2026 New Year Resolutions

2026-01-01

5 min read

This year, I want to live with more discipline and consistency.

Turning 25 has made me think differently about time. Not in a dramatic way, but enough to realise that this is a phase of life where effort really matters. There’s still time to push my physical limits, take risks, and seriously invest in the kind of person I want to become.

Health & Fitness

One big focus this year is my health and fitness. I don’t want training to be something I do only when I feel motivated. I want to show up regularly, respect the process, and trust that small efforts add up. A personal milestone I’m working toward is completing the Standard Chartered Half Marathon. For me, it’s less about the race itself and more about proving that I can stay consistent over time and show up when it matters. I will be building up to this final race with smaller ones throughout the year.

Career

Career-wise, I’m aiming to land a full-time role at a tech firm. That means learning every day, building skills and projects, and staying resilient through setbacks and rejections. The past year has been filled with rejections mainly due to my lack of experience in live-coding and being fuzzy about what I want to do - leading to poor understanding and hence articulation of my domain expertise. I applied broadly to different roles: data analyst, AI engineering, algorithm researcher, software engineering, devops and many other roles in my job search. I believed knowing something about everything makes me valuable but this obviously did not work out. This cycle, I will be more focused and only apply for a smaller subset of software-related roles. Through targeted personal projects, I hope to quicken the cycle of knowing what kind of software roles I would like to dive deeper into instead of pondering incessantly without a conclusion.

Goals

Standard Chartered Half Marathon (Completion without time goal)
Land / Convert a full-time role at a tech firm!
Mastery of English & Chinese Languages: Articulate technical concepts

Systems (weekly/daily habits)

Academics: Study at least 2 hours everyday; engage with professors and TAs
Code: 1 hour Leetcode everyday
Code: 1 flagship project per month + small weekly iterations
Knowledge: Read widely using Libby
Language: Listen to Chinese podcasts on Spotify whenever in transit, practice explaining technical concepts in Chinese
Money: Invest & Track personal expenditure on a daily basis
Health: run Tue/Thu/Sat; full-body workout Mon/Wed/Fri
Health: meal prep Mon–Wed
Social: Catch up with friends over weekends
Social: Join more hackathon, social networking events to learn more about the tech field

Let's review this article again at the end of 2026 to see how much progress is made!