2020: A Personal Year in Review
3 min readDec 30, 2020
The silver linings of 2020 for everyone
It would be easy to harp on all of the bad things that happened in 2020. Here are some of the good things that came out of the last year of pandemic for most of us.
- A new perspective on basically everything.
- A reason to sympathize with one another.
- A challenge for humanity to solve together.
- A deeper sense of gratitude for the things we have.
- More time to spend at home with family.
- Less time commuting to work.
- Leveraging some incredible technology.
- An opportunity to slow down.
The good things that happened to me in 2020
Overall, this wasn’t a bad year for myself and my family. It was definitely weird and stressful. But I was still able to accomplish a few things and celebrate a few more.
- My daughter celebrated her first birthday. We actually had a party in January. It was by far the most people we saw all year long.
- I got a new job. It seems crazy to make a job transition during a global pandemic. But I made the tough decision to leave my old company to lead marketing at GreenMellen.
- Besides a new full-time job, I also earned more than double what I made last year in freelance income. I worked with several clients, including a few new ones, to help with copywriting, social media strategy, and marketing consulting.
- Two of my short stories were published in an anthology collection called After The Fall. The collection was put together by a friend of mine to promote his award-winning post-apocalyptic independent film, This World Alone.
- After publishing books in 2017 and 2019, I finished writing another potential manuscript for a novel this year. And I started meeting with a virtual writing group every month to help polish it. No idea if or when it will be complete, but I’m dedicated to working on it.
- I read a ton of books — over 90. I even made a list of my favorite 12 books.
- I spent the second six months of the year writing in a Five Minute Journal every day. It was a good practice of self-reflection and gratitude. My goal is to start using a Full Focus Planner at the start of 2021 to increase my productivity.
What I hope to see in 2021
More importantly, there’s a lot of great things we get to look forward to next year. Here’s a few things I’d love to see happen in 2021, both globally and personally.
- A viable COVID-19 vaccine — which may be a reasonable prediction given our progress.
- Seeing more people in person and less via Zoom calls.
- More productivity from using my new Full Focus Planner.
- More time to write and edit a new book.
- Less political tension and more unity.
- An intentional dedication to my physical health, maybe even taking up a martial art.
Previous Year Recaps
This is a practice I’ve gotten into over the past few years. It’s a good way for me to reflect back on what happened and share a few of them publicly with anyone willing to read.
