After I built this website, being an INTJ who is good at planning and treating life like a project, I reviewed 2022 at the start of 2023 and set new goals for the year.

Of course, 2024 could be no exception: I had to make another set of New Year’s resolutions while also looking back at what happened in 2023.

I need to return to this post from time to time and make sure I have not drifted away from my original goals.

Looking Back at 2023

2023 was an extraordinarily eventful year for me. I carried out a major cleanup of my living environment and relationships, clearing everything I no longer thought I needed out of my home.

I also cleaned up relationships that were toxic or no longer necessary for me, including people I had once started businesses with and the cram-school job where I had stayed for so long.

I kept only the people and things I care about. I did only the work I like, went where I wanted to go, and spent time with people I like.

I would say 2023 was a pretty happy year. It was unbelievably damn busy, but also extremely fulfilling.

First, let me review my goals for 2023 and how far I got with each one.

One Goal: Become the Most Reliable SAS Programmer at IQVIA

Entering the clinical-trials industry and joining a CRO company was a complete accident in my life.

But this accident worked out beautifully and matched my own definition of a good job. I have a wonderful manager, incredibly supportive senior colleagues, very friendly teammates in Taiwan, and that Shanghainese colleague D who suddenly ran off but is still extremely supportive.

I have always known that I love programming almost to the point of forgetting to eat and sleep. During this year as a SAS programmer, I could spend an entire day finishing code without eating or resting, and I genuinely enjoyed discussing different ways to write programs with colleagues.

After about nine months, I finally began to understand the progress of a Study, the role of my own position, and what I could and could not do.

For most of the first six months, I handled many tasks while only half understanding them. It was the painful transition of changing careers and starting from zero. I still have plenty to learn, but at least it is far less painful now. I can even say I rather enjoy the process of improving.

The pay is good and the benefits are excellent. During the early stage of starting businesses, the job gave me a strong financial foundation and allowed me to keep learning different skills without worrying about money.

I am certainly not the strongest SAS programmer yet, but when it comes to reliability, I have received excellent feedback from team members I have worked with.

So I would say this goal was successfully achieved XD.

One Goal: Leave the Cram School Where I Had Worked for More Than a Decade, Safely and Smoothly

I had stumbled into the cram-school world by accident too, and somehow ended up teaching for thirteen years. After announcing during the pandemic that I intended to leave, I finally saw the last class of students in my care through graduation in May.

I also fulfilled the standard I had set for myself: every child I had personally taught would make it all the way to graduation without being handed over to another teacher.

Of course, when I left, I also gave one colleague who taught in a chaotic, slapdash way a small parting jab.

Teaching two classes in the same time slot would sound awful if people found out. I let you get away with it for a year only because I could not be bothered to deal with the interpersonal mess while I still had to work there.

Fine, blessings and good wishes, as always. You can just keep muddling through your teaching like that.

After leaving the cram school, I finally stopped falling every week into the negative mood of “my colleagues are finding creative ways to slack off, so what the hell am I working so hard for?”

I also finally had complete weekends. Sleeping the whole day away, playing games, or wandering around by myself all felt wonderful.

I absolutely never want to return to a life of working seven days a week XDDDD.

So this goal was achieved too (check mark.

One Goal: Start Tackling the Long-Neglected Air, Water, Waste, and Toxic-Substance Certifications

I completed only one quarter of this goal, maybe?

After leaving the cram school, I quickly enrolled in the Level A air-pollution course at National Taipei University of Education. I attended classes in July and August, took the examination in September, and learned in October that I had successfully earned the certification.

Then I ran out of energy...

The Level A air-pollution course lasted more than a month. Every Saturday and Sunday I spent eight hours there taking classes at full speed, and I had eighteen subjects to prepare for, with both written and practical examinations. I even took a day of annual leave from work for the practical exam. It was an extremely heavy burden Orz.

Honestly, whether I will ever return to the environmental field is difficult to say, so I stopped after the Level A air-pollution certification. Together with my indoor-air-quality certification, that means I have conquered both indoor and outdoor air (for reasons that are not entirely clear).

So for this goal... all right, half a check mark?

One Goal: Get All the New Ventures onto the Right Track

Starting businesses ran through the whole of 2023. Apart from my full-time job, I devoted almost all my time to one venture or another.

None of them had truly reached a stable track yet, so this goal definitely could not receive a check mark XDDDD. Still, we made far more progress than a year earlier. The road ahead became clearer, my abilities improved considerably, and I met many wonderful collaborators.

