2020 Goals Review
2020 was a train wreck of a year. Global pandemic, Hong Kong protests, murder hornets, George Floyd protests, Trump-Biden election, giant forest fires, Tiger King. The list goes on.
I’ve been writing these goal reviews for over a decade now and I have to admit, 2020 was also a bit of a train wreck for my goals, too. Some of them were fragile in the face of COVID, and some just didn’t seem to matter as much as they had before the pandemic. Let’s take a look at them and see how I scored.
Healthcare policy
I read a few books, attended a conference on healthcare policy, learned more than I ever cared to learn about how our society was unprepared for this pandemic, and saw consistently this year how our system is broken. I didn’t make new friends with folks living in lands of socialized healthcare, didn’t read the MPH curriculum for UW, and didn’t audit a class at UW.
Score: C- It’s a pass but it didn’t really go the distance that I hoped to go at the beginning of the year. Early into the pandemic, I was emotionally exhausted by thinking about healthcare policy, and today, I still am. The most interesting tidbit was attending the State of Reform conference and listening to state senators and lobbyists say how difficult it was to do their jobs effectively while working from home. COVID had a leveling effect on even the most powerful people in our society. I’m sure there’s a memento mori lesson somewhere in there.
Spanish
I successfully completed Duolingo for Spanish in February and immediately realized that I had a lot more to learn in order to really level up my skills. When COVID hit and our trip to Spain was cancelled, I stopped studying, didn’t pursue any ways of practicing (Unless you count watching Money Heist) and am ending the year worse at reading, writing, speaking and listening to Spanish than when I started.
Score: F This is an outright failure. When the purpose of learning Spanish (be useful to my fellow travelers while in Spain, talk to Spaniards) went away, I lost interest and motivation.
Jiu Jitsu
Jiu jitsu was a wild ride this year. I didn’t train for a few months because COVID was popping, then started training in my garage with a few friends, then trained in the gym when restrictions lightened, wrecked my ankle and was on crutches not training for 6 weeks, started training again, was promoted to purple belt, then basically couldn’t train because COVID popped again. My jiu jitsu is unquestionably better because of the focused garage training and I’ve spent far more time watching tape than I have any other year. I have tighter Jiu jitsu friends because of COVID, but had awful attendance.
Score: A or C. I’ll take the A, but this is hard to objectively assess. Any year you get promoted in Jiu jitsu is a victory year, but it’s hard to accept that score when there were so many weeks that I didn’t train at all because of injury and COVID. The other big reason I’ll take the A is that this year was the year I cracked the code on owning my own development in the sport. I’m better able to study, better able to understand where mistakes are happening, and better able to direct my training to improve. This will pay massive dividends down the road.
Mobility/Stretching
I had such high hopes for this goal and I so obviously did not hit it. Without Jiu jitsu to motivate me, I did not invest into this activity, though I did add gymnastics rings and calisthenics which scratched the itch of having a better, healthier body. I did zero in-person yoga classes and did a few Yoga for BJJ classes before I canceled.
Score: F I just literally didn’t do this. Reading through the goal again, I also notice that I was over-confident that I would complete this goal because I didn’t define the goal sufficiently. I declared my win condition as “A pattern that I can pick up easily”, but this is not descriptive enough to know if I was making progress toward that goal. A better goal would have been, “Have a memorized yoga flow like this.” For my 2021 goals, I’ll need to interrogate them a bit better to make sure I don’t have any that don’t have a clear win condition.
Climbing
I think I climbed one time with Luke early this year. When Climbing gyms closed, I felt blocked by this and didn’t invest.
Score: F I didn’t do any climbing in 2020, but I’m open to doing some climbing next year. One thing I did realize about myself this year is that I love learning movement. I’m a slow beginner, but the puzzle of how to move my body and how the patterns work is a lovely thing for me.
Meditation
My meditation habit was hit or miss this year, but I really did find myself being mindful in tiny bursts a lot this year. Almost every day I found a way to be present, to pay attention to what was happening. It honestly kept me sane this year. I did a Zoom retreat, read Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, learned some Stoic mindfulness practices, left and returned to Sam’s app, took a Buddhist Scriptures class and will likely finish with Why Buddhism is True before the new year.
