Reinventing myself in 2022
My goals for the new year and what I hope to achieve - reaching for new creative and physical frontiers (lifetothemax #30)
Happy new year!
Welcome to 2022. It’s been over a year since I started this experiment of writing a somewhat-weekly newsletter to keep track of my goals. You can read last week’s newsletter to see how that went.
Overall, it went pretty great, so I’m continuing the experiment this year. However, it’s a new year, which means I have new New Year’s resolutions.
Before I get into what those resolutions are, I want to mention the guidelines that led me to this list of goals.
Looking back, I think last year was really about laying good foundations: being healthy, reading more, creating structure in my life… So this year is first and foremost about solidifying these foundations, through reading and continuing the newsletter.
Next, I want to set some ambitious goals to push last year’s habits to the next level. I want to achieve some impressive physical feats, and also continue my self-improvement through additional avenues of education (other than reading).
Furthermore, I want to create goals that will force me to make the best of life. If we weren’t in the midst of a pandemic, this might involve travel and experiencing other cultures, but that’ll have to wait. Instead, I want to boost my creativity, through writing and making art, and also collaborate with other creatives/entrepreneurs.
Lastly, I want to take time to reflect on what I truly want to do with my future.
Okay, we’ve covered the general guidelines. So what are my goals for 2022?
Write a somewhat-weekly newsletter. This is the same goal as last year: writing a weekly newsletter to keep track of my goals for the year and see how I’m doing with achieving each goal. However, I am adding a caveat that I am allowed (and even encouraged) to sometimes miss a week here and there. This can be for any reason: work, vacation, not feeling up to it… I’m allowed to take time off. I’m sending out my first newsletter of 2022 a day late to really drive this point home (and not because I was too lazy to finish writing this up last night, oops lol). So, I’ll write a weekly newsletter, but I’ll miss a few and that’s okay. Hopefully this relieves some of the stress and allows the creative juices to flow without added pressure.
Read an hour a day. Reading thirty minutes a day last year allowed me to read close to 25 books (I finished 23 by December 31st and was over halfway done with three other books). I’m hoping to double that this year, and am therefore doubling the amount of time I need to read each day. This goal last year was truly mind-expanding and inspiring. I hope this year feels twice as much so.
Run a marathon. This is the goal that hopefully turns me into a full-fledged athlete. If I’m able to achieve this, and especially all the training that it takes to get there, I will be the fittest I’ve ever been all while conquering one of the greatest achievements of my life. Fingers crossed!
Make time for my mental health. Last year, one of my goals was “prioritize my mental health”. I did some meditation, but other than that not much was “prioritized”. I want to find ways to make more time for my mental health this year, be it through more meditation, taking time off from work/other activities when necessary, or any other method I see fit.
Reserve one day a week for being creative. I’m very excited about this goal. In my last newsletter, I talked a lot about the shortcomings I had last year when it came to setting creative goals. The key points were that creativity comes in many forms, and setting arbitrary goals at the beginning of the year that might change down the line (e.g. make one TikTok a week), doesn’t really give space for true creativity, and can end up hindering it. So this year, instead of deciding how I will be creative, I am deciding when I will be creative.
Starting next weekend, I want to reserve Saturdays for creativity. What does this mean in practice? No work or tasks that don’t promote creativity (except for necessities like food shopping/walking the dog, etc). If possible, I’d also like to limit consumption, even reading if I’m able to get ahead on it during the week. One day a week where all I do is create. Making social media content, painting, or trying something new entirely… anything creative. My hope is that this will promote my creativity more than ever before.
Learn something new every month. Each month this year, I want to pick one relatively big concept and spend one month learning about it. This can be anything, from a new coding language, to a new art form, or even taking a course online. By the end of the year, this should expand my toolbox of things I can do and make me a better person. I hope that it will also allow me to gain new insights into areas that I might be interested in but have never had the framework to explore.
Collaborate with other creatives. This goal makes me really excited. So many of my friends, especially after the past two years, are turning towards creative endeavors (like I have with this newsletter). I would love to work and collaborate with these friends and other creatives I haven’t yet met. What would we collaborate on? Who knows! Could be a writing project (like a newsletter), some art, a podcast, anything… I just want to collaborate with people. If you are reading this and would like to collaborate with me in any way please dm me (even if you don’t yet know what we’d work on). I’m down for anything and I just want to create cool stuff with cool people.
Build a bucket list. This is my final goal for the year. What I hope to achieve with this goal is building a list of 100 things that I’d like to do before I die, as well as start to check things off that list. I want to take ideas from books I read, experiences I have, and new things I learn this year to create this list.
So there we go. Eight ambitious goals for the new year.
I went with eight this year instead of ten, firstly because I couldn’t come up with two more meaningful goals, but also because I really only failed two out of the ten goals I set last year, so eight should be achievable.
This list gets me really excited for the new year. I hope these goals push me to better myself even more, be more creative than ever, work with awesome people and really look forward to the future.
When it comes to this newsletter, I want to keep the format a little looser than I did last year. I had really formalized a structure over time that included my reading, stats on my goals, links to my daily schedule and other stuff that just ended up making the newsletter clunky (I’m sure most readers just skipped over these sections anyway). I’ll still briefly mention books I finish each week as well as some important links, but other than that I want to really take the newsletter to new heights with an unconfined format. I’ll dive deeper into how I’m achieving my goals and what to improve, subjects I’m learning about each month, how my marathon training is going and cool projects I’m able to work on with interesting people. If any of that is of interest to you, or you just want to read stuff I write every now and then, please consider subscribing.
And thank you if you have already subscribed. As I said last week, I really love writing for you, the reader, and it’s already helped me achieve so much. So thank you for reading, and let’s have a great year! ❤️