Well, I must admit one thing right away before even starting to write about my goals for 2026. 2025 was not the best year of my life. It had a lots of ups and downs, mostly downs. So much so that I'd rather not consider 2025 as canon, and give myself an excuse that it was just the year for me to chill and learn that I need to work harder.
What went wrong?
Everything. I had a goal of reaching 6,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. I did not achieve that. I wasn't even consistent in creating video content. I kind of wasted away my life till May of 2025, and then I joined Appwrite as a DevRel, and things changed. I had a ton of work to do, and didn't have time to create video content for my own YouTube channel. But at the same time, I learnt a ton of cool things about video content that I can use in my own YouTube journey.
You cannot focus on too many things at once
This year was an important lesson to teach me that. I was trying to do everything. Fueling myself with anger of all the unfairness happened to me so far, and using it to try to do everything like working, going to gym everyday, creating videos, etc. You can ideally do all of these, but there's a problem.
You cannot do this if you're starting to do this just after being a couch potato. It's overwhelming to just take on a million tasks. Well you can be super motivated and do it for a couple of days, but burnout is almost guaranteed, unless you're superhuman. Everyone has the superhuman phase in their life atleast once, but not sure if this motivation cycle is that.
You keep burning yourself out and complain
I kept trying to do everything, and then I got burnt out completely. Since it wasn't a great year already, I was very close to giving up on everything many times and just take the traditional career path. However, it's quite scary because you know you have insane amount of potential, but you're just a lazy fuck who can't even do what you're capable of. So you keep finding little bits of motivations just to get burnt out again.
Everyone else becomes a problem
After getting burnt out, everyone else becomes a problem. You start blaming others for your incompetence and lack of motivation. It takes a massive ego-swallowing to accept that you are the problem.
Goals for 2026
Keeping what everything went wrong in 2025 in mind, I've set some goals for myself for 2026.
YouTube channel
This is a non-negotiable. I need to be consistent with my channel. All the opportunities I've ever gotten in my life are because of the content I write and publish on my channel. So I need to be consistent with it. There's so much stuff I can make videos on, I just need to have some time without music to brainstorm about content ideas. I've already made a list, and recording will start soon.
I also have ideas for other social channels like X and Instagram, but I don't have clear goals for them yet. I wanna start small. I will work on YouTube for now, because it's more important than the others for me. If I gain consistency, which I will have to, eventually I will start working on more of the channels.
Goal: Reach 7,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel.
Fitness
I'm not making the same mistake again. Gym membership is very well expensive, and I don't wanna get burnt out. So, I have purchased a walking pad. I'm just gonna start by walking in the first quarter of the year. If things go well and I start feeling like I can take on more, I'll buy that gym membership.
Walking might sound an easy task, but for someone who spends his whole time in front of computers, it's a challenge. I really don't step out of my house unless I really need to.
Or maybe even before the first quarter ends, I just need to build the confidence back up and not feel overwhelmed. Starting small is the key here.
Goal: Walk for 1 hour every day, try to get to 10,000 steps every day.
Work
Well, I do have some work goals, but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to reveal them at all. So I'm just gonna say I'm gonna try to do my best at work. I've been taking up some engineering tasks along with my DevRel responsibilities, so I'm enjoying and learning new things everyday.
Goal: [REDACTED]
Conclusion
Well, that's it for my current goals for 2026. Aim is to keep adding to the list and tweaking stuff. If something doesn't work out, I need to learn to remove it from my goals and try again later at some point.
