It’s January 1st, 2020 – 2019 is officially over. Yesterday I went back and finished reviewing my accomplishments from the year and spent some time thinking through goals for 2020. I’m now in the second year of formally documenting my accomplishments throughout the year, and it is great to actually have something from 2018 to compare against and to help me see the progress I’ve continued to make in subsequent years.
There’s no question that 2019 was a great year for me across the board. Looking back on it, I accomplished a lot more than I ever felt I was doing at the time – things like recruiting success at Amex, being more deliberate in learning new things, becoming more involved as a volunteer. A lot of what I’m most proud of, beyond the 50 mile run and the volunteer hours, are more qualitative achievements, advances that I made as a person that are strong steps in the right direction of who I want myself to be and the legacy I want to one day leave.
What is interesting about qualitative achievements is that they require a more deliberate acknowledgement throughout the year. You sort of have to reflect on what you are currently doing right in order to even feel like you’re doing anything at all. There’s no race date or hour tally to show your progress for you, and since I feel that many of the most important goals are those intangible ones, it’s important for me to think about time spent reflecting in 2020 on the progress that I am making.
In the same vein as my 2018 reflection, I broke out my achievements into four categories: Personal, Career, Athletic and Volunteer. Below are some of the highlights:
Personal: Created a website for my writing and posted five essays to the site, revamped my personal finance processes and set tangible and automated savings goals, dedicated time to self-improvement and learning, focused on time spent with friends and family (hosted dinners, planned camping trip, organized Great Saunter etc..).
Career: Got a challenging new role at Amex and continued to be more fulfilled by what I’m doing, recruited a strong intern class and filled multiple analyst positions with strong candidates, developed a reputation as a strong networker/relationship builder, crystallized a much healthier and happier career philosophy around longevity and gradual improvement.
Athletic: Ran a 50 mile race in under nine hours, started biking with Dad (and had my first crash), continued to harden as a runner and develop a base endurance level that is higher than I would have thought possible a few years ago.
Volunteer: Set new personal hour record of 312 volunteer hours (roughly $15,000 worth of my time), donated a total of $4,800 using company match, continued to expand involvement at Centro by joining the board and playing a more active role in community development and retention.
I am very proud of all of those items. I said this last year and I’ll say it again: Everyone should reflect on their achievements like this in some form. It’s incredibly rewarding to actually see all of the things that you’ve done, and it’s particularly rewarding to track the progress you’re making. When I think back to myself at Wake Forest, or in high school, I had all of the qualities that would eventually drive the achievements above. I could act selflessly at times and was willing to help out other people at school with homework, cleaning etc… I had grit when I played sports, and I loved to learn. I unfortunately never let any of those things truly define me. I could blame it on alcohol or partying or my friend group, but in reality I just think I was maturing, and as I matured I gradually came to value those qualities that actually made me someone I could truly respect. It’s hard to see it in the moment I guess, but there’s nothing impressive or honorable about blacking out, insulting friends for a cheap laugh, or de-prioritizing your family. It’s a cheap way to make friends and build a reputation. And now I feel much more comfortable about who I am and what I stand for.
What I am most proud of this year are the intangibles. I made an impact on the students I spoke with during Amex recruiting at Emory, and have actually continued to help mentor a few who ended up getting offers elsewhere. I laid my emotions out on the page and on my website without reservations. I started to give back in a meaningful way – both my time and money. I made wonderful friends at Centro. I feel like I have career capital that matters for the first time at Amex, and I’m not moved to leave for some theoretical “better” career pursuit. I spent a lot of my free time learning from other people’s success stories. Anne and I had an amazing year together, with more quality time spent together (interview prep, time talking about values and the future), and moving towards more companionate love for one another. I continued to mature in my interactions with family, and spent less of our time together regressing to my adolescent ways.
At the core of 2019 is the reality that nothing happens all at once. Nothing sums this up better than my 50 mile race, which was actually one of the easier accomplishments of my year. I was already in shape for the 50K race in 2018, and had been building a strong foundation since I started running back in 2016. That slow build extends to the rest of my accomplishments this past year. Everything I was doing in 2018 formed the building blocks for my year. This realization excites me – it means that every single year’s goals and accomplishments will actually be bigger than the year before, but shouldn’t require more effort. The most important thing is to just be reflective on my progress and make sure I’m continuing to act in connection with those goals.
My 2020 goals represent this exact notion: they are gradual step ups from 2019. I’m running the Yeti 100 mile endurance race, and am going to re-run the North Face 50 mile in DC as preparation this spring. I am going to continue to write and to post to my website, with the promise of 12 posts in 2020 (one per month). More importantly, I am going to share the site with friends and family, and try to solicit some meaningful feedback on my writing. I will be ready to purchase a second investment property, and will do so. I’ll continue to read about a book per week, but will try to focus more on themes that are important to me: coaching/mentoring, presentation/communication, property management and negotiation. I will push myself into uncomfortable situations at work that stretch my intellectual capacity and technical skills. I will keep building my network at Amex with monthly coffee chats and will ultimately shoot for a 1 rating at year-end in the new job. Finally I’ll maintain where I am on the volunteer front, with 250 hours, 2% of my income donated. Beyond that I will continue to give away books to friends and family who I think could use them, and I will try to get a friend or two to volunteer with me.
I am incredibly excited about the year to come. Until I started these reflections and conscious goal setting, the new year was completely irrelevant to me. It wasn’t until 2017, when I set the goal of reading one book per week, that I started to spend real time thinking about the upcoming year and what I wanted to get out of it. It’s crazy that in a lifetime with 100 or fewer years, we don’t spend more time trying to squeeze everything we can out of each one.