2023 new year's resolutions

26. Dec, 2022

Every year i make resolutions on this site and call them "yearly goals" or similar.

But I have become old fashioned in between and thought I might as well call it what it is 🙃

In 2022 my resolutions were:

Be able to speak basic Dutch and find friends in Netherlands
Build my first Ruby robot (hardware programming)
Get deeper knowledge about aesthetics
Play more

It's a bit sad to sit back and look at the list now. None of it achieved (several has progress on them though). Has to be the first year this happened :/ Getting another child, settling in a new country, making a big company turnaround and dealing with all the drama that followed and then buying a house in Haarlem in need of renovation was definitely already a plate too full.

But what did I then achieve in 2022? I matured a lot mentally in 2022 and grew more confidence in making my own decisions - both privately and professionally. As a side effect I took a distance from all those people wanting to give me advice. Not only a distance, I started disliking when it happened. Everyone who gives me advice, but has not had the same experience as I had or even remotely similar, just come across as arrogant to me now. And I can't shake my new feeling that a lot of people would be better off keeping their mouth shut more. It's not a positive feeling, but I feel stronger now that I listen less. There has been too many naive or foolish whispers in my ears in prior years. And of course I rarely asked for that advice. They simply just felt they needed to teach me how the world worked...

The positive effect of this, is that I am super conscious about making opinions myself now. A lot of people heard me say "I don't know", "I am no expert" or "Please ask someone experienced" in 2022. And I am proud about that. We need less unqualified opinions thrown around.

Financially it was a horrible year for me. Losing like 20% of my total net worth (rough estimate, it felt like a lot more). But this seems to be a general trend for entrepreneurs/investors in tech.

My 2023 resolution:

Be able to speak basic Dutch
- Learn all numbers
- Be able to communicate fluently with shops/daycare/strangers on the street
- Be able to read a comic (currently Asterix in Dutch) without using Google Translate

There is only one resolution this year (but with subgoals). I repeat the first failed one from 2022, this time to double down on it.

That's already ambitious. Learning a new language is hard. I have a lot of other things on my plate already, so this shall be THE mission in 2023.

This simplicity theme is not just a thing with my new years resolution. I also made a yearly plan for Morningscore that is the simplest plan I have ever made. By far.

There is really something extremely powerful about simplicity. A key 2022 learning.

I am excited to enter a simple and powerful 2023.

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Karsten Madsen

This is my public diary. My passion is to build cool novel things. My dream is to improve ethics in this world.

Go to my "about page" if you want to read a longer story :)