Let me start with LearnMore. The Podcast probably made the most progress XD.

At first I knew almost nothing about video and audio editing or how to publish on different platforms. The entire workflow was unfamiliar.

Now I can handle recording, editing, and publishing. I can also find time to use Premiere to cut behind-the-scenes clips, add subtitles and effects, and even produce short-form videos.

The Podcast has now reached more than thirty episodes and is approaching forty. My editing and marketing skills have gradually matured, and the conversations have helped me understand several partners better.

This was my first technical challenge built entirely from scratch. I cannot deny that the process genuinely helped me overcome my fear of “unknown technologies and abilities.”

As for preparing the online-course physics handouts, I already have a complete set of senior-high physics materials. I only need to adapt them into handouts LearnMore can use, so my starting line is different from that of the other two partners XD.

I have revised more than half of the first-year physics handouts. There is still a long road ahead, but this project always ends up lower on the priority list. I only hope I can find more time to finish it XD.

Board-game development, by contrast, began advancing by leaps and bounds after September. From my very rough first card to another element I drew only a few days ago, even my partners could clearly see how much my style had changed and improved XD.

I hope the elemental card game might finally appear next year. I think I should finish all the artwork by the end of this year.

Next comes the single most painful part of the first half of 2023: the escape room.

I invited two people I had known for years to join the escape-room project. Unfortunately, they contributed the least money and the least work while offering endless opinions. They never prepared before meetings, tended to work only on their own things yet still fell behind, and preferred going out on holidays to spending any time on the project.

They never once showed up during construction. Whenever something new had to be learned, they said the learning curve was unacceptable. They could barely complete anything assigned to them properly, so almost everything had to be redone afterward.

When work was unfinished, they would not help. They only said the people doing the work should rest and pay someone else—while contributing no money themselves. Every meeting came with an emotional atmosphere.

In the end, they were even willing to destroy evidence to sustain their lies. I kept things private for the sake of the last trace of our former friendship, only to earn a reputation as a two-faced person myself.

I was afraid that if I revealed everything and honestly expressed how I felt, the whole situation would become spectacularly ugly.

Those examples were only the tip of the iceberg. The painful first half of the year could almost have become a three-volume novel. Unfortunately, I have already fed those memories into the shredder, and I can barely remember the sequence or fragments anymore.

I came to regard those two partners as the friends most worth recycling out of my life that year. I am grateful that the experience taught me more clearly which people can be trusted and known deeply—and which cannot.

After a form of temporary withdrawal and then reinvesting my way back in, the current escape-room team is extremely useful. Progress is fast, discussions reach conclusions quickly, and everyone keeps excellent control of their own responsibilities. It is completely different from the first half of the year.

Because we removed those two disastrous partners, we could also approach fundraising and collaboration from different sources with greater confidence. In the second half of the year, we met many interesting collaborators and received many excellent opportunities.

Our friends were tremendously helpful and supportive too.

The escape room is still progressing very slowly, but in four words: after hardship comes good fortune. Next year should go much more smoothly.

One Goal: Further Improve My Skills and Abilities

I wildly overperformed on this goal. I think it deserves a hundred check marks (far too many.

After learning illustration last year, I rarely had time to practice. Once I officially became an illustrator for LearnMore and 覓徑 this year, however, I drew almost every day.

Comparing my very first card with my most recent card artwork, the improvement is extremely obvious.

My methods grew from flat coloring into a little painterly rendering, and then evolved again into watercolor expression.

I improved greatly in scenes, composition, materials, and my ability to observe objects. Unfortunately, I had almost no chance to practice the human body, so my depiction of people remains much weaker.

But drawing a small card for the escape room is basically a piece of cake now XD.

My intermittent work with Blender and growing control of 3D modeling also supported my digital illustration skills.

The needs of the escape room pushed me to learn skills I probably never would have mastered otherwise: needle felting, plush toys, bent-wire lettering, epoxy resin, and silicone molding. I am almost ready to run a stall at a little craft market.

Later, I also learned laser cutting, RFID, and furniture wrapping.

I gradually realized that as your powers of observation improve and the number of skills you have learned increases, the time required to learn something new steadily becomes shorter.

Turning a skill from completely unknown into “good enough” can take as little as one day or as long as one month. That may be the greatest benefit of learning continuously.

If I go too long without encountering something new or a new technique, the lack of challenge begins to feel boring.

