Long Term Goals Update

During my vacation I suddenly got a bunch of “life crisis” type thoughts in an almost panic inducing intensity. They were mostly thoughts about not having accomplished anything and that the future looks bleak and meaningless and it’s not worth to do anything. As usual they are mostly illogical and they usually subside fairly quickly. But they got me thinking of what I want to do with my life and what some of my larger goals are. Making yearly reviews is a great way of combating the “I haven’t done anything” thoughts.

I’ve written about some long term goals before. Let’s revisit them.

• I want to have kids (No change)

  Still the most important long-term goal.

• Write a Book (No change)

  Having written a book feels like a big accomplishment I’d like to have on my list.

• Contribute to a popular open-source project (Completed)

  I made some contributions to rust in 2014.

• Black belt in Taekwon-do (Completed)

  Yes! I achieved 1-Dan this June.

• Write my own Programming Language (Abandoned)

  It would be cool to write my own programming language, but in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t feel as important. I’m just not motivated enough to start up it as a big project.

• Own a Snooker table (Abandoned)

  Looking back this looks like a fairly stupid materialistic goal. Snooker is awesome but does it really warrant being one of my long term life goals? Not a chance.

One can argue about the definition of a long term goal vs a short term goal. Generally it’s something I wish to have on my list of stuff I’ve done during my life.

I would also like to add two new goals I’ve been thinking about lately:

• Learn a new language

  And I don’t mean another programming language, maybe Korean or Finnish.

• Freedom over my work/life balance

  I think this is a big point for me. I value freedom very highly and I see no bigger gain than to have control over your work.

What I should do is to expand on my goals and think about why I want them and how I should accomplish them. For now though this quick overview is enough to calm down my anxious thoughts.