It’s a bit early to be setting goals for 2021, especially amidst the current global pandemic, but I’m mostly an optimist and I’m excited to see what awaits us in 2021. I’ll be writing a separate post to reflect back on 2020 – most likely the last post of this year to wrap the writing challenge up.
First things first, I’d most likely not doing a writing challenge anymore, at least not “directly”. I’m still contemplating between setting up a challenge for yoga or mobile app development, two of which I’m investing most of my time into right now.
Which brings me to the two big goals I have for myself next year – a 200-hour yoga teacher training certification and a fully-functional native mobile app coded from scratch using Flutter.
200-hour yoga teacher training
After about three years of casual practice from following YouTube videos (thanks Boho Beautiful!), and one year of regular practice with alignment cues and adjustments from certified instructors in studio and online, I think I’m almost ready for a 200-hour yoga teacher training.
That’s not to say I’m ready to start teaching yoga classes, far from that. It’s just that I want to know how to adjust others professionally, give alignment cues, and of course, deepen my own practice. There’s a lot of advanced stuff to learn in the teacher training, which isn’t possible in regular group classes.
I’m personally targeting to join a mid-2021 batch, which was the goal I set early this year, and I intend to stick to it. Thereafter, I’m looking at starting to teach classes one year from then.
To be honest, I’m still not very sure if teaching yoga classes is my kind of thing. Never try, never know, though. Either way, the teacher training is to allow me to deepen my practice with or without attending classes. I imagine myself still attending quite a few classes to get guidance from other more experienced instructors.
Yoga is and will be a big part of my life because of the benefits I’ve reaped from the regular practice over the past few years. Even if I’m not cut out to be a yoga instructor, I’ll still remain a humble yogi and share my love for yoga with other yogis, beginners or advanced practitioners.
Native mobile app development
After building an app using Adalo, which is a very amazing tool to build fairly basic mobile apps without any coding knowledge, and publishing it on both iOS and Android app stores, I’m completely intrigued by mobile app development.
I’m currently going through a web development course, mainly the Javascript parts because the internet kinda runs on Javascript. Concurrently, I’m learning Dart and Flutter too, the programming language to build cross-platform mobile apps and web apps.
I didn’t know Google Ads – the web app I use practically every single day because of work – is built on Flutter, a programming language developed by Google. It’s fairly new compared to React Native, which was developed by Facebook and used to run many of the popular apps we use daily.
I chose Flutter over React Native because of how much easier it is to pick up for someone quite new to Javascript. Many experienced developers who know both languages all say that React Native can definitely get you a job right now, but Flutter is equally strong and easier to learn.
Anyway, I imagine the trend moving forward would be more web-based apps as well as native mobile apps, and knowing app development on top of digital marketing would prove to be very useful in the next five to ten years.
Other goals
Apart from two key goals I want to achieve next year, there are smaller, “softer” goals I have for myself.
Buying a house – Land is limited in Singapore and the population is only going to get bigger and bigger. Getting a house sooner than later is a no-brainer especially since I won’t be going anywhere for the next 20-30 years or even more. We might want to spend our retirement away from the city, but that’d be a plan for the future. We’re saving up now to be prepared to get a house in the near future when we see a unit near my parents’ place (for government subsidies).
Spend more time investing – It’s important to work hard in our careers, but putting our money to work rather than leaving it to accrue meagre interest in the bank is equally as important. Also, investing in a wonderful company doesn’t just benefit us as investors, it also helps the company get the capital they need to help even more people (provided they’re giving good value to its customers and stakeholders).
Grooming more colleagues – This is a very personal goal, yet an important one that will impact many others around me. When I started my first job, I didn’t have someone who was readily available to help me whenever I needed it. And I’m not talking about spoonfeeding – it’s the kind of help when you don’t know what you don’t know, and solving problems that only experience can solve. I want to help many more fresh graduates succeed and achieve their potential, and I have to start with the colleagues in my immediate surroundings first.
Everything here can seem too little to achieve in a year. Trust me, a year flies past very fast for working adults. And with the limited time we all have outside of work, achieving what makes us happy and fulfilled is the least we can do for ourselves.
I hope to achieve everything mentioned here a year from now, because I have a headstart for some of the goals already, so it’s only fair to set higher expectations for myself.
Ask yourself as we reach the end of the year, what do you want to achieve next year? Start now, because before you know it, 2021 will just roll by.
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