I’m not sure how to structure this. Sometimes, I even have trouble telling when reflecting on the past year stops and planning for the next begins. This is a collection of ideas regarding how 2022 went and what I want out of the next 12 months.
What I set out to do
When looking through old writing to see what I was thinking a year ago, I couldn’t find much. The main thing was this post I wrote about living an intentional spring semester. I guess broadly, I wanted to increase my baseline level of wellbeing through consistency at the gym and “mental clarity,” whatever that meant.
I feel like I’m so far detached from these goals that I don’t even know how to evaluate my progress. I don’t think they were a priority after the first few weeks of the year.
Starfish retrospective
Came across the starfish retrospective a few times when searching for ways to do annual reviews. I like the idea of it so here is mine:
Keep doing (in similar amounts/levels)
Travel. I’m not sure if I hit the absolute sweet spot, but I had lots of fun going places in 2022 without feeling any major burn out or fatigue (for context, I flew 22 times in 2022). In 2023, I’d like to continue traveling, preferably to a couple new places and with friends.
Spending time with close friends. I spent a lot (some would say a comically large amount) of time with my close friends, and I’d like to continue that. I was lucky that me, along with many of my friends, were working remotely over the summer. Coworking every day made that job much more bearable. In an ideal world, I’d spend even more time with my friends, but I know that’s not feasible because of school and people being location-constrained over the summer.
Less of
Fake work. I have a bad habit of avoiding “real work” in favor of planning, strategizing, and idea-mazing. More on this later.
More of
Reading. Not that much more though. I’d like to just continue building my reading habit. I want to read more niche books, especially in the genre of history. I think 24 books is a good number, and I’m actually pretty confident I’ll be in the 22-26 range.
Writing. Daily writing was interesting and I might bring it back. But in 2023, I want to go deep into storytelling. I don’t know about metrics or any stuff like that, but ideally I’ll have written at least one thing I’m proud of by the end of the year.
Community at school. I wasn’t very proactive this past semester. I’d like to become more of a facilitator among my friends and be the one reaching out, hosting gatherings, and meeting new people.
Stop doing
Energy drainers at school. Another lesson from this past semester has been that taking classes I don’t like can have a huge negative effect on quality of life. For the upcoming fall semester, I’d like to drastically reduce, and possibly eliminate, all classes and school activities that time up time and I don’t enjoy.
Start
“Real work” and embracing hard things. An ongoing problem I have that I’d like to finally address is my tendency to fill my time with “fake work.” Fake work is stuff that is intellectually stimulating, feels like progress, but doesn’t actually move the needle meaningfully. For example, before starting my podcast, I spent a lot of time researching people to interview, reading about audio editing software, and dreaming of ideas. It felt like I was making a podcast, but I wasn’t. This year I want to focus on doing the “real work.”
Something closely related is embracing difficulty. A common piece of advice I hear is to try and make whatever you’re doing easier to be more productive. Also, that suffering is to be avoided and everything should be fun. I’ve gone too far in that direction and feel that I now have an aversion to doing difficult things. Some people might think this is a toxic or unhealthy mindset to have, but I think I need to overcorrect in this area of life.
Bucket list things
There are also a few bucket list items that I’m not too committed to, but are on my mind:
Run a marathon
Bench 225
Upgrade my wardrobe
Learn to surf
Win money from poker
Host a hacker/creator house with strangers
I dislike a year as a time period for goals and making life changes. Priorities change and what you want in January is going to be different from what you want in August and December. What ends up happening is that goals set in January reflect how I was feeling at that time.
In terms of the specifics, I’m going to plan things in 1-3 month chunks. Here’s to more 30-day experiments and a great year.
Life updates
I’m taking a gap semester. Currently living in NYC (East Williamsburg) so hit me up if you’re ever in the city. Spending my time working at a startup, writing and reading, exploring my neighborhood, and trying to cook more.
That’s it, actually. It’s lonely up here, so please visit if you can.