Score: B- All told, was more mindful and open this year than last, and am realizing that I am actually interested in learning more about Buddhism and its practices. I’m hoping to greatly level up my understanding of theory of mind this next year and will likely adopt a Feynman technique for explaining Buddhism in order to see if I can better test my knowledge.
Finance and Strategy
This is a weird success. It felt like I set the bar at just the right height for this goal focusing on some specific elements that I didn’t understand rather than requiring a comprehensive understanding in order to win. I finished my corporate finance text-book self-study, and took two Columbia MOOC’s on finance that were very helpful for my understanding of how corporate investments work.
Score: A- I passed this, but feel that I didn’t do as much work tying how finance works with strategy. It’s not written into the goal, but the real purpose of this goal was to understand how the money ties to the behavior of the business, and while I have a better sense of how corporate investments work, I could not explain to anyone how those investments realize a strategy besides “make money.”
Self-Love
This is a weird win as well. I did a poor job at actual Metta practice but I was shockingly patient with myself during COVID, and am ending the year more self-confident and more honest with who I am, what I want, and where I’m going than I have been in recent memory.
Score: B I accomplished the spirit of this goal, but didn’t do the extra work to establish habits and patterns that ensure that it will persist. Persistent confidence and self-care is one of my goals for 2021.
Salons
As it’s written, this goal objectively failed. It was focused on having in-person discussions with new people around difficult topics. But if we squint, we see something else. Instead of in-person salons, I had a regular, bi-monthly “book club” on a wide array of topics with my friends from Oxford. We “read” about Americana literature, sci-fi, race in Africa, communes, musical theatre and more. These discussions were rich, thought-provoking, and always full of laughter and fun.
Score: F or A. Again, as written, there were no salons. Again, if we honor the spirit of this goal, I did a perfect COVID pivot.
Incorporate Good Tech
Oh, how the dreams of 2020 were shattered. I had such high hopes for Good Tech, and wanted to find a way to found a company oriented toward ethical technology. This did not happen at all. Instead, I looked inward and struggled to find my way in the new COVID world, and Luke launched a beautiful project focused on helping people take politically left actions.
Score: F This just didn’t happen. It lost the edge as COVID hit and the emotional and intellectual need to do another outside project hasn’t hit until recently.
Student Debt
The Goal was to pay off 50k of student debt in 2020. We paid off 88k. I am now student debt-free.
Score: A+++ This deserves a post of its own, but this has been a tremendous game-changer. I now feel that I have my whole life ahead of me and I have now been released onto the world. For all of my adult life until now, I have been indentured. Now, my life is mine to live.
Overall score: 7 out of 11 goals passed, and 4 of the 11 goals catastrophically failed. What a wild year for my pre-selected goals! The ones I completed, I mostly hit them solidly. For the goals that I missed, I just didn’t complete at all. Looking back over my last few years, most of the goals that I’ve failed, I
The other side of 2020:
The above story about goal failures doesn’t tell the full picture for the year, though, because the time that wasn’t spent on the goals above wasn’t wasted. Instead of the above goals here’s what I accomplished instead:
I built a sauna myself. I went from a dry-walled shed to a sauna with shiplapped cedar walls and a cast-iron wood stove.
I started learning carpentry. I know way more about how to use a table saw than I ever expected to know and I’m just beginning!
I was promoted to Senior Manager and hired my own team.
Bought a truck!
I completed 25% of an MBA in 3 months. If I have time and interest, I’m hoping to do a speed run on the last 75%.
I learned to sail and am now certified to skipper keel boats up to 30 feet in length.
I vacationed on the Oregon Coast and fell in love with the eerie beauty of PNW beaches.
Pre-COVID, I visited Chicago and Mississippi.
I started training on the gymnastics rings and have completely rehabbed my shoulder and am stronger than I’ve ever been.
I read more than 30 books, including a ton of sci-fi and non-fiction.
Started live-streaming a podcast with my buddies about how to set goals, how to make a meaningful life, and what mechanisms we can develop to ensure we’re on a good path.
I have a much clearer picture of what I want out of the next 5 years of my life. Without COVID and working from home, I would have stayed on the same career path, same perspective in my life. It’s been a hidden blessing to be able to re-examine my core assumptions about what my job means to me, and what I want my efforts to be focused on.
