Saalik’s Year in Review — 2019
2019! The end of a decade, and the end of an incredible year filled with an enormous amount of growth. I’m beyond grateful for the journey of this year in particular. This one was formative for me — and one where I finally realized the simultaneous enormity and smallness of the world we live in.
I’ve felt abundant, focused, distracted, detracted. I’ve been happy, excited and anxious. The full range of experiences was on display, which is everything I could hope for in a formative year filled with newness and experience.
Thank you for everything, 2019. Here’s to an even better 2020.
Here’s my year in review, a mere snapshot of the craziness. Thank you, reader, for checking it out.
The Brainwave Topics:
Throughout the year, I’ve thought about lots of different topics — “brainwaves” as I call them. I have a tendency to get really excited over certain ideas and immerse myself in them for brief period of time. Here are just a few notable ones from 2019.
Some of these ideas came and went, and some I’m still thinking about!
- Becoming a fully remote worker and a digital nomad, moving from place to place once every couple months
- Feeling abundance in my life, and making that a core perspective on how I view the world’s possibilities
- The impact of gratitude on my daily life and my relationships
- The possibility of supporting myself as a web development freelancer
- Digging into frontend technologies, especially in the React JS ecosystem
- Having Boston as a home-base for my community, and traveling the world via Logan Airport
- Becoming an indie maker, shipping fun side-projects “just-cause”
- Being a writer, sharing my thoughts and stories
Regions Visited:
- San Francisco, New York, White Mountains New Hampshire, Berkshires Massachusetts, Elizaville New York — United States 🇺🇸
- Paa Mul — Mexico 🇲🇽
- Doha — Qatar 🇶🇦
- Mumbai, Surat, Aurangabad, Jabalpur, Bhandavgarh, Goa — India 🇮🇳
- Galle, Kandy — Sri Lanka 🇱🇰
- Karachi, Islamabad, Abbottabad — Pakistan 🇵🇰
- Arusha, Kilimanjaro, Serengeti — Tanzania 🇹🇿
Books Read: 32
I read 12,391 pages across 32 books
Some of my favorites from the year:
- Essentialism — Greg McKeown
- Factfulness — Hans Rosling
- Make Time — Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
- Foundryside — Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Monk of Mokha — Dave Eggers
- Holistic Islam — Kabir Edmund Helminski
- I Will Teach You to be Rich — Ramit Sethi
- Becoming — Michelle Obama
- Storm Front (Dresden Files) — Jim Butcher
Top Musical Artists
- Young the Giant
- J. Cole
- Still Woozy
- Logic
- Tom Misch
Career and Life Transitions
- Spent the first half of 2019 extensively traveling as a product manager for Glucose Trail
- Signed a year lease for a house in Boston
- Started working full-time at Drift in September of 2019
Next Year?
- Honing my writing and storytelling skills
- Expanding my technical knowledge in depth and in practicality
- Embracing solitude and making the most of quiet moments of reflection
- Learning bass guitar, and some basic music theory
- Continuing to be spontaneous and travel-hungry
