5 Types of Goals

This time of the year lots of accountants validate balances in the books of their firms. In quite a similar fashion when December draws to a close my thoughts constantly come to back to the goals that I had set back in January. Seeing how my results of the year vary from area to area, it is quite easy and at the same time interesting to break these goals into categories based on both the degree of success with them and the reasons that stand behind it.

First and most simple, there is a number of things that I wanted to do this year, but didn't even start to shoot in their direction. In some cases I did make initial steps but lacked persistence to see even minor results and gave it up. The failures of this kind are mostly caused by mere laziness. However, sometimes the problem is deeper: many of unachieved goals were not understood and formulated properly. This does actually boil down to laziness, but that's the laziness that occurred back on the stage of planning and prevented me from setting myself up for success. The presence of such failures reminds me that I must put more thought into planning and avoid picking goals, of which I am not sure whether I really want to pursue them and why.

Fortunately, neither of the past years were marked with complete failures only and 2014 is not exceptional. With some of the plans I came very close to the objectives. Even though I fell short of my own expectations in regards to, for example, the number and frequency of posts in this blog, I am still quite happy with the fact that I was regularly working on this goal. The interesting thing about this kind of under-achievements is that they bring me almost as much satisfaction as the act of reaching a target. The only difference is that when I don't manage to fully meet a goal I have to analyze the reasons that stand behind underperforming - mostly to allow for more accurate planning, but also to find where exactly I am inefficient and try to improve on that in the next year.

On the other side, there are some points on my 2014 checklist, which I pursued hard and can easily mark as achieved, but which gave me mostly disappointment. A nice example of a goal of this kind is to accrue a certain amount of savings over the year - I do have this on my list. I was quite disciplined, got some help from outside - particularly, from my employer - and, thanks to that, succeeded at having the desired amount on the bank account by the 31st of December. The problem is that the currency that I used to set the goal and accumulated my earnings - the Russian Rouble - depreciated by more than 30% since the moment when I had prepared my plans for the year. I could lament a lot about the world and Russian economy, in particular, being unfair and make a tragedy of this in dozens other ways, although this would be attributing my own planning mistake to someone else's actions. Even though the goal looked pretty reasonable at the time of setting, it did become 30% less relevant over the course of the year. Despite the fact that this happened due to external events and without much of my own guilt, I should have had some measures of protection against depressions of this kind. Instead, I assumed that once an objective is set I only have to work hard to meet it, but goals may and do lose value over time because both we and the world change, so one has to monitor and adjust them accordingly.

Judging by the above paragraphs one might think that I am mostly a failure, because I either don't achieve my goals or they bring little satisfaction to me. Fortunately, that's not the case and I did proudly check-marked some important points on the 2014 to-do list. These took quite a lot of work and made me feel happy about both putting in all the efforts and getting to the finish line. Success of this kind not only lets me see what I am good at - it also encourages me to continue working simply because I know I am capable of something. Add the feeling of proudness for merely getting planned things done and you'll see that a year worth of time wasn't wasted and opened new roads for the next one.

Finally, there is a type of goal or achievement in my classification that looks quite strange to me. Back in the beginning of the year along with a list of goals I wrote down some thoughts on where I want to move with my job and which new responsibilities I am willing to take. Since I had only vague understanding of what my goals in this area are and how one can achieve them, that was merely a set of ideas with only a few action points, which could hardly lead to any serious changes. Still, despite the fact that this didn't look like a plan at all, by virtue of luck, other people's will and who knows what else, during the year I was moving in the direction defined by these notes and in December found myself far beyond what I could have expected and hoped for in January. Things like this - when I get something that makes me happy without any definite plan - happened to me occasionally, but it is the first time when I had something written down, didn't understand how I can get it and nevertheless got much more. 

Even though the "overachievements" like this do bring tons of happiness and satisfaction, it is also crucial to analyze them carefully once you're done with the celebration. That's a good thing to do because understanding one's strengths helps both planning and working, and, more importantly, because it is useful to know how big is the share of mere luck and colleagues', friends' and relatives'  help in that success.

So, now I have a great basement for building and meeting plans for the next year. I see where I underperformed, what I am capable of and how I can improve my results in certain areas with little effort. Equally important, I know the things, which I shouldn't pursue the next year and also understand how to avoid getting too disappointed about failures, a certain amount of which is inevitable. All this will help me make clearer goals, do better at working towards them, adjust the direction on the way and avoid getting depressed when I fail or find that I have been pursuing the wrong target.

I wish you to set your goals for 2015 and make it a Happy New Year through achieving them!

Aging

I was pretty fortunate to be born in the middle of summer as this gives me two very well defined and perfectly positioned points in a year when I am willing to reflect on the results of recent months. In January everyone’s year ends to give way to a new one and in July my own age gets incremented – both events suit well for peeking into past and future. So, a couple weeks ago I turned 25 and this somehow made me think about what does it mean to get older apart from the fact that every year you have to tell different numbers when answering a question “How old are you?”

