50th Year Goals - One Year Later
How did I do?
One year ago I set out in these pages personal goals for my 50th year of life. Well, it is time for a recap and some accountability.
As I said in the original post, I reserved the right to amend the list. Well . . . I am taking that very liberally. The post was titled “Goals in the 50th Year”, and I didn’t turn 50 until late July. Therefore, I still have almost 7 months to go on these!
Seriously, as a completionist seeking reform and because I’m not one to simply make excuses for failure to finish and let that be it, I am going to hold myself to finishing these in the coming months. Those that I did finish will stay finished—I’m not adding to the goal or bothering to count further progress. I will try to keep up the good work in those cases where the goal was toward good work.
On to the review. (I removed the bullet points from the goals to hopefully better identify the results.)
Sprint 50 miles - cumulative, of course, and I do mean sprint—full speed
I did not reach this goal. I needed 88,000 yards. I achieve just over 25,000. I got off to a slow start, began making real progress, promptly incurred an injury (plantar fasciitis in the right foot, which I continued running on after brief rest resulting in rupture—“That’s one way to fix it,” said the pediatrist I spoke with afterwards.). Upon rest and recovered proceeded to get PF in the left foot. This sidelined me for weeks from running. Turns out hard pavement is hard on the body. I’ve switched to a rugby field and plan to complete this.
Read 50 books - deep skimming non-fiction and quitting any if they prove not worth finishing counts as long as I have meaningfully attempted them. This relates to the tradeoff thoughts below the list.
Nope. I only read seven. I blame my poor habit of reading TOO MUCH other stuff. Namely blogs, which in many cases are posts of 5,000-10,000 words. A few of these amount to a book in length. Nevertheless, this is failure.1
Enter 50 Oklahoma counties - some might say “cross”, but I’m too literal for that.
Achieved! Exactly 50 of Oklahoma’s 77. Because of my extensive driving for work and some pleasure, I only had to deviate a little from the path I would otherwise have taken to make sure I got this done. Driving around Oklahoma is underrated. The state has a diverse landscape despite the reputation, and many views are truly beautiful.
Present in 50 prospective-client meetings at work - I am not in complete control of this being attained, but it is reasonable.
Done with ease. I do a lot of meetings. Very grateful for my work and my clients.
Watch 50 movies or TV shows with family members.
Achieved by the letter of the law; failed by my amended goal. I decided to only count unique titles. I watched 100, but those only spanned 19 unique titles. Basically, I wanted to watch more movies rather than episodes within a TV series. Still have work to do here.
Go on 50 dates with my wife - just her and I; walks, etc. can count; simply watching a movie or TV show at home does not.
Sadly a failure on my part. I only did 25. It would have been easily achieved without the TV/movie rider because of the TV episodes in particular. There is a good chance I missed counting one or two, but the failure is all mine and remains. This is a testament to how difficult it is to make time for one another—my failure still.
Try 50 new restaurants - widely interpreted such that a new, non-chain coffee shop would count.
Got there, just barely. 50 on the nose with the last one coming on December 30th by luck of my wife suggesting a dinner date that afternoon. Phew.
Go to The Library Bar and Grill 50 times.
Failure with an asterisk. Only got 15. The asterisk is that I became very dissatisfied with the service there for the first half of the year which came to a head in June including me blowing up at the manager (sorry, kinda not sorry, for losing my temper). The good news is they made dramatic changes and this place (my favorite and neighborhood bar) is back in great shape. Achieving this one probably would have implied achieving the date goal as well.
Mix and drink 50 new-to-me cocktails - leaning heavily on Peter Suderman for help on this one.
Achieved right at 50. I was really flying through this one and then took a turn for the complacent as old fashioneds and other staples became my go to. Proud? to say I buckled down and made it happen timing it out for a great ending run right at the close of the year—had my 50th, Suderman’s champagne old fashion, new year’s eve evening.
