A lot of people create life goals and never complete them. Sometimes they feel the goals are too lofty and impossible to complete while other times the people are either lazy or just forget. After working on my procrastination by being more accountable I thought I’d try that with my life goals.
Hopefully by writing them down here and keeping track of their progress I’ll be more motivated to complete everything on the list.
Professional Goals
Work for a Startup: I think there’s something rewarding about working with a small team building a product from scratch. Both the rewards and challenges that come from a startup are something I want to experience in my life time.
Completed June 8th, 2020
Become a Manager: I love programming. It’s challenging, fun and interesting. One thing I don’t want to do is be sitting at a desk when I’m 50 churning out code that doesn’t mean anything. As part of my goal to work at a startup I also want to manage a good team of developers. I can’t see a greater calling than mentoring people in the field and helping create something unique and useful.
Completed July 2nd, 2013
Become a Chief Technical Officer (Added 2013-04-13): At some point in my life I want to become a CTO. I love programming, I love working with people but I think being able to lead a companies technical strategy and drive a team of developers, managers and potentially VP’s would be amazing. I realize this is a very long term goal, but I wanted to write it down to get it on paper (or screens?).
Frontpage of Hacker News: I’ve always wanted to write something that made it onto the front page of Hacker News. When I was writing this article it hadn’t happened yet. My article on Django 1.5’s User Models made it onto the front page of Hacker News bringing thousands of visitors to my site.
Completed November 30th, 2012
Launch a Popular Application (Added 2013-04-13): I want to create a popular website/application and launch it. This is rather vague, and I’m not 100% sure how to define “popular” but I really want to launch something that other people find useful. I always have a number of ideas but executing them to completion has been a problem.
Completed July 31st, 2013
Personal Goals
Get Married: When I started writing this post I wasn’t married. As I know finish it I’ve already completed this goal and married the love of my life.
Completed October 20th, 2012
Become a Dad: I’m still young but I know at some point in my life I want to become a dad. I can’t think of any greater calling than to raise someone.
Completed in 2016
Snowboard the Andes: Fairly self-explanatory.
Travel to each Continent: I’ve already hit 3 continents and I want to get to all 7 before I die. I’ve already gotten North America, South America and Australia so I only have 4 left. Obviously Antarctica will be the hardest to get but I’m hoping to go there some day.
As of 2023 I’ve now hit 6 of 7 continents. I just have Antarctica left.
Write 52 Blog Posts in a Year: Writing brings me peace and satisfaction. I always seem to procrastinate writing but whenever I do I enjoy myself. I want to be able to say that I wrote an article a week for at least a year (hopefully more).
Skydive: The rush from skydiving is almost irresistible to me. I want to jump out of a plane at some point before I die.
Obviously this is a short list of my goals and I plan on adding to it as I think of them.