“What are your big goals this year? What are you gonna do to top the last one?”

I would hear some variation of that question over and over as 2014 began.

I think the Internet puts a lot of pressure on us to out-achieve ourselves every year. We must leave our great job for a better one. We must make the next great company. We must raise the biggest round. We must make projects that make us famous. We must find a romantic partner much better looking than our last. We must get more likes. We must get more press. We must make the best-of lists. We must set and achieve goals bigger than years past and we must share them in a retrospective blog post at the end of December. We get so lost trying to outdo ourselves (and each other) that we can’t even sit back and appreciate how far we’ve come.

For me, 2013 was the year that out-achieved any year I could imagine (you can see that retrospective here). So what do you do to top it? And then how do you top it the next year?

When first trying to answer those questions, it didn’t take long before I was on the verge of a full-blown life crisis panic attack.

Then I decided to ditch the trajectory and I felt better.

As an experiment, I chose to pursue goals related less to my career (assuming I’d still make work a top priority), and more to other stuff. At the time, I was feeling over-worked and unhealthy, with little time for myself or my friends. So it made sense to create goals that would solve that.

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