Create 50 adventures and challenges for my kids along with doing first-time activities with them - this would be everything from scavenger hunts to puzzles as well as goals to help them reach to games we’ve never played together or places they haven’t been.
Failure, and I, for one, blame the children . . . the kids these days . . . Okay, I don’t really blame them. I did get to 21. This one was probably the most difficult and still will be. To my credit it is because I’ve done a lot of things with my kids already. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Also, the kids have pretty full schedules despite definitely not being highly scheduled kids. They have their own lives and create their own challenges.
Write and publish (on this blog) 50 poems
I’ve already acknowledged this failure as well as the plan to get it done—just not before the end of the 50th year given the plan as outlined.
Write 50 *****redacted*****
I did not do this, but I will. My fault lies in making the perfect the enemy of the good. Like so many things in life (writing and otherwise), the answer is “go do it”. There is no perfect moment or “when the time is right” or other BS.
Complete having visited all 50 states - admittedly a somewhat easy one being that there are only two (Alaska and Vermont). Still these are fairly distant and remote from Oklahoma.
Success! I visited Vermont in July and Alaska in August.
Have 50 conversations or deep engagements with (various) AIs.
Easily done. And I’m not just counting searches in Chrome that default to Gemini. However, one might quibble with the “deep engagement” part.
Daily (exercise) do 50 of any two:
Pushups
Sit-ups
Curls
Burpees
Other that is comparable
Did this. But I didn’t do it as well as I probably should have since my go-tos of pushups and sit-ups are easy while burpees and harder workouts were avoided.
Daily (other):
Read on average 50 blog posts or articles
Done with ease. Note how this interfered with others above—not just reading books. Does reading by the fire with your wife reading by your side count as a date? Asking for a friend . . . (spoiler, it does not).
Bi-Weekly:
Listen to 50 hours of podcasts on average.
Super easy yes. Did I mention I drive a lot?
Quarterly:
Publish 50 blog posts.
Q1 - Failure, only did 39.
Q2 - Failure, only did 30.
Q3 - Failure, only did 7 (ugh).
Q4 - Failure, only did 23.
Bike 50 miles.
Achieved. The only difficulty was when weather interfered or short days of winter, early spring, and late fall. I don’t ride in the dark for safety, and I work during the day.
Eat 50 pounds of fruit and salads - I estimate this would be per week about six large apples or oranges or comparable fruit quantities and four “big salads”.
Done and fairly easy. Had to be a little disciplined here. But it wasn’t hard and should have been easier than it even was.
Eat 50 eggs - “It seemed a nice, round number.“
Super easy yes. So easy that in pure Cool-Hand-Luke style I amended it for the fourth quarter to be only hard-boiled eggs. And no, the rest of the time I didn’t do it by counting eggs as an ingredient.
Summary
I am very glad I did this. While I’ve done lots of things like it in the past, this was the broadest effort by far. It definitely made me more intentional about things I wanted to do including aspirations as well as things I do regularly anyway. I would say it moderately improved my output and process.
It taught me some lessons about tradeoffs, goals, and planning. By being such a demanding tick list, it gave me insight into the shortcomings of that system, which I developed into this post.
While it might seem so, this really wasn’t the purpose of my existence in the 50th year. It was something operating largely in the background giving me nudges toward some things and away from others.
Lastly, it taught me a hands-on lesson in letting go (or hitting pause) and not falling for the sunk-cost fallacy or one I would call the prior-commitment fallacy. The items I failed on were often ones I chose to set aside or wanted to do correctly or not do at all . . . for now at least.
Some goals are done and some are left to be done. I look forward to fully completing them . . . or not.
The books read were the following:
Title | Author
20 Answers: Anti-Catholic Myths | Jimmy Akin
Thinking In Bets | Annie Duke You Will Not Stampede Me | Bryan Caplan
Trusting God in the Present | Fr. Jacques Philippe
The Psychology of Money | Morgan House
To Kill A Mockingbird | Harper Lee
Labor Econ Versus The World | Bryan Caplan