It’s That Time: 2021 Goals
Hello! Here I am! Showing up on my little corner of the internet, writing down what I hope this year contains, as I’ve done once, twice, three times over (and a dozen times in an old notebook before I took myself and my ambitions digital)!
I don’t think about setting annual goals as navigating some brave new world. Or as marking down the stops on a long journey I’m just setting out on. It’s more like I’m out on the open ocean, and I’m taking a minute to chart my course and calibrate it against the stars on a particularly clear night. The fog and the storms and the stress of staying shipshape have paused for a moment and I can ask: Am I on track towards being the person I want to be? Am I traveling in line with my values? Is this track the right level of challenging? Am I adjusting my tack and my sails to respond to the changing waves around me, to the environment I find myself in? If I am, wonderful—let’s keep on keeping on. And if I’m not, let’s take a moment to refresh my navigation. (/end kitschy nautical metaphor, you’re welcome.)
There are two changes to my goals this year. One is a type of goal; I’m adding a medium-term ambition that I won’t be tracking quarterly, like the rest, but that I will be thinking about as the year builds. The other is a thematic adjustment. For the last few years, I’ve had goals around traveling and seeing new places and new people. I still want to do that, but I’m surer than ever that I want to have one place to come home to. More on this below.
Onto the goals:
Care for my health, mind, body, & soul.
There’s this German traveler that I’ve followed on Instagram for a while. A few years ago, she started posting about bullet journaling and how it transformed her life. She’d share her perfectly-plotted progress each month: a list of seemingly mundane goals, like “meditation” and “gratitude” and “yoga” and “10.000 Schritte” and “3 Liters,” followed by diagonal tick marks in the boxes corresponding to the days she succeeded at each. A month of relative success looked like an undulating pattern of cross-stich.
I didn’t understand her gushing captions about how much all of that mattered. It seemed like an awful lot of effort to go, both the doing all the stuff—accomplishing everything on her list seemed like at least a half-time job—and the cataloguing it.
But then 2020 happened, and I fully recognized the life-changing magic of caring for yourself.
I knew it before, I think, but even when travel or freelancing got stressful, I had other things to fall back on (like a community of friends or a partner), so I didn’t immediately go to self-care. But last year, when people have been far away and screens can only distract me up until a point, I learned to really lean into the small ways I love and maintain myself and my health, physical, mental, and emotional. I’m still not a bullet journaler, but I do know I want to keep up these habits, and thus these goals:
1. Keep reading and learning. How? Read at least four books/month, at least one of which is a non-novel. Stay in my lovely book club and discuss with them! And keep my book journal to mark what I’m reading and what it’s teaching me in terms of life, craft, history, empathy, etc.
2. Practice mindfulness semi-regularly, versus as a last resort to stressful situations. How? Meditate at least 3x/week.
3. Stay moving. How? Walk an average of 10,000 steps/day and work out 3x/week.
4. Feel more confident in my body. How? Eat better and take good care of myself; avoid the self-pitying slump that reared up during the pandemic.
Keep valuing community and being a world citizen.
The other day, I was thinking about the first trip I wrote about on this blog, when I went to Catalina Island and LA and Seattle. I remember planning it as an experiment. Could I live in either of those last two places? Did I want to? No and no were my first answers; LA felt way too sprawling, way too self-obsessed, and the tech bros of Seattle turned me all the way off. But having returned to both of those places in the last year or so, I love each of them in different ways, and can imagine eking out a home in either. I still don’t want to, particularly, but I know I could, and with that knowledge has come a warm sense of belonging, a secure confidence that I could find a way to be happy in most places, along with a terrifying, overwhelming realization that there’s no one place that’s calling out for me to build a home in.
It might be that I’ve changed a lot in five years, or that those places have. (Maybe if I went back to New Zealand or tried to live in Mexico City again, I’d stay forever. Who knows!). Or it might be that I’ve just learned to see nuance better, to understand the good and the bad that underpins the way I feel about a place, and to recognize that if you stay long enough, every place will have things in both columns.
It’s less about finding some perfect community and more about committing to one—which feels impossible, considering how many places in the world interest me. But I know I want to be more settled, at least for a little while. I hope that’s possible in 2021, though it will depend on how we come out of this pandemic (and when). I’d like to find a place—maybe it’s in Spain?—where I can live and build a base of a life, and I want to keep finding ways to explore other communities and places even if I don’t live in them. Including linguistically!
1. Find a city I want to live in and find a way to be there. How? For Q1, I’ll be sheltering-in-place in Austin and seeing if that could be a medium-term home. I’m really interested in living in other countries, though, and would love to explore Europe after so much time in Latin America, so ideally I’ll get to date London, Madrid, Berlin, Amsterdam, etc. at some point this year for a month or so each, then get the right visas to be able to stay in the one I’m most in love with, then find good housing and start settling in.
