2023 recap
It's December 31, so if you've been reading my newsletter for a while, you know what time it is. 'Tis the season to recap my 2023: what my goals were, what went well, and what to change in the future.
Before we begin, I’ll be announcing my 2024 goals in my next post which will be out tomorrow! So, if you want to know what's on the docket for me next year, be sure to subscribe. (My first 100 subscribers will get a secret gift, so grab one before they’re gone — only 21 left!)
Let's jump right in!
The first category of goals for 2023 was “Building Healthy Habits.” This category contained four goals, and overall, I did pretty well.
The first goal was to write 25 posts for my newsletter. I wrote ten. Despite the quantity, I'm proud of the quality of what I put out. I've found my groove with the writing, and I feel gratified by the feedback I get after every post. Since I missed the mark on the quantity, the obvious takeaway is that 25 may have been overly ambitious. I don’t want the newsletter to become so much work that it distracts me from my other goals.
My next goal was to read 25 books, and I read 25! Reading has been a part of my goals since I started this newsletter in 2021. It was something I didn’t use to do enough, but it was surprisingly easy to add to my life once I started. If it didn't take time away from my other goals, I would want to do even more reading than I allowed myself to do this year. It's super fun and exciting, and honestly, it's an easy win. I think 25 books a year is the perfect number, and I intend to keep this as a goal for many years. I’m making great progress towards my bucket list goal of reading 1000 books before I die. Before I started keeping track, I could conservatively estimate that I had read 100 books. Since starting the newsletter, I've read 80. So at a rate of 25 books per year, I'll achieve 1000 in 32 years. Not too shabby.
My third goal was to meditate 250 times, with the intention of making meditation a daily habit. I blew this out of the park. It became easy as soon as I added meditation to my morning routine. For this same reason, I now make my bed and put sunscreen on my face every morning — two things I didn’t use to do consistently. The meditation goal enables me to set time aside daily to stay in touch with my mind and emotions. I will definitely keep doing this in the new year.
My final goal in the “Building Healthy Habits” category goal was the ambitious goal of completing 25 small creative side projects. I managed to get fifteen. It took me a while to get into the groove of things. At first, I was too ambitious with the scope of my creations, which slowed things down. This changed once I started outlining what the finished product looked like at the start of each new project. This gave me a clear endpoint, enabling a more focused creative process and allowing me to ignore distractions that weren't getting me closer to the end result. If I wanted to add to or alter a project after that end result was reached, I would consider these changes a new project in themselves. This allowed me to keep moving forward and increase my creative output. These creative projects and my newsletter were both forms of creative expression for me, and having them as two separate goals with two separate targets, I believe, contributed to me not achieving as much as I would have liked with either. It was hard to focus on creative projects when I had a newsletter to write, and vice versa. It could be worth combining these two into one goal in the new year, representing all of my creative output with one focused target.
The next category of goals was the “Physical Challenges.” This category contained two goals — complete a triathlon and run a second marathon — and I did both! The triathlon went great because I had trained well, which made the outcome very fulfilling. In contrast, the marathon was challenging because I hadn’t prepared enough for it and suffered the consequences. I wrote individual posts about both of these (triathlon and marathon), so I won't elaborate much further here. Instead, I'll outline a lesson I learned.
With two major races like these in one calendar year, I put too much on my plate. If my goal was to become an endurance athlete, that's what I'd have to do to get there. But that was never the goal. My goal is to live a better, more fulfilling life, which I believe involves challenging myself physically. But focusing on one race would have sufficed for this and would probably have allowed me to do even better with the training. Training for two major races also took time away from my other goals, and I’ll be more mindful of this balance in the future.
My final goal for 2023 was to check ten items off my bucket list.
I'm proud to say I completed eight. I missed the mark by two, sure, but it would be a shame to dwell on that when what I achieved was eight significant life achievements—things that I've wanted to do for a very long time and that I can proudly say are now part of the story of my life.
The eight goals I completed were:
Eat tacos in Mexico City. These were everything I hoped for and more. I had such a fun trip with Charlotte and our friends. We had some fantastic food and laughs. Here’s the exact moment I completed this goal.
Do a triathlon. (Read about this here.)
Run the NYC marathon. (Read about this here.)
Do an entire training program for a race with a friend. (Also spoke about this in my triathlon post)
Build my personal website. (Read about this here.)
Create a font. I’ll write a post about this in the future, but here’s a sneak peak:
Build a piece of furniture out of wood. I guess it wasn’t technically furniture, but I’ll count it: I made a gate at the top of this staircase to stop our family dogs from nosediving down the stairs. Next time, I’ll build something slightly more artistic, although this was a good primer for the skills needed.
Go to a movie festival. I am not going to lie, until I attended two screenings at the New York Film Festival this year, I thought film festivals worked the same way as music festivals, in that you get one ticket and then get to see a bunch of shows over the span of one to a few days. I didn’t realize you got tickets to individual movies, just like going to a regular viewing at a movie theater. Still, this was a cool experience. Charlotte and I saw an old film by Niki de Saint Phalle called “Un rêve plus long que la nuit.” It kind of went over my head, but it was a fun first film festival experience nonetheless. Then we caught a viewing of Ferrari before it came out in regular movie theaters. It was cool to see it early, even though we also didn’t love this one… Better luck next time.
These were all super fun to achieve, and I can't wait to get more bucket list goals done next year. Ten was a very ambitious goal for one year. I can take a bit more time on these since the list is 100 items long, and I don't plan on dying in the next decade. Maybe lucky number seven would be a decent middle ground.
That's all I got up to in 2023. What a year! I am really proud of what I achieved.
Before we close, there’s one overarching lesson that I'd like to take into the new year as I plan my future goals. You may find this useful as well, let me know what you think.
When developing goals, you should start by clarifying your guiding principles / your values. These are the sort of untouchable idealized qualities that you'd like to live by. As an example, some of these for me are creativity (to be creative or innovative), authenticity (to be authentic, genuine, real; to be true to myself), and challenge (to keep challenging myself to grow, learn, improve). By the way, I didn’t come up with these off the top of my head. I followed an exercise prescribed by my therapist, which takes just a few minutes, and you can do too right here.
Once you set those guiding principles, you should use them to develop your goals. This is something I was missing when I first started my newsletter. I had set myself the goal of reading daily just because I wanted to be someone who reads, but that isn’t a great reason, is it? Luckily, it fits well with my “challenge” value, but that's more luck than anything else. The key is to develop goals that bring you closer to those guiding values while keeping in mind that balance is everything and putting too much towards one value will take you away from the others.
Now you have your goals, but don't stop there! Then comes the third crucial step that’s been a big theme of my newsletter in the past: turning those goals into actionable habits. For my newsletter this year, I had a recurring task in my task manager to write for a half hour each day. Building these habits allows you to achieve the goals that bring you closer to your intended values. As the quote goes, “You are what you do repeatedly every day.”
This is how I like to visualize this:
I hope that makes sense and that you might also see value in this way of thinking about your goals. I’ll use this to set my 2024 goals more intentionally and especially to decide how much I want to do for each goal. No more double-race years, at least not for the time being!
Anyway, enough of 2023 already. I hope you had a good year, and I wish you all the best in the new one. Thanks as always for reading, and make sure to subscribe because I'll be sending out my 2024 goals tomorrow, and you won't want to miss ‘em!
Yay