Reflection of 2019 Goals

It seems that every year goes by quicker as the pace of technology impacts our daily lives given our access to more information every day. Blockchain is one of those technologies that is disrupting my way of thinking and given how it makes one accountable given the immutability, I find it interesting to go back and look of what we said and ultimately did. I was one that posted some goals for the 2019 year and have gone back to make myself accountable.

I try to make goals achievable in order to motivate a continued strive to improve myself by reflecting on both successes and failures. 2019 was no different than previous years as there was a mixed bag of both sides in terms of what I set off to do. I did enjoy the fact that I was able to prioritize somewhat and achieve those that were most important for me and my family. My family comes first in everything I do and that is why it was at the top of my list for 2019. Given how busy I was, I wanted to make sure I spent more time with the family this year and I accomplished it very well as we had our busiest year of travel ever with trips to South America and Europe for the first times as a family as well as more local time spent together in Cruises and the infamous Disney World. The completion of this goal alone makes 2019 a success for me as it allowed me to realize how much I value the experiences we pave with the family relative to other goals I have had in the past.

While I wanted to put myself as a priority this year by achieving fitness and health goals, I could not celebrate where I ultimately landed on this one. While the first half of the year was very good on this goal, I let it slip with my largest weakness which has always been my diet and I am paying for it now. Despite some great achievements related to my fitness as I accomplished my 5K race within my target finish time and to this day continue working out almost every day, I am not better off this year as my weight continues to be a challenge. Given the issues it gives to my health, I would have to mark this one down as a failure although it remains at the top of my mind for 2020.

One of my ambitious goals of the year was to aggressively improved my personal finances by leveraging off the trend I started in the previous year to continue to pay down my debt. Unfortunately, the amount of disposable income during the year went to other sources which did not allow me to really make a dent in my debt load although it continues to be the lowest I have had relative to my income. My investment portfolios did not help much either as I stay away from the hottest equity stock market in years and lost out on that opportunity for returns while adding to my cryptocurrency portfolio which did not outperform much this year despite a good rebound from the bear market of the previous year. This is really neutral as I cannot honestly say that I am worst off although not everything worked out as planned this year. An important lesson is to adjust to realities and I believe I did a good job on adjusting from a personal finance perspective this year.

My goals around community continue to be related to my engagement here on Steem. While it has been impacted by my professional career and workload, it continues to be my main focus in my spare time. I have continued to learn about new communities around the ecosystem and despite supporting some that are no longer with us, I learned to engage more actively off chain given the accessibility of mobility with Discord. While many of my metrics of engagement are much lower now than when I started the year, many other metrics remained strong for me.

I doubled my Steem Power from almost 11k to over 22k by continuing my monthly purchases of Steem until October. The purchases have stopped for the short term but this figure of Steem Power could have been higher given the over 19k Steem I bought; however, much of that went into Splinterlands and my Collection which has turned out to be a very good decision. The game has evolved my ability to engage and continues to draw me to the ecosystem given the potential it continues to highlight. While other projects have seemingly disappeared, Splinterlands continues to grow.

I set out some very specific metric goals for Steem this year and have seen mixed results so far. My largest goal was to hit 25k Steem Power this year but despite the huge purchases of Steem, they did not end up in my Steem Power because of the decision to buy cards. However, if I take the value of my Collection into consideration in terms of Steem, I am well past my goal of this year and next with over 50k Steem Power. While it may not turn out that way in the short term, the flexibility to do so is a great way to demonstrate the potential of the asset over time.

However, my reputation metrics on Steem are much better than I had planned for. Given the slow grind towards 70, I was targeting to be around 66 but find myself at 69. The @steem-ua project is somewhat confusing to me but I wanted to be in the top 3,000 and now find myself "stuck" at 1,770 despite having had a run in the top 500 for a short time. I am still unsure of what to think of reputation these days as it has surely been out of focus since the Hard Fork given the declines in engagement overall on posts. However, the fact that Tribes and communities continue to be an area of interest, I think it will remain relevant over time. This had led me to also come short of my 1,500 follower goal although the amount of meaningful interactions with followers is only a very small amount of those.

This reflection has been great as it sets the foundation for me to start looking towards 2020 and the decade that begins. While not important, I always enjoy setting goals at these timeframes to keep myself accountable. I think that looking at the next decade, we can surely make a difference to improving our lives if we remain in focus and engaged. Thanks to blockchain I will be able to look back and measure the performance over time with almost an autobiography of my endeavors!