077 • 2025 is nearly here already
An introduction to reviewing the last year or so...
At the end of 2023 I wasn’t too sure about goal-setting, thinking that perhaps it would hold me back from what I actually wanted to achieve by straitjacketing me into ploughing forward on the same missions for the whole of 2024.
I had set out a few rough guidelines, under the categories Health, Wealth and Relationships and today I just wanted to cast my mind back briefly to how things have gone in those areas for the last 12 months…
I’ve not excelled in the wealth category, as I talked about last issue, but it’s not that the earnings aren’t satisfactory (I’m a student and get student finance as well as help from my parents on top of everything I earn from my online business), it’s just that I don’t feel as though I’ve discovered the best way to spend it on worthwhile experiences yet.
On the other hand, health improvement has been going well. I’ve been partying a lot less this university year, although it’s not completely disappeared, and I’ve hit most of the handful of things (although not well-defined goals) that I wanted to better, from an improved supplementation regime, to decreasing my chance of injury.
The latter was important for me this year considering that I spent last winter completely out of sport because of a torn groin. I could still lift weights luckily, but this was far from the condition that I wanted to be in.
This year I’ve been able to compete in more sport and I’ve still mostly kept the size and conditioning that I built last year with a more strength-training-based emphasis. My supplementation has been better, but I’ve been spending more money on it, which directly contrasts the wealth category of tasks, which, as I said, I’m not achieving much in.
In the last category, relationships, everything feels roughly the same as last year. I’ve been surrounded by the same people at university and have been interacting in a similar way.
This is all set to change during 2025 as I move out of education and into the world to make something of myself, so I’m sure next year’s review is going to be very different in this category.
In fact, I think it’ll be different in the other categories too, Wealth especially. Health less so, as this is the one category that I think I’ve got locked down at the moment. At least in the physical domain at any rate - mental might take more work
I get the feeling that the next year or so is going to be foundational for my future, in a similar way to how 2022 was when I first came to university - there’ll be a lot of changes, upgrades and improvements. It’s something that I write about and remind myself of every single time I decide to open my journal and write.
If all goes according to plan, I’ll keep sharing the best of these lessons and changes with you in this newsletter.
For the last few weeks of the year, we’re going to be going over the best things of 2024 and setting out a more concrete plan for the next year or so (including some actual concrete goals this time around, I think), so I hope you can join me for this too. Thanks as always for reading!
— Theo
Last week’s issue (extended cut)…
Started adding subtitles to these, seeing as every single video I watch seems to have them these days. Another tip - watch on 1.75x speed, I’m painfully slow in some of these video issues.
Images I shared this week…
I’m running out of past issues right now but my mother says that a parakeet has been visiting our garden bird feeder regularly so maybe I’ll have images of that after I head back home from uni for Christmas soon…
This week’s YouTube videos…
After a request from one of last week’s videos (that has far exceeded expectations in terms of the numbers), I created another video giving a little more detail about the Dataview tables that I use to create indexes in my folder notes in Obsidian.
Thank you for all that you do, and many blessings 🙏