I made some new years resolutions at the beginning of 2022, which can be found below. The ones that I crossed out are the ones that I actually completed. Overall, I didn’t complete many of my initial goals. Working on AI Productivity at Meta was a big source of burnout and my first year as a landlord was rough. When I try to remember what I did with my free time, I usually come up blank for moment — then I remember that I spent a lot of time dealing with the rental.
Habits/Wellness
Review+plan every week — nope
Quarterly review — nope
Sleep early — nope
Prioritize stillness, no screens and no speakers (how long? How often?)
I enabled the screen time widget on my phone and set up daily app timers. They’re good reminders, but I found myself ignoring it sometimes. Android lets you see your screen time metrics for the past 4 weeks — it would be cool to plot this over longer time periods to see how various interventions affect screen time. I started using Finch app this year and have found it to be a good tool for gamifying habit formation and staying on task.
Fitness
375 DL, 315 Squat, (stretch) 275 Bench
I tried Candito’s 6 week intermediate program and made some decent but diminishing gains over 4 cycles the first half of the year and hit 265 bench, 295 squat, and 325 DL. After reading Juggernaut Strength’s Powerlifting Programming Manual, I did a 12 week volume block for my bench and made some nice gains, hitting 275 by end of September. A knee injury from sprinting, getting sick a bunch of times, and overtraining my shoulder really set me back in Q4, resulting in no further progress. I’m starting this year by focusing on prehab/rehab.
Switch over to CrossFit?
The original plan was to hit 315 squat and 375 deadlift and then try CrossFit for the Olympic lifting, but that didn’t happen. Also, why are CrossFit gyms so damned expensive??
Handstand 10s — my focus was on the powerlifting, so I didn’t get to this.
Culture
Iceland
This was, for the most part, an awesome trip. I’m glad we planned it so far in advance, because it ended up being very cheap. Getting people to commit to a trip far in advance is surprisingly hard, which is a recurring theme (might be worth writing a separate post about). A lot of people expressed interest, but very few committed, and I’m still looking for more efficient ways to organize group trips. We also had some car-related headaches that took months to completely resolve. Would definitely go back to see the northern lights, hike the Laugavegur trail, see Eystrahorn, and witness volcanic flows.
Montreal
Ballet
Rutgers Symphony Orchestra
Turkiye
Originally planned to do this in Q4, but work was too chaotic to think about this. In retrospect, not going was the right choice especially since I got laid off. I’m not too mad though because I still got to travel 65 days of the year — super grateful for that. This year I got to ski at Big Sky, Snoqualmie, Mt. Bachelor, Breckenridge, and Killington/Sugarbush. I went all over Iceland, down to Wildwood/Cape May, Mexico City, Montreal, the Bay Area, the Berkshires, Art Basel in Miami, and Philly for PAX Unplugged.
Financial
Cash flow positive on rental, be a good landlord
As discussed earlier, I ended up putting a lot of work/repairs into the rental this year, which resulted in a net loss. At least I took care of every maintenance request that my tenants asked of me. Better to lose some money and do things right than to be a slumlord.
Max mega backdoor
Invest 170k
Become well-read on crypto
I didn’t have the motivation to do this — was too burnt out from work to dig into something technical. Also, a lot of my friends went from bullish to bearish on crypto this past year, which impacted my interest. On the other hand, my interest in blockchain technologies is now piqued from listening to a couple of podcasts that featured Balaji Srinivasan.
Invest 50k into crypto
This became hard due to 1. the bull market, 2. interest rates rising, and 3. holding the bag on my rental property for 6 months. I came into the year with a 60k balance on my margin loan and was hoping to pay it off gradually, but it made more sense to prioritize paying it down because the interest rate tracks the Fed’s rates, which needless to say, went up a lot this year. Stocks and crypto weren’t going to rise anytime soon, so I wasn’t going to outpace the debt accrual by investing instead of paying down. I let my rental unit sit empty for 6 months and paid ~20k into the mortgage that I could have invested into crypto.
Photography
Shoot 3 tests
Nope :/ I think there is some perfectionism and fear of failure that is holding me back here.
Make and hang prints
I made some progress on this. I started on a photo book and mounted my picture frames at least. Once I finish the book, I will look into making art prints.
Make NFTs — too burnt out from work
Be a better friend — I pretty much completely forgot about this goal. Building friendships and communities as an adult is something that I want to write more about sometime. I took the office environment for granted and dropped off on some of my more social hobbies, so I’ve found the pandemic/post-pandemic years to be very challenging.
2023 goals to come in a separate post.