30

Introduction

Turning thirty Is a bit anti-climactic. I feel—surprisingly—like I'm on an aircraft that has reached cruising altitude. Certainly not at 37,000 feet, but lower. Like on a short flight across the state. The plane is a little noisier, and the seat is not as comfortable, but at this level, you can still look out the window and enjoy the view.

With a few life milestones checked off the list I'm mostly ambivalent about this supposed age milestone. The birthday seems that it will come and go, like others before it, and I'll be thinking about the next year all the same.

Therefore, allow me to recap my successes and failures from my thirtieth year so I can start working on a list for next year.

Primary Goals

My primary goals are goals that either lasted a good part of the year, were the most important to me, or were at the top of a goal category for the year. This year, I split my goal categories into Health, Family, Personal, Home, and Business.

Double Business Revenue

Since I started freelancing four years ago, I've tried to double my business revenue year-over-year. This has been a helpful goal, especially because I started small. It's led me to evaluate my contracts yearly, look for new opportunities, and consider how my skills and experience impact my contract valuation.

So far, I've been successful—more or less—in achieving this goal since I began. However, this year, I'll fall short.

This year would have been by far the largest jump. Opposite of what I would have liked, I spent the first few weeks of October not earning money. Then, after switching to a different contract, there was some miscommunication that put me out of work for two weeks and part-time for ten weeks. Even if I had worked those weeks, it would not have been enough.

I didn't have enough revenue streams or the hourly rate to get to the number, and it was apparent early on in the year.

Regardless, I'm not overly bummed out about missing the target. It was a goal that was going to run its course. Although I missed the "doubling", I still saw an increase of 25% in contract earnings.

This goal was not completely successful, but I'm thankful that I was able to grow—and that I still see opportunities for growth and improvement in the future.

Six months of BJJ 3x a Week

Last year, my wife and I had a baby. With all of that craziness and change in life happenings, I decided to stop training BJJ. I never intended to quit; I even kept paying during those months. I just took a break.

Therefore, this year, I vowed to return to the gym in October and train BJJ three times a week. To be clear, I only went to the gym twice a week, but on a third day during the week, I would drill on a BJJ dummy at home, journal, and practice techniques from class.

Making things more interesting was I also was starting work again after paternity leave at the same time I was getting back in the gym. So, I established a work schedule that made getting to class relatively easy.

Although the details of the goal were specific, the general goal was to re-establish a habit. I'm happy to say the habit is back, and this goal was a success.

Monthly Date Night

Making up one of two family goals was a monthly date night (without the baby). My relationship with my wife has changed a lot now that our family is bigger and it's not just us two.

One of the small ways that I could make things better and help out was to plan a monthly date night. This could be dinner, lunch, or breakfast. Any meal was game.

Having a monthly date night, usually on a Friday night, was a guilty pleasure of a goal. It wasn't hard, most months, to make the time. Consequently, this goal was a success!

Landscape Backyard on West Side

Last year, I completed the front side yard as part of a long project during a good part of my paternity leave. Despite working on the front side yard, I had been thinking about and brainstorming what to do in the back yard on the west side.

I wanted to landscape it by bringing in dirt, planting trees, moving rocks, and building a wood shed. I spent lots of time last year observing front and side yards that I liked. Occasionally I would take pictures of landscapes I liked. Then, I looked up the species of plants that I wanted, measured the amount of dirt, and made a budget for the project.

The sideyard makeover the previous year was more expensive than I thought, so I wanted a better projection of how much this would cost so I wouldn't feel so uneasy when I went to buy a $250 tree.
I drew a sketch for the layout and landscaping that I wanted.

Last summer my neighbor took down a few large Ponderosa pines so I became the owner of a large stock of wood. Unfortunately, I didn't have a good place to keep it. I decided to build a wood shed with stone walls (using stones from the yard). You can see one of the walls in the sketch above. Similar to the landscaping, I drew a sketch of the stone walls detailing the layout and dimensions.

Neither the landscaping nor the stone walls turned out exactly how I drew them up, but having an initial plan went a long way.

Working part-time as I transitioned between contracts was unfortunate for my revenue goal but perfect for my landscaping and side yard goal. I had more time in the spring to choose the landscaping, planting, and laying the stone for the walls.

Above is a picture I took still constructing the roof. I put a lot of time, sweat, and money in the side yard this year for this goal but still can't say that I'm done. A few remaining items are:

• Concrete edging
• A roof over wood storage
• Bark or mulch

Unfortunately, this goal was not completed but finishing it off next year doesn't look like too much trouble.

Go Camping with Family Twice

The second of two family goals was to put in the time planning and going on two camping trips as a family.

