Annual reflections are a good little exercise to try.  It helps put things into perspective by taking a look at what went right, wrong, nowhere and somewhere in between in your life.  This helps with planning on future direction and gaining insight.  I would encourage everybody to give it a go.  At the end of the year is completely arbitrary as I don’t subscribe to the new years resolution mentality.  If it can wait until the new year than the burning desire for achieving the goal just isn’t there yet.  You could just as easily do an annual review mid year.  In fact doing a semi-annual review wouldnt be such a bad idea but if you’ve never done anything like it before than starting with one is a good start.  Something I am very bad at is measuring and recording results.  This leaves me doing inaccurate guesswork with skewed and crappy memory.  Don’t do that.  Record and measure results whenever possible and save the guesswork.  Be as specific as possible.

What can I really say this year? 2009 was a year of epic lows and mountain highs.  2010 was much more low key.  I did some traveling.  Hit up a cruise and went to some excellent European countries.  Great fun.  Met some great people during these times and had some really positive Couchsurfing experiences.  I will likely write about that in the future.  Quit my job and got back into school, which I put off for too long.  I have been very happy with this decision.  Got back into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and realized a healthy, tougher me is also a better BJJ student on the mats.  So for me, 2010 was like transitioning into a new and exciting phase in my life.  Lots of tiny little discoveries and aha! moments that have made it quite rewarding.

I didn’t define many goals for 2010 and thus did not accomplish many goals.  This was a mistake.  I tried a machine gun approach and because of this learned a ton but in terms of measurable success it was negligible.  Still, in terms of overall life satisfaction I raised the bar for myself.  I expect 2011 to be an equally slow process of discovery and adventure.  The one thing I lacked the most in 2010 was consistency, which imo is one of the most important things you could do to achieving any type of noticeable gains.  I plan on being much more consistent in my endeavours going forward.

I was amazed how tough 2010 was for some of my friends and family.  This affected me more than most things going on in my own life.  Lots of marriages and breakups and highs and lows hit me with smiles when things were good and poopiness when things were bad.  I felt it more this year for reasons I cannot explain.  It did seem like it was a string of bad news after bad news more than usual.  No worries. Just a random series of events.  Good news always follows.  I hope my friends know that walking through fire only makes them stronger.

That’s it, may 2011 bring you success and happiness.  I have a good feeling it will 🙂