Tag: Goals

At the start of this year I set myself four goals:

Read 12 Books

I read 20 books! This is twice as many as 2018

Make a 5% return on savings and investments

I made a 5.2% average return (unweighted, includes investments held for less than 6 months) on my investments. Savings accounts much less as repeated rate cuts hurt my savings growth.

Travel to USA or Singapore/Asia

I went to Japan!

Buy a Mazda 3

I paid for my own wedding instead!

Like most years, what was expected at the start of the year and what transpired was very different. That said, 2019, despite a number of stressors, was a great year. Bring on the next decade and new adventures in marital bliss!

2018 has been a great year. I left academia, started working in the financial industry, set up a new apartment, and celebrated good times with friends.

I have also posted very few blog posts (only 4!), I’m well over a year behind in editing photos from trips. However, life has been busy and I’m being slightly more restrained in what I chose to post online.

Some of the highlights from the year are shown below.

Hiking in Blue Mountains

Hunter Valley

Opera in the Domain

Corporate Life

One of many Ikea trips

Melbourne from Albert Park

Circular Quay Vivid Sydney

Freezing while Gysers Erupt in NZ

Getting rained on in London

Travelling around Germany

Exploring Palaces in Portugal

Thanking and Farewelling Friends

Mixing Lights at the Enmore

Where to travel next?

Continue reading “2018 – The Year of Personal Development”

2017 has been a roller coaster of a year, there have been some big highs but also some huge lows. At the start of this year I set myself some goals which I mostly achieved:

• Continue to build savings through regular contributions
  • This I achieved, and then spent on a laptop and a holiday. Unfortunately Sydney house prices continued to increase by far more than I can possibly ever save.
    
• Halve the amount remaining on my student loan
  • I paid off 47% of the loan, before interest was applied and 45% if you include the interest accumulated across the year.
• Read 18 books
  • I read 14 books, which is fewer, much fewer than previous years.
• Travel to the USA/Canada or Europe or Both
  • I went to the USA twice (once leisure, once business), Canada, Singapore, and New Zealand

In short 2017 has been a year where I found love, lost love, lost loved ones, got glasses, wrote, had papers rejected, hiked, travelled, saved, spent, read, and watched. I’m still a bit behind in writing blog posts on some of these events but they will come over the next few weeks.

Overall, this year has had some very rough low patches and was a roller coaster of emotion. Rather than doing a month by month highlights, I’m happy to say that at the end of this year I’m happy, I have some new things happening in my life and further new things to come in early 2018.

2016 has been a strange year, it has gone by very quickly, and has been full of change.

At the start of 2016 I set a small number of goals, while I only completely achieved two of them I feel I made progress towards all of them:

• Get a stable job (this may involve leaving academia)
  • The first half the year saw more of the casual work and weeks without income that I had experienced in 2015
  • However, by the end of 2016 I have a full time job and it is in academia! While I continue to look for further opportunities it has been good in the second half the year to have some stability in life.
• Continue learning German
  • During the first half of the year I continued well along this goal, however, by the end of the year any practice has fallen by the wayside.
• Travel and/or move to Europe or Singapore
  • I spent a month travelling around Europe in February and tried for a job in Germany but was unsuccessful.
• Read 30 books
  • I completed 27 books, which is fewer than the previous two years, however, after moving house I have a shorter commute to work which is where I do the majority of my reading. Below are some of the books I read this year.

Every month had its highlights:  Continue reading “2016 – The Year of Change… Kinda”

(Note: this was posted in February but backdated to December).

At the end of my 2014 goal review I wrote:

“Bring on new challenges and opportunities in 2015.”

Challenging would be a word that aptly sums up my 2015. From holding none to multiple jobs, changing churches, and teaching hundreds of students, 2015 presented plenty of challenges and also plenty of opportunities.

At the start of the year I set some goals which I subsequently completely forgot about, but looking back now I achieved four out of five of them. They were:

• Get a stable job
  • Work life in 2015 was anything but stable, I went for months at a time without work or pay and then at other times I was holding five contracts at a time. Despite these ups and downs I was presented with the opportunity to lecture a whole course of my own. This was a great personal development opportunity coming less than two years after completing my PhD.
• Continue learning German
  • This goal ebbed and flowed, but in the later part of the year I completed around 90 days of continuous practice on Duolingo.com
• Learn python
  • I completed multiple Coursera courses on python and had to crash course myself through it to work on a Baxter robot in the middle of the year.
• Go to Europe
  • I went in February on a whim after finding myself out of work.
• Read 20 books
  • I read 33! (Below are some of the covers as shown by goodreads.com)