Why I’m making this post
This is mostly a way for me to organize and offload some of my thoughts but I figured I would make this a post since wanting to be a better person is a universal experience and hopefully I make some point that will help someone else. If this isn’t your type of content that’s okay! Feel free to move on, the next post will not be so human and non-tech related.
Inspiration
There are three main points of inspiration for this plan:
- After the AOC post, I was in a very negative headspace which sucked but I realized something while I was moping around for about 3 weeks… If you do something you don’t like (in that case it was using A.I), you can just not do that thing which is a very simple and important thing to realize.
- I watched this video[1] by Bread on penguins and decided I would take my goals more seriously this year.
- During my moping about, my social media consumption was beginning to straddle the line of an addiction which is not how I want to live my life.
The plan
With that pre-amble out of the way, let’s get into “the plan”. “The plan” is really quite simple, stick to my goals and become a better person. That seems great! but you might have noticed an issue… there needs to be goals to stick to in the first place. As someone who has always struggled with goal setting and just long-term planning in general, I found the video linked above to be super helpful as a kind of guided goal setting session. Since I was watching the video as I was doing this I made the plan in the same structure which had a few parts but the important ones for this post are the high level goals and the lower level sub-goals.
High level
As the name suggests, these goals are very broad and meant to get the general idea of what the overall success condition of the year is. How many of your goals you have to complete to “feel” like a success is dependent on the person (and personally I don’t have an idea of that yet myself) but, for the purpose of motivation I would consider any progress a success. So what are my goals? Well, broadly speaking I want to take this year to:
- have more fun
- go to more events
- make more friends
- become healthier overall
- take my transition more seriously (I don’t think it’s mentioned anywhere else on the bog but I am trans)
- work on/complete my personal projects
You might be thinking “wow those are super generic and kind of cheezy”, to which I would say “that’s the point!”. These goals are just to get the brain going on what you want from the year and a very general idea of what direction to go to get there.
The how
This is the lower level sub-goals section where I’ll state a few of my subgoals and then what I’m actively doing to go towards them. I have them separated into categories because it makes for easier reading and that’s how my brain works but again, if you decide to follow along then do whatever works for you :)
Side note: being someone interested in technology makes this much easier as generally you’re constantly learning new tech and have a pretty good way to find out stuff. This is good because it’s fairly easy to pivot that type of thinking towards IRL goals and get over the beginning inertia stage that a lot of people struggle with.
Physical
This category is pretty self explanatory, it’s just stuff to do with physical wellbeing.
Goal: eat healthier
- Actively doing: eating out less and eating more organic/whole foods
Goal: go outside more
- Actively doing: going on walks
Goal: sleep better
- Actively doing: go to bed at a reasonable time and keep devices away from bed
Mental
This category is more focused on mental sharpness or brain health I suppose it could be called.
Goal: read more books
- Actively doing: reading books on my days off and doing active reading[2]
Goal: relearn algebra/math
- Actively doing: reading some math books and doing the exercises
Goal: learn 5 or more songs on bass
- Actively doing: starting with learning some music theory and note positions
Spiritual
I know some of you read that heading and rolled your eyes and are probably on your way to close the tab but this isn’t religious type spiritual it’s more…. emotional wellbeing I suppose? I’m not really sure what word I would use but it’s more about your relationship with yourself than anything else.
Goal: become comfortable with my thoughts
- Actively doing: spending time without any stimulus and meditation
Goal: become comfortable with my body
- Actively doing: practicing positive self talk, doing transition stuff, and realizing that everyone is different (being trans is hard and a lot of the times the brain worms get to you)
Goal: become less reactive
- Actively doing: taking time to think about my actions before I do them
I’m not sure what more I can say without just sounding like I’m complaining or something so I’ll leave you with a quote I heard that I thought was really good.
The goal isn’t to become good at these things, though you might think it is. The goal is to teach your nervous system that you can survive while being bad.
As a former “gifted kid” and someone with really high expectations of myself, that quote was an eye-opener and I hope I can teach myself to live by it in some sort of capacity.
Technological
This category is basically only comprised of one goal which is to not get addicted to social media. I bought a flip-phone for daily use out in the world for this, I’ll probably make a post about this after I’ve spent enough time with it to see if it did anything but it can make calls/texts and play music so that’s good enough for me… also it has a headphone jack so it’s better than an IPhone (I’m mostly joking).
Conclusion
As is tradition, thank you for reading! This one was a little bit different than usual but I hope it was still a good read and maybe even helped you think about how to become a better version of you! A lot of people (myself included) usually stick to their goals for the first month or two of the year and then gradually peter out into old habits but that doesn’t have to be case. Normally I’m not a self-help book kind of person but the following image really struck a chord with me, and I hope it might for you, dear reader, as well.
![1 percent a day from the book: Atomic Habits [3]](../images/slopage/graph.png)
If there were only two thoughts I hope to instill with this post to the reader (including my future self), they are:
- How do you define success
- What’s your 1% a day?
I have so much rattling around in my brain about this but instead of making a giant post where I ramble and make no sense, I think I’ll leave it here. At the end of the year I think I’ll make a follow-up post and see how successful I was but until then… may your compilations be fast and your ping low. Farewell citizens of the Wired.
Links
[1] bread on penguins new years resolutions video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5tfw6_SJnc&pp=0gcJCYcKAYcqIYzv
[2] active reading definition -> https://mcgraw.princeton.edu/undergraduates/resources/resource-library/active-reading-strategies
[3] 1 percent a day image -> https://progblog.pages.dev/images/slopage/graph.png