I got the inspiration from another blog that I came across to do a year-in-review – I figured it’d be a great way to be grateful for the past year, gauge my growth, and set plans for the next year. So, I dug through Google Photos, Google Calendar, and my contacts list to jog as many memories as I could (and yet, I’m still worried about how much recency bias is clouding this).

Highlights from 2019

• The last day before I flew back home from Uganda, I found a tick on my back. A few weeks later, a ring of bumps showed up around the site, so for a solid few hours I was entertaining the possibility that I had Lyme Disease.

• My Spring Break trip to Mexico City and Puebla with Ariel, Tom, Neil, Anish, and Misha was unforgettable, and truly a first-class experience. I’ll never forget eating tacos de canasta in the middle of CDMX, or the way-too-fancy hotel we found in Puebla for $40/person/night.

• I got the idea of Texas Personal Finance as a club. Even if I never gave it the time it needed, it spawned the personal finance section on my website.

• My summer internship with Popspots taught me to love Austin as a yuppie-local. I learned a ton about groceries, and met a few interesting people. Maybe I’ll be a tech-billionaire one day as a result?

• I had an eventful dinner at Launderette with the parents (and Neel, Madison, and Ariel).

• Edie and Max joined me to start the 2019 BBQ Bonanza. I’ve now been to Snow’s, Kreuz Market, La Barbeque, Valentina’s, Louie Mueller, and Franklin’s. The main takeaway I’ve had is that burnt ends are fantastic and to order one (and only one) pork rib everywhere I go. More broadly, I also started to spend a lot more time with folks in EE.

• I made a trip to Breckenridge with Jimmy and Daniel. We climbed a 13,000 foot mountain together (I wore nylon shorts), Daniel made a seafood paella, and we hit up an absinthe bar.

• The last night I spent with David featured, of course, a game of Jeopardy! I forgot who won, but Madison kept score (and pretty much everyone lost).

• I visited The Yard with Madison. We tried the unofficial-smores-shake, and I made the playlist to accompany it. Despite a year full of ups and downs, I grew a lot emotionally.

• Dad and I visited Ethan, Chloe, Krissy, and Dhruv in Colorado, where we ended up going fly fishing. I didn’t catch anything, but Dad eventually got something just before we left. Later, they came to Houston for a small family reunion.

• I got structured and wrote out some core values and my activities for the Fall 2019 semester. That helped me cut down on my commitments, and helped me focus on what really mattered. This is something I’ll likely do again for Semester 8.

• I went to a Texas Edge event and hooked ‘em in front of a bunch of UT alumni far more wealthy than I was. I must have grabbed eight notebooks.

• I ended recruiting season early, and Collin and I have been matching in our grey sweaters ever since.

• I turned 22 (Taylor doesn’t know it yet, but the song was about me) and had a more strenuous night than I ever had before. I did make it to Kismet Cafe, though, so not all was lost. The P18 is fantastic.

• Academically, the Fall 2019 semester was amazing. I took 20 amazing, interesting hours (including the hardest class I’ve taken to date and a class taught by a whiter, older version of me) and handled the load remarkably well.

• I started working out a lot more (I think nearly every day since the semester started featured either a run or a workout, and perhaps I did well over the summer, too!). I also discovered the T.H.E. shorts from Lululemon and the Peloton digital subscription.

• Pre-finals season, I cooked my first steak with Nate. The garlic butter that Nate made was fantastic; the meat I made a bit salty and undercooked. I’m glad it happened. Finals season went well, and I think I spent more time in the library during those two days than I had all semester long.

• I went on a trip to Japan! I tried out quasi-solo-travel for the first time, and realized the importance of having good people around you.

• I started doing a gratitude journal, which is easily the single best thing to have happened to me in 2019. Without a doubt, I’m a calmer, happier person as a result.

How I’ll grow in 2020

1. I want to become a top-notch athlete. At some point, I’d like to run a marathon, and fast - a 2:55 will allow me to qualify for Boston, and Nate and I have talked about how amazing doing Boston together would be. More broadly, I think that being active and working out on most days has seriously helped me enjoy Semester 7 more than other semesters (which shouldn’t be surprising, given the volume of research that points to how much happier working out makes you), and it’s something I ought to carry forward. The Peloton subscription well help out tremendously here. Yoga may also play into this - it’s a workout that also helps me stretch and meditate at the same time.

2. Continue making small, atomic changes to my life that push me forward one step at a time. Much to my dentist’s pleasure (just kidding, I don’t really go to the dentist), I finally started brushing my teeth twice a day. Some atomic changes I might make include being on Reddit less (becoming someone who spends time in the physical world, not the digital one), being more active in voicing my gratitude toward others (being someone who is grateful), or cooking more often (becoming an amateur chef). In any scenario, I want each month to be accompanied by a new good habit or the removal of an old bad one (and as I write this, I’m working on reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits).

3. Focus on what really matters: relationships with people. I recently wrote on my door a second phrase: “Long-term Happiness = Quality of Relationships” as a way to remind myself that the stuff that actually matters for long-term happiness is spending quality time with those you care about. This will be especially important for me when most of my friends graduate in May; I’ll need to be especially active in fostering new friendships and building existing ones for the future. On the dating side of things, it’s time to start applying some newfound confidence - how exactly that’ll shape up is unclear.

4. Continue to learn interesting, new things. Academically, this means working toward my degrees and taking a few courses on the side that I find interesting. Outside of UT, it means reading more than my currently abysmal rate (perhaps one of the atomic changes I’ll make is to incorporate reading into my pre-bed routine).

5. Be a good person. I’m not sure how exactly this will manifest, but it’s important to do, so it’s on the list.

Things to Ponder

1. Over the course of the next year, I want to better establish a system for internalizing and remembering what I learn in school. There’s a lot of material that we cover in class that I think is useful and important (especially in my management and psychology classes) that I would like to remember/internalize, but that I think is currently atrophying away. Practice makes perfect, but there aren’t many daily opportunities to practice crisis management or lead a new team – when the time comes, will I remember what I (was to supposed to have) learned in school? If I don’t, what was the point?

2. How will I balance my personal/professional lives? I’m not the only one who struggles with this, I’m sure. On one hand, I’d like to be able to work on projects/to work for companies that are improving the world; on the other, I’d like to really spend time fostering relationships with others. To the extent possible, can I win in both of these arenas? When the tradeoffs start to arise, where will I place the fulcrum? The keywords in my mind are generative and connected.