Jan 3, 2024 9 min read

2023 Annual Review and 2024 Goals

2023 turned out to be one of the more challenging years I've experienced - A mixture of a long term relationship ending, friendships growing apart and ending over politics and losing one of my pets very suddenly resulted in a lot of inwards reflection. A year of Almost but not quite for any personal goals I had set.

While I always knew that 2023 was going to have a tough time matching or reaching the highs of 2022, the comedown turned out to be a lot more pronounced and took a lot longer to get out of my system than anticipated. Despite this, 2023 turned out to have a good number of successes and milestones I achieved.

Inward Growth and Reflection

At the outset of 2023 I knew I wanted to spend more time with my feet on the ground, limiting international travel for either work or fun. I wanted to spend more time in Manchester at home, spending more time in nature and greenery and plot out the next major steps in my life.

I have always felt like life is very cyclical and typically things happen in three year cycles. With that in mind, I had started to feel like I was at least half way through this cycle and knew I wanted to spend some time figuring out what comes next. There were two key areas I knew I wanted to reassess:

Does my work still bring me joy and fulfillment?
Does Manchester feel like home?

While work can feel like a slog at times, working in healthcare and making a difference in healthcare is something that brings me a lot of happiness and fulfillment. There are few other industries I could see myself working in outside of healthcare at the moment, and very few other healthcare companies that I am interested in either. This felt like a relatively easy question to answer and reflect on.

Manchester feeling like home is a more complicated question and truthfully the one that has taken up the most amount of my time to reflect on. At the start of the year I felt unsettled and had started to consider moving further north for the sake of my long term relationship. Long distance is hard and it felt like the next step. Unfortunately the relationship didn't work out, and this caused me to pivot my initial plans. Stay in Manchester a little while longer with long term ambitions to move back south to be closer to family.

I spent some time on holiday seeing family, enjoying the Kent seaside and reliving my university days in Canterbury. I could see myself living on the Kent seaside in the future, but it will be reliant on escaping the endless cycle of renting and saving up enough money to actually buy a place.

Few days down by the sea in Kent - first week off all year 💆🏻‍♂️🌊 pic.twitter.com/TphJWgtN1m
— Tom Ross (@tmrss_) August 15, 2023

Over the last few months though I have started to feel more settled in Manchester. I've started to feel more like this is my city. I don't really know why or whether this will last, but it's a state of mind I find myself in as I write this.

Health

From the start of 2023 I knew I wanted to really work hard to improve my health and fitness. I had spent a good chunk of 2022 building consistency and that continued and improved throughout 2023.

Working with my personal trainer we had set out the following goals:

Reach 100kg benchpress by the end of the year
Average 10k steps a day
Lose 10kg to reach goal weight of 100kg

Out of the three goals, I only achieved the 100kg bench press. I made decent progress in the other two, but didn't quite hit the targets I set for myself. I'm okay with this as I feel like 100kg bench is a much more important and impressive goal than the other two.

I had started the year only being able to bench 72.5kg, so to reach 100kg I needed a 37% increase in strength to achieve that goal. To achieve that while trying to drop enough weight to achieve the 10kg weight loss at first felt difficult, before then feeling impossible. By March I had started to feel a lot of mental anguish relating to stepping on the scales to see the weight hadn't been dropping, while my body felt sore from the lifting and general fatigue. I was trying to do too much all at once and it wasn't working for me, so I decided to quietly drop the weight loss goal while I chased the bench press goal.

Curiously my weight stayed static at around 110kg throughout the year despite my strength going up by 37%. I take some solace in the fact that I would have had to put on some muscle to achieve that while simultaneously losing some fat in the process. Friends and colleagues had commented that I look a lot stronger and more muscular too, which was nice, especially as I hadn't mentioned my plans to them.

Steps wise I didn't reach the 10kg daily amount, but I did average out at 8052 which is up from 7073 average in 2022. It's nice I had an almost 15% increase here, but wasn't anywhere where I wanted to get to by the end of the year. There's a monotony to steps that I'm just a bit done with - Working from home makes this an annoying time sink goal that I'm not sure I really want to chase moving into 2024.

