I checked Steam today, and found that the new 2024 year in review information had been updated. Since it is the end of the year, I figured I’d do some reflecting and assessing on where I am currently, where I would like to be in the coming year, and make some personal accounting of where I am with regards to the goals I had set for myself in 2023.
In 2023, I had set a total of six major goals, much in line with the way I think it was Warren Buffett who said something along the lines of making a todo-list each day of six goals, and ignoring anything unrelated to those six goals.
So with that in mind, here were my six general goals:
- Progressing on my Tyrant Mod.
- A personal goal not fit for discussion here.
- Work goal.
- Exercise goal.
- Family and health goal.
- Japanese goal.
Of these, I’m generally satisfied with most of my progress on my goals.
Going through them one-by-one:
On the Tyrant Mod, I wanted to progress significantly in writing, rendering, setting up a self-hosted Git server, and complete a character analysis on a monthly basis for each character.
While I would have liked to progress much further on writing and rendering than I have made in this year, I think the fact that I’m close/on the cusp of releasing a demo for the two variations of a scene that I’ve been working on is excellent news, and demonstrates to me that I should just bite the bullet and continue working hard at the mod.
Additionally, I did manage to get my homelab with the self-hosted git setup, my repositories migrated, and generally, am happy with that technical side to my setup.
I did, however, fail somewhat spectacularly on my goal of doing a monthly character analysis. This is because I never quite set up the time to work through the entire character arcs, their interplays, and fully flesh out the characters in The Tyrant yet, as well as analyze how their orbits interact with each other.
This task turned out to be a lot more mentally strenuous than I thought, as while I have been writing this scene I’ve been working on, I’ve continuously been analyzing whether what I’m doing makes the character likeable or not. So a lot more human psychology, language, and intent is necessary to go into this analysis, and given the way I’ve been working on the writing, I’m expecting it to continue evolving as the scenes themselves shift and morph over time.
So, I’ll probably give myself a C or a B on the scoring chart, depending on how high I want to set my standards. It’s a passing grade, and could be better, but for the first year I’ve really gotten more invested into this project, it’s not bad. Plus, I feel I’ve learned a lot of extraneous non-quantifiable factors that will go towards improving this project.
My second personal goal not for discussion was a failure. I failed it somewhat early this year. There are different modes to my mind and personality, and this portion of my personality is often at odds with my personal wants, desires, and ambitions, and so, with the failure of my personal character, I become double tongued, and thereby fail here.
There have been a few sparse moments of success, but they have been sparse and few. Even though I may be destined for failure on this goal, I wish to strive to continue it next year, and hopefully then, I’ll be able to succeed marginally more.
Because for goals, it may not necessarily be failure because I failed to reach the goal, so long as I can eventually get to that goal. Just because I haven’t gotten to the end of my trip doesn’t mean that the steps I took towards it have been in vain.
Solid F on this one.
My third goal was an amalgamation of various ambitious projects I wanted to work on, which were more in line with what I do in my typical day job.
The main goal here was to progress professionally, which I have attained. There were side goals for side projects, such as working on a webnovel translation website on the side, some pluralsight learning, personal website development, and generally other side projects fall in here.
I basically haven’t gotten any progress done on the myriad side projects I had listed, though some progress was made on some tools that I ended up writing/scripting for work on my mod, which is nice. Still, I’ll give myself a pass, since the main objective was not to get fired at my day job while still possibly getting a raise, which ended up happening. So all in all, it’s an okay result. But I’m not too bent out of shape over this, since it’s always been the leftover items in my list of priorities.
I’ll give myself a B here.
The next category was personal health/exercise oriented as a goal. I wanted to drop from 187.6 pounds to 147.6 pounds over the course of the year. Somewhere along the way, I lost a lot of my drive, but I have managed to drop to around 169/170, and have consistently been hovering there since. As there are still a few days left in the year, my continuing resolution on this front is to grit my teeth and do some hardcore fasting, which I hope to persist in until the goal on this front is met.
I expect this goal to bleed over to next year. However, the secondary objective of this goal was to be able to hit the one-punch man exercise regimen (100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, and running for 10 kilometers). Early in the year, when the weather was still cool, I was sometimes able to take walks for the six miles or 10 kilometers necessary, while not being able to hit the other goals. I think for next year, I’ll prioritize this goal as first hitting my weight target, second maintaining that weight target, and finally, with whatever leftover energy/motivational capital I have left, to hit the exercise target.
I think I’ll give myself a C here, as I have lost almost half the intended weight I planned on losing.
The fifth category was personal family time and health oriented. In 2024, I wanted to set for myself a goal of hanging out more with my family, regularizing better dental hygiene (getting sick of paying the dentist to do more intensive care), and possibly getting vision correction or braces. I’ll give myself an A on this goal, as I’ve managed to hit all the major targets I had aimed for.
My final goal was to pick up more Japanese via the Duolingo app, and to maintain the streak through the end of the year while hitting the monthly quest every month. As of now, I am 44 quests out of 50 for December, so I think with 9 days left in the year, I should be able to hit that quest streak. For days, I’ve missed I think 10 days in total over the course of the year, but somehow still maintained my streak with streak freezes. So I’m tentatively giving myself an A on this one on the condition that I complete the monthly quest.
Thus, with this summary out of the way, the next organizational step for me is to do a retrospective on why certain goals failed for the year, which ones failed, set up a pass, satisfactory, fail guideline, and perform some analyses on steps that I can take in 2025 to improve my goal attainment. Finally, there will be a projection of what 2025 will be like, and a series of analyses to set up the new goals for the new year.
Maybe I’ll save that post for tomorrow, as this one is already growing a bit lengthy as is.