I mean I am not a complete idiot an I know that over the time of my existence the Earth has done roughly 25 full circles around the Sun, cells in different parts of my body died off and got replaced with new ones many times and all that stuff. In other words, something changed in the world and something changed in me as well: I used to be an infant, then a little boy, then kept growing larger and stronger and now I am this guy with a laptop in a park. I also know that from this point on I will likely grow weaker – not stronger, not until I put some serious effort into avoiding this. Still, physiological aging feels as boring as it is inevitable.

Being a bit more intelligent than a rock, I also acknowledge that there is a social aspect to aging. When I was born I wasn’t actually a member of any society at all and was hardly capable of being one. I gradually started interacting with my parents and other family members and being a part of a small group of people. After learning some stuff from them as well as other guys of my age one day I became eligible to enter a larger community – an elementary school. From there I advanced to the high school, then university – both of them taught me some crucial skills and knowledge making me potentially valuable for Humanity. Finally, somewhere close to the 7th of 6 years of my study at the university I learned that I can not only consume what society gives me, but also give something back. That’s when I took my first part-time job in software development. A year ago I finished study at the university and working as a programmer became my fulltime activity, so that I moved a bit closer to the production side of the consumption-production gauge. This is certainly a very important aspect of aging, yet the same as the biological part of the matter it doesn’t seem interesting.

Continuing the search for the “essence of aging”, I also remember of responsibilities: the older one gets the more responsibilities they are supposed to carry. Until some time you have only to be doing what others tell you, so you are only responsible for not breaking the simple rules they set for you. Later, one takes the new, sometimes less clear responsibilities associated with study or job. Furthermore, one may take responsibilities for others' well-being and well-fare when they get married and give birth to children. So, the general idea is that children are responsible for nothing, while grown-ups are in charge of everything and that’s what I was taught in school and elsewhere. Even though I believe that’s true – to the extent anything about the way human society functions can be true – that’s not something that I have been facing a lot during the recent years. I mean I did get new responsibilities when starting to work as a developer or when obtaining the driver’s license, but all these feel so natural that it is hard to define aging in these terms.

What does seem to be essential to aging for me is learning and, most importantly, learning that most things won’t do themselves. Learning itself is crucial and it is often true that the older you get the more you learn – sometimes that’s what makes you capable of going further. Still, it just happens to come along with aging. On the other side, understanding that some things are just not going to happen the way you want them until you push them hard into the desired direction comes to me as a manifestation of the fact that I am getting older. 

There are plenty of examples of how this simple idea might jump at one here and there. For instance, long ago the laces on my shoes used to get tied properly without any help from me. Later the magic vanished and I discovered that one has to put effort to get out of home without losing their shoes. Something very similar happens with keeping shoes clean – for some time while you are trying to accustom yourself with the laces, magic keeps cleaning your shoes, but later it evaporates as well. You notice that shiny footwear becomes bleak and dusty, dirt sticks to it and doesn’t go away overnight any more. This way every year one sees some magic being drained away from their world.

This thought is not something original or new, but it struck me this year. I mean my parents stopped cleaning my shoes long ago – that’s other things that drew my attention to it. For example, I always used to be a very slim person. During some periods of my life this was supported by my attempts to do running consistently, but even when I was much less physically active I remained slim and hardly seen any body fat. However, the situation changed dramatically about a year ago. Somehow, after I took my current position and started to work full-time at the office my body began to build up fat. I don’t fully understand why did this happen – the amount of physical activity didn’t change much between the university and the job. One of the reasons may be that my life became more determined than a couple years ago when I had much more options for where to sit with a laptop and study and when to change the place. Anyway, some months ago I noticed that I got much fatter than I have ever been before and that my body is not going to remain slim or fit without some help from me anymore.

I also made similar discoveries closer to the software development field. While I already knew that code doesn’t write itself (although, there is meta-programming!), it turned out that there is still some place for surprise. My Windows Phone development adventures taught me one thing for sure: the products that I make won’t market themselves – not until I put significant effort into making them stand out and forcing potential customers to see them. Put in other words, my customers won’t come to me until I reach out and find them. So, basically nothing is going to happen by itself in terms of distributing and marketing my products – I have to do something to show them, explain them and sell them.

All these “discoveries” of things, which I believed to be driven by magic, but which can actually be driven only by me, do feel obvious. At the same time I’m pretty sure I will have a lot more of them in future. None of them is too difficult to predict now – almost everything that I might rely on will one day require some payment from me and stop working silently the way I am used to. However, like with shining shoes, testing my code and marketing my apps, I will definitely be very surprised by each and every thing that didn’t seem to need any help to get done but suddenly starts to do so when I get a little bit older.

EOL: 2013

It is the beginning of January now, which means that it’s time to look back and see what has been done and what I failed to do over the last 12 months. As with any year in our life, during the last one I witnessed the appearance of new things and the start of new activities – many of them I will carry through 2014 and maybe even further. On the other side, there are things that I had to leave in 2013 either because I have chosen to do so or due to the reasons less dependent on my short term decisions and determined mostly by the nature of the events. Both what I left and what I take with me will influence my future life and is important when looking ahead.