Every year I make a list of the things I accomplished the year prior, as well as make a list of “New Year’s Resolutions.” I take these quite seriously and have my whole life (thanks to my mom)! Over the last couple years I have noticed a growing trend of going against the New Year’s Resolution, or claiming that they are unhealthy or bad, or that you should be focusing on yourself over these goals that you have set out for yourself. And I think that this is completely false in my view, if anything, I think that much of what I accomplish in general is due to goal setting, a New Year’s goal is no different, it’s just that it has a very nice beginning and end that you can easily track and manage and think about. I also think that people with negative opinions of the “New Year’s Resolution” may be victim to setting too many, large, unspecific, or unquantifiable goals. I myself have made this mistake many times including last year, I just think that you need to remember that you are human, will need time to rest, and you also need to learn where/how to push yourself. If you want to improve in one way or another, you will have to work at it, even when you occasionally don’t want to. Anyway, I just wanted to share with all of you my goals for the upcoming year. This will help give people an idea of what I’m focusing on and valuing, as well as helps me to be more accountable for making sure I accomplish them, because I have all of YOU out there to back me up, push me and keep me accountable. Without further adieu, here are my goals for 2022!

1. Plan 80% Of My Wedding

Most of you probably don’t know, but I got engaged this year! Whoohoo to me and my fiancee. Now we just have to plan the wedding, and gosh is this stressful and a ton of work. It’s much more work than I imagined. Props to everyone that has had a wedding, it is so much more work and money than I could have ever expected and let’s hope we can plan it all out and have a nice time!

2. Exercise 2 Times Per Week

I’m sure almost everyone has something about exercise on their New Year’s Resolution sheet. I myself have had this a number of years, and I have failed almost every year. However, this year, I think I have the most fool-proof system yet. First being that 2 days per week is the lowest exercise goal I have ever set for myself, but also that (with exception of the last three crazy weeks of Christmas and Vacation) I have exercised twice weekly for about 4 weeks straight! I am sharing this goal with my fiancee which will push both of us to go. And finally, this is the real thing that’s going to push me more than anything, is that my third goal is something that I have told multiple people about, and promised I would do with my friend, and that is…

3. Run a Marathon

Yes, it’s to run a marathon at the Marathon in Philadelphia that takes place around The end of October or early November. Now, I’ve never jogged more than a few miles, however, I have a training schedule written out for me, I plan to increase my jog lengths, times, or speeds every week, and I plan to build muscle on the other day that I’m not jogging. The fact that I know that people are expecting me to run this marathon at the end of the year really pushes me to get to the gym on a constant basis, you can’t cram for a marathon.

4. Work On Personal Project At Least One Hour Per Week

Last year, one of my biggest downfalls was that I had many project goals. I wanted to do Handmade Hero once a week, I wanted to work on my Easy Dialogue Asset, I wanted to work on a personal game, a personal engine, etc. It was too much and within a couple weeks I was destined to fail as the time requirements we just much too great. In actuality, I really just want to make sure that I’m constantly working on separate personal projects, whatever it is, I need to make sure to work on something consistently. This gives me the flexibility to change what I work on every week, but makes sure that I build a habit to develop on over time.

5. Finish Creature Collector (tmp name)

This is one of those personal projects I have been working on with Kelly Abramowitz that is not officially announced. It’s a small game that should be within reason for us to complete. I don’t want to talk too much about it, as I want to work on it more first, but I at some point want to do a couple, more formal development logs on the project.

6. Release One YouTube Video

Yeah, I know one is basically nothing, but that’s a good starting point! In years passed on alternate channels I was able to release 1 a week, but I could only keep it up for about 2 months. It was just WAY to much time to sink in, and my small, shared apartment is just not ideal for recording sound, as my desk is in the living-room about 5 feet from the TV. I would have to relocate, or make sure nobody is watching or playing anything too loud. That being said, I still love the idea of making a large variety of videos, and I think that this year I could try and get my foot in the door by releasing one.

7. Organize/Donate From Hall Closet And Dresser

Every year I must have to reorganize my hall closet, as we gain more and more things every year, more and more ends up in there. The problem is that we want most of it, but we really don’t have room for it. Buying some nice bins and other storage containers and organizers should help, but ultimately we need to figure out what things we want, and what things we want to have go.

8. Grow Stocks 30%

So in August of 2019 I started my Robinhood account with a couple hundred dollars. And over time I have grown my stocks quite a bit! I added more personal money into the account, I had some stocks go up, some go down, I tried to sell high and buy low and last year I was able to do really well for myself! My portfolio grew by ~80% last year (which I think is a ton, I got lucky with AMC). So this year, I just want to make sure that I am still engaged in the stock market and that I am trying to grow my wealth, because if I can do better than the 0.4% of my savings account than I think it’s a win!

9. Write One Blog A Month

Another huge aspect of what I am trying to do is build my own game development persona online. I want to be up there with the “Cat Like Coding”s and others. I would love to have a large database of gamedev tutorials, instructions, tools, of both videos and blogs. This is of course a large endeavor and will take a huge amount of effort and time, and it all starts with a single blog post and consistency. I was rather consistent last year in making one blog post a month, and I would love to maintain that (and even increase that) over this next year.

10. Get One Patron

Along with growing my own personal business and gamedev persona, I want to get to a point where I can actually make a living off of my own work! So far I have released my own Unity Asset which has pulled in about $15, and I have set up a Patreon account so that others may tip me for the content I put out into the world. Now I just so happened to tweet out my goals yesterday, this being one of them, and my friend actually went ahead and became my Patron! It’s incredibly nice of him, and I’m super thankful, as he just let me accomplish my goal for the year. So now my new goal is to get one more! But he is my first patron, my first dollar, on my way to making a living from my personal projects which is super important to me!

Conclusion:

So those were my ten goals, another goal that I kind of have this year that I’m not counting as a formal goal is to “Complete all of my goals.” I say that this isn’t a formal goal because it should kind of go unstated that your goal is to complete all your goals! However, that’s not actually actually something I have prioritized in the past. I have often made many goals with the hope of completing many or some of them, so I have many or some things I accomplished. This year, it’s incredibly important to me that I set goals that have a reasonable expectation around them, and it’s important to me that I do all of them.

So those are my goals this year, wish me the best of luck as I push forwards into the first week of the new year. I encourage you to make your own goals and try to push yourself to accomplish them to the best of your ability!