Reflection on the Year 2021 and Way Forward in 2022

I gave myself 3 goals for the Year 2021: Find the work that I feel is significant, Run 10K under an hour, and Develop meaningful relationships and deepen existing ones.

Together with some of my friends, we started to explore different problems that we can potentially solve as a business. This year, we studied Data Labelling Business, Cloud Kitchen, Cloud Gaming, Book Summary App, and A YouTube with Educational Content. Not only did we do desktop study, but we also did potential customer interviews to validate our hypothesis and built quick prototypes to test our ideas. Although we haven’t come up with any workable ideas, I consider that I have achieved this goal since I spent time finding the work that I feel is significant, and I am forming my own mental models to find and validate the business hypothesis.

I will keep doing the same thing in 2022. What I can do better is to focus more on my circle of competence. People say we should dream big. But it is hard to do it in one step. It is true that we should think big instead of just focusing on our comfort zone. But the comfort zone, the circle of competence will not grow overnight. It is a slowly expanding process. In 2022, I can focus more attention on what I am good at and do slightly more than that. Instead of focusing on the result, I should prioritize learning. Is doing X optimized the learning rate? That’s the question I need to ask.

Running 10K under an hour is my second goal in 2021. I achieved this on 28 Jan 2021 LOL.

However, I cannot run 10K under an hour now due to a few quarantine periods and lack of training. After reading The Atomic Habit, I understand that changing identity is more efficient than setting goals. Instead of saying I want to run 10K under an hour, I can say I want to be a healthy and energetic person. And one of the ways to achieve it is to run 10K in under an hour. With that, I will keep running even I achieved the goal early.

For the last goal, it is hard to judge whether I have achieved it. But a lot had happened in 2021 in terms of relationships. I have my girlfriend. I left HK for work and met some new friends. Separation with families due to overseas work and Covid-19. My Dad passed away and I cannot personally be with him. With all that, I want to repeat the quote in my last post:

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

Warren Buffett

For 2022, I want to be the following person:

• Live a meaningful life by solving problems through business methods (explore and validate ideas that optimize learning rate)
• Live a healthy life by eating healthy and exercising (run 10K)
• Develop meaningful relationships and deepen existing ones.
• Be a person that understand how the world works by acquiring, developing, and revamping different mental models on how think works.

The things I will stop doing:

• Picking individual stocks. I will just buy index fund instead since I think without significant capital, investing in individual stocks does not worth it.
• Stop buying unncessary electronics in 2022. I think I waste quite some money in this bad hobby.