The Reading Challenge: Almost But Not Quite

Like always I had set myself the goal of reading 30 books and in 2023 I managed 27 books. A decrease of one from 2022.

Curiously I started the year really strong, being far ahead of my goal at one point. I could see the finish line of 30 books and even thought I would blow past the goal and then... I got distracted, complacent and fell off. It is what it is.

A real blend of different types of books this year - A lot of wildlife and nature focus, with some health and biographies mixed in.

My 5 star books this year were as follows:

Some really great books in that list, but if I had to pick one out of all of them it would have to be Outlive by Peter Attia. It solidified my determination to invest in my own personal health and highlighted to me a number of ways I need to evolve my thinking.

Out of all the books I read this year, the only real disappointment I had was with Gabor Mate's the Myth of Normal. This is predominantly down to the style rather than the content. It felt very dry and dull on a topic that should be fascinating.

2024 Goals

This year I want to introduce a few additional themes to my goals. The main focus is going to remain on my health and fitness goals, but there's some new avenues I've been exploring.

Health Goals

Having achieved my 100kg bench press goal I had to take a moment to reflect on where to go from here. I could continue pushing this upwards to achieve a bigger and better bench press, which would be cool and fun but doesn't feel as beneficial or important as the 100kg felt to me. Similarly I could also hunt down 100kg squat, but I'm not all that interested in that as a specific goal.

This year I want to pivot onto functional fitness. Like many others I've been swept up into the buzzword of the moment and with that I want to level up my cardio fitness. A few years back I could run a 5k in about 45 minutes, which is dreadfully slow. I haven't ran properly in years now and would like to reintroduce this for 2024.

If I've learnt anything from Peter Attia's work, it's that great heart health is a net benefit to all other areas of my life. It's so obvious, but also not something I have actively focused on for a long time. With that in mind then, my fitness goals for 2024 are as follows:

Run a 5K without stopping
Run a 10K without stopping
Maintain 100kg Bench Press
Achieve 100kg body weight

My thought process is that I can maintain my current strength while working on my cardio which should result in the weight loss happening as a side effect. I am nervous and excited about achieving this.

Separately I want to get a blood test. I have been Vegan for a couple of years now and I'm curious if I'm deficit in anything in particular that needs adjusting. I had included this on last years post, but it slipped my mind entirely.

The Blog

Last year I set no goals here and it shows. I had a few ideas of things to post but I never got round to posting much of anything. This year I want to blow off the cobwebs and post a few more things here - A bit more structured thinking rather than just loose notes in my notes application. Therefore my goal for this year is:

Post 10x on this blog
Refresh the look and feel

Ten posts on here may not seem like a lot, but it's also more than I've posted on here in two years. I've got enough stuff sitting on my notes tool that I could transform and post that would be helpful to develop my craft of structured thinking.

I'm also conscious that the look and feel of this site feels a bit underwhelming to me now, and so I want to reinvigorate it a bit. I will of course continue to cross post onto Substack as it's the main place I discover and read things myself, and maybe someone else will find what I post interesting. Either way I'm not interested in growing an audience per se rather than just writing as an occasional hobby.

The Reading Challenge

Unsurprisingly my goal here remains to hit my target of 30 books in one year. I'm less than 10% away from reaching it over the last two years. There's little else to be said here, although I'm slightly embarassed at my inability to reach it so publicly for so long.

Bonus: Youtube?

Something I have been thinking about for literally years is creating content on Youtube. This wouldn't be anything highbrow or intellectual, but rather be some type of gaming content.

Youtube strikes me with fear, the idea of creating content for people to watch, and consequently judge, feels nerve wracking. Yet at the same time I've had to become comfortable with the camera at work over the last couple of years so I feel less worried about it than I once had. Keeping it focused on gaming allows me to keep it more relaxed and a fun outlet, especially as I love gaming.

I'm going to explore this and see if I can convince myself to take the plunge, but don't want to hold myself completely accountable to doing this. Therefore it's a bonus goal for 2024.

That's everything I'm planning goals wise for 2024. A lot of hard work and fun ahead, and I'm looking forward to it. Lets see where we end up.

Tom