Want to know what my goals for 2025 are? They probably aren't what you think...
Focus, discipline, persistence
These are my themes going into the new year. About 10 years ago, my boss at the time told me "you are one of the most disciplined people I know" based entirely on the various systems I had in place to produce work, and my personal health routine regarding being active, meal prepping, and having a strict regiment in place for my overall wellbeing.
Over the years I've let so many distractions (good and bad) get in the way of living up to that standard. Ultimately, I want to get back to that level of prestige with my life and I really think those three words will act as cornerstones for building back up to that.
- Maintaining focus on my long term goals.
- Being disciplined in sticking to the systems I build around the big areas of my life.
- Persistently seeing things through to the end, so my goals can be realized.
Here are my big areas I will be focusing on this year:
Personal health
I once considered becoming a professional bodybuilder and lived the lifestyle. These days I struggle to find time to be active on a daily basis, and when I do, I often find excuses to work or get other things done. I've struggled with back issues my entire life, and my lack of discipline in this area have only made those issues much worse.
Previously I'd focus my efforts purely on becoming "jacked" through lifting as intensely as possible and doing HIIT on an almost daily basis. I want to do a kind of reset and focus purely on improving my cardio through running, doing yoga daily, and implementing a mobility routine so as I age, my back issues don't continue to get worse.
One thing at a time
Focusing on a single task is something I've always struggled with as well. I often come up with crazy ideas that I want to test out, and while these ideas help me learn and grow as a tech professional, they take me away from what I'm supposed to be doing throughout the day. The result is an ever growing backlog of open tasks that never get closed.
I want to change that going forward and try to hyper-focus on one thing at a time. I'll always keep experimenting with fun or silly ideas since I get so much enjoyment out of it, but I want to make those moments more intentional so I can still experience those dopamine hits while making sure to stay on top of the work I'm responsible for.
Family and household
My family is the most important thing in this world to me. Over the years I've seen work slowly creep into my personal life and take my attention away from being present with them. Not in the sense that I work late on a regular basis, but I sometimes can't get work out of my head. I think a lot of that has to do with the previous point where I often have too much open.
My hope is that by limiting the things I take on, I'll be able to more easily clear my mind to be present with my wife and kids. I've always been a very involved husband and father, but this year I want to make sure that this is a big area that I dedicate more of my time to, whether it's helping my kids read more or doing more to keep the house in order.
My faith
I saved the biggest for last. I'm a born and raised Christian, and while there are plenty of examples of how the faith is poorly applied in this world, I want to be a force for good in the name of Christ. I want to simply focus on serving others in love and compassion.
This area will have me focusing more on being in the Word more regularly and asking for God to show me ways where I can be a light in this world. And ultimately, the courage to act on it.
I also want to connect with other Christians in tech. I've learned in the last year that there are more of us in the field than I once thought, so I want to find ways to build meaningful relationships with others to grow both professionally and spiritually.
So what about tech?
If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll notice that I didn’t mention anything tech focused throughout this article. That’s mostly intentional, not because it isn't a priority, but because I don't know what my long term goals in tech are anymore. I've been in this field for over 15 years in the following roles:
- I ran my own IT business.
- I was a Systems Engineer managing a warehouse network built on Cisco, VMware, Windows, and Linux servers.
- I was a full stack developer for a telematics company.
- I was a lead backend engineer focusing on platform integrations and scalability.
- I am currently a developer educator for Clerk where I get to learn cool stuff and help others learn it too.
I'm not bragging, but I'm just demonstrating that I've covered ALOT of ground throughout my career, and I've loved every minute of it. But realistically I think my focus needs to be less on the shiny new tech and more on carving out systems to help work with what I have right now.
THAT SAID...
...here are some of the things I do plan to explore during my planned experimentations:
- I want to learn about AI more deeply, diving into topics such as prompt engineering, fine tuning, and building workflows to automate learning.
- I recently started building an Obsidian plugin for myself, and it's been a great experience, and it's something I want to experiment with more.
- I plan to go harder into React Native and maybe even Swift to build more apps for iOS.
- I want to experiment with longer, more deeply educational videos for my YouTube channel.
The thing I want to keep in mind is that these bullets arent goals, they're just areas of interest. And I hope that the mindset around these will make a difference when it comes to avoiding burnout.