Goals for 2024

The old year is behind us and the new one is ahead of us, and it's that time again when we remember the New Year's resolutions of the previous year and then realize that we didn't keep our promises, so we make new ones in the hope that we will fulfill them this year. Full of motivation and hope, we think this year will be different but it probably won't be, when this year turns around, we'll be sad again knowing we've done nothing again, set new goals again and this cycle will repeat itself ad infinitum. Since I am not any better myself, I will approach things differently this year. But that's why I first need to understand/analyze where things went wrong in the past two years.

Analysis of the years 2022 and 2023

1. If I go back to the year 22, I didn't have many goals, I had three:

2. Read 10 books outside of school

3. Lose 10 kg

4. Start a Youtube channel and get 10,000 subscribers
   

Out of these three goals, I completely fulfilled one, in the new year I was 10 kg lighter. A goal that was partially met was that I only read 5 books instead of ten. And I haven't even tackled the last goal.

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Last year on 1/1/2023, when I reflected and wrote something about the past year, I wrote this:

"Today, January 1, 2023, when I look at the goals I set for 2023, I am deeply disappointed, as I managed to achieve only one set goal. When I set new goals for myself this year, I have to work harder to achieve them. When I look back not only at the last year, but at the last three years, I feel that I have wasted them a little.

I can say that I was deeply disappointed by the failures of the previous year, but motivated to achieve new goals, and so I entered 2023 with even bigger goals:

1. Lose 10 kg

2. Drop-out from school until summer

3. Learn to play the guitar

4. Read 1 book every 2 weeks

5. Write 1 blog per week
   

Of the last goals, I fully achieved them and even exceeded them a little, because this year I am 12 kg lighter. I only read 7 books out of the planned 26. As for blogging I wrote 4 but mostly deleted them because I didn't think they were good enough. And the goals/objectives that I didn't even try to achieve were to learn to play the guitar and to "drop out" of school. Just for the sake of the story, I would only leave school if I had a net income of 4000 euros.

After this analysis, I can say with a heavy heart that I didn't burn out at the finish line, but I burned out 100km before the finish line.

Where things went wrong

Based on this analysis, one could conclude that people should not set themselves high goals, but in my opinion, the approach is wrong. I have noticed several mistakes in my actions.

In both years, I briefly wrote down all my goals on a piece of paper, and I put this piece of paper in a desk drawer and over time, I forgot about the goal. Throughout the year, I sometimes remembered the goals, the easy goals were imprinted in my memory, but the more difficult goals were selectively forgotten by my brain.

In the beginning, I relied on motivation, but motivation is, in my opinion, the biggest obstacle to achieving goals, not because of a decrease in motivation. The problem with motivation is that it is huge all of a sudden and then eventually disappears and in a few days or weeks it is gone because motivation comes and goes and this is where discipline comes into play. stayed on the path I set for myself.

Last year towards the end of the year I read James Clear's book Atomic Habits. In the book, Clear points out one good way to force yourself to meet goals is to sign a contract with someone in which you write down penalties for not working. In the book, Clear points out the case of entrepreneur Bryan Harris, in which Harris made a contract with his personal trainer, he agreed, for example, that if he did not meet the goals set for a given quarter, he would have to work until the end of the quarter and wear elegant dress, e.g. Another punishment was that if he didn't write down everything he ate, he had to give his trainer $200. This strategy seems unnecessary to some, but it seems rather effective, so I intend to use it.

This year's Goals

Not only do I have more goals this year, these goals are much bigger:

1. Drop out - no school until summer vacation (optimally until May Day)

2. -Provided that I have more than 4,000 euros in monthly net income.

3. Read at least 20 pages of a book a day

4. Learn to play the guitar

5. Write 1 blog per week

6. In May, he takes part in the Ironman in Lido di Jesolo

7. You get a total of 100,000 followers on Tik Tok and Instagram networks

8. Achieve 1 million euros in sales in 2024

If you are interested in seeing if I can make it, I will post the whole route on X and at http://oskarvolcansek.com