I Set Myself 31 Goals for 2022
I spent "a whole week" carefully choosing my goals for 2022.
I went back and forth many times, cutting a lot of them — and adding even more.
The most unexpected discovery: after crunching the numbers again and again, I'm "convinced" I can get far more done in a year than I'd imagined.
You have to dare to dream and dare to do. Here they are:
Including my Dedao "core curriculum" (forgive the terrible layout)
There you have it — the 🚩 is planted. Please hold me to it.
I especially invite friends who work in the relevant fields to "volunteer" to keep an eye on specific goals.
A few thoughts from the goal-setting process
- What goals are really for
None of these goals are, at heart, the Objective itself; they're the "Key Results" I designed in order to reach it.
That is: OKR (Objectives and Key Results)
Being able to tell an "objective" from a "key result" matters enormously.
So what is my Objective?
Steady, sustained growth for the company and the team, so that my partners get "growth and income" that match the company's development, while staying in a healthy, "sustainable" state.
- A new 80/20 rule
The Pareto principle: 80% of output comes from 20% of input
So "five 20% inputs" should produce "400% output"
Always remember: "efficiency is not the same as effectiveness"
The outcome of your work depends not only on how fast or how well you do things, but even more on what you choose to do.
For me, the five 20% portions point to five dimensions: "business, capability, health, relationships, and self."
This year I want to make choosing a habit, and push "effectiveness first, clear goals, data-based measurement" a big step further.
- Let the data speak
At first I listed 20 core courses and thought that was already a lot. But the data showed the exact opposite — they'd only take 30 minutes a day (at 2x speed; in a quiet setting you can manage 3x), far below my current median listening time. That made me realize: over a whole year, if you stick with it, you can learn an enormous amount. So why not pursue my dream of becoming a "generalist"? Take every general-education course — law, mathematics, chemistry, ethics, astronomy, the lot. Even then, it would only come to 1.5 hours a day.
And so came my current, utterly insane ambition: listen to "every single" business, economics and management course, plus all the general-education ones. (Sadly, to keep the hours in check, I cut Western Art and Chinese Art.)
The Dedao core-curriculum plan now needs 2.5–3 hours a day, which fits comfortably into the time I spend washing up, commuting, exercising and eating. And that's assuming it only takes "185 days."
That assumption leaves me plenty of time to learn about new things and new needs as they come up.
Simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division — letting the data speak — helps us make better decisions and plans.
- Persistence, persistence, persistence
People often "overestimate what they can achieve in the short term" and "underestimate what they can achieve in the long term."
I dared to set these goals because my daily check-ins in 2021 let me taste the rewards of sticking with something.
Break your goals down into daily actions, and over time, miracles happen. Don't burn yourself out, don't "work hard, play hard" — just make progress bit by bit. To borrow the couplet Chairman Mao wrote for himself as a student in Changsha, adapted from the Ming dynasty scholar Hu Juren: "If you value perseverance, why stay up till the third watch and rise at the fifth; nothing is more useless than one day in the sun followed by ten days in the cold."
Finally, the New Year message I wrote for my team — I'm giving it to my 2022 self as well:
We do not possess; we create. We do not chase; we explore.
Though we will all vanish in an instant of this universe,
we still honor the years — with song, with love, with hot tears, and with an everlasting, devoted dedication.