The first of the three sub-parts of my End of Campaign Year 2023 review.
What did I learn this year?
Overall, I gained a ton of new skills
Seriously.
- The year kicked off with adult swimming lessons, and now I can swim 1,000m front crawl pretty consistently, without being too knackered to carry on with my day.
- I started learning guitar, and now I have a new hobby. I’m even starting to sound OK now!
- To get a dog aboard the boat, I learned metal wire swaging.
- After sailing the boat across the Channel – at night – I passed my RYA Day Skipper course.
- I’m now licensed to operate a marine VHF radio.
Fitness is being maintained – sort of
The sad fact is I’m not a 25-year-old military man anymore. It hurts to type that, but there we go.
My years of training twice a day, five days a week are probably history. Even if that isn’t true, I’m not training with anything like the same level of intensity.
Still, I’ve managed to keep some kind of deliberate fitness activity going twice a week, with some kind of active weekend most weekends.
It’s not really enough to counterbalance the damage of desk life, but it’s OK.
Overall, I’ll give myself a five out of ten for fitness this year. OK, could be better.
I started meditation
Actually, I’ve basically stopped doing that. Now I wonder why I’m stressed.
Turns out I’m a moron who doesn’t learn.
This could probably be picked back up for 2024.
Archery fell off the wagon
Ugh! I was enjoying it, but when things get in the way and something has to give, it’s generally archery.
The main reason is that it starts at 1800hrs. I need to finish work at 1700hrs to make it, which in law is basically not going to happen often.
Surprise, surprise – I don’t attend much.
Even though this isn’t going well and I’m probably not going to improve at this rate, I can’t help but feel like I need to be kinder to myself here. You can’t do everything all the time. I still like it, but it’s just not a priority right now.
I said I’d do more networking at work
And it has paid off more than once.
Sure, I’ve been to a few events which were frankly an energy drain, but on the whole I’ve met new people and brought in some extra work from clients. Seems like a skill that will transfer over to other things.
What I said I’d do
On the 2023 Campaign Plan…
Accept as many networking events as possible
Continue with sports
Read more fiction
What I did
I did it!
Let this slip up. My bad.
Did it. It was nice.
Final thoughts on this section
My year didn’t go anything like the way I expected it to.
On the one hand, I didn’t do the things I said I would. That’s not ideal.
However, on balance, I learned a ton of new stuff that will pay dividends later.
On the whole, I’ve made much more progress investing in myself than I thought I would, and that’s hopefully going to make my financial independence campaign easier, too.
