A year ago I wrote down my goals that I hoped to accomplish during 2023 and now is the right time to take stock on what happened this year, how I did against those stated goals, and what I’m looking forward to in this coming year.

I categorized my various goals into career, health, adventure, and mind. When it comes to my career I redacted most of the goals but the few I wrote down I did not achieve. I did not get super into LLMs and I can’t really bring myself to get excited about the AI hype-train. I simultaneously did not take part in interviewing at all but I do think my work had a sizable impact and I’m proud of what I accomplished here. There is still a lot more to do but I believe I made the most of the opportunities I was given and delivered on the promises I made.

Jumping to my goals around adventure I definitely fulfilled those:

• Live in San Francisco for a month and work out of Census HQ
• Travel alone to a country that speaks a foreign language
• 2-day motorcycle trip across the Moroccan desert
• Wild card adventure

I traveled alone to Brazil last Christmas and stayed there for all of January, living for a bit in Porto Alegre and then in Rio, where I made friends, learned Portuguese, and worked remotely. That was fun and rewarding and it helped me regain some of the confidence in myself that I’d lost. I did not do the 2-day motorcycle trip but I did move to SF in October and now I’m living here and working out of the Census office and it’s been great so far. I’ve been meeting new people, making new friends, bought a motorcycle, and overall been really enjoying living in a new city for the first time in my life. I also traveled to Portugal with some college friends in the Summer and traveled around the entire country from Lisbon to Albufeira to Porto. We befriended a couple Dutch travelers, a Ukrainian refugee, and some Portuguese locals to make for an exciting experience. I’m more than satisfied with the adventures I’ve partaken in this year.

My goals around my mind focused on my communication and more specifically:

• Post at least once a month on this blog
• Share my writing more publicly
• Add a blogroll of other independent blogs I am inspired by
• Write some non-technical posts about topics such as education, my illness, etc.

I did not post once a month but I’m happy with how much I’ve written. I released 10 posts this year and I have at least one more (maybe two) to come before the end of the year. Ultimately the quantity is less important than the quality with writing and I do believe the quality of my writing is improving while also engaging with more interesting topics. I wrote more non-technical posts such as my experiences developing then living with an autoimmune problem, my move to SF, my growing appreciation for the changing seasons (something I don’t really get in SF), and why believing can be the difference between succeeding and failing. I also wrote some more technical posts about career and tech including the Software Crisis, the 6 questions that I regularly think about and would love to see answered/solved in my lifetime, the importance of thinking short and long, and what the NFL taught me about business.

I did not really share my writing more publicly and I’m still quite embarassed when I learn that people I know in real life read my blog but more people in my life have definitely been reading it and I’ve even gained some job opportunities from this blog in the past year. I’ve also expanded the site to include a blogroll as well as a reading list of books I find valuable and I hope to continue expanding it to include more things beyond just blog posts/essays.

So for all of those above goals I’m pretty happy with their outcomes but my greatest frustrations and failures surround my goals for my health:

• Weigh 155 lbs by EOY
• Run 10 miles at a pace of 8 minutes a mile
• Be capable of performing a split
• Perform reps on the ab wheel from a standing position

The only somewhat success I had here was around running. Near the end of this Spring I canceled my gym membership and just began running and doing calisthenics and it was a phenomenal decision. Leaving the office at 5pm and having the beautiful summer New York weather did not inspire strong workouts indoors under fluorescent lights so instead I spent that time running and exercising outside which gave me an opportunity to start running seriously. Up to that point I’d run 6 miles once in my life and my average run was around 2 to 3 miles. A couple months later on September 11 I ran 10 miles for the first time in my life with an average pace of 8:41/mi. Over the next two weeks I ran 10 miles two more times at paces of 8:54/mi and 9:04/mi. Then last month I ran 11 miles at 8:48/mi. My aerobic endurance is higher than its ever been and I can comfortably run 4 miles on my worst days when I’ve had shitty sleep, no food, and feeling weak. At this point my average run is about 5-6 miles and I’m working on improving my speed. At the start of this month I ran 5 miles at 7:58/mi. I am happy with my progress towards this goal but I could have gone even further. Recently I’ve started lifting again 2 days a week and I can immediately notice that slowing me down and making it harder to push the distances but it’s worth it as the weather becomes colder again. I have no desire to push the distance beyond 10 miles in any material way mostly because 1) it takes a long time and it’s hard to regularly find multiple hours to dedicate just to a single run and 2) aerobic endurance is just one component of my overall fitness and I don’t want to maximize that at the expense of everything else. In my opinion you see dramatically diminishing returns to increasing distance beyond 10 miles. So for now I’m focusing on keeping my average run length at around 6 miles with occasional 10 milers and pushing the speed.

Apart from that I failed at all my other health goals. I didn’t even work on doing a split and performing a rep from the ab wheel in a standing position so those were failures but the worst failure is around my bodyweight. I do not currently weight 155lbs and I instead weigh 145lbs — the same weight as when I started the year. I did gain weight this year reaching 149lbs on two different occasions but proceeded to lose the weight every time due to traveling, moving, and other general stressors. I’m now unhappily plateaued at the same weight as when I started and I consider this an utter failure. Ironically enough the part of the year I saw the most success in gaining weight were the summer months when I was running consistently and doing calisthenics.

