Alright, I’m ready for 2022. I am extremely excited about the upcoming 356 days. As always, I start my planning by sketching a vision of who I want to be. It slightly changes every year, but the red line in all of those visions has always been that I want to be a free and independent individual.

That sounds abstract, and maybe a bit cringe to some of you, but it is the value that I recognise in all of my little individual goals. I’ll explain what I mean by that in the paragraphs below. I usually use the four pillars (cultural, physical, mental/spiritual, career) to define my goals and plans for the year. Last year, I also had a fifth pillar called ‘adventure’, but in retrospect that was a bit of a stupid pillar to use because it didn’t really mean anything. It had no place being a stand-alone pillar in my planning, as I could have adventurous elements in the goals in the other pillars already. I did however replace ‘adventure’ with ‘charitas’ this year. I’ll explain below why I did that.

Please find all of the different pillars below. I start every section by describing shortly what I want to do next year and why, after which I will simply present my goals in an unordered list.

Disclaimer: this is a dynamic document and after my monthly reflections, I might change some of the goals, depending on how it’s going.

Culture

Okay, the first pillar. Culture. I don’t have a super clear vision or direction I want to take for this pillar. That’s because I think it’s a bit silly to have a very strictly planned strategy for something so free and fluid as culture. I just kinda want to play. Have fun and be a homo ludens. For this pillar, I want to allow myself some freedom to explore and discover cool things by just fooling around and playing.

The only direction I consciously want to steer myself to culturally is to diversify my sources. This relates to my ambition to be free and independent. I’d love to be freed of my biases and prejudices. To be aware of all the things I assume to be true, just because they were part of my cultural background. I think learning from others, and exploring different perspectives can help me with that. It might sound a bit bullshitty, and I agree that it does sound exactly the same as what all the teenage white girls say when they travel to Bali for 3 months during their gap year to get boned by some Australian dude and then come back to claim that they ‘found themselves’ by ‘exploring other cultures’. I see how similar I sound to those teenage white girls. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the teenage white girls have a point.

This especially rings true for my reading challenge. After last year’s feminist literature challenge, I learned how cool and enriching it can be to read outside of my typically classical Western comfort zone. So that’s something I definitely want to implement this year again. And I will probably try on some more other reading challenges as well. Just for the fun of it.

For the generative art/soup/writing goals I like to have some freedom in how to fill them in, but I also included some quantitative elements to those goals because I know that will help me actually start working on them.

Reading

  • ? Read 40 books
  • ? Diversity challenge
    • 10 books by female authors
    • 5 books by Asian authors
    • 5 books by South American authors
    • 5 books by Afrikan authors

Generative Art

  • ? Create an generative art collection of Maltese patterns
  • ? Get some art works published somewhere (can be digitally or irl)

Soup Boi

  • ? Make 50 different soups
  • ? Write a blog post about every soup that includes: recipe, proces and a review.
  • ? Create an end-of-the-year rating list with all 50 soups

Writing

  • ✍? 12 essays
  • ✍? 12 reflection documents
  • ✍? 12 random blog posts
  • ✍? 12 spoken word pieces for Radio Noadors
  • ✍? 50 soup articles
  • ✍? End of the year deliverable: 100 articles

Physical

Next up are my physical goals. Most of that is focused on endurance sports. I’d love to challenge my limits in those sports. In the first place of course just to stay healthy and fit, but next to that it also gives me a sense of freedom. Challenging myself to do things that I didn’t think I was able to do before gives me this exhilarating feeling of owning my body. That I can tell my body to do what I want it to do and that my body just obeys. In a way, that’s freedom of the mind. It’s not being limited by the body.

This year I want to take it more systematic approach. Last year, I would stop training when I was on a holiday or when people would visit me in Malta. And then I would find it hard to start doing exercises again because ‘oh well, in two weeks we’ll fly to the Netherlands again and then I won’t train again so why bother starting now?’ But this year, I’ll make a conscious effort to continue training even in those moments. To make it a habit and a routine to just keep on going every week. Therefore, I’ve listed a few goals I want to reach during the year. Bear with me, because it’s quite a list.

PS I also challenge myself to join the yearly Catholic fasting period of Lent between carnival and easter. I think this is both a physical and a spiritual challenge, therefore I listed it under the pillar ‘spiritual’.

Running

  • ?? Run minimally 20KM a week. Hit 1000KM at the end of the year
  • ?? Run 2 half marathons.
  • ?? Run 30K in one run
  • ?? Run from the South to the North of Malta (full marathon)

Swimming

  • ? Get swimming lessons
  • ? Swim minimally 1000M a week. Hit 50KM at the end of the year.
  • ? Swim 1K under 2:00/100m
  • ? Participate in the Malta-Gozo Swim (or Malta-Comino, depending on how the practice goes haha)

Cycling

  • ? Minimal 40KM a week. Hit 2000KM at the end of the year.
  • ? Ride the perimeter of Malta in one day.

Triathlon

No time restrictions on all of these. It’s just about finishing for me now. A decent pace is preferred, but not required.

