My 2019 in a nutshell.
Tags: retrospective, goals, motivation
Published: 2019-12-26 16:12:58

Last year, around the same day, I created the classical new years' resolution list, but this time it was different. I went and try to do everything on it.

**Read 10 to 12 books this year**
I've never been much of a reader and never liked books either. But one lovely day I got curious about what do great minds in my field have in common. 
People like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and many others have an interest in reading, side by side with things like waking up early, have a quiet and alone time, pre organize the day and so on.
So I started reading books about personal finance, which is something I'm interested in, and I highly recommend you start with something you will like aswell - I'm not into fiction/romance but that's ok ( I think ). 
I then moved slowly to more technical books and the last one I bought was *Steal Like an Artist - by Austin Kleon* which is a small book with some insights on how to be creative that I found useful for the next topic.

**Start freelancing**
I always had a crush on front end development but never went after something outside my 9 to 6 job as a full-stack. This year I changed it by doing some freelancing. 
The extra money is great, but have you ever done something different for yourself? I've not only improved my skills as a developer but also as a communicator and web designer. Being a freelance made me aware of the importance of organizing my CSS, have a good and simple deploy pipeline, and I started using Figma for the first time. I've also become more aware of my value as a professional which is something everyone should be.

**Invest in my work**
I bought a couple of online courses to help me improve some specific skillset like angular, react and CSS.
I also had an old beaten laptop which would from time to time get stuck during boot and couldn't really handle my unorganized universe of 1000 tabs on chrome and so I bought myself a brand new MacBook Pro 15''. As a first time using macOS it was a bit of a struggle but everything is fine now, and NPM runs smoother as well. So win-win plus I can now sit on Starbucks working - just kidding!

**Minimalism**
Oh boy... Let me tell you... Everything I owned I had probably two or three of it. This was turning my home office into an unorganized hell aswell as my life. But not only that, I was trying to do so much at once that I was procrastinating everything around me. So, new year new me, I started cleansing my mindset. I've donated a lot of clothes, shoes, throw away unnecessary stuff like broken chargers and headphones, old parts of laptops, old demo CDs and the biggest thing of all, I scanned all my receipts and invoices and threw every paper on the trash.
There's still a long way to go but I've found myself a bit more productive, more organized and the air is a bit more breathable now.

**Financial Education**
So after getting some cleansing on my mind, I decided it was time for me to take a short leech on my money spending. I fixed a budget for monthly spend on leisure, house expenses, and investments. Since I started to question myself "what's the value this item can bring to my life" I started buying less and thus spending less, so my monthly budget decreased and I've been able to apply the remaining money to lower some credits I have. Less is more.

**Health & Mindfulness**
I'm a remote worker so I find myself locked "in the basement" for days in a row. This has led me to a decrease in my immune system and thus my calm and zen posture ended up revealing that I have some sort of fake nervous personality and so I started getting some problems with health. This was the year I started to make this a priority in my life and thus trying to chill a bit more, definitely leaving the house more often and just enjoy life - I must say my new minimalist lifestyle is helping here as well.

So this is it! I didn't plan it, however, I'm finishing this year by writing my first (of many, so I hope) posts on dev.to. 
I'll try to keep it going next year but maybe focusing more on web development. 
I hope you guys liked this and don't forget it's never too late to start something. You are your only concurrence and enemy, beat your self and become better than yesterday.