2024: Goal Review
2024 was one of the harder years of my adulthood. A lot went sideways and didn’t develop how I had expected. I also made the decision to limit the scope of my goals this year to have what I hoped would be a tighter focus.
I’m going to call this experiment mostly a failure! I much prefer my maximalist approach to goal setting, and I found the limited scope to be drudgery. I accomplished less, felt less successful at the end of the year, and learned that having the ability to pick up and put down many different avenues of development is far more productive and powerful than limiting my attention. I much prefer to play 100 games of chess at a time and have some lose and some win than playing only 5 very hard chess games.
How I used free or unstructured time was ultimately the root of my goal failures. In 2024, I had 5 major goals. At any given time, I could be working toward those goals, but during my down time, I felt free to faff about. I still accomplished a lot of other things, but my attention was often spent on YouTube, or reading blogs, or just lying around. I don’t mind those things, but I also really love driving my curiousity forward and faffing about in ways that further my goals. The process doesn’t need to be serious, but there does need to be a process.
Goals for 2024:
Goal 1: Train and learn like I’m a brown belt
This year was a remarkable success with jiu jitsu. I trained a lot this year, studied instructionals, taught classes, and started to shore up weaknesses in my game. I had a lot of deliberate mat time this year. I earned two stripes on my belt, landed more submissions on higher belts, and spent significantly more time in control against higher belts than ever before.
Score: 10/10
Goal 2: Earn $500,000 dollars
I set this goal as a push for me to do better, drive more seriously with my business endeavors and solve the problem of making more money in novel ways. In a lot of important ways, this is exactly what happened! I started a new consultancy with colleagues, pitched over $30 million dollars in sales, built business cases, hunted new clients and really set my sights on not being merely a middle manager, but a business owner and entrepreneur. My headspace around this stuff is still expanding, but I feel clearer about my approach than ever before.
But in the real dollar sense, I fell short! All up including job salary, rental income, coaching income and some consulting income, I didn’t quite achieve half my target. Though I’m happy for the attempts at more that I made, this goal didn’t get completed.
Score: 5/10
Goal 3: Share the learning I’m doing
This goal is a hard one to score because I had a vision of what this would look like and the reality was much different. I imagined myself writing blogs, making videos, MAKING CONTENT. Instead, I wrote notes and published them with Obsidian publish, I shared my class notes, I had long conversations with people about learning, shared details and techniques on anything and everything. While content was low, the output was high.
Score 7.5/10
Goal 4: Be a better fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writer
I had big plans to take writing courses and really dig into my writing technique this year. This was hijacked heavily by brain fog through the beginning of the year and I struggled a lot to find the creative energy to give time and attention to this. The one caveat is that I did spend a fair bit of time working with AI tools in order to write clearer blogs and improve my prose. It has helped some, but it was ad hoc and not as organized as I would have liked. I believe I wrote only a couple pieces of fiction, a handful of poems, and a fair bit of non-fiction this year. As I said above, it was a low content year.
Score: 2/10
Goal 5: Become Pain Free (again)
At the beginning of the year, I was about 4 weeks into a pretty intense diet change due to some persistent gut inflammation, which had led to a ton of body pain. A year later, I’m mostly pain free. I’m slowly ungluing a frozen shoulder, but otherwise, my body is otherwise in less pain than I’ve felt in years. This counts as an almost full success.
Score: 9.5/10
Conclusion:
Total score for the year: 34/50. This gets me to a solid C+ of a year, and that feels about right! I was aiming for higher goals, so I shouldn’t expect perfect scores. I had a few areas that I managed to deliver and a few others that were weaker than I wanted. In my follow on post, 2024: Everything Else, I’ll discuss what captured my time and attention away from these goals, and in my 2025 goals post, I’ll outline how I’m going to tackle ALL of these things successfully in 2025.