  • ? Finish a sprint triathlon: 750M/20KM/5KM triathlon
  • ? Finish an olympic triathlon: 1.5KM/40KM/10KM triathlon
  • ? Finish an half iron man: 1.9KM/90KM/21KM triathlon

Random physical challenges

  • Learn how to unicycle
    • End goal: unicycle 5KM over the promenade
  • Freediving
    • Hold my breath for 4 minutes
    • Get to 20m deep
  • Be able to do a backflip
  • Kayak around Comino in one day
  • Try rockclimbing in Malta

Spiritual

  • ?? Go to church once a month
  • ?? Go for a reflective walk once a week
    • No music, No phone. Camera is allowed, but mostly: just be alone with your brain.
  • ?? Write a reflection on my goals at the end of every month
    • Publish this reflection on this blog, so that I’m forced to share it with others that can keep me accountable.

Fasting

As in recent years, I will participate in the Catholic fasting period. And although I was raised Catholic, my family and I were never too extreme in our religion. The fasting for example is not something we used do with our family very rigorously. Maybe we would just not eat meat on Fridays and skip candy for 40 days. But since two years ago, I started taking it more seriously. I wrote this blog post about it, explaining why I choose to participate and what it is bringing me. Since the Catholic Church doesn’t have a super clear vision of the set of rules that comes with the fasting period, I designed my own rules that I use (see below). You’ll find a more elaborate description of the rules that I follow in the aforementioned blog post. I’ll stick to these rules from the 2nd of March till the 14th of April. The 40-day-period between the carnival week till Easter.

  • ✅ Allowed
    • Breakfast (yogurt, fruit, nuts, grains)
    • During the day (only water and fruit)
    • Diner (no sauces like mayo/ketchup)
  • ❌ Not allowed
    • Alcohol/cigarettes/drugs
    • Meat
    • Mayo/ketchup and other sauces

Career

If my degree in Innovation Management taught me anything, it is that I absolutely do not want to be caught up in the corporate mess. I would hate being the middle man in a large bureaucratic system without having any concrete skills to do something myself. I’m convinced that 90% of all management/bureaucratic/office jobs are total BS. Luckily, my first degree was Industrial Design, which was much more practical and it actually taught me some useful skills. Like coding, designing and bringing projects to life. This is all important to know in order to understand why my career goals will be very hands-on. I want to become a really good full-stack developer, so that I can pursue my dream of being an indie-maker. Making digital products that I think are cool for audiences that I like. I love the freedom and independence that it gives me.

Next to improving my developing skills by building cool projects (and monetizing those projects), I’d love to set some goals for the amount of money that I would like to earn and by what means. I believe in the importance of having multiple streams of income (again, for the sake of independence), so one of my goals this year will be to grow my number of income streams by two. I’d like to add ‘digital products’ and ‘info product’ to my list of incomestreams. At the moment my income portfolio looks like this: 62% salary, 28% freelance, 10% other. The reason why I’d like to do less freelance this year and add the other two income streams is because those two new incomes streams can generate passive income, whilst freelancing still requires me to trade my hours for money like a wage slave.

  • ? [€XXXXXX] earned by the end of the year
    • I’m not yet comfortable sharing this number, so I’ll just be talking in relative numbers on this blog. However, I do think that it would be cool to be able to share my actual income numbers in the future, when I feel a bit more confident about sharing that kind of information.
  • ? Ideal income portfolio for 2022:
    • 62% salary
    • 18% freelance
    • 13% digital products
    • 5% info product
    • 2% return on investments
  • ? Creating and selling an infoproduct
  • ? Improve Sevenums Woordenboek
    • Improve features
    • Get 3 sponsors for website and maillist
    • Grow the maillist to [XXXX redacted]
  • ? Build Sound of Malta-sound board
    • Get covered by Maltese media
    • Get 3 sponsors for website
    • Build with REACT and Tailwind
  • ? Build a REACT/Tailwind/Webscraping app

Charitas

This is the fifth pillar of my 2022 plan and it is the one I only added recently. I added it because when I was writing this article, it dawned on me that all of my goals are essentially incredibly self-obsessed. Of course that’s kind of the point of creating such a personal development plan, but it still left me with a nasty feeling. I realised that I don’t actually do that much for the people around me/the world/community. Most of the stuff I do in my life is driven by some sort of egotistical motivation.

Arguably the only truly altruistic thing that I do is donating a portion of my salary to a few charities every month. But let’s be honest: that’s the laziest and easiest way of pretending to do anything good in this world. It’s like securing your place in heaven by buying indulgence (Dutch: aflaat) from the Catholic church in the Middle Ages. So this year, I’ll try to make an effort of helping the world to become slightly nicer.

Oh, and no, I won’t be posting narcissistic pictures of myself doing charity work on the internet (or at least, I’ll try to). I’m just mentioning them in this document (and I’ll mention them in my monthly reflection articles) because it’s part of the direction I want to take my life. And these goals help me in holding myself accountable to actually go in that direction.

  • ?? Clean a beach/section of Malta every month
    • Side goal: pick up a piece of trash everytime I go for a run or a cycle ride.
  • ?? Promoting darkness and fighting light pollution
    • Don’t really know how to do this yet, but I’m just putting it on the agenda already because this is something that I actually care about.