One Goal: Grow My Personal Media and Do Interesting Things with Interesting People

The Wakame brand had accumulated sixty-five followers, and I had published roughly 135 posts on the work account.

The social-media work account is only a record and diary, though. Most of the knowledge-focused content lives here on my personal website, with SEO as the main focus.

Traffic to the personal website grew from fourteen clicks and a little over three hundred impressions per day when it launched to more than 140 daily clicks and over four thousand total impressions.

According to the GA4 dashboard, most website traffic came through search engines. Secondary sources included platforms such as Vocus, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and the site received roughly two hundred new users each day.

For a website that sometimes went several months without a new article—and had no particular advertising or promotion—I already thought that was pretty good XDDDD.

From time to time, readers contacted me through Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn to discuss technical questions, certifications, or work as a SAS programmer. I also met quite a few good people that way.

I did not become an influencer or famous blogger, but occasionally writing an article and helping someone already felt pretty good to me.

Because of the new ventures, I barely had time to collaborate with other people. Still, I had many things I wanted to try once the escape room and LearnMore became more stable, and thinking about them now was exciting.

Sadly, after submitting one article to PanSci, I never had another chance to write a second one. Then I retired from the front line as a cram-school teacher XDDDD.

So the completion level for this goal... perhaps half a check mark XD. At least the personal website was doing fairly well (if I may say so myself.

One Goal: Improve My Language Skills

The most noticeable improvement was definitely my English—especially Indian-accented and Scottish-accented English XDDDD.

When I first joined IQVIA, the things I feared most were my weekly one-on-one and team meetings. I understood less than half of what people said, partly because there were too many technical terms to follow and partly, of course, because of the accents.

Whenever I messaged a colleague, I checked every sentence repeatedly for grammatical errors, wondered whether I had remembered to use the passive voice, and worried they might not understand. Even writing one email took a tremendous amount of time.

Now the casual-chat one-on-one is the thing I look forward to most every week. I can listen and speak comfortably in any meeting, and I can even secretly message colleagues on the same team to chat XDDD.

I now rather enjoy calling even the senior colleague with the strongest accent and fastest speech XDDD. He especially loves to murmur, and our conversations are often troubled and apologetic in a very funny way XDD. Teasing him is a little entertaining.

I can now explain the complete sequence of events in spoken English. When messaging, I type casually and throw around GM, NP, ASAP, and whatever else. I do not even care about grammar anymore; as long as people understand, it is fine.

If I cannot understand something, I ask. If I still cannot understand, I ask the other person to type it. I am shameless about it, so who cares?

I used to write a full script before every presentation in English. Now I do not need one at all, which is absolutely wonderful XD.

Just as a friend said, I did not need to find a special teacher or take lessons. After spending enough time in the environment, I naturally improved and overcame the difficulty.

As for the N1 certificate I said I would take, who knows what distant corner of the sky it has disappeared into... My Japanese can only be kept from declining by watching anime and listening to Japanese songs while doing other things. My Japanese certifications and ability truly made no progress at all that year...

Korean goes without saying. Where would I find the time or opportunity to learn a third foreign language XD? Still, because my English improved so dramatically, I will count this goal as completed (check.

One Goal: Have a Healthy Body

In the later part of 2023, I did not consistently exercise every week. But whenever I went out and it was not too late, I almost always rode my bicycle home.

I also worked out how to cross three different bridges on the way from downtown Taipei back to Neihu: Zhongshan Bridge, MacArthur First Bridge, and Dazhi Bridge.

Each ride took roughly one to two hours, and I became considerably healthier as a result.

Once we began building the escape room, I also worked with AB adhesive and paint and did all kinds of physical labor. I did not deliberately lift weights, but my ability to carry heavy things improved a lot.

As for sleeping and waking early... I managed it from time to time. At least I now tried to go to bed before 1:30 a.m. When I woke up depended on whether I had worked overtime the previous day. In short, I tried to let myself sleep a little more whenever possible.

Compared with my condition in 2022, my body was a little better in 2023 and my routine was more regular, so I suppose this goal was achieved!

Overall, I would give myself roughly a 75% completion rate on the goals I set at the beginning of 2023, hahahaha. I did not finish everything, but at least the direction was right, and everything was gradually improving.

My New Year’s Resolutions for 2024

Having reviewed 2023, it was time for my hopes for 2024 XDD.

But when I thought about it, they would probably be much the same as in 2023. In the end, is every year not basically the same XDD?

