Setting direction for 2025
Many people start the new year by setting goals. They plan what to accomplish and how to better themselves. A wise man said “Forget about setting goals, do this instead”. That wise man is James Clear, author of a great book called Atomic Habits.
A goal is nice for setting the direction, but it does not tell you how to get there. You also need a system for taking the steps in that direction - the details of how you are going to achieve that goal.
A goal sets direction but doesn’t show the path. You need a system - a detailed plan for taking steps toward that goal.
have my own failures from 2024.
Learning from the mistakes of 2024
In 2024, I set a goal to hold a 20-minute conversation in Arabic by year’s end.
I failed miserably.
Why? I had milestones (5, 10, 15, 20-minute conversations) but no system for reaching them. This pattern repeated with other goals - without a detailed “how”, they remained unachieved.
Plans for 2025
For 2025, I’m taking a different approach with two languages:
- Arabic (both Modern Standard and Iraqi), study time:
- Baseline: 240 hours
- Minimum: 120 hours
- Stretch goal: 360 hours
- Esperanto, study time:
- Same time commitments as Arabic
Esperanto was actually the first foreign language I tried to learn, even before I started to learn English at school. I was 6-7 years old, and I had found a book teaching Esperanto. Back then, I did not get very far, and my interest faded. I like the idea of Esperanto, and I picked it as I was also interested in comparing my progress with Arabic. Arabic may be one of the hardest languages you can learn (if you know Indo-European languages only), and Esperanto may be one of the easiest. It will be interesting to compare the progress of the two.
As an example, about a year ago I set a few goals for the year 2024. One of these goals was to be able to have a conversation in Arabic for 20 minutes by the end of the year.
I failed miserably, not even getting close.
One problem here was that I did not define how I should accomplish that goal. I defined some partial goals, like “have a conversation for 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes”. But I did not define anything about the system I would use to get there.
Almost all goals I set without defining more in detail how to get there failed.
Reflecting on that towards the end of 2024, I started to look at a different approach in 2025.
Also in 2025, I will work on my Arabic, as well as Esperanto. Arabic is a language many friends and family can speak, and I hope to be able to participate more in conversations in Arabic and also consume media in Arabic. This includes both Modern Standard Arabic and Iraqi Arabic.
Esperanto was actually the first foreign language I tried to learn, even before I started to learn English at school. I was 6-7 years old, and I had found a book teaching Esperanto. Back then, I did not get very far, and my interest faded. I like the idea of Esperanto, and I picked it as I was also interested in comparing my progress with Arabic. Arabic may be one of the hardest languages you can learn (if you know Indo-European languages only), and Esperanto may be one of the easiest.
Software enginnering commits
In the software engineering space, I am also setting up my system for writing regularly, which also failed to a large extent in 2024. This includes this blog and also some ebooks/online courses. The ebooks include infrastructure as code work both with AWS CDK and Pulumi.
Right now, the first version of the AWS CDK book should not be too far away in time since it is using a lot of material written in the past, but rewritten to be more current. The Pulumi material is barely started, but I aim to finish it later this year.
Technically, I am currently using fly.io to publish the content of the books, as well as other websites. Right now this blog is hosted by Netlify, but I may change that to fly.io in the future. January is used to figure out how my system for writing regularly should be.
A minimal aim for me is to publish a blog post every month, but my main goal is every two weeks with a stretch goal of close to every week. But the goals there are only setting the direction.
The main part is devising a system for writing regularly that works for me now.
That is my commitment for 2025.