Goals For 2016

Despite this being a month or so late, I figured I would follow up on my post reviewing 2015 and to set some new goals for this upcoming year. You can see my goals for 2015 here and a look back on how I did for those goals here. Similar to the structure that I used last year, I’ll be detailing some targets I’ll be trying to reach in three different categories:

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.

2016 Goal: Become Conversational in German

I had a few issues learning some languages in the past year. One was that I tried to take on too much with the task. This year, I’m limiting the breadth and going to be increasing the depth of this goal. I want to not just be able to read an article in German on a regular basis, I want to be fully conversational in German. I’m also going to tack on French to this if/when I feel I am strong with my German as I’ve already got a base in French.

Another issue I faced with this challenge last year was consistency. I plan on having this be something I do first thing in the morning rather than at will, or in the evening. Doing this in the evening opens it up to being too tired to follow through, which is something I want to avoid. Futhermore, as a reward and purpose to learning German, I am committing now to go to Germany and Austria (among other locations) by the end of January 2017. I might go earlier if I learn the language and become conversational earlier, but the deadline and target is January of next year.

As with last year, I’m going to be using Duolingo’s mobile and web applications to learn German. If you’d like to challenge yourself (and me), you can sign up here and follow my progress here. Furthermore, as a supplemental way to increase my exposure and learn more, I will be looking into a penpal that I can converse with, and hopefully my roommate and I will be opening our doors to couchsurfers this year. If you are interested in staying with us, please see our profile on CourchSurfing and feel free to send us a request to stay with us.

2016 Theme: Have More Fun

Originally, I was going to have a theme for this year that centered around saving for a purpose. One in which I would set goals for saving, and in doing so would also set aside money for personal leisure purchases. After the last few weeks, I’ve decided to go with something a little bit different.

Specifically, this year, my theme is going to be to have more fun. It is fairly vague theme, and one that is going to be difficult to measure objectively, but the conclusion I’ve come to for myself over the past few weeks has been that I spend a much larger portion of my daily life and activities doing things that are not my first choice in activity when it comes to getting the most out of life. I simply want to be more satisfied with how I live my day to day life, and that starts with changing my mindset, and actively setting goals and doing things for the primary purpose of my enjoyment.

As I write this now, I am in the process of doing the first thing this year that will be aimed at living up to and furthering this theme - I am on a plane to Arizona for a week where I will be spending time with my grandfather and doing a bunch of skydives at a nearby dropzone. This trip is for my own personal benefit and well being. I want the theme for this year to push me to spending more time thinking about and participating in activities of this nature.

2016 Challenge: Visit 12 New Dropzones

Partially in line with my theme, my challenge for this year will be to go to, on average, one new skydive dropzone every month. I think this is going to be a challenge that will definitely require some planning and work, but will be something that will be very rewarding. It will mean that I need to do some level of travel, either via road trip or via flight, to areas I haven’t been to before, and it will also mean that this year will very much focus on getting a lot more experience with skydiving. I’ll be getting some new gear for myself soon, and that should make this challenge a lot less expensive in the long run.

Thanks for reading, and I would love to hear any thoughts or questions you might have so please feel free to leave a comment below.