Yesterday night I went to a friend’s house to give him a birthday present.
After leaving I remembered I was very close to a main street with lots of bars.

It was Sunday (which is the first day of the week where I’m living) so the bars weren’t full and some weren’t even open. I remembered a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago – We talked about stepping outside of the comfort zone and thought about ‘going alone to a bar’ situation.

This situation is somewhat scary and embarrassing but not too much (A few years back I would say it is too much).

I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and try this thing.

I walked down the street looking for a place to enter, most of the places were close or totally empty.
Then I remembered a certain place, right next to a place I used to live a few years ago – a pizza bar, it was a bar that serves mainly pizzas and beers.

I walked to this place and there were some people, about 3-4 tables, on each one of them were 2-4 people.
Once I saw the place with the people inside, it was the most crucial moment. At this moment I felt myself splitting into two different entities. The first one really wanted to overcome my fears and try new things, but the second one wanted to avoid the rough situation. So as I’ve done many times in these situations, I couldn’t decide what to do and kind of froze, I stayed across the street, watching the place and thinking how embarrassing it would be. I noticed it and understood what is happening, I think this is the core difference between my attempts in the past to this one, that way I could and I did snap out of it. Right away I started walking directly to the entrance (Thought about going near the place, that way I could just keep going without stopping by, but made myself go directly) that way the only thing I could do is get inside.

I entered the bar while there was a group of 3 other girls looking for a table.
I took a menu and didn’t know what to do. The waitress came to me without saying anything, I verified with her that they are still open and serving, then I sat by the bar. I took a few breaths and then everything was fine, it was even a little bit funny. I ordered myself a pizza and told the waitress that I’ll take the leftovers afterward to emphasize that I’m not waiting for anyone else, it was just me.
I also ordered a beer (I didn’t actually want one), just to emphasize the fact that I’m alone at a bar, eating pizza is different than drinking beer alone, at least in my head…

Then everything was fine, I felt light and not that weird – I wanted to push it a bit more.
I watched Jia Jiang’s Ted talk a while ago about rejections. In his talk, he referred to his 100 days of rejections therapy which I super recommend as a list of super frightening but interesting “challenges”.
On one of the challenges, he shared his own enlightenment – when doing something that might be weird, acknowledging it out loud can make it less weird. So that’s what I did.
The next time the waitress (who was also the bartender) was near me I asked her “Is it weird to come alone to a bar?”. To be honest, it didn’t seem like she was happy to talk to me but we had a little conversation of a few sentences, for me it’s a big step. (Actually, she kind of responded ‘yes’ to my question, she said it’s weird but only here, all around the world it’s common except here)

At this point I really didn’t care what she said, I was just happy with what I’m doing, the fact I’m more or less relaxed and that’s it.

I wanted to finish this whole thing as well as I can, for my future self to want to do these things again.
So I tipped her a big tip and stepped outside with the rest of my pizza slices.
Went to the first homeless guy I saw and gave him the pizza.

After that, I felt so powerful, I couldn’t believe I actually enjoyed this whole thing! (I still can’t).

Then I took a bus home while being way happier than I would’ve expected.

When I first made the decision to start this blog, I didn’t know exactly what it will be for and what I’ll write about.
That made it super hard to decide what to have the first post about.
I’m thinking about writing the first post for weeks now and didn’t make any progress. In order to motivate me to finally write this post I used some help from a friend, but this story is a subject for another post.

To make it all clear in my mind and easier to make any progress, I realized that the first step is to understand how I define the best year, then I decided to make it the subject for this post as it lays the basics for everything this blog is about.

When I decided to have this blog it was on a yearly milestone – my birthday.
At this time of the year, and on a few other occasions (like a new year, starting a job, leaving a job… etc) I am thinking about how I changed since last year, what have I achieved, how close I am to my goals, what progress I did and how my goals have changed during the year.
At the same time, I think about the upcoming year, and what I want to achieve until next year / the next milestone.

I don’t think I had even one year that I was pleased with what I’ve achieved in the past year.
It’s not that I am at the same place for years now, I do make a lot of progress and achieve stuff, but:

1. I don’t have clear goals that I can really compare to my current state.
2. I want to do a lot more, and I know I’m capable of it.

So the first step to having the best year would be setting clear and measurable goals. Goals that you cannot measure are bad goals. When the goals are unmeasurable, it’s impossible to specify if you achieved them or not.

Even though I haven’t done it every year, I did set goals a few times, but setting them is still only the first step.
Following those goals, each and every day is nearly impossible. We have so much stuff in our lives that dealing every day with the yearly goals is overwhelming. Waking on a random Tuesday in the middle of the year and thinking about the goals that I’m nowhere close to yet, can affect the opposite way – it can lead to stress and giving up before even trying.
Instead, we need to have hierarchical order of goals. Having yearly goals is important but, setting also monthly, weekly, and daily goals are super important. Each level should be aligned with its parent level:
My daily goals should lead me to achieve my weekly goals. My weekly goals to my monthly goals and my monthly goals to my yearly goals.
Now, waking up on a random Tuesday with a goal/task like summarizing a paper about some new research would be far more effective than thinking about that I want to finish my professional book about something. Maybe the goal for this week would be to organize all the material about one subject that will sum up to a lot of information with the goals of multiple weeks, then on the following months I’ll have goals of writing a chapter each month then I’ll have the whole book at the end of the year.
So setting medium and small-term goals would be the second step.
I’ll do it on daily basis. Every day I’ll have to set my goals for the day, every week for the week, and every month for the month. It’s possible and even necessary to plan it somewhat ahead but things change, so we should adapt and alter our goals accordingly.

Now, a year that:

1. I set some clear, realistic but also ambitious goals as I described above.
2. At the end of the year, I’ll mark most of the goals as achieved.
3. I’ll be happy with how much I achieved, how much I tried to achieve, and how better I am than last year.

That would be the definition of the best year.

A little disclaimer about the goals:
I think that goals can change over time, even during the year. So changing the goals I started with at the beginning of the year is probable and absolutely fine. It should be conscious and affect the next actions immediately.