only one that might have been attainable was the “Reach 62 kg” goal. In fact, I fell 1kg short, but to be honest, this goal was about gaining “healthy weight” and not becoming fat due to not exercising, so I tried to restrain myself in the way I ate.

Inner-circle

OK! Here we start to see some achievements, and ones which make me really proud. If you’re wondering, I’m learning German on Duolingo. We can also see that despite not having been “achieved”, I managed to make some progress on most of them (i.e., painting).

Something that happened, which I intend to avoid in 2024, is that I set myself a lot of goals, and promptly disregarded them from the beginning of the year. I didn’t even bother tracking the movies, albums, and TV series.

Life

Again not much happening here, I ended up going to three countries: Germany (which I’ve been to in the past), Belgium (I actually went five times), and France. Volunteering was something that I enjoyed doing at the start the end of 2022, but then the knee injury happened, and I never got around to starting again.

As for the Açores thing, it just shows that setting goals without having a plan to achieve them just sets you up for failure. This is also true for the recipe one since I didn’t actually define what doing them “all” means, and how I can achieve it.

Professional

This category is the most complete one because it involves stuff that I’m “forced” to do: work. This is further supported by the fact that the one that is not complete is the only one that is completely under my control.

Overall I think that I achieved a lot in 2023, even though the list makes it seem like I was an utter failure. That’s the thing about ambitious lists, which isn’t bad per se.

2024 goals

This year I tried to set goals that, while still ambitious, are much more toned down. I took what I learned from the previous year and tried to pick attainable things instead of sounding good (e.g. “the one per week” fallacy). Another thing is commitment. Saying that I want to go to China this year is OK, but if that is something that is going to stay on the back burner without a proper plan, it’s bound to fail.

Physical

This year’s physical goals are much shorter. This is because, before achieving greater things, I need to go back to basics and heal my knee, whatever it takes. The 5K goal is there just so I have an actual goal for measuring how much my knee has healed.

Inner-circle

In this section, we see more adjustments than additions/removals. For the goals that I did not accomplish, I toned down the goal (e.g. 20 movies instead of 30). For things that, despite not achieving in 2023, I still feel are attainable, I kept the goal as is (e.g. the 12 books). For the goals that I did achieve, I took them one step further (e.g. going from “starting to invest” to “invest 10K”).

I already took steps toward this: I listen to a Huberman Lab, I created by budget, I deleted my Instagram account and I’m looking into signing up for German classes.

Life

This will be the most ambitious section of them all. Not because of visiting a new country (in fact, I intend on doing that two weeks from now), but because finding a job and a house in a foreign country is a giant step in my life. In addition, to do this, I’m counting on having my life stable enough, in particular when it comes to health (I’m looking at you, left knee!!!).

Although ambitious, I feel like this is the right step for my life right now, so even if I don’t achieve it, writing it down at least sets the wish in stone.

Professional

Remember when I said that, last year, the ones I didn’t manage to complete were the ones related to things that I had to take the full initiative in? Well, this year all of them need that, and I’ll be damned if this will stop me.

What now?

Well, not much. Now I just need to be conscious of this list and actually work toward achieving it. We’ll review it one year from now to see how I did. From past experience, a year seems like a lot but will be done so so quickly. So I guess I will see you in a bit.