Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)
A bit of context: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. You can find them all here.
I start every year with a set of overall hopes and aspirations and expectations, and then get to see over the course of the year what reality has in store. This year, though, I came into the year making a conscious effort to be more flexible with those expectations over the course of the year. The past few years, I have set myself up for emotional distress late in the year as hopes and goals became increasingly unattainable. I recognized, in doing my usual end-of-year review last year, how that put me in a counterproductive place: the discouragement of missed goals left me that much less motivated to try to make progress where I could.
Starting out this year, then, I did set some goals — but with two explicit changes to my thinking about those aims:
First, it is important to readjust goals proactively throughout the year. On the “hitting my goals” side, this feels obvious: If I am having a particularly productive year and hit all my annual goals by the end of May, adding more goals for the rest of the year is fine. Rationally, the same is true of the “not hitting my goals” side of things as well: If, in a less productive year, I come to the end of May and am clearly not on track, it is fine to cut back on goals for the rest of the year. The challenge is proactively addressing a negative mismatch, because the associated emotions are so much less pleasant. Doing so is very helpful emotionally in the medium term, though, because holding onto unreasonable goals just feeds frustration as the tension between goal and reality mounts. Biting the bullet lets me deal with the emotional setback once — and then move on.
Second, setting ambitious goals inherently means I might not meet all of them. That is an inversion of my normal feelings on the matter! If I easily accomplish every goal I set, that means my goals were probably too modest, and I likely did not grow much. If I cannot accomplish any of my goals, I was unreasonable at the outset. If, however, I accomplish most of my goals, but cannot quite finish or succeed at one or two of them — particularly those I identify as being a stretch — that is healthy. It indicates I picked goals which were a good fit for my current abilities and circumstances: with room to learn or to fail, but also the chance to succeed.
I have (as ever) written many more words about the details, but I am happiest about having succeeded here: in adapting throughout the year as I needed to. It is a really good feeling to come to the end of the year satisfied with what I did, and not because it had fewer ups and downs — to the contrary, in fact.
In a variety of ways, and for reasons not totally clear to me, 2023 feels like a turning point in several of my public endeavors, setting me up for what I hope will be a really good 2024 — and many years to follow. I touch on this most directly in my notes on work already lined up for 2024 in the Writing and Speaking post, but I have the same general sense overall.