Saisai and Dora were watching Zootopia 2 in the cinema upstairs, while I sat alone daydreaming in the café downstairs. Google Photos pushed a picture from 13 years ago to me, and it lit up those memories—the green years when I had just arrived in Shanghai.
In November 2012, looking back at the “three-year goals” I had written down then, I couldn’t help admiring my younger self. Then looking at everything I have now, I felt deeply moved. The greatest meaning of a goal is not whether it is completed by the deadline, but that once it is planted in your heart, it is like a seed—one day it will sprout and grow, and at some moment in the future it will bear fruit.
In 2012, before graduating, I came to Shanghai alone for an internship at a startup. The internship stipend was 80 yuan a day, plus a 20-yuan meal allowance. I lived at the end of Metro Line 2, in a rented room that cost 700 yuan a month. After work, walking out of the metro station, my favorite song to listen to was Mavis Hsu’s “都市夜归人” (Night Wanderer in the City). It was in that rented room, full of longing for a better life, that I wrote down these goals.
- Salary: annual income exceeding 150,000 yuan
- Language: English no longer a problem (reading English originals, news, and communicating), and learning a second foreign language (Japanese)
- Master Java (Android) and related technologies, be able to independently solve problems in the industry, lead everyone through projects, and grow into a team leader.
- Professionalism, with a broad vision
Most of these goals have been achieved. As for the ones I failed to reach in 2015, I no longer dwell on them—they have been replaced by new goals.
These days, whether in life or at work, I try not to set goals for myself. As someone who is goal-oriented and results-driven, I know well that I tend to overestimate my effort, misjudge situations, and be overly optimistic.
Achieving short-term goals one hundred percent is extremely difficult. Especially nowadays, when the objective environment changes so fast, goals often drift off course during execution. In the end, whether they are achieved or not doesn’t really matter that much.
But what I want to record is this: this sense of purpose and results orientation has stayed with me all along and has become part of my life. There is no need to deliberately avoid it.
Now, I want to set a goal for myself ten years from now—something especially important for a pessimist.
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