April 10, 2026 · 11:58 AM
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2026 Personal Goals: Better Late than Never

I normally try to set personal goals for the year in January, but the start oft his year has been the perfect storm of minor health issues in the family and family/work travel, so I wasn’t able to set goals formally at my usual time. Things were starting to quiet down by the end of March, so I decided that there’s no reason you can’t formalize your yearly goals at the start of Q2, so here we are. As with previous years, I’ve structured my goals in the four categories my church uses for encouraging youth to set personal goals: spiritual, social, physical, and intellectual.

This year I’m trying a new thing with several of my goals: I’m going to set explicit Good/Meh/Ugly thresholds for many of these goals. This allows me to have a broader top level goal, combined with an explicit up-front scoring criteria. I have more goals this year than I can realistically simultaneously achieve, but I’m ok with several goals that would’ve been ugly at least getting up into the Meh range.

Without further ado,

Spiritual Goals:

  1. Get into the habit of regular journal writing: I’ve written in journals off-and-on for the past 30 years, but had lately gotten into the habit where other than church conference notes, I was only writing a few times per year. I tried to get up to weekly writing last year, but only did so-so, hence I wanted to try again this year. Scoring Criteria: Good if >100 entries, Meh if 50-100 entries, and Ugly if <50 entries.
  2. Help Jamie get prepared and out the door on his mission: Jamie received his mission call earlier this year, and has been assigned to serve for two years in the Baton Rouge Louisiana Mission, starting on May 6th. Before he goes, we need to help him prepare a ton of things, including buying sufficient clothes, luggage, and equipment, but also helping him get ready for two years without computer games and most social media, hopefully getting to bed and getting up in sync with his future missionary schedule, and helping him get used to exercise routines he can do without having regular access to a gym.
  3. Read the book Jesus the Christ from cover to cover: This is a good one on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, written by latter-day saint apostle James Talmage about a century ago. I read it on my mission, but thought it would be a good one to reread.
  4. Attend the temple regularly: This one is almost always on my goals list, both because it is important to me, but also because with the temple almost an hour away, it’s something that’s easy to let slip if it’s not a focus. Scoring Criteria: Good if >10x this year, Meh if 6-10x, and Ugly if <6x.
  5. Work on at least one goal from General Conference each week: I really enjoy my church’s semi-annual General Conferences. The talks are often inspiring, the spirit is wonderful, and most of the time six months later, I have little tangible progress to show for it. There are often too many areas of improvement for me to juggle all of them at once1, but picking one item to work on for each given week is something where I can make some tangible incremental progress. Scoring Criteria: starting after the April General Conference in Q2, measured by if I set and successfully kept at least one goal stemming from General Conference (or Stake Conference) in a given week. Good if successful >30x, Meh if 15-30x, Ugly if <15x.

Social Goals:

  1. Renew Passports and take the family on at least one international trip: With Jamie heading out on the mission, we’ll be down to four of us, so international travel is a little more feasibly financially. Most likely this will be a trip up to Banff National Park up in Canada, since our last attempt to make it up there was during COVID, and the border was still closed by the time we made it up to Montana.
  2. Go on regular dates with Tiff: We haven’t been very consistent on this, especially as the boys have grown up and gotten busier, so I wanted to set a goal to try and do this more often. Scoring Criteria: Start counting in Q2, group dates count, going shopping together at Walmart doesn’t. Good if >27x, Meh if 15-27x, Ugly if <15x.
  3. [Update 7/1: New Goal Added] Spanish speaking practice at least 10 min/day and secondary language learning at least 5min/day: I was realizing that I’m in a rut on my Spanish, having gotten most of what I can from Duolingo and Pimsleur. I’m going to try using a AI-based language conversation app (likely Langua) to try and get to a point where I’m more comfortable communicating in Spanish. Additionally, I have a work conference in Turkey that I’ll be speaking at in October, and I decided I want to spend a little time every day between now and the conference on Duolingo and/or Pimsleur learning basic Turkish. My guess is this may be my only visit to Turkey, so I’ll probably switch to another language after the trip. Scoring Criteria: Start counting in Q3. Good if >120x, Meh if 60-150x, Ugly if <60x.

Physical Goals:

  1. Get back into a cadence of daily exercise: I had actually been doing pretty well with this last year, but things fell apart in Q1 with how many times we were sick or traveling. I want to get back into the swing of things. This year, I’m trying to mix things up with some distance running, some strength training, and some Tai-chi2. Scoring Criteria: Starting in Q2, it counts if it’s at least 10min of intense exercise. So regular walking wouldn’t count, but most other things would. Good if >150x, Meh if 75-150x, Ugly if <75x.
  2. Get pull-up bar setup, and get to the point where I can do multiple proper pull-ups sequentially: My family got me a wall-anchored pull-up bar station for Christmas that I want to setup and use. Back in 2020 I got to the point where I could do 1-2 chin-ups, but I want to get to the point where I can do a proper pull-up, starting from a hanging position, without cheating. Scoring Criteria: by the end of the year, how many proper pull-ups can I do in a row. Good if >5x, Meh if 1-5x, Ugly if none3.