The biggest bottleneck around my weight as well as my general happiness and ability to achieve the rest of my goals is the allergies to dairy and gluten that I developed three years ago. These allergies are highly problematic because they severely limit my access to otherwise healthy calories and nutrients that my body could use (basically all the calories and nutrition from most salads come from their cheese components). High quality dairies and glutens contain critical nutrients for overall health and are often far healthier than modern alternatives like fake butters and other processed foods that are chock full of vegetable oils. Currently if I eat these foods, however, I will experience severe inflammation, bloating, a weakened immune system, and excess fatigue. The inflammation in my gut will prevent efficient metabolization of the other foods I eat and will make my various tendons and joints more susceptible to injuries while exercising. My energy levels will drop, the pain will cause brain fog, and ultimately I will find myself sleeping for longer periods so I can recover. I wrote about my experience when these allergies first developed and how physically and mentally painful and exhausting it was to constantly have my body attacking itself due to gluten. I was in constant pain, lost a ton of weight, and became a shell of myself. I simply cannot go back to that.

It is because of these restrictions that my diet is actually the most important piece of all my goals. The allergies force me to spend a lot of cognitive and physical energy maintaining this part of my routine and the consequences of failing here disrupts every other area of my life. Because of these restrictions I cook basically all of my meals which simply adds up to a lot of time. Buying groceries, preparing, cooking, then cleaning, then repeating that 3 times every day can quickly accumulate to many hours each week. At least once or twice a day I have to context switch from whatever I’m doing to think about what groceries I have and what I need to buy, what meals I can make with the supplies I have, what the timing will be for when I’m home and can start cooking, etc. Then I have to spend the time actually cooking and cleaning and I have to do this every… single… day. It’s mentally and physically draining and it takes up far too much time that I could spend working towards my other goals. And most frustratingly is that none of this work compounds. Every single day my caloric situation resets to zero and I have to start the whole process of getting enough calories from scratch. It’s a persistent and daily tax on my productivity.

These dietary allergies also make it almost impossible to rely on getting an easy bite to eat when out and about. While it may not be the healthiest option if you find yourself out late with friends or at the office it’s normally trivial to grab a slice of pizza or a burger. Sure maybe you eat unhealthily for one meal but then you can still sleep at night and have the energy to recover and exercise and get back on your routine the next day. If I find myself in that situation I can either eat a food that will act like poison, go hungry and have a tough time sleeping, or wait until I’m home and make some food quickly which may disrupt my sleep schedule but at least I get the nutrients I need (if I happen to have any ingredients in my fridge). Basically in every case I lose weight or mess up my routine because the inflammation of eating gluten destroys my appetite and not eating means I don’t get the calories I need and not getting enough sleep means I have to skip a workout the next morning. I constantly have anxiety around being spontaneous and social because of worries around finding food and it forces me to play it safe and reduce my surface area of luck more than I’d like. Reducing this dietary burden is one of the highest leverage problems I can solve to free up my time and enable me to achieve my health, career, and personal goals.

Meal prep can help reduce this burden but it’s not without its problems. For starters I cannot travel with a week’s worth of meal prep so any time I want to go on a week-long trip I’m either confined to getting a place with a proper kitchen (hotels never do and AirBnB’s are hit-or-miss) and buying a bunch of groceries or operating on a caloric deficit for the week. That’s partially why it’s so important for me to gain weight: if I weighed 155-160 lbs with 3-4% more body fat than I have now then I could more easily handle those weeks of traveling on a caloric deficit. As it stands now I have basically no buffer room with my body weight. Secondly, meal prepping isn’t easy! I still need to spend a bunch of time figuring out what to make and then buying groceries and doing the bulk cooking. I should be able to do this but it takes discipline so that I do not miss the day I’m supposed to do the cooking. It also lends itself to eating the same thing every day which is not the worst thing — better to eat the same healthy foods every day than varied unhealthy foods — but eating an unvaried diet can make you more susceptible to developing food allergies and I suspect that’s at least partially the cause of me developing allergies to dairy and gluten. If I lose another food group it’s over for my ass. But these roadblocks are surmountable. I need to figure out what a somewhat varied meal plan is that I can make in bulk at the start of the week and just pull from that throughout the week. I’ll still have to spend time reheating and cleaning for every meal but in a pinch I can rely on a microwave and eat right out of the tupperware. It’s definitely an improvement over cooking every meal from scratch and I’ve had a lot of success with it in the past I just haven’t developed a proper routine for it since moving to SF.

There’s another solution besides meal prepping and that’s simply to cure my allergies altogether. When it comes to my goals for 2024 this is the only one that really matters to me. By the end of 2024 I must be able to eat gluten and dairy again without any adverse reactions. I need to dedicate serious time to figuring out how to make that happen and I’m willing to forego a lot to accomplish such a feat. I firmly believe curing these allergies is possible and I have the inklings of a plan for how to do it but I need to sit down and make the plan concrete. It’s gotten to the point where I feel significantly hindered in my other pursuits because of these dietary problems and I’m willing to make a big sacrifice to get back to where I am. I’ll give up my net worth, my job, and all my other goals for the year if it means I can get back to a fully healthy and functioning body. As long as I have my health I can get back to where I am with ease. I have some other goals besides this but they’re all secondary.

You can sum up my goals for 2024 as:

• Cure my dietary allergies
• Run 10 miles @ 8:00/mi
• Weigh 155 lbs by EOY
• Find a wife