2019 Year end review

The Year 2019 has been the most wonderful year for me. I had made huge progress in each and every aspect of my life and I would like to share them with you

Financially

I had been reading, listening to lots of speeches, articles, blogs about financial freedom and I wanted to take a step towards it on 2019. So, I cautiously started investing in share markets, mutual funds on a monthly basis. They say

Little drops of water make the mighty ocean

The above statement is so true that now I have a good backup to survive at least for 2-3 months calculating my expenses at Bangalore even if I lose my job now. I think this is one of the finest achievement of 2019. For 2020, I have lot more plans pipelined to execute and will continue to contemplate on it

Fitness

By the end of September, I along with my roommates joined cult.fit. I became so much dedicated and rigorous towards exercising, that I started attending workouts even on Saturdays and Sunday mornings. Adhering to the concept of learning a new thing per year strategy(last year I started with the guitar), in 2019 I wanted to try my hands with boxing. Two months in, and I'm already loving each and every session of boxing I train.

Music

When 2019 started, I was a nobody in music. But thanks to Murthy (My Guitar tutor) who believed in me and kept pushing me to become the best version of me on guitar. Because of him, I had been very regularly at my guitar practice and gave a shot at Guitar Grade 2 exam of Trinity College of London directly skipping Grade 1. Guess what? I cleared with distinction, a freaking 90/100 score. And last week of December I did my first guitar stage performance in the Mother Tekkla Auditorium located at Indira Nagar, Bangalore.

I also bought my first Guitar, Yamaha FS800 on November 2019.

Technically

I had always been a simple LAMP stack developer and I had been stuck with PHP for the past 6 years of my life. So I wanted to change it on 2019. I started learning Node through codewithmosh.com, completed the entire Node course and got my hands dirty quickly with two of my office projects. Now, I’m officially a both LAMP and MERN stack developer. 

Socially

For 2019 Madras day, I wanted to do something for Madras(I perfer the name Madras over Chennai). So I co-ordinated with the Environmental Foundation of India, and through them I participated in lake restoration work and planted more than 20 Palm saplings near Ambattur lake. Even though this isn’t much, I believe this is my first baby steps towards helping society.

Reading

On 2018, I had completed 10 books (most of which are self help books), for 2019 I wanted to complete at least 15 but I couldn’t. I was able to finish only 8 and I'm perfectly fine with it. Because when you are progressing so much in other things, you tend to lag behind in few things. Books I had read in 2019 are as follows

• The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
• The Magic by Rhonda Byrne
• Master Your Time In 10 Minutes a Day by Michal Stawicki
• Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan, Steve Schoger
• The Art of Living by Bob Proctor
• Good Vibes, Good Life by Vex King
• The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy, Ian McMahan

Trips

On 2019, I had been to three of the most memorable trips of my life. First one started with me attending my friend's marriage at Chengannur, Kerala. He is my first best friend and one of the coolest guy I have ever seen in my life.

Second one is my much awaited trip to Ladak and the last one was a two day road trip on the car with my roommates. I would be writing blogs about them very soon so, kindly watch out for them. I had also done numerous Chennai-Bangalore bike trips

List of places I visited on 2019

• Chengannur, Kerala
• Thiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu
• Gangai Konda Chozhapuram, Tamil Nadu
• Tiruvarur, Tamil Nadu
• Velankanni, Tamil Nadu
• Nagore Dargah, Tamil Nadu
• Periya Koyil(Big Temple) Tanjore, Tamil Nadu
• Leh, Jammu & Kashmir
• Ladak, Jammu & Kashmir
• Pangong Tso, Jammu & Kashmir
• Khardung La, Jammu & Kashmir
• Nubra Valley, Jammu & Kashmir
• Qutub Minar, Delhi
• India Gate, Delhi
• Charminar, Hyderbad, Telangana
• Go Karna, Karnataka
• Hogenakkal, Tamil Nadu
• Pune, Maharastra

Track your progress

While there are many apps to track your progress, I kind of felt excel to be very simple and straight forward app to manage your progress. So I had added all habits that I wanted to track on an excel sheet and started tracking them as follows

I have been tracking lot more things apart from the ones mentioned above and I'll be blogging them here once I succeed on them. List of the habits I picked up on 2019

• Brushing twice a day
• Practising guitar atleast 4-5 days a week
• Regular to Cult/Gym 7 days a week
• Cold shower twice a day
• Cutting down my sugar intake

So, comparatively with 2018, 2019 was indeed a blessed one for me. I had a opportunity to meet and make friendships with lot of wonderful, intelligent people(Not you Karthik! :D) . When 2019 started, I made a list of checklist I wanted to complete and I was able to complete only 50-60 percent of them. May be I can achieve them in 2020. Apart from ones written here, I tried many things out of my comfort zone and broke my introvert stereotype on which few things worked and most of them failed and still I'm fine with that. Because making progress each day is what matters the most.  

To conclude the year 2019 was amazing and most happening year of my life. Hope 2020 will great for all of us!

Previously Year end reviews : 2018