To 2023 and beyond 🔭

Sat Dec 31 2022•quarterly review life

I didn't knock out all of my 2022 goals, but perhaps they weren't entirely right in the first place.

With the end of the year imminent, I'm going to take a moment to reflect on the past 3 months, and then do a quick review of the past year with goals for next year.

Past three months

Based on my previous reflection in September, the key things I wanted to focus on these past 3 months were 1) determining my why and 2) making this site feel more distinct.

Determining my why

Writing these past 3 months has helped me work towards finding my why. In fact, this search for my why is what led me to start my newsletter this past month as well. I wanted to increase the surface area I write from to get a better sense of what I gravitate towards. So far, the 'why' I've landed on for myself is to turn life into a game that I and others love to play as a force for positive change.

Making this site feel more distinct

While I haven't given this site a dazzling coat of paint yet, I have improved its technical foundations and added features. Namely around the accountability trackers, as they are now mostly automated, with improved UI/UX that I've been iterating on. I think they make the site more distinctly mine, in that they capture some degree of what I do day-to-day, week-to-week. More technical improvements and plans discussed here.

So while I've made strides with both goals, in reality, goal 2 was fuzzy to begin with. A healthy reminder to find ways to concretize actionable metrics when at all possible.

All in all, these past 3 months involved a lot of creativity and reflection, but now I'm entering a deeper execution mode. I know what I must do to reach the next level, namely by continuing to roll my newly formed snowballs to observe what trajectories start forming.

Past year

Oddly enough, I can't find the notebook paper I wrote my goals for 2022 in (this was before I started blogging, and before I got a journal to write in), so I'll instead work off of memory.

My 2022 goals:

✅ Relaunch my personal website
✅ Publish my first blog post
✅ Road trip across the USA and back
⚠️ Publish weekly recordings of my singing
- I didn't start as planned in January 2022.
- When I did start publishing SoundCloud recordings in August 2022, I opted for a monthly instead of weekly cadence.

Additional 2022 milestones:

✅ Launched personal newsletter
✅ 16 published blog posts
✅ ~1000 new chinese words learned

Overall, I hit most of my goals and executed well on the table stakes stuff that I didn't have high-level goals for (eg running + lifting).

As it turns out, the goals that I've been getting the most value out of are the website relaunch and blogging goals. While they were originally secondary to my key goal of practicing my singing more, I think they were the most beneficial and enjoyable. However, I think these 2022 goals weren't ambitious enough, so I'm going to change that for 2023.

Next year

My key goal for 2023:

Execute on my monthly newsletter

My one big thing for 2023 is to continue executing on the newsletter I just started publishing this month.

I have a feeling that in focusing on executing and trying to produce an interesting newsletter, I'll spend time on thoughts that'll turn into hacks and eventually real products.

My secondary 2023 goals:

Publish 52 blog posts
Learn 2000 new chinese words
Publish a mastered cover
Publish a YouTube tutorial series (>= 5 videos) on a niche topic of interest
Earn first $1000 outside of salary
- I'm not sure what this will look like yet, but I'm considering these avenues:
  - Freelancing
  - Selling an info product
  - YouTube ad revenue
  - App store revenue

These secondary goals are more ambitious than my 2022 goals, and are quite varied, but I think they're achievable and notably mostly byproducts of sustainable and enjoyable processes.

Part of the reason why they're so varied is that I don't know what my best growth vector will be, so taking a few swings at different things seems like a good idea, and importantly, writing about it on the blog and newsletter.

For the blog post goal I'm going to keep publishing weekly. This is the most significant secondary goal because it will also support execution on the newsletter goal and clarify my thinking.

For the Chinese word goal I'm going to keep meeting with my teacher 1:1 weekly + doing 10 minutes of daily vocabulary acquisition/retention on hackchinese.com (opens in a new tab).

For the YouTube series goal I'm going to pick something interesting & enjoyable in one of [iOS dev, multiplayer game dev, AI, NextJS web dev] to write a tutorial series on. I've published YouTube tutorials before, so I don't expect this to be too challenging. Mostly just need to start flexing these muscles again, namely:

comfort being in front of a camera
breaking down a complex subject into actionable, approachable DIY steps
editing videos via Final Cut Pro

For the 'first 1k outside of salary' goal I similarly have a path forward and just want to start flexing those muscles again, because if I were currently in a pinch, or simply wanted to quickly produce incremental income, I wouldn't have an option paved. I've previously earned money via freelancing, the iOS App Store, and YouTube, so I'm confident I can figure this out.

The most novel goal will be properly recording, editing and mastering a cover as I haven't formally gone through that process, so I expect to need to learn how to use Logic Pro.

Anyway, there you have it. I'll be back in 3 months to discuss progress.

Thanks for reading!

Last Updated: Sat Dec 31 2022

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