Following the tradition of 2018, 2019 and 2020, I’ll revisit my previous year’s goals and see what I achieved, and set new goals for 2021.

Reviewing 2020’s goals

Get back to a bi-weekly blog-post consistency.

❌  Failed, I only wrote 15 out of the desired 26 posts (not counting monthly progress reports). I had a lot of client work during some of the summer months when I didn’t write any posts.

Set up tinyletter for my blog and fully automate the sending of email notifications every month with my latest blog posts. (I already know I am not going to do it if I have to > write a personalized email for every post. 😃)

❌   Failed, I totally forgot this was a goal 😅 There wouldn’t have been many newsletters anyway with the low amount of posts. There’s also an RSS feed and I crosspost everything to Medium where people can subscribe to me. Not sure if email newsletters are even still a thing. Personally, I prefer reading in bulks: I keep a list of posts I want to read and RSS feeds of interesting blogs. When I’m free I go through this list and read 4-5 posts in a row.

Launch a new side-project with the potential to earn income

✅   I’d consider Vigor a side-project of mine, even though I’m not the only person working on it. Instead, I was one of the genesis custodians of the Vigor DAO/DAC and we launched the first Defi lending platform on EOS this year!

I was also one of the first to create an on-chain EOS arbitrage bot in February which was really lucrative in the beginning. Nowadays with distributed/pooled arbitrage strategies like Gravy and EOS Nation’s arbitrage bot, it has become a lot more competitive for a single arbitrage bot executor. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I estimate I made around 6k$-8k$ this year with zero-risk arbitrage trading.

I experimented with some other strategies to game DeFi protocols but in the end, they weren’t that profitable.

Be open to throw away these goals if they become irrelevant, my priorities change, or other better opportunities come along.

✅   Done. I dismissed the blog post goal because, quite frankly, it’s a low priority goal that I didn’t follow when working towards deadlines.

Goals for 2021

Dive into decentralized finance security auditing

I’m really interested in DeFi and security. I’m fascinated when reading about all these huge hacks on Ethereum and the role of whitehat hackers. It’s strange to me that they don’t get any attention outside of the crypto space. If there were multi-million dollar heists happening every week in any other industry, I’m sure they’d receive press coverage.

Combining and applying these two Naval quotes then gives me a direction for 2021:

Same as you always did - move to the frontier. The frontier is the place where the risk takers have arrived, but the masses and the bureaucrats have not. Today, that’s probably DeFi.

— Naval (@naval) December 19, 2020

Specific knowledge can't be taught, but can be learned.

Knowledge that gets you paid.

Identify your strengths and apply them to what you care about. Iterate at the edge of knowledge.

Building it will feel like play to you, but look like work to others.https://t.co/6O8AI38PtY

— Naval (@naval) March 27, 2019

Get back to a bi-weekly blog-post consistency.

It’s funny that I keep failing this goal and categorize it as a low-priority goal, yet, I still put it onto my goal list every year. It’s because this has always been a great way I got introduced to interesting people. If I reflect, most of my clients and other interesting connections I made happened because they were searching for something and landed on one of my blog posts.

It’s hard to quantify the utility of writing blog posts, especially when writing for a niche audience and getting bad scores at all traditional ways of measuring success: Low page views, low public interactions, etc. But it has always worked very well for me to connect with like-minded people in this small crypto world. That’s why keeping a bi-weekly writing habit will also be a goal for 2021.

Get back to a daily routine

I go to bed and get up when “I” want and I don’t like it. (Who is this “I” that is doing something that some other “I” does not want? How does one reconcile the Is? Is finding out that there is no I to begin with the only solution? - Yes, 2020 has also been a very introspective and philosophical year for me. 😄) I have the feeling that not having a routine is leading to lower energy levels and, in the end, is making me less productive. I’m not running the day, the day is running me.

Be open to throw away these goals if they become irrelevant, my priorities change, or other better opportunities come along.

As always, be flexible.

I wish you reading this a happy new year and the strength to progressively realize your goals. 🎉