Goals and Aspirations

Yahallo~

It’s my third ever blog post! I just re-read what I wrote last night, and I seriously considered renaming the “Thoughts” subcategory to “Extremely Cringe and Cheesy Lore by a Teen”. However, I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write better sooner or later.

Today’s topic is going to be about my goals in life, and how they’ve changed along with me as I got older. Very cliche, I know, but I’d like to really write a bit about myself so that future me will have a good idea of the type of person I was at 16.

The Super Rich CEO

At the ripe old age of 11, I was a huge fan of children’s stories and playing with hotwheels, and all that. Right? Nah. Instead, I read books about investment, entrepreneurship, and general ways of becoming rich. Honestly, I’m not too sure as to why I was so hell-bent on getting rich, but there I was, engrossed in the world of CEOs and the stock market. Maybe it was my father’s influence, (potential blog post idea: father lore) or perhaps that was my chuunibyou symptoms showing up in a rather peculiar way… Anyhow, I believe that this period of time, when I was 11-13, really shaped my worldviews and values, as well as my interests.

The 10x Programmer

As I entered the ages of adolescence (14-15), my attention switched from the more traditional business-oriented ways of getting rich (yes, I will always be trying to get rich) to… programming! I know, what a surprise. When I was 13, (keep in mind these are wildly inaccurate guesses of my age at the time) my dad introduced me to programming, using… Python! Yeah, shocker huh?

However, I didn’t really enjoy programming all that much at the time. All of the stuff with ides, syntax, and whatever else comes with learning a programming language really put me off. So it wasn’t until I was 14, and decided to make my own Discord bot that I actually started enjoying coding. The tutorial that I decided to follow was using Replit to host the bot. Things really took off when I decided to explore Replit, but I’ll just give a quick summary (I can definitely write an entire blog post about my Replit journey).

Becoming a Repliteer, in 5 Bullet Points

• Made some text adventure games that immediately became popular (200k plays).
• Became famous in the Replit community, and even had a YouTube video made about one of my games.
• Attended 3 different Replit hackathons, winning (monetary) prizes each time.
• Did freelancing work through Replit’s Bounties, and got decent at coding.
• Earned over $5.5k solely through Replit over the span of a year.

$1m Before 18

After winning my first Replit hackathon, I made a really bare-bones markdown blog (more on that later?), and wrote a post about my goal to earn $1m before I was 18 years old. What, did you really think I had given up on getting rich?

The Jaded, Old Teenager

As I grew older (15yo?), I became more aware of things like depression, and started pondering more philosophical questions. My depression during this time might’ve played a role in reshaping my values yet again. I’m pretty sure that I changed from being an optimist about my life to a pessimist when I was either 14 or 15. Over the past 2 years, I’ve constantly worried about my future. When I was younger, I had clear ideas about what my future could’ve looked like, but they only got more and more murky as I got older.

Every day, a nagging worry eats at me - what if I don’t succeed? Not that I know what success might look like, but I do have inklings of what failure looks like. Maybe success is not failing?

But What Do I Want?

What I’ve “wanted” has also changed throughout my life - when I was younger, I had visions of being an ultra-wealthy CEO, and doing everything that the stereotypical rich people do in popular media these days.

Now? I think that my main wishes are for financial security, and being able to be “free”.

Free?

To me, being “free” is more akin to not having to worry about anything, and being able to live my life doing whatever I want, spontaneously. This probably stems from the fact that homