Review of 2018 Goals
Every year since 2011, I have made yearly goals. They represent both specific and general objectives for the year. They are mark of my flourishing. It’s challenging to set goals that can realistically be fulfilled, harder still to set goals at a range of year. I don’t hit all my goals every year, but every year since I started, I’ve gotten better at setting goals, understanding what it takes to complete a goal, what makes some goals unlikely to be achieved and what I can do to set myself up for success.
2018 Goals: In 2018, I set 21 goals with lots of variety in size and difficulty, ranging from learning languages to improving existing skills to developing new habits. This was the most goals that I’ve set in a year and the most variable in scope. I’m treating any score of a C or higher a successfully completed goal, but want to include the grade scale to represent quality.
Goals and Score:
Clean Personal Space: B-/C+
I improved a lot of my living circumstance this year, had my desk cleaner for more days than ever before, my bedroom was significantly cleaner. But I didn’t maintain the habit consistently, slipped up lots of times and had several stints where I had a messy desk space and didn’t clean it. There is a lot more to build on here.
Lessons learned: I am way cleaner when there is a specific place for things to go. My desk leveled up when I made rules around what is allowed to live on it and what is not.
Eye Contact: A
I started the year with some bad deep-seated habits in this space, but am ending the year with the ability to make steady and easy eye contact with just about anyone.
Lessons learned: Eye contact is easy to practice, there are tons of resources on this and I developed it early on in the year without much challenge.
Jaw Tension: C
I’m made some good improvements with my jaw tension, but I don’t have a specific habit around it. I suspect that if I did a month straight of jaw tension work, I would feel a lot better. I’m working on a plan that would get me to an A on this goal by the end of the year.
Lessons learned: Resources around jaw tension are low quality, don’t give advice around developing good habits, and are too generic to be effective. This is kind of shocking to me given how commonplace jaw tension is, and how simple the jaw structure is in comparison to the shoulder (which has tons of resources for improvement).
Lessons learned: 5 minute habits are wildly expensive in terms of time to cognitive demand to develop. I’ve attempted a number of small habit creation goals over the years and almost all of them have failed. I need to explore why this really is and what can be done to defeat this outcome.
Meditation: F/C
I set a high bar on this goal. I wanted to 2 separate rounds of 30 days in a row meditating, so 60 days total. I did not hit this mark. My longest completed chain was 15 days, and the next longest was 10, with a few 5 day streaks as well. I’m mildly confused by my failure, because the days that I meditate or do breathing work are wildly better days than the days I don’t. The quality of those days is just unquestionably better. But yet I didn’t do it because I was busy, had to get up early, etc etc etc. Endless reasons and justifications that don’t make sense. I’m disappointed that I didn’t do better at this, partially because this would have produced a massive quality of life boost. Expect to see a meditation and breathing practice on my goals for 2019.
Lessons learned: 30 day habits are challenging and probably demand external incentives to create from scratch. Guided Vipassana meditation is awesome.
Breathing: F/C
Very similar results to meditation. I typically treat these as the same thing, even though they are not. The outcomes are similar in terms of calmness during the day, but meditation is training mental skills while breathing seems to be training oxygen utilization. This said, I had some wild successes with using Wim Hof to handle cold. If I’m cold, I can eliminate that feeling of being cold under most circumstances with 1 or 2 rounds of Wim Hof breathing. I even proved it out by using Wim Hof while swimming in the ocean above the Arctic Circle while in Norway. After I got out of the water, my body felt great and warm, despite the air temperature being quite chilly.
Lessons learned: Wim Hof breathing legitimately works. I haven’t done cold exposure with it over a period of several weeks yet, but look forward to testing it in 2019.
Flexibility and Mobility Increased: C
I had originally intended to document a long sequence of mobility and flexibility work this last year, but just didn’t put aside the time or set up the rigor to complete it. That said, the warm ups we’ve done in jiu jitsu, especially the shoulder and hip work, has increased my mobility and flexibility quite a bit. Hitting this goal was not a feature of any deliberate extra work I did this year, but a fact of having good routines that have been incorporated into our jiu jitsu gym’s community.
Lessons learned: There is a big difference between tight hips and moderately tight hips, so much so that I imagine that there is an exponentional growth curve in the middle of the flexibility and mobility graph. Wins are cheap here. 2 weeks of intensive flexibility work has enormous dividends. My wrists are genuinely messed up and a weak link in getting further mobility and flexibility success.
Jiu Jitsu: A
I poured a lot into jiu jitsu this year, probably more than I should have. I pushed myself to play smarter, to compete, to practice standup and really understand the game more. I’ve reached several new levels in my understanding, and on reaching those new levels, now see how much further I have to go. I’m genuinely proud of the work I put in and know that I owe a lot of great training partners and instructors. My list for this goal included work on passing, becoming dangerous from guard, being more aggressive, and understanding standup work, and I’ve done those things. I’m a vastly more dangerous opponent than I was in January and I’m really starting to see dividends on the work I started at the beginning of the year.
Lessons learned: Helping with the kids class is amazing. Pressure is everything. I need more active drilling in my life. I am now in the role of the blue belts that I looked up to and admired when I first started jiu jitsu; I believe them now when they said they weren’t that good. :)
Lifting: A+
I crushed all of my lifting goals this year. I’m lifting regularly 3 days a week, I am lifting more than I thought I would be on almost all my lifts, and I really like the hard work. I’ve been doing Grey Skull LP and seeing good results.
