My 2016 Annual Review

Time for my 2016 annu­al review.

I’ll do my best to answer three ques­tions in this post: ¹This format is inspired by James Clear’s annu­al reviews.

What went well this year?
What did­n’t go so well this year?
What am I work­ing toward?

Here we go:

1. What Went Well This Year?

Cision PR Influencer Award. After being nom­in­ated for five years, I got the Cision Scandinavia’s PR Influencer Award. It’s always debat­able wheth­er the right per­son or not won, but the big thing about win­ning this award was the feel­ing of grat­it­ude for being recognized.

TEDx. I talked about stu­pid major­it­ies in Östersund, Sweden. In ret­ro­spect, I don’t feel I gave the best talk pos­sible. I acci­dent­ally switched my slideshow to an older ver­sion, so I had to impro­vise a lot. Right before going up, I was nervous (pub­lic speak­ing usu­ally does­n’t make me nervous), so I messed up my English. On top of this, I had a severe eye infec­tion and a high fever. There are many excuses right there, but that’s not the point; I’m still proud of being allowed to be part of the TEDx tra­di­tion — and I want to go at it again and better!

Better sem­inars. Before this year, I focused a bit more on giv­ing bet­ter sem­inars. I’ve always seen myself as a prac­ti­tion­er who some­times talks to people about what I do and how they can do it. This year, I wanted to take my pub­lic speak­ing more ser­i­ously and pre­pare more adequately for each talk. In 2016, I aver­aged more than one talk per month and did well (con­sist­ently above 4.3÷5).

Hard reset (part one). I got sick at the end of the year (a severe eye infec­tion). I could not put in any screen time for almost two months, but that was almost enough to crash my solo busi­ness. As a res­ult, I almost burnt myself out while try­ing to keep up des­pite not being well. So, I resigned from all my cli­ent pro­jects and focused on get­ting well. It was a dif­fi­cult step to take, but I’m happy that I did, and I have no regrets.

2. What Didn’t Go So Well This Year?

Hard reset (part two). Even if I’m happy about how I handled the “crash,” it could’ve been avoided alto­geth­er. I mis­man­aged my sleep, exer­cise routine, and diet through­out the year. And I had no backup plan for hand­ling busi­ness in case of get­ting sick for longer than a week.

“Life as usu­al.” Looking back, I did­n’t do much this year to explore life. I just woke up daily to tackle whatever was in front of me. To man­age my time and energy in some way, I uncon­sciously avoided cre­at­ive ‘out­side-the-box’ endeav­ours, social events, trav­el­ling with the fam­ily, and hav­ing fun for the sake of hav­ing a good time. In this react­ive state, the year just flew by.

3. What Am I Working Toward?

Energy man­age­ment. If you don’t man­age your life, it will man­age you. In 2017, I will strive to explore vari­ous ways of put­ting myself back into the driver­’s seat of my own life. And this calls for a change of strategy!