---
title: "New Year's Resolutions for 2026 (and scoring 2025 resolutions)"
date: 2026-01-05T00:00Z
tags:
    - personal development
    - _recent-highlight
has_math: false
---

Happy 2026! Here is my self-assessment on [last year's
goals](/blog/2025-01-05-resolutions25/) and my goals for this year (2026).

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## Review of 2025 goals

Good news: all goals were met 🙌. In detail:

1. Do amazing work at Valence.
    - **Assessment**: pass
    - **Comment**: overall I'm happy with the work I did.
2. More writing. Want to average 1 blog post every 2 weeks (= total of 26 blog
    - **Assessment**: exceeded
    - **Comment**: 35 total posts 🥳
3. Use LLMs more for my own learning.
    - **Assessment**: pass
    - **Comment**: at work I've made decent use of the Gemini and ChatGPT
      subscriptions that we are provided and learned a lot from them. Outside
      of work I've used my personal Claude subscription to learn about a huge
      number of topics (everything from history to using the Nikola package
      properly to build this website).
4. Read 6 books unrelated to work (mix of fiction and non-fiction).
    - **Assessment**: exceeded
    - **Comment**: I read 7 books (or 10 if you count each "Years of Lyndon
      Johnson" book separately). They were: Anna Karenina, The Diamond Age, The
      Dispossessed, Katabasis, Seeing like a State, The Years of Lyndon Johnson
      (books 1-4), A Brief History of Intelligence.
5. Learning for drug discovery.
    - **Assessment**: pass
    - **Comment**: I learned a lot by talking to people within Recursion,
      through my projects at work, and about biology via reading a textbook on
      cellular biology (I will write a summary of what I learned in a future
      post).

## More ambitious goals for 2026

Since I met all my goals last year, this year I need to be more ambitious! My
2026 goals are:

1. **Continue blog writing:** at least 26 posts (1 every 2 weeks), _and_ at
   least 5 "great" posts: ones that are polished and reasonably high effort,
   that I think are truly original and unique content on the internet.
2. **LLM proficiency:** I need to go beyond chat and use LLMs programmatically
   / via APIs. This includes A) onboarding onto Claude code B) trying out
   cursor's more advanced "agent" features C) doing at least 1 project that
   involves using LLMs programmatically.[^work]
3. **Reading:** read at least _12_ books (1 per month). I want to spend more
   time reading.
4. **Nature:** do at least 1 good multi-day trip into nature (hiking in the
   Alps??)
5. **Learning:** finish at least 2 textbooks as part of my professional growth.

<!-- when going back to evaluate goal 1, be sure to actually list the posts you think are "great"!-->

[^work]: Good chance this will happen via my work anyway.