Goals 2021/Q1

gui commited 3 years ago

This is my first attempt to make my goals public (inspired by the sephist). I believe it's a requirement to keep life interesting (someday I'll write more about it). Although I'm publishing it in February, I already started making some progress back in January so I think I'm on time.

This year I'm doing different from all other years. I'm going to create goals envisioning no more than 3 months, so I'll split into quarters. I need this to ensure two things mostly: (1) make me move faster than waiting late October to realize it's too late; (2) My wantings change frequently and so should my goals change, I used to think it's a problem, but after reading this article on focus, I believe it's part of my personal growth process.

Besides deciding what I'm doing, I'll also decide what I'm not doing. I learned that this is the key to keep engaged and focusing on moving. If I want to do 100 things, that's fine, but every YES for something means a NO for something else - I need to make visible what I'm saying no to, so I can feel more confident about my choices. It becomes a reward, if I committed to reading 10 books, but limited myself to 5, the only way to select the next half is to finish the first five sooner.

Finally, I'll be using Notion to track my progress. It's really simple and I love the idea behind different views to see my goals.

🦘 What I'm skipping

Learning Golang
Speaking Deutsch

I feel anxious by reading what I decided not to do above, since I've been willing to learn them for quite some time (for no particular reason) and I already (somewhat) started them and never finished.

What outcome do I expect?

I don't want to engage with "tasks", but instead "outcomes". A friend of mine named Greg very correctly reminded me that:

Personal goals are more about who we want to be over what we want to achieve

So who I expect to be in the next three (now two) months?

🧠 I know how to start a small digital business

I'm a dreamer, I always have been fascinated by people making impact and changes against the odds. From Steve Jobs on Apple to Jen on lunch money.

Once people told me I'm too young to make such a thing, and maybe they're right, but it doesn't mean that just waiting time passes by would get me any closer to my aspirations. That's why I'm moving, It's a damn big goal for such a small window of time, but I'm moving and I'm pushing it forward TODAY and NOW while I'm too young.

To make this happen I'm committing to reading The Lean Startup from Eric Ries. I'm hoping it will give me a shallow (since it's a small book) view of how startups are born and grow.

Besides the book, I'm willing to publish (and make it open source) a small app that so far I'm calling "Profly". I'll talk more about it later on.

🔢 I'm able to solve any coding challenge

The truth that hurt me deeply to share in public is that I suck at those fancy FANG code challenges out there. But it's not just a "bad algorithm guy", I deeply suck at them and I simply can't stand it anymore. I focused so much on learning languages, frameworks, good practices, and reading books that I never felt like it would matter.

Honestly, I still don't think it matters, I wonder if any of these companies use binary trees, thus maybe I'll drop this goal. What pushes me to keep going is that I somehow feel it would make me a better engineer. If I think it sucks and I find out it's useless, then I'll get good at it, I'll beat such challenges and finally, I'll get rid of them.

So, I'm going to measure it by:

Solving 10 challenges in January
Solving 15 challenges in February
Solving 20 challenges in March

I'm going to use leetcode and hackerrank to solve those. I'm assuming that as I evolve it will get easier and easier to understand and solve them. I might take some courses in the meanwhile, the point is: those solved challenges would prove my understanding of the knowledge.

Yes, this is right, I just made this! Yay! 🎉

I got inspired by Show your work from Austin Kleon. So I'll start publishing more about my personal growth and projects I've done. Hopefully, they might be useful for someone.

I still gotta move my old https://latrovacommits.com domain to here and expose some personal projects here.

☀️ Habits

I created a difference between habits and goals. There are things that I do only because I enjoy and not willing to achieve anything but rather to create a "way of living", e.g. meditating, exercising, reading, etc...

Goals are achievable, once I achieve them I won't be doing it again, e.g. reading a specific book, solving a single problem, etc...

For my habits I'm going to keep meditating, working out, writing on this blog and I would like to read the following books across this year:

The Lean Startup
Show your work
Antifragile
No Rules Rules
Atomic Habits
Unit testing principles practices and patterns

To help me achieve this, I got a Kindle which I'm going to take everywhere with my phone, hopefully, it will make the habit stick!

As always I'm too ambitious. I won't feel bad if I fail on any of these, I will instead:

Measure growth (e.g. reading 50 pages of a book would be a progress)
Decide again on keeping or skipping