Lessons Learned: Overhead press is so hard. There is always room for better form.
Be Hotter: A
I’m dressing better, my hair looks good, lifting has paid off. Relative to where I was a year ago, I’ve definitely improved. There is still plenty to do. Better skin care, better hair care, better clothes and outfits, better shoes, bigger muscles and less body fat.
Lessons learned: A good haircut and well fitting clothing is the core of being hot.
Public Speaking: B-
I’ve done a lot more speaking and presenting at new job than I did last year and to a more influential audience. I started a podcast, joined Toastmasters at work, and have worked to remove my sentence start repeating tic. I could have done more and more consistently, but this has been an improvement year.
Lessons learned: Speaking is one of my favorite things. I love impromptu speeches. Storytelling is the next big objective.
Presentation Design: B
My presentations look so much better now than when I started this goal. I’ve learned a lot about color and a bit about design. There is a lot more I can do here, but I’ve gone from bare bones and ugly presentations to having a few presentations that are genuinely well designed. Next year, I’d like to dig in even deeper into slide design and story telling, as well as developing and practicing good design principles all the way through.
Lessons learned: Color means a lot. Keep the slides simple. Use massive font if you must have words on your slide.
Website and Blog: A
This was low hanging fruit. It amounted to: have a website, write on it sometimes. I did this. Easy goal, easy life. That said, I’ve enjoyed having a web domain associated with my name and enjoy the ideas that the AI reading list and Existential Risk reading lists might actually be used by other people out there.
Lessons learned: Squarespace is easy. Don’t use pictures with massive file sizes or your site won’t load quickly.
Personal Brand Development: D
I pretty much flat out didn’t do this, and also don’t really believe this is valuable anymore. I’d like to be an expert at a bunch of things, know other experts, and one day be respected by other experts, but I think the path is slow and what I wanted out of this goal was the cheap and fast way to make money. It gets a D instead of an F because I do have my own website named after myself.
Lessons learned: The things that are valuable in life take time to develop. We live a world that wants fame fast and its probably not worth it.
Further Education: A
This goal was all about deciding whether I would pursue more academic training in the near future. I’ve decided not to. Everything I’d want to learn, I can learn on my own and most likely can find a way to get a job that pays me to learn that information. I may end up back in school for an alternative career, an MBA, or some type of PhD someday, but it’s not in the cards for the near term.
Lessons learned: Most everything that I want to learn, I can teach myself. I’ll learn faster if I know people who are also interested in that topic. I don’t need more education to get better and more interesting jobs.
New Job: A+
I have a new job that pays a lot more, has better work environments, is topically more interesting, and is fundamentally ethically oriented. I have a job that I genuinely see myself in for several years and all I had to do is not settle.
Lessons learned: 500 applications, 20 interviews, and several job offers later, things can change for the better. The best way to get a job is via your network, so every job from now on must be a network acquired job. Put another way, I am not going through the shotgun hell again if I can avoid it.
Esperanto and Toki Pona: F
I didn’t learn these languages. I could have spent more time on them, but I wasn’t invested. I think these ended up on the list because I was very bored with my job at Boeing and I could learn them while on the clock at work.
Lessons learned: Put things I want to legitimately do all year on the annual goals and maintain a separate list of things I’d like to try during the year without commitment. These things should have been on the “try list” not the “do list”.
Get a Tattoo: F
I didn’t get a tattoo. This is not for lack of tattoo ideas, but genuinely because I was mostly healthy this year with limited injuries, which meant that I was on the jiu jitsu mats instead of waiting for a tattoo to heal.
Falconry: A?
This was a silly goal, more of a “try” than a “do”. I set the goal as learn more, which I did. I watched a bunch of videos, read articles and decided that the commitment to a falcon was pretty extreme and probably not for me.
Lessons learned: Falcons are powerful but inaccurate against live prey. You can lose all your work in an instant if the bird decides not to fly back. Chickens are almost as cool as falcons. Birds are not mammals and are not social in the same way people and dogs are.
Shoot A Rifle: F
I didn’t do this. I could have, but it honestly wasn’t a priority. Try not do.
Lessons learned: None.
Learn About Music: A? D? could be a C by end of year.
This was a vague goal and I did a lot of vague progress towards this goal. I learned a fair amount about black metal, listened to a bunch of jazz, and just recently started learning piano. There is so much coolness happening in music and I am so very much a novice.
Lessons Learned: Playing piano is like typing and playing video games. Lots of puzzles and lots of skills focused on finger dexterity and reacting to what your eyes are seeing.
Study the Stoics: A
I spent mornings for part of the year reading through Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations” and have Seneca ready for reading on my shelf. I feel like a bit of a Stoic hipster: I was into the Stoics before they were cool.
Lessons learned: Marcus says it best himself: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’”
Goals set: 21
Goals that passed with C or higher: 15
Goals that failed: 6.
I consider this year to be a wild success in terms of my goals set. I learned so much about myself, pushed myself to challenging problems, and learned a ton about how my quality of life can be improved by developing very basic habits. Onward to next year!