Camping was an important part of my life growing up, so I wanted to make sure that we had it on schedule this summer.

The first trip we took was in early spring at Spring Canyon on Lake Roosevelt. We got a group site and enjoyed exceptional weather with family.

Our second trip, a few weeks later, was out to Farragut State Park in Idaho with my brother-in-law and his wife. The weather wasn't that great but we had fun and found out that our daughter was going to be getting a new cousin next year!

Just like that, we had completed the goal of two camping trips and it wasn't even the end of June! However, that didn't stop us from fitting in one more trip the weekend after our second trip (a very busy couple of weeks).

Our third trip was out to Marcus Island, also on Lake Roosevelt, with neighbors, family, and friends of friends. We felt pretty good about our camping abilities at this point but were worn out after three trips in a month and a half.

I don't think I'll make this a goal in future years because we usually know enough people who want to go camping which gives us the opportunity to get out a couple of times a summer. A success nonetheless.

Create Wonderland Backpacking Website

Rounding out what I considered to be my primary goals was creating a tool for exploring backpacking opportunities in Mount Rainier National Park.

The Wonderland Trail is a 90-ish-mile trail that circumvents Mount Rainier. I've been lucky enough to backpack on the trail on a number of occasions. Having planned multiple trips I'm pretty familiar with the area and have spent plenty of time looking at different trails, camps, and potential trips on maps.

It's a large trail system with all kinds of different places to start, places to camp, and things to see.

I went after this goal fairly aggressively at the beginning part of the year planning what a user interface may look like, where or how I would get data, and starting the development process. I even bought a few books on SQL thinking I may try to couple this application with a better understanding of databases (instead of using SQL I've started working with graph databases instead).

Accessing the necessary data was easier than I predicted, but getting it to work with the user interface took some time.

In December of 2022, I published Wonderland Trail Backpacking Planner, which is a post on this blog explaining the application and marking the completion of the first phase of this project.

After writing the post, I still went back and made some changes, but I considered that the end, and successful completion of the goal thus far.

The application is viewable in its current form at https://wonderland-backpacking-planner.netlify.app/

Secondary Goals

Secondary goals are a very small step down from primary goals. Sometimes they are simple one-off events, or longer-term goals that are intriguing but may require too much time and are low priority.

Conversely, some secondary goals are really important to me and have been repeat goals for some years now.

Create Hiking Books

I've been on a few hikes and I have a lot of pictures. Also, I wrote a series of blog posts titled Hiking from Coachella Valley a couple of years ago with descriptions and pictures. It's nice having it all digitally online, but I wanted to take my backpacking and hiking series posts and put them into a book. Likewise, I wanted to go through all my hiking pictures and rediscover photos from across the years for a photo book. In total that was three books:

• Hiking
• Hiking from Coachella Valley Series
• Backpacking

I researched online applications to use which is quite the rabbit hole when it comes to photo books. There are a lot of different companies with tons of different options for sizing, pricing, paper, and with different user interfaces.

Two of the books I wanted to make had a lot of text because I wanted to include the entire hike or backpacking post alongside the images. That helped narrow things down.

For Hiking from Coachella Valley and Backpacking: 2017-2022 I used the company Blurb and their desktop application BookWright.

The Hiking Landscapes book was only images. I was impressed with Mimeo's book-building interface which I thought was easy to use and convenient because you can build photo books in your Macbook Photos application. This made getting the pictures together way easier.

With all three books made, and my goal complete, I found out I really liked making these books! I kept going. I made two more.

One, again using Mimeo, was a photo album with pictures from Thru-Hiking the Enchantments in October.

Finally, I used the Macbook application MILK to create a smaller photobook from a family vacation to Sunriver, OR in 2021.

Now I really can't stop. I have a few more lined up to make next year.

Go Backpacking

I spend a pretty good chunk of time thinking about, planning, and preparing for backpacking trips—even though I only go on one or two a year.

Throughout the year I found myself spending time to make sure I had gear, writing up an itinerary, and researching trips. Because it draws so much of my attention I needed to make it a goal. Albeit a secondary goal, I would feel guilty using this time for backpacking when I have other goals to accomplish if it wasn't a goal itself.

Working in tandem with my plans to go backpacking was the work I did to decrease my pack weight. My uncle has been super into ultra-light backpacking working to get his pack weight down into the 12 lbs range. I don't have any allusions that I'll be able to do that but I was able to get my pack weight down from 45-50 lbs for a two-night trip to around 30 lbs. It was a very comfortable weight and I was excited to try out my new gear setups during this summer's trip.

In July, my cousin, uncle, my uncle's friend, and I went on a two-night trip in the central cascades to Pete and Spectacle Lake.

