The Carry On Life

Year-End Review

While there’s still a little more than a month left of it, I’d like to look back at the goals I set for the year and how I did on them. In hindsight, I could have set the bar a little higher. In light of that, I’ll also evaluate some achievements that I didn’t particularly set as goals for the year.

On December 23, 2009, I wrote the following in my notebook:

Things to do in 2010

1. Pay off my credit card
2. Nurture a profitable skill
3. Find and practice a pleasurable talent [hobby]
4. Get my own place

For a couple pages, I expounded on each a little further, but for the most part, they are pretty cut and dry. The first one I took care of pretty quickly. It wasn’t a huge balance, and I had it paid off in a couple of months. However, I was in a car accident not to long after and even though it wasn’t my fault, I ended up incurring another balance. I soon paid that off though, and as of today have a zero-balance.

The second I feel like I accomplished my goal and then some. I began to pick up PHP after having not programmed for several years. I got it back quickly and began to learn more and more material throughout the spring and summer. I also started to brush up my other web dev skills, learning HTML5 and getting familiar with jQuery. During the summer, I set another goal for myself: to get a job using it by the end of the summer. The week before school started, I had a successful interview with the president of a creative agency in town and landed a paid internship doing web development.

The third goal, I’m trying to look at in two ways. I enjoy doing web development so much, that when I’m working on my own projects (e.g. Trestle), it’s fun. However, it’s also a work-related skill, and I think I was intending more of a hobby-for-hobby’s-sake type talent. I probably could have done a little better to achieve this goal to the letter, but I no longer feel the void of fun or happiness that I was trying to fill, so one way or another, in spirit I think I achieved this one.

Getting my own place didn’t take very long. I had my own apartment by the end of the winter. It was pretty nice to live alone. I found it easier to concentrate and be productive than I had when living with roommates. That didn’t last too long though. My brother and my girlfriend have moved in with me, and I’m sharing my living space again. This time it’s not such a problem though. Space is a little cramped, but there’s no roommate drama. Consequently, I’m enjoying company, lower rent and am still able to concentrate and be productive.

Something that I didn’t really set as a goal (but really should have) was to go on a vacation. Being stationary in Atlanta after traveling abroad for a few years was more painful than I can describe. I one tried to leave in 2009 only to have my plans fall through. However, this year I got to go on a trip to Chicago with my girlfriend for three days. It’s wasn’t quite a month backpacking Europe, but after being stuck here for three years, it was a tsunami of fresh air.

All-in-all, this year has been great. The best I’ve had since crash landing back home from Ecuador. Especially scoring the web development gig. After delivering pizza for over two years, and doing even worse work before that, using the skills I’ve spent time and effort learning feels great. I finally have a sense of work satisfaction and the promise of rewards from self-improvement. Let’s face it, you can’t really hope to augment your income delivering pizza by watching webcasts or reading a book. The potential to improve my living conditions just by soaking up knowledge is exciting to me.

I’ll be spending some time before January picking my battles for 2011. I think the lesson learned here is that I can definitely set some loftier goals, especially since I have more momentum than I had last year.