Usually I don’t set goals for New Year’s. This is because I think it is pointless to make goals when many don’t get through them. Majority of people never accomplish what they’ve set out to do this year. Or in their entire life.
But this year I decided to set some. Reasoning: you shouldn’t avoid setting goals because people don’t accomplish them. You should set them, and try to beat the odds. Despite failure, you should keep trying. It’s worse to not set them than set them and fail. If you’re always failing to meet expectations, perhaps it’s time for you to do a deep dive as to why you never accomplish them and take a different approach.
The way I’m going to do it differently this year is that I’m going to share New Year’s goals to at least one person and try to be accountable.
They are:
- Get back to 160 pounds. A lot of my weight has come from being an utter bum during my last semester in college and drinking an absurd amount of soda. Of course I don’t drink that much anymore, but I haven’t been able to get rid of that sugar build up. I’ve learned my lesson. As my brother told me, “Bro stop drinking sugar water. You ain’t some bumblebee!”
- Create a simple multiplayer game that could be played on browser. I have a nice one in mind involving a certain dawg =D.
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Learn Japanese. I’ve been wanting to learn Japanese for a long time. My main reason is that I like Japanese media(Terrace House!), but I don’t want to pay 100% attention to what people are saying. I want to multitask. No show deserves 100% of your undivided attention. They provide breaks here and there to prevent overstimulation, so I want to do other things during the slow times in the show. I want to watch only the interesting bits. Subtitled shows demand your full attention since you won’t understand what they’re saying if you don’t see the subtitles, and it’s hella annoying.
But to circumvent not looking at subtitles you have to put an ungodly amount of up front costs to learn the language.
I’ve attempted to learn the language, but I’ve never gotten past the lowest noob level. I think the level of proficiency I should aim for passing the highest level of JPLT. Since I’m Korean, my friend told me I should have a much easier time compared to his experience. I still remember his bewilderment on his face when he was learning the language. He struggled a lot because the sentence structure of Japanese is reversed relative to English.
I’m also thinking that what would be really sick is if I can go to Japan next year.
- Meditate at least twice a week. I’ve always tried to set a goal of doing it everyday but end up with streaky runs. I’ve done it consistently for around 3 months everyday last year and it was very good. But I stopped for a very long time after that. I think it’s because of this sense of failure when you forget to do it for one day builds up. I want to be very consistent on a weekly basis.
- Read 23 books. I read 10-15 books last year and I’d like to try to read double that amount.