Reviewing The Past Year

This post is primarily going to go over the goals I set for myself in 2015, and how I did in terms of meeting them. I outlined them here almost a year ago.

The three categories in which I set targets for myself are as follows:

Goal – Something I want to accomplish that is measurable and relatively continual. eg. exercise X times per week or decrease sugar consumption by X percent. These are often habits I want to build into my life an my hope is that by doing it for a year, it will stick.

 

Theme – A central topic for the year – something I can spend time thinking about and take a few concrete efforts towards. eg. build community or rethink what health means. These are often abstract ideas that are hard to measure but important to spend time focusing on.

 

Challenge – Something I want to conquer. Crossing an item off my bucket list. eg. climb Mr. Everest or learn to tight rope walk. These are binary, I either complete them or I don’t.

2015 Goal: Become Fluent in 2 More Languages

My goal was to become fluent in both German and Swedish. I defined “Fluency” as

the ability to read a news article, out loud, in the languages that I am learning

I added the additional requirement that once I felt fluent in a language, I would read one article per week in that language in order to ensure that I retained it.

Score: 2/10

I learned some German this year, and a very very minimal amount of Swedish, but I am not fluent in either in any respect. As per Duolingo standards, I reached just short of 50% fluency in German, which means that at best I have 0.5/2 languages learned. I can’t give myself any better of a score, not having at least learned one of the languages.

2015 Theme: Budgeting & Saving

I did very very poorly with this one. I actually focused and paid attention to it for maybe a total of 2 months. Even with that, I still have almost no idea where I lie with regards to my monthly expenses, and my savings are not looking any better for this theme.

Score: 0/10

This was an absolute failure. The one thing I did learn about this is how much I actually dislike focusing on money, saving, and spending patterns. Given how aware I am that these things are very crucial to long term success and an ability to be comfortable later in life, this means I need to find a good way to make it an interesting topic for me.

2015 Challenge: Complete a Tough Mudder

This one is fairly simple to judge. The task was to enroll and participate in a Tough Mudder race. I also gave myself a goal of completing it in under 3 hours, but this was a secondary goal to completing it in the first place.

Score: 9/10

On June 13th of 2015, I participated in Tough Mudder Tahoe 2015, and completed the entire course. Not only did I complete the entire course, but I did not skip or fail any of the course obstacles. The only reason I did not give myself a perfect score on this is that I did very little preparation leading up to the race (which was supposed to be one of the benefits to it) and I did not go the hardest I could during the race as I joined up with a few people in the race and decided to match their speed and go as a group rather than try to push as hard as I could to make my best time.

Recap And Review

Score: 11/30

This year was very poor with regards to following through with what I was trying to accomplish. I only actively completed one of them, failed entirely at another, and was very mediocre at best for the third. The important thing here is to make sure I understand why I succeeded where I did, and why I failed elsewhere.

I’m pretty sure one of the big reasons I succeeded with my Tough Mudder challenge is because of the simplicity of the task. It’s not that it was easy, but that it was simple. Enrolling was the most complex part of it, and I only needed to do that once. Once I was enrolled, I just needed to rent a car, show up, and run the race. Yes, I might get tired, or sore, or even have trouble with the obstacles, but I could face those when the time came.

I think the difficulty I encountered in learning the languages was multi-faceted. Firstly, I think I bit off more than I could chew. Learning one language - German - would have been a fantastic goal for the year, and if I had succeeded, I could have very easily moved on to the next. Setting reachable goals I think is a very important part of this. The second facet of the difficulty stemmed from consistency. I never really made it a part of my routine to actually learn the language, instead just favouring to spend time on it whenever I had an opportunity. I went into it without a plan, and as a result fell short. Lastly, I had no direct purpose or reason to learn the language besides wanting to, which meant I did not have much to gain or be motivated by. I plan on redoing this goal with a few slight modifications that will hopefully improve my odds of succeeding.

Lastly comes my theme of budgeting and saving. This one failed almost purely out of disinterest and the fact that it felt like a chore. I might see if I can rework this one as well so that I do it in a way that I am working towards something specific, and so that it hopefully feels less like a chore and more like a stepping stone on my way to something more fun and benificial. How I do that remains to be seen though.

Thanks for reading! The last thing I learned about doing this for the first time this year is that I much prefer setting goals instead of choosing a New Years resolution. Goals feel like I’m improving and working towards something better, whereas a resolution very often feels like I’m trying to maintain some status quo or that I’m depriving myself of something that I generally enjoy doing. What are your goals/resolutions for 2016? Do you have any big plans to go along with it? I would love to hear from you in the comments.