One of the biggest challenges I faced during 2019, was my ability to stay consistent with the goals I have set to myself. But that only taught me how to improve my goals for the years to come. I do not believe in yearly resolutions, but firmly so in yearly themes. 2019 was themed as “The Year of Me” and it was about bringing personal improvements and maintaining them to become the person I aspire to be. I have learned so much in the last year that I will not call it a failure even though I did not achieve the points that I wanted to reach. 

During the year, many things have happened that were both good and bad. Starting the year I managed to lose about 11 kilograms off my weight through the keto diet, and it felt great! I felt lighter and more energetic. I did have to stop due to difficulties in my schedule and other personal reasons, but I would do it again, and most probably soon.

Losing weight proved to me that it is possible since I have always struggled with the way I looked or how much I weighed. It showed that with a bit of inconvenience and consistency a lot can be achieved.

In addition to that, in 2019, I realized one of the most important things in my life. Something that I honestly should’ve realized long ago. This is something that I believe so many people face and are struggling with; Lack of motivation does not decide when I do work or when I don’t.

The feeling of being motivated that some of us get right after a hot shower on a cold night or after a great workout does help a lot to get things started, but it does not last long enough to maintain the new change we’re trying to implement in our life at the point.

I know that so many of us know that, but I never really took it to heart and started adapting to it before. This year, however, I did have a change of heart on how I want to take on projects or personal goals. One of the biggest flaws that I ought to work on is how I always start-up motivated and have a really strong head start, but end up falling off track. This is almost always because of how I face an obstacle that sort of prevents me from doing whatever habit I was developing at the time, which causes me to slack down, and rather than making up for it at a later time, I would just simply give up.

The closest example of this is me trying our YNAB. It still is something that I need to get more consistent within my life, but what happened recently was that I missed recording a couple of days worth of transactions which threw off the whole idea of the service. Now the logical solution is to just make up for that, but the fact that this is a habit that relies on consistency to reflect its true potential makes it difficult to get started with.

Since 2020 is right around the corner, at the time of writing this, the next big challenge that is heading my way is hands down my consistency. I need to tone down my goals for the next chapter of my life and focus on making sure that they stick. So far the three main aspects that I want to focus on are reading, writing and exercising. 

I want reading and writing to become a core part of my life. I can say that about writing actually, but not for reading sadly. However, since I bought my kindle, that is starting to change, but still, it is not at the level that I wish for it to be. It is just a matter of me rearranging my priorities and responsibilities to make time for what’s important. 

Writing, on the other hand, is something that is going to improve over time. I will be carrying my laptop with me almost everywhere, writing should become a more streamlined process and shouldn’t be very difficult to do.

So with these aspects in mind, the next year is going to be based merely on me trying to be more consistent along with gradual improvement. The year 2020 is going to be my best year yet. Regardless of the outcome! Whether I end up reaching my goals or not, I am proud of the progress that I am going to make.

Starting with 2020, the next decade is going to reflect the most change I have had. The last one started with me starting to learn the English language, and now I am ending it with me writing a blog with it. I am not the best at it, but there will always be room for improvement.