You can read the full trip report in my post, Backpacking to Pete Lake So We Can Hike to Spectacle Lake.

No Alcohol in January

For the past few years, I've taken a month off drinking alcohol. I think I've been doing this for five or six years now. It started as a preparatory measure for a marathon and I've continued it each year.

The twist this year was that I was going to take January off, instead of my usual choice, February. Over the years I've found that January, despite being a few extra days, is easier than February.

Anyway, it was another successful year and the streak continues.

No Podcasts for One Month (Feb.)

Instead of refraining from alcohol in February, I decided to give up a different habit: listening to podcasts. I've spent countless hours listening to podcasts since I began listening to them in 2016. Truly an untold amount of time. Sometimes in the car, sometimes at work, while I eat lunch, and I really haven't ever stopped since I started.

Worse yet sometimes I listen to them when I'm in the car with my family or around my family. There was something that started to feel wrong about that. So, I resolved to give it up for a month. I didn't give up listening to things on my phone in general though. I still could listen to an audiobook but in the spirit of the goal, it would have to be if I was doing nothing else.

It was nice, actually, to lie down at night or sit and listen to an audiobook. I usually only listen to things when I'm doing something else. I also rediscovered a lot of music.

This was a needed goal this year and its design was to help me realize what I'm missing when I mindlessly find the next podcast to play in the background when I could be putting more focus on what I'm actually doing.

I am happy to say I made it the full month and that this goal was a success!

Family Savings

I really like saving money. I used to wake up early when I worked in the golf industry and set money aside the morning I got paid. It feels good, and I was fortunate to be able to do so.

I set a goal to save a certain amount this year because last year we had a baby and the year before that we had a wedding. Back-to-back it makes for a pretty expensive two-year stretch.

We did not reach the goal that I set, but I'm thankful we were able to put some money away.

Retirement Savings

Unlike the Family Savings goal, the retirement savings goal was for myself. It was a bit more modest but still important. While I was transitioning careers and changing my life situation I neglected putting money away in retirement for a while.

Also unlike the Family Savings, I was able to accomplish this goal.

Goal Approach

Last year, I mentioned that Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman on the Waking Up app had a pretty big effect on me.

Instead of hopelessly slamming against time, trying to be more productive so that I could, "get everything done", I wanted to try the approach he discusses. As he says, we'll never get everything done because we'll always find more to do, but that realization can help us move away from productivity "hacks" that don't give us fulfillment, to choosing the important things that we want to spend our time on and patiently letting them take as long as necessary.

However, that wasn't all the recordings offered. I also tried limiting my work in progress by category, rethinking my expectations for planned time, and trying to understand that interruptions by people in my life (like friends, or family) are not afronts to my future perfect self. They are, in fact, part of my life: likely the part of life that makes it worth living.

Limiting Work in Progress

One important approach I tried this year was limiting my work in progress. It starts with creating a few categories for my life (i.e., fitness, home, family, work) and trying to only have one thing you're focusing on in those areas at a time. Then, if you think of something else you want to get done, put it on a list of things to do later. As Burkeman points out, you may think that this poses a problem because you're creating a "to do" list that you'll never get done. However, you're never going to get everything done anyway so you're expectations are not aligned in the first place.

Limiting my work in progress this year was helpful. If I had free time there was a very small list of things that I could possibly do with that free time. And from that list, there was a smaller number of things that were reasonable to do at that time in the day, or on that particular day. One category this was helpful in was fitness. Instead of trying to get to the BJJ gym to train multiple times a week and achieve some sort of physical strength goal by lifting weights, I focused on one. And if there wasn't time for the other that was OK. Maybe after establishing my gym habit I could deprioritize training days and focus on a physical strength goal.

That's precisely what I did. I focused the first six months on making time for BJJ training but after that six-month period, I started working with my sister, who is a physical therapist, to fix my lower back problems. The program she had me on was my new focus, so I wasn't trying to do both at once. One took precedence and sometimes crowded out the other. I was able to have both, just not at the same time.

Limiting my work in progress has also changed my expectations on what I should expect to get over the next month, year, or decade. It's been harder to think about slowing down on projects or working on less at a time. But, I think focusing on finishing the small number of projects I have now, will prove more beneficial than continuously adding projects and growing my work in progress.

Conclusion

As podcaster Marshall Kosloff put it, after being asked what's different about turning thirty, he remarked that you realize you're no longer "up and coming".

I've been thinking about, and trying to figure out, what that means because I think it offers insight into how I've felt about the transition out of my twenties, too.

My life—and me—have changed a lot in ten years. I struggle to wrap my mind around what the next ten will mean or how my expectations and hopes will change for the next few years of my life.

Despite my musings, it's been a satisfying year full of good memories, health, and goals.