A year ago, I wrote a post about my goal-setting philosophy. I wrote:

It can be quite fun and insightful to reflect on long-term goals. I’ll come back to this post in a year and see what I really achieved in the end.

Now is finally the time to do it, see what I achieved and reflect upon my old goals.

So here are last year’s goals for 2018:

• Write a book / interactive course / video course, and sell it

  🙂 I’m still working on this. I’m writing a book about EOS Development. I started in July 2018 and hope I can finish it soon™.

• Read a book each month

  👎 I did so in the beginning but stopped after a while.

  It just wasn’t important to me anymore. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but reading books is overvalued. Especially if you read similar books before or even just short articles on the topic, you get to the point of diminishing returns. It’s just not worth spending all the time reading the book anymore, just for some little nugget of insight that you weren’t aware of before. Many books just keep rehashing their central idea over hundreds of pages. I ‘d rather read fiction books now or if I want to be productive, spend my time on actually productive things.

• Write a smart contract (d)app that earns money on some blockchain

  👍 I did so with King of EOS.

• Code a side project in a functional programming language. I always liked functional programming in university and it’s been a while since I used one. Maybe ReasonML & React for frontend? Elixir for backend? Haskell for smart contracts (Cardano)?

  👎 I did not do this. There were things to learn that I actually used in my day-to-day life, so I learned these instead.

  This goal is a bit stupid in hindsight. I should not just learn a new technology just for the sake of it. Or at least not make it a goal.

• Learn a new framework doing a side project. Probably Apollo & GraphQL? Vue.js?

  👍 I did. I learned Vue.js and some GraphQL.

  I’m learning Apollo now because I actually use it. I also really used Vue.js in building the Learn EOS landing page and on some other projects. (I still prefer React, especially with the hooks now.)

• Finally start live-coding on twitch. Been procrastinating on this for too long

  👎 I did it like four times. I just never had the time had more important things to do.

  Live-streaming really slows me down and I’m not used to talking while coding. (I also didn’t have an audience to talk to and ended up talking to myself. 😅)

• Less sports. I’m going to the gym 4x a week now, but my priorities changed and I want to go down to 3 times or do a shorter routine

  👍 I went to the gym only 3 times a week, and since a couple of months, I’m doing shorter ~45-60 minutes freeletics workouts 3.5x per week.

• Write blog posts more often. Bi-weekly schedule?

  👍 I mostly stuck to my bi-weekly schedule. I wrote 30 blog posts last year (excluding the progress reports).

• Earn 1000 EUR / month by end of the year through my side-projects.

  👎 This was the biggest fail. I did not launch any side-project that still earns me money.

  The monthly recurring-revenue even went down to 0 as Google removed my React Native Android apps.

Looking at the results, it was only an OK year for my side-projects with the biggest non-achieved goal being the non-existent MRR. The book just consumed the second half of the year and there was no time to launch anything else. Let’s see if all the work on the book pays off this year. (Even if it doesn’t, I met some interesting people through it.)

I also ended up doing a lot of things that were not on my goal list. I contributed to open source a lot more than the years before, both by releasing many of my own repos, but also fixing bugs on other public repos. I received some emails in return thanking me for my work which was nice 😍, which makes me try to continue to repeat this in 2019.

Goals for 2019

Let’s get to the goals for this year.

• Finish the book in the first quarter of the year
• Earn 1000 EUR / month by end of the year through my side-projects
• Keep up the bi-weekly blog-post consistency
• Grow my blog viewers to 20,000 / month. (It flattened out at 10,000 sessions per month for quite a while.) Set up a tiny newsletter.

This year I have less specific goals regarding technologies, as I found some of my goals from last year to be quite irrelevant and I don’t stand behind them anymore today. On the one side, as I said, I ‘ll only learn some new framework or language when it actually makes sense to use= in one of my side projects. On the other side, I found timing to be a lot more important than I initially thought. When something new is released that you can build upon, f.i., skills for Alexa or dapps for a new blockchain, there are not many apps for it yet and it’s really easy to get traction simply because you’re the first one to do it. (first-mover advantage) This is what happened to my King of EOS game - I attribute a big part of its success to it just being one of the first dapps on EOS.

Let’s see what 2019 will bring forth, be flexible and always on the lookout. 🕵️‍♂️