Quick 2021 goals retrospective and 2022 goals

Evaluation

-Priority goal: 4.0 in my classes.

Success. Cumulative 4.09 at the moment.

-Added in March, to give some meaning to my part-time job: Produce 15 of X, 5 of Y, and 100 of Z.

Moderate success. Produced 8/15 of X, 2/5 of Y, and zero of Z (by far the least important). My heart wasn’t in it for the last two months because babysitting upper middle class Boomers is black-pilling in the extreme and your mental game has to be absolutely on-point.

-70.3 triathlon in less than 5:40:00.

Hurt myself two weeks beforehand and had to skip. Ended up being a lot worse than it felt at the time, took about 6 months of recovery to get back to 100%. Nottuh introduced me to the knees over toes guy and the idea of bulletproofing, which has made me smarter about injury prevention and recovery. The basic idea is that if you’re at risk for a type of injury, e.g. rotator cuff tears for lifters or calf pulls for me, then you do the rehab exercises ahead of time to build up stiffness and mobility (which prevents injury and increases motion-specific performance). Also lost a lot of fitness while working on my parents’ property for about six weeks. Generally speaking, I’m at about the same cardio fitness level now as I was at the beginning of the year. One significant improvement is I’ve completely transitioned to zero-drop running shoes, and the hype is real.

–20 chinups in one set

Got to 14.

–Bench 250×5

Got up to 110-pound dumbbells for six reps. I just got a barbell for home so I plan to hit this around March.

–Deep squat 315×5

Got up to 145-pound dumbbells for 12 reps, which is the most weight I can fit on them, but it’s not possible to do these “deep”. Again, the barbell will allow me to make more progress.

–Standing overhead press 165×5

Got up to 125×5. Didn’t occur to me until November that I could break through plateaus by doing them seated for a few weeks.

–Deadlift 420×1

Was mostly restricted to dumbbell squats, so it’s hard to say.

At least one of the following:
–An internship, preferably but not necessarily part-time.
–Freelance work totaling 50k revenue.
–A blockchain mobile app on both the Apple and Google stores.

Negligible progress. I’ve been focusing on the job search over break, but didn’t do anything before that. I think the freelance work totaled $400.

-Find a satisfying answer for why God hides himself from us more now than he used to.

No progress.

-Create an Edenism wiki with 1 million words of content.

No progress.

-Take a ballroom dance class.

No progress.

Overview

Once again, only the top priority stuff got done. Qualitatively, I’d give myself points for extra difficulty this year because I hate computers and I especially hate school, whereas last year’s goals were things I wanted to do for their own sake. Conservatively, I’d rate myself as 25% improved over last year in terms of ability to set and achieve difficult goals.

Working primarily on a goal in an area I detest for long-term rewards required me to step up my mental game in a big way, so I’m about three times better at that particularly than last year. However, I let it slip toward the very end and that almost ruined everything. (I suspect there was a touch of the old Omega self-sabotage hiding in this.) I accommodated for this by obscenely over-preparing for the final in that class, because I needed to get a certain grade (and the way to avoid regret from failure is to legitimately feel you couldn’t possibly have prepared more diligently) and because I wanted to teach my brain that failures of discipline mean the future will be harder, not easier.

Previous retrospective notes on GPA goal here, as written in September. Will do additional lessons from school and exercise as separate posts.

2022 Goals

I’m focusing a bit more this year, hoping this will aid my attempts to balance hard goals in multiple areas of life. These will change significantly if I get a job. Otherwise, I’m on pace to run out of money around May, so I’ll be asking family and friends for loans and possibly go live with someone if I don’t get enough to pay rent. That would also change things significantly.

School

-Top priority: 4.1 cumulative GPA. A flat four point just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

Exercise

-Same strength goals as last year, except I put definite deadlines on them based on how long I expect each one to take. Plus:
-Jumping rope, do double-unders for 15 minutes straight. This is approximately 1,000 of them.
-Run a 6:25 mile (February).
-Two triathlons (by myself, to save money). An Olympic-length one in March and a half-Ironman in August.

Professional/financial

-Get a programming job or internship.

Spiritual

-Read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.