2019 Goals

I’ve found that goals work well for me when they are:

• Clear — both in terms of what the goal is and being able to tell whether you achieve it
• Public — meaning you tell at least one other person what the goal is
• Difficult — you honestly don’t know if you can achieve the goal

So my personal goals for 2019 are as follows:

• Run a total of at least 400km (vs 283km total for 2018)
• Run a half marathon in under 1hr 40mins
• Write 30 blog posts (vs 3 in 2018)
• Take part in a chess competition

My last goal is the one I’m most unsure about. I’ve never competed in chess and as I write this I know only the basic rules of the game. But over the Christmas break, I listened to an interview with Howard Marks, who is among the most impressive and articulate people I’ve seen speak. He mentioned that most of the investors he knows are game players (whether backgammon, bridge or chess). Obviously, correlation is not causation — but I’m still interested in seeing if spending some time playing a strategic game is helpful in other areas of life.

Let’s see how it goes.