This year has been a big one, we could talk about how there has been a lot of movement on the macroeconomics situation of most countries, that a war started between countries that aren’t that far from where I live, or that we could be living the start of another dotcom like a cycle.
All of which sounds like we just had one of the worst years in a while, but like always, there’s some good too.
I will start this year’s review like always, looking at what I wanted to accomplish this year and how close I got to between those boundaries. Then I will reflect on a few life events that changed how I think I should approach the exercise of making new goals for 2023.
Personal OKRs review
Last year I divided my goals into buckets that affect different parts of my life.
With this theme in mind, let’s talk about each of these challenges, from top to bottom.
Health
In 2022, this was the bucket I focused on the least, and the reason for that was because I started the year with what I thought was a foot injury which resulted to be an autoimmune disease, nothing extreme once I got to find the correct medication for it, but this is something that I will have to keep taking for the rest of my life and that will surely affect some of the decisions I take.
I did manage to meet my goals of exercising at least 3 times a week by doing some light exercises whenever I could and closing my Apple Watch Move + Exercise ring (This is how I’m measuring the success of this one), but I did not meditate nor I treated myself after February.
Why didn’t I do it? Overall, the situation with my health was stressful enough that I didn’t like meditating because it was a constant reminder of how I felt my body and what the unknown I was facing which made me feel worst, this led me to not focus on myself enough because I wasn’t in my best mental state.
It’s tough to say it, and I will try to go into details when I reflect on the life events of this year that affected me the most. If you want to know, I now feel like I’m working towards something better, but there’s still a lot of room to improve myself.
Finances
An easy one to measure, I had a number in mind for this one and I did achieve it. Let’s talk about what happened though, there are many things I’m trying to cover here to diversify myself and protect myself.
Peer-to-peer lending was overall my best performer this year, growing almost 10% while the stock market, to the day of my writing (Dec 19, 2022) is making me potentially lose €600. Which isn’t much considering we are on this one for the long run.
I’m also trying to get into the real estate market, I put in a reservation offer for an apartment near where I live which is an area I quite like, but I’m still unsure if I will be able to finish up with the process since there are many hurdles I still have to past to get to the finish line.
Personal Growth
This was the most holistic area of my goals, this blog has grown a lot in 2022, surpassing the traffic I expected to achieve when I started it taking it more seriously, so we can call that one achieved.
How did I do it? Well, consistently building more habits led me to write those 15 blog posts and expand my knowledge on many areas around social studies and macroeconomics with a little bit of more in-depth algorithms, I did not read 15 books but I came close, and I’m pleased with that.
Some of you may follow me on different social networks where I posted about my dog this year. If you do, you know I love my dog but boy oh boy, isn’t he a crazy one. He did manage to deplete my patience a few times and that’s why I added the goal to teach him and me how to handle those situations. I can’t say for sure that doing so made things better but I feel like I understand him a bit more and I hope he does the same with me. Let’s call this one a “maybe achieved it?”
Career
I became a tech lead at Cameo, overall the experience has been awesome, even though this year had many elements in the industry that wasn’t. I have met many people and got to work with them which in my opinion has made me grow too as a developer.
It has been a good year for my personal growth in this area, it has also been the area in which I have invested the most of my time, so those 2 sentences make a lot of sense in hindsight, taking small, consistent steps leads to better results because it allows you to calibrate during the process the path you are taking.
Hobbies
My grandmother was a great gardener, I’m not. I did manage to have some fresh herbs during spring and the summer, but I killed them through fall, probably by overwatering them, or not enough? I’m unsure about that one.
I bought this Breville Air fryer Oven and honestly what an amazing kitchen appliance. I would 10/10 recommend it for all the things listed on their website and many more.
Reflecting on
Making long-lasting friendships
A couple friends and I decided to start what I would call a support group of some sort, we did it a few years ago using the mastermind format which evolved to our own custom format that meets our needs.
We have now run this experiment for over 3 years and we’ll continue doing so, this also inspired me to create another group a bit more focused on the financial side of things, since I have longed for a while to have meaningful and open conversations about money that I felt I could not have with my friends since the topic is a bit of a taboo with them.
I enjoy a lot the conversations that this new group has sparked and the openness of these individuals that felt a similar issue with their family or friends has led me to find a new tribe amongst people that I might have not opened up as much in a different context.
I would recommend to anyone reading this on following a similar approach to find your own tribe. Most importantly, building connections with people around you that care and live through the same or similar values you do.
Relationships
Probably where I need to work the most, I have made many mistakes this year, like not writing enough to the people I care about just because I felt like I might be annoying them and honestly I have feared the answer to the question, so I have not even asked.
I did make really good relationships with old acquaintances, for a while, but didn’t manage to grow those relationships in the right direction which sadly, will probably wither with time. These follow a cycle I have repeated twice in my life and I honestly seem to not be able to grasp enough to make it right. So, obviously expect it to be a topic for my next year’s goals.
But not everything is bad, most of my good relationships did continue and even grew, either through life events that tested these relationships or by becoming more open about what we all wanted from the friendships we have. This leads us to our next topic.
Responsibility
Something, at work I’m quite good at handling and taking, but outside of work, seems to be an overwhelming topic because I try to take as most as I can. However, I have learned to say “no” when given more than I can take.
Many interesting projects and individuals have appeared on my journey with amazing ideas and a shared path in some way, I have had this feeling of needing to align myself more towards a common goal and somewhat find allies in my pursuit of enjoying the process of making new things, but this has taken a toll on me.
My raw food app for pets has been doing quite well and I have plans to overhaul the way it works to make it easier for pet owners to track their loved one’s food consumption and health.
Life decisions
I heard a friend telling me once “Go to where you are treated best” and honestly that phrase resonated in my head for a few days until I realized what he actually meant with it and what it meant personally to me.
I like living in Spain, this country has offered me a different lifestyle, and a slower pace and made me appreciate different things in life I believe that I would have not appreciated as much if I wasn’t in this environment, but we all evolve and it has come to a point where it feels like even though I like the culture and the people, the country has been moving towards a spiral of increasing the fiscal pressure around its people and it gives me some throwback feelings from where I was raised.
This is why I decided a few months ago that I would be looking for a country I can contribute to and that also treats me better for what I bring to the table. I talked about it a bit more in a previous journal entry if you want to check my reasons.
TL;DR
I kept growing as a professional at a fast pace and I will continue to develop my skills, be it soft and hard skills at the same or a bit slower pace to give myself enough room to grow more outside of my professional self and live a healthier life.
Let’s set some goals
I’m going to follow the same framework that served me well in 2022, we are obviously making some changes because things got pretty interesting and we are always evolving and learning what worked well and what did not.
So here are the themes for 2023.
Focus on being a developer
Taking a step back and coming back to my goals of 2020 when I decided to create at least 1 app and launch it on the AppStore, I’ll set a goal to maintain and improve Chomp (my raw food for pets app) and create a new web app (TBD on the name) that I will be openly building and sharing any progress I make on this journal.
Be healthier
Now that I have an idea of what I have, how to deal with it, and a plan for it to continue controlling it, I want to really do what I set myself to do for 2022, so we’ll keep the same goals here but strive to achieve them.
Personal growth
I will keep focusing on opening up my perspective and experiencing what life offers.
Finances
Double my investments for this year will be a bit unrealistic, so we are going to ground up this goal and set it to invest at least the same amount of money I invested in 2022. The market isn’t doing as well this year, but we are playing the long-term game here, so that does not matter right now.