Since 2022, I’ve laid out a list of dozens of goals including (re-)learning languages, athletic goals, career goals, hobby goals, and life goals. By the end of each year, I manage to accomplish two goals. I wasn’t always a goal setter, and every year my goals changed.

Growing up, I didn’t really have a life goal besides helping people. I didn’t really know how to go about it, but I narrowed down what my family always talked about during dinner: politics (more on the human nature and ideological side but practical), what it means to be altruistic in society vs. being selfish to advance ourselves and our family, and making money. My family is full of big dreamers, but we were all making small businesses, and only doing well sometimes.

I attended University of Michigan’s business school after declining a STEM major in biology, economics, statistics, or computer science (which I ended up dual majoring in) in other colleges I’d been accepted to. At the time, my family was all concentrated in Michigan, UMich has a good public and business school, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to make at the time.

In 2022:

• I wanted to help my grandma see doctors and acclimate her to new technology as I’d moved to NYC
• Work on my first AI/LLM startup (it was customer service)
• Adjust to my new adult life post-dropping out of college. Make new friends, actually do more adult responsibilities and financial planning, and indulge in my urbanist (I’m not a purist; I’m practical and realistic about urbanist expectations for any country)

Of those goals, my grandma can FaceTime or call me regularly, re-lives educational trauma (she studies the week before my sibling arrives home, and my sibling then tests her), and . I dropped out

In 2023, in addition to a year-end list, I set about a Goals by Decade list.

My goal this year: marketing