Intellectual Goals:

  1. Get back into a cadence of regular substantive blog posts: Between this blog (focused on personal stuff, politics, religion, and recipes), Selenian Boondocks (my blog where I post along with a few friends about general space, technology, policy, family updates, etc.), and my Starbright Engineering blog (where I post professional think-pieces about satellite servicing technology, policy, and business), I have a lot of blogs, but have been very inconsistent about writing. Running a bootstrapped space startup for a decade, where so much of my time was tied up in creative technical writing, it didn’t leave much time or juice for blogging. Now that my boys are starting to grow up and head out on their own, and now that I’m currently not running a startup, I have a bit more time to think. So I wanted to see if I could get back into creating long-form, thoughtful content, rather than just shooting my mouth off on Twitter4, which is more content consumption than content creation. Scoring Criteria: What counts as a substantive blog post is somewhat subjective, but examples of things would count include: explaining new concepts, writing persuasive arguments, posting recipes, etc. If it’s just a blog post with links to stuff I’ve written recently on my other blogs, or something more administrative, or two quick of a quick take, I probably won’t count it. Good if >18x posts this year, Meh if 9-18x, Ugly if < 9 blog posts5.
  2. Read books on a regular basis: I did reasonably well with this last year, and wanted to double down on this, especially as I try to be better with preparing for sleep most nights. This includes both fiction and non-fiction. Scoring Criteria: number of books completed this year. Good if >36x, Meh if 18-36x, Ugly if < 18 books6.
  3. Finish setting-up and learning how to use my maker and cooking tools: I like to buy gizmos, especially 3d printers and cooking tools. But a lot of the time I buy them then never learn how to use them. Or at least take a long, long time. So I’m setting a goal to setup and use the ones I haven’t figured out yet (currently including my belt-fed 3d printer, my resin printer, my Snapmaker’s CNC router fourth axis, the reinforcement kit for my Snapmaker, the bamboo bun/dumpling steamer, and the ice cream maker that was my first time getting scammed on Kickstarter7). Scoring Criteria: how many I setup and learn how to use well enough to make something with. Good if >3 tools, Meh if 1-2 tools, and Ugly if none.
  4. Learn how to use AI Tools (Claud, ChatGPT, etc.) to do useful work-related tasks: I’ve been fairly slow at adapting AI to help with work and creative tasks. I still prefer doing the creative writing, but there are plenty of things that I could use AI for such as: skimming an RFP to create a draft compliance matrix, reviewing a proposal against requirements and selection criteria, creating orbital dynamics simulation and visualization tools (vs doing stuff in Excel), creating useful illustrations, filling in drafts of boilerplate sections in proposals, etc. Scoring Criteria: number of useful work-related tasks that I successfully learn how to do using AI. Good if >3 tasks, Meh if 1-3 tasks, Ugly if no tasks.

Anyhow, that’s a long list. It’s almost certain that I won’t be able to accomplish all of my goals at the “Good” level, but I decided that this year, I’d rather have a few Goods, many Mehs, and hopefully not too many Uglies, than having a smaller list of goals. We’ll see in January how that turned out for me.

  1. And when it comes to areas for self-improvement, I’m what military folks might like to call a “target rich environment”… ↩︎
  2. I hear that Tai-Chi can be good for flexibility, and strengthening your joints, while also having some benefits similar to strength training. I’m not hippy enough to truly enjoy all of the eastern philosophy that comes along with the Tai-Chi youtube videos I’ve been using, but the exercises do seem to help, especially in the evening for wind-down before bed. ↩︎
  3. In this case, getting to even one proper pull-up is enough for me to count it as a Meh-level win. ↩︎
  4. Yes, I still refuse to call it X. You knew exactly what I meant. ↩︎
  5. It’s worth noting that at this point (10 Apr 2026), I think I’ve written at least four posts this year that count — A SB post about canceling Starliner and recompeting it for commercial crew, two SE posts about Fleet Maintenance satellite servicing, and my post here about ideas for new constitutional amendments. So I’m already halfway to Meh status, and have a fighting shot at getting to Good. ↩︎
  6. At the time of this writing (10 Apr 2026), I’m already at 11 books completed. Some of which were thick non-fiction books. I’ll probably do a writeup soon. But I’m well on the way to Meh, and Good is feasible. ↩︎
  7. Long story short, right after closing a large kickstarter for a compressor-style ice cream maker, they changed the design and some of the specs. Then they charged a suspiciously high shipping cost, that I initially thought was due to tariffs, but basically drove the cost of the machine up higher than what it would’ve cost to get an equivalent one on Amazon. Yes, I was dumb enough not to search to see if stuff like this already existed with others — I had never seen a home version compressor ice cream maker, so was dumb enough to think this was novel. When the hardware arrived, if you google searched for the part number on the user’s manual, it pulls up a design you could buy already from someone else on Alibaba. All of their pictures of their “factory” showed stuff like a bunch of the machines fully assembled on rows of workbenches with no tools, no parts, no sign of any real assembly. Just 100% fake. The machine does seem to work, just about half the speed that they advertised, and they didn’t send me the four additional mixing containers I ordered. I’ve backed a lot of things on Kickstarter, and this is the first time I’ve been scammed, and I at least got something out of it, so I count myself somewhat lucky. ↩︎

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