Because life is a never-ending learning process, every year I set myself new areas to improve. For many years I have been writing publicly my new year resolutions (2021,2020, 2019, etc) and my own assessments at the end of the year (2021,2020, 2019, etc). The process of writing them and after 365 days revisiting them is a practice that I find useful. This time I won’t split the objectives into different categories. Instead I’ll merge them together wihtout any length limit.

- Ironman 70.3: I’ve had this goal semi-regularly for several years now. I believe that if corona allows I should have enough time to train for it and successfully finish without much hassle.

- Defend my PhD: I already submitted my thesis, and once it’s approved I shall defend it.

- Finish my PhD papers: I would like to wrap up the manuscripts I worked on during the last three years (my mortality papers, a mapping paper, and a historic-demographic paper). I would consider this successful if I send them all to journals.

- Back to dancing: Time has passed by super fast since I was last dancing. With the new stage of my life, it would help me to meet new people in a nice environment. I would consider this achieved if I go dancing on average once per week.

- Visit Australia: Since I’ll be living there for a while, I would like to visit the different cities. This goal would be achieved if I visit the following places: Uluru, Melbourne, Adelaide, Tasmania, and Brisbane (coral reef). Optional: Shark bay, Tjuwaliyn, and Darwin,

- Publish regularly high-quality content: I want to publish 12 well-written pieces of content that drive new visitors to the blog. The aim is to increase the daily visits to an average of 200 people/day.

- Create videos: I want to share my learnings as video content. It is supposed to be the next blogging. So, I’ll start creating them privately and when I consider myself with enough knowledge I may start sharing it publicly. The content here should be a presentation of the research for the post. I would consider this successful if I create, and edit 5 videos.

- Start a business: I have two ideas that need some work. I’ll try to work on them sequentially to prevent too much dispersion and lack of real progress. I would consider this successful if I manage to develop a full pipeline (from website to delivery) and it is used at least once by a random person.

- No alcohol challenge: I don’t have anything against alcohol. But I liked when I was barely drinking any so I decided to keep these standards. I would consider this successful if I barely drink a beer a week on average.

- Book reading: Before going to bed I want to read a page or two minimum. No number of books is required, simply putting the effort.

- Meditation: Once per day, using a meditation app do a 10min meditation. It can be on the bus, at home, in the morning, at night. But find the time to do it.

- Self-discipline: All of these goals will require tremendous amounts of self-discipline to keep the right focus and pursue them constantly. So I would consider this a success if I give in max once a week. The goal is to make every second count and do not pursue my curiosity but instead, only applicable goals based on high-quality content.

- Things I would like to learn (at least do a Coursera course). Reinforcement learning, project management, Snakemake, Jenkins, Spark, MLflow, NoSQL, Docker, terraform, and airflow.

Remember to aim for the stars, be happy, and when in doubt choose the adventure.

Happy new year!