The Journey Into The Unknown
2022 has been great. Now, it's time to step into another year of unknowns with the principles I gathered in 2022.
Hey friends 👋
First of all, Happy new year! 2022 was a great year for me, and I'm excited to see what the next one brings. I took a much-needed vacation over the past few weeks and it was one of the best things I did all year. I really enjoyed the time off and spent some amazing time with my girlfriend without bombarding myself with information junk from the internet.
Even though the new year has no real significance, it just feels like an artificial reset to monotonous life. People take small breaks, stop for a while and reflect on things that happened. It’s a good reminder to notice things as time keeps passing by. And like many others, I used to have new year's resolutions and I set goals for myself. Last year, I even made an excel sheet with a list of things I wanted to achieve with quarterly timelines attached to each one of the goals. Personal OKRs 🤣
I have seen people who do this and achieve their goals, but it definitely didn’t work for me. Either I was bad at setting goals or the whole process just didn’t align with me. Most of the goals I set for myself were outcome-oriented and not input oriented. I used to have goals such as reaching 10k subscribers on YouTube or getting ripped enough to have visible 6-pack abs within 6 months and so on. The problem with these was, I never knew the starting point or the path I need to take to achieve these goals. I used to feel anxious while looking at the list and within a few weeks, the sheet is lost. I never open it until the next year.
This time around, I’m consciously not having any goals that are outcome-oriented. Any desirable outcome comes from the input actions I put in and the time frame I give myself in achieving the outcome. My resolution this year is to focus on the input actions that are aligned with my outcomes, consistently.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing against goals. Goals are great and they provide direction. But breaking down goals into actionable items is important. These actionable items are the only things I can control and measure myself towards. The measure of the outcome will only help me fix the actions I take, and it will never be the measure of my personal success.
Apart from setting expectations for the coming year, the new year also feels like a great time to reflect back on the past year. I have had some great experiences in 2022 and it has taught me a lot, both personally and professionally. I tried hard to condense them into 5 macro level principles that I will be taking forward in the coming years. Here we go:
🧑🎨 Create more
Create more than I consume. I consumed a lot more than I created in 2022. But this year I want to flip the ratio. I want to focus on creating more things, whether it's writing, art, or building products. Creating gives me joy and I grow a lot when I create.
🏃 Take the first step
Just start. Take the first step and put things into action without overthinking the shit out of things. I suck at it, and I’m getting better. Even this newsletter, it took me months to publish the first newsletter and then things worked out. I just want to start this year and take the first step ASAP.
⚙️ Stay consistent & build a process
Slow is smooth; smooth is fast.
Start slow, stay consistent and keep at it. There is no hurry and things will fall into place when I stay consistent over long periods of time. Running has been a great example of this principle. I just want to keep running forever.
💫 Enjoy the process & strive for excellence
I want to find things I enjoy doing and keep getting better at them. Running and writing feel that way. The process of writing and the time when I’m running gives me joy. I hope to find more of these in the coming year.
🌱 Invest in things I care
Invest in Relationships. Invest in my Craft. Invest in my Body.
I never invested my time, effort or money into things I really care for. I had this blind belief that nothing will go away from me or I’ll always be at my peak fitness. Which is not true. So I should be consciously investing my time, effort & money into things that I really care for this year.
And that’s it for this week’s issue. This was a classic new year’s post, but this is the mental space I’m in right now. I would love to hear your thoughts on my opinions and if you had any reflections from the past year, I would love to hear them!!! Please drop a comment below 💌
💫 This week in Read Write Run
📝 The dark side of setting goals
“Goals are widely used and promoted as having really beneficial effects. And yet, the same motivation that can push people to exert more effort in a constructive way could also motivate people to be more likely to engage in unethical behaviors,”
~ Maurice Schweitzer
“People become significantly more likely to cheat with goals than without them,”
~ Maurice Schweitzer
📝 How to build leverage from scratch
Nobody cares what you can do, everybody cares what you can do for them.
A blank page can feel like a curse. It often feels like a curse. But a new one can also be a relief. By the time you’re finished whatever you filled that last blank page in with, you might have come to hate it, or at least gotten sick of it. I can go so deep on a topic, get so far into it, that halfway through I wonder if it’s the best or most important or most interesting thing I could be writing about, but by then, it’s too late. I’m in too deep.
🏃 Run
Took a break during the vacation. Back to running and covered 19 km this week. Feeling content that running has become a part of my routine, excited for this year of running.