2. Work to give back to my communities. How? Keep up pro-bono consulting with direct aid platform NeighborShare, donate at least $500/quarter to causes I care about and community members in need, and support political movements like Black Lives Matter and policy positions like Medicare for All, universal childcare, free public education K-college, and the Green New Deal.
3. Make new friends and keep the old. How? Regular phone calls with people I love, celebration of their wins and love through their losses, even from afar, at the cadence of at least two per week. Keep shot-shooting with friend crushes around once a month, and, when it’s safe, participate in lots of community events.
4. Enjoy family. How? Visit at least annually, including with extended family, and encourage them to come visit me when I’m settled somewhere. Set and maintain healthy boundaries.
5. Re-enter the world of dating. How? Don’t feel like I need an action plan for this one, but it is something I want to do when it’s safe. Love is great & I want to experience more of it.
6. Keep up with my Spanish. How? Have at least one extended conversation in Spanish per week—with Brinley, Laura, Gabs, Jimena, etc.—and keep listening to music and podcasts in Spanish at least 3x/week. I’d like to say that I’ll also finally finish Outlander in Spanish but I have failed at my Spanish-language-reading goals for three years in a row and I’ve finally accepted it.
Commit to my craft and be productive with it.
I won’t get better as a writer if I don’t keep writing, so this year, I’d like to focus on my craft (and where it takes me) as separate from the business I’m building. I am often my own worst enemy when it comes to writing; I don’t make a habit of doing it and thus have to goad and coax my way into realizing my ideas. I had some success experimenting with habits last year, though, like writing for 30 minutes every day, and I’d like to do more of that.
1. Write personal and cultural essays that I’m proud of. How? Write at least two essays per quarter and see them published, both here and in at least three new-to-me outlets, and write for at least 90 minutes per week on non-commissioned ideas or non-client work.
2. Learn from better writers. How? Participate in at least three critique sessions with peers, read writing on craft at least once a month, and take a writing workshop of some sort.
Medium-term goal: Work towards writing something that I can later produce. Maybe it’s a memoir, an essay collection, a reported feature. I’m curious about the process of bringing an idea/story to the screen, and I think I’d be good at the combination of creative + managerial elements involved, so I think being a part of adapting my own work would be a great way to explore that. I don’t plan on writing a book proposal this year, but I do want to be shooting for doing work that’s unique and meaningful and in that league over time.
Grow professionally and be financially successful.
I had the pleasure of working with half a dozen startups last year, and I love the passion they bring to the table. But I’ve also seen how that passion can be forced into an all-out pursuit of growth—and what happens companies and individuals when that sprint becomes unsustainable. I set up my working life to support the rest of my life, and I’m uninterested in flipping that structure around. I don’t need to see revenue skyrocket to feel like I’m successful. That being said, I do want to earn enough to realize my goals, current and future, and to continue to learn and grow as an individual across my skill sets (and into new ones), both because I like that process and because I want to stay competitive if and when I decide to stop freelancing and go back into a more traditional job.
1. Launch and run a successful business. How? I just incorporated—two and a half years of freelancing later, I realized it was worth it!—and Q1 will be about setting up the scaffolding that supports my company: first payroll and accounting systems, then some branding work (won’t plan on it being an avenue to new clients but want a consistent look across the board), and then Q3 and beyond will include exploring more about taxes and incentives, including a SEP IRA. Commercially, I will bring on 2-3 new clients on retainer this year and maintain my core 4-5 otherwise, with additional ad-hoc projects as I have time. I don’t plan to limit myself to only one niche, but expect content marketing and brand/marketing strategy to be my two biggest buckets of income.
2. Continue to plan for my future and have the resources needed to support it. How? Earn at least $100,000 in gross revenue and save at least $20,000. That first figure is fairly arbitrary—100k isn’t a magic number; 90k would be fine, etc.—but it’s nice and round, so we’ll aim for it. The second figure is arbitrary, too, honestly. Should I be trying to buy a house at some point? Maybe? Seems like 20k would help.
3. Keep learning about other careers and industries. How? Keep doing Lunchclub and other virtual networking sessions, including ones I organize, at least twice a month. Continue to work on NeighborShare and get to know that talented team + develop a deeper understanding of the nonprofit world and also of the process of creating a tech product from scratch.
What would great look like?
At the end of the day—or, better said, at the end of 2021—I would like to feel happy with who I am, what I’m doing, who I have around me, what I’ve created, and what I’ve lived through. I would like to be a kind, loving person with strong personal boundaries who gives less power to people who don’t respect those boundaries. I’d like to find love, romantic and platonic, with people who make me better and who I make better. I’d like to feel part of a bigger community. And I’d like to live in the present while acknowledging the past and preparing for the future, as impossible as that whole bevy of contradictions sometimes feels.
Luckily, I’m pretty close to all of that. 2021 will be a year of experimenting and refining and not building from the ground up. It will still be work, though, and I’m excited to roll up my sleeves and start it.
See you at the end of Q1!