The end of a year - DEC 2023

What do I want to say? I have the feeling that this year did not go well...I guess that's not true. I feel like I did not do my best this year. But I think this is true for many people. We all have goals...new year's resolutions and such. For many of us, we do not meet our goals. Perhaps we do not persist in working on our goals. And, perhaps all this wishy washy reflection is not particularly helpful or interesting to read.

In that case, what do I want to talk about? I want to talk about what I did do this year, and try to set up the next year to be better than this one. I also want to reset my yearly review to match the calendar year, because I think that would be nice.

Well, I already did a one year review of sorts in my October 2023 blog post to catch up on what I've been doing since the blog post before that. Since I am trying to do these annual posts by calendar year now, it would be good to include everything I did in 2023. Where I have covered something in more detail in the October 2023 post, I will simply refer to that post.

What did I want to achieve this year?

There were the 1000 Paintings. I did not make 1000 paintings. To be fair my goal was more along the lines of 1 per day on average.

I did not make 365 paintings either. I made 5 paintings this year.

212 Mushroom Kingdom

I wanted to work on my story ideas. From October, I started tracking how many words I have been writing in my story planning. Between then and now, I have written 9436 words while planning out the broad strokes of some of my story ideas.

In terms of social media, it has been 85 days since I started posting one of my 1000 Paintings on Reddit every day. Through this process I have found out that Reddit only keeps track of some basic data on each post for 45 days. This lesson cost me a few data points, but I believe I have enough to start doing some basic exploration of the data.

My Power BI dashboard to encourage me to exercise

Other things I have done include a dashboard for helping encourage me to meditate more, which I shared in my October 2023 blog post. This month, I created a similar dashboard to encourage me to do physical exercise. The goals are inspired by Saitama's path to becoming One Punch Man in the titular anime series.

I have wanted to create a tutorial series on my YouTube channel to teach absolute beginners how to create art, and I am still working on that.

I did also want to work on analytics projects related to my art, or social media, and have not made any progress there, besides creating social media data for my Reddit account.

What do I want to achieve in 2024?

I have many goals, and part of me thinks this will be a wish list more than anything else. Yet, I do believe that if I want to take these annual reviews more seriously, I should set out my goals at the start.

In terms of the 1000 paintings, I would like to complete 200 paintings this year.

In terms of my story planning, I would like to complete the story planning of the current project I am working on. It is a more complex story, so I do think it warrants more time and care. As an additional measure of progress, I would like to have written at least 12000 words during my story planning adventures.

For my YouTube channel, I would like to complete my art tutorial series for absolute beginners. I think a few more videos would be great too, ideally 11 more. That way there would be enough videos for every month of 2024.

In a similar vein, I wanted to complete 12 data or AI related projects last year. I have not done that yet, but have data on different topics now, and ways to collect more data. This year, I would still like to create 12 of these projects, again one for each month.

Last but not least, I could do with more money. More importantly, I have wanted to learn to create a business from scratch for a long time. So I would like to do that in 2024 as well. A clear way to measure success is if I actually make any money. Probably I will do something in the creative space, as that is where many of my interests lie, though I will be aiming to use data and AI to help me with my potential future business as well.