New Goal 1: Be Healthy in Both Body and Mind

Last year, physical health sat near the very bottom of my list. This year I am moving physical health to the very top.

I need to rest when it is time to rest, stop staying up late for no reason, and stop working all the time.

When I should relax by playing games, I will try to do so. When I have a day off, I will go outside for a walk whenever I can.

New Goal 2: Keep Earning Certifications That Interest Me

This time, I can break the certifications into more manageable pieces and divide them between the first and second halves of the year. After all, course schedules do not always line up this smoothly XD.

The certifications I planned to earn in the first half of 2024 included SAS Base, SAS Advanced, and TOEIC.

For the second half of 2024, I planned to pursue the Level A wastewater certification—the weekend course at National Taiwan University’s Ching-Ling Industrial Research Center was scheduled for October 5 through November 9—and a Japanese-language proficiency test.

I was still very interested in becoming an ISO 14001 lead auditor, although I had no idea whether some generous sponsor might be willing to donate the cost XDDDD.

If I had time, I also hoped to earn the PMP certification along the way, but the items above would have to come first...

New Goal 3: Keep Moving the New Ventures Forward

So I am no longer trying to get the ventures “onto the right track,” am I XD? Correct. What right track could there possibly be? With my partners constantly proposing new things we want to do, the task list will only keep growing.

For LearnMore, I can discuss only my own part here XDDD. The shared work is not something I can complete simply because I declare it a goal XD.

For the online course, I hoped to finish preparing all the senior-high physics handouts by the end of 2024. I also wanted to finish the website and record and upload the first-year physics course in the first half of the year (an unbelievably ambitious goal XD.

As for the board game and all the other miscellaneous development, I would just have to judge what each stage needed and keep grinding through the schedule.

For the escape room... my goal was simply to complete my own responsibilities cleanly and efficiently enough that the other partners were satisfied with the results XD. The rest was not truly under my control.

There were other tasks too, such as the Shopee store, but I could not completely determine or control their schedules, so I will leave those aside for now, heh.

New Goal 4: Continue Developing My Abilities

It looked as though I would remain in the clinical-trials field for a while. Although I was a SAS programmer, I wanted to move more toward big data or statistics.

I also needed to prepare for LearnMore’s future, so it was time to return to the embrace of foundational mathematics and statistics. I planned to work through university online courses and statistics materials and organize them into notes.

For entrepreneurial skills, the main areas would be marketing, media production, and product development.

For marketing, I would continue advancing through the webmaster’s courses and following content from the meetup so I could keep up with relatively new marketing ideas and techniques.

I also had several books on copywriting that I had neither read nor bought yet.

Media production would include audio, video, graphics, and similar materials.

For product photography, I primarily wanted to improve my photography and Photoshop compositing and retouching skills. A Hahow online course looked like a possible way to do that.

My existing video-editing skills were sufficient for basic cuts and subtitles, but I remained very weak in details such as effects, transitions, and storyboarding. I hoped the year’s production work would give my skills another substantial upgrade.

My Illustrator fundamentals were decent too, but I was still somewhat weak at creating unusual material appearances or effects. I hoped online courses could strengthen that area XD. For now, I could start with type designer Ning Shu’s free course, “I Use Illustrator.”

Product development for the future direction that the partners at LearnMore and 覓徑 had in mind would require unlocking an extremely diverse range of skill trees.

First, I hoped to conquer Blender and 3D modeling so that I could later handle 3D printing and different kinds of image files. I expected to complete that in the first half of 2024.

Next came illustration and animation. In addition to strengthening my digital-drawing fundamentals, I wanted to study the relevant animation techniques in Procreate Dreams and Animate. That would give future product development another different option.

For special materials, my epoxy-resin and silicone-molding work still needed final polishing, refinement, and a smoother overall process. Metalworking was another area to overcome. If I could connect that entire chain of skills, the escape room’s art production would face few serious problems.

It looked like I still had so much to do and learn. I was truly looking forward to major growth in the coming year XD.

New Goal 5: Develop the “Wakame” Personal Brand and Pursue Different Collaborations

At the end of 2023, I applied for a mysterious project. Whether I had any chance of being selected was another matter, but if I made it, I would need to operate under a hidden identity for a while.

I hoped 2024 would bring more opportunities to stream, keep writing, and submit work to major platforms XD.

And of course, I hoped to clear the backlog of games I owed myself. Not being able to buy new ones was truly pitiful.

All right, let’s keep going in 2024 (raises fist!