Context

In a previous post I promised a post on my yearly goals, along with the rationale behind them.

The reason I have explicitly outlined goals every year is that they serve in the same capacity that OKRs serve in a corporate setting, that is, to provide a northern star during the time period they demarcate along with some quantifiable metrics that can provide a final outcome analysis.

I started setting explicit yearly goals in 2020, and the results have been great for me, in the sense that while I don’t always reach my goals, the documentation itself serves as a clarification and reinforcing mechanism for my thinking process and my short-term and long-term goal-setting.

So, without any further ado, let’s move on to the…

Yearly Goals: 2023

Main Themes:

I have organised my developmental goals for 2023 around three main themes:

  • Improvement of financial stability
  • Improvement of mathematical maturity
  • Improvement of musical capacity

These are the main development themes - I do maintain some side goals in my plan, but I try to build around a certain number of development themes every year. Main themes within this contexts means that the majority of my efforts for the year is going to be spent in developing across one of these main themes.

Let’s see what I aim for in each of these development themes.

Financial Stability

Last year was a very exciting year for me personally, with the biggest change being my purchase of a new appartment in Oxford. I have gone through all of the benefits that this move afforded me in a previous post, but this move also came packaged with significant financial strain in the first few months after the purchase. It also didn’t help that most of my financial resources went into the purchase itself (and associated costs like conveyancing, etc), so that meant that I found myself earlier last year with significant liquidity constraints.

These liquidity constraints have significantly eased throughout 2022, as most of my furniture has now been paid off and cash flows are getting freed to serve other purposes, which allows me to focus on the following two subgoals for this year:

  • Enhance my financial safety net, and
  • Support long-term financial outcomes.

Both of these two subgoals are measured against specific amounts levels that my L1 (liquid), L2 (support + growth) and L3 (long term growth + illiquid) positions should have achieved by the end of the year.

The reasons for these two subgoals should be fairly obvious:

  • A robust financial safety net would allow me to deeply focus on my other activities without financial constraints occupying mental space (or at least, significant amounts of it), and

  • I recently read a book on retirement investing, which had some benchmark figures of where retirement accounts should be by certain age groups and what percentage of your income you should be saving for retirement at certain age categories, and shockingly, I found out that I am quite a long way away from these benchmarks in my current capacity.

    Long term investing is the kind of thing where small changes today can compound into massive differences between outcomes in the future, so for now I have decided to allocate an additional 3%+ per month of my total income towards enhancing my retirement accounts and increase the chance that future outcomes are more aligned with what the experts suggest is a viable retirement strategy.

    (This allocation strategy is just for this year, and I intend to revisit this decision at the end of this year to checkout how it has performed and whether it does indeed help with getting closer to the outcomes I am looking for.)

Mathematical Maturity

Coming out of university I believe I had attained a very robust background in Discrete Mathematics, which at the time aimed to serve very well with my then chosen subdomains in Computer Science: Compilers, Languages and Verification.

However, I didn’t practice (both at university and afterwards) my maths skills in other subdomains, to the point where I have found some my skills there atrophied.

I had made some efforts during 2020 and 2021 to repair my skills there, but as I expand across multiple domains, I have found that an enhanced mathematical capacity will be a significant asset for the rest of my life (and would support my future forays into data science, quant finance and synthetic biology a lot better) - with the added bonus of building competence and confidence that would allow me to be fearless against any mathematical problem that I face on a going forward basis.

To that end, I have decided to dedicate a good chunk of my time this year to improve my mathematical maturity. I have some study guides that I am following, the most significant of which are:

I do not intend to follow these too closely for now, as I want to have my exploration be curiosity driven - but certainly having some study guides helps with having guidance if and when I need it.

Musical Capacity

I hold no secret of my musical aspirations (I will become the male equivalent of Ava Max… eventually :) ).

I have been moving slower than I would like to on this front, so this year I have set up a target hours-spent goal of about 250 hours spent developing across anything that would enhance my skills in this area. This includes but is not limited to:

  • Dancing,
  • Songwriting,
  • Music Theory,
  • Piano,
  • Guitar,
  • Singing.

Regardless of the time spent building across these, I still don’t expect that my skills in this domain will be deployable in any meaningful capacity, but I do expect that a certain number of hours in which I deliberately practice should help in slowly chiseling a core set of skills that I can depend on at a later date.

Last thoughts

A pretty tall order this year as well with regards to yearly goals, but I am confident that these should be pretty attainable.

All of these are iteration based, so they just depend on my habits, which are pretty streamlined at this point. The goals have been crafted in such a way as to be controlled by me and appear resilient to uncertainty, as they do not depend on external sources or any massive action nor are there any clearly identifiable risks on the horizon across any of these development themes that would threaten my yearly desired outcomes.

Wishing myself and others a beautiful and productive 2023, with all your goals achieved, leading us all into a brighter future.