Setting Goals for 2023: Personal and Professional Ambitions

Hello everyone,

I have now been back in Sweden for a little more than a week and I must say it feels good to be home. Especially when you have time off and create your own schedule. During the daytime, I have mostly been trying to organize things for my move to Switzerland at the end of January. It was not looking great for a bit, and finding accommodation proved hard. But now I have at least two or three promising leads and I should be able to finalize something this week. I have to sort out some things regarding the residence permit too, but it should be fine.

Other than preparing for Switzerland I have mostly focused on spending time at home with my girlfriend, seeing friends and family. My younger brother signed up for a trial period at my gym so we worked out a few times this week which was great. It has been a long time since I had a training partner and it can be extremely helpful in those sessions where you kind of feel like not going. I am also trying to establish a habit of writing for 30 minutes every day and Sunday marks six straight days and it feels great. Combined with that I am trying to be a more active participant on Twitter too. It feels like a natural place to write out shorter thoughts and ideas that come up when I write. If I want to grow this newsletter it makes for a good funnel too, as people are exposed to my writing and if they like it they find their way over here.

Changes to the Newsletter

I have decided to make some changes to the blog/newsletter. I am going to keep these Sunday night newsletters shorter and let them be more of a review of the week. The longer posts that I have written previously will instead be posted as "blog posts" and not sent out in emails. I think this is a good change both for the newsletter readers and for me.

For me, it means these newsletters do not need to be 2000 words. And for the newsletter, it also means they don't have to be that long. I think a shorter and more concise newsletter will be more valuable for you too. If you end up missing the longer posts they will still be posted on the website, but a bit more sporadically. This decreases the pressure of writing a longer article every week too.

Goals 2023

I told you last week that I would present my goals for 2023 this week and here they are. I have quite a few goals set from my birthday on the 24th of September 2022, seen in the tweet below and I intend to follow through on them too. Some of them will be included in the 2023 goals and others have been changed in my new goals.

To set the goals I have used a framework developed by Sahil Bloom that can be found here. Using the framework you create goals for two categories, personal and professional. Then you set what Sahil calls a BHAG - Big Hairy Audacious Goal. The point is to set ambitious but not ridiculous goals

Personal Goals:

I have two big goals in the personal category for 2023. I want to be able to do a powerlifting total (squat + deadlift + bench press) of 500 kg before the end of 2023. It is a pretty big goal as today I am at around 330 kg total due to some previous injury troubles, but I am building up quite rapidly now as my back feels better. With my personal bests in the three lifts, I would be around 420 kg. So it is an ambitious goal and might be near being ridiculous but I think I could do it. To reach the goal I have set two "process goals", things I must do to be able to reach the goal. For me, this is working out 3 times a week and consuming at least 180 grams of protein per day. If I do those things consistently over the year I believe I have a good chance of reaching my goal.

My second personal goal is to read 18 books, which would mean 1.5 books per month. This may not seem like an ambitious goal, but to read that much outside of school has been a struggle for me over the last few years, so it feels ambitious. To do that I should read at least 15 mins a day throughout the year. If I am able to do that I should reach it.

Professional Goals

My first professional goal is to reach 1000 newsletter subscribers, currently, we are at 17. Some growth needs to happen, but I believe a lot can happen in a year. I have two process goals related to this goal. The first one is I plan to write for 30 minutes every day and secondly I am going to tweet at least once a day. The second one might be unintuitive at first, but as I stated earlier it is a natural growth funnel for a newsletter.

I don't have a professional goal for my internship yet but I would want one. It is hard to come up with a quantifiable goal before having started so I am saving a second goal for that as soon I begin working in February.

Final Takeaway

This is the end of this week's newsletter, I hope you will enjoy the new format. It feels great to have set some goals for the year and I am ready to take on 2023. If you have set some goals for the year please do share them with me, it would be interesting to read! Let us have an amazing 2023.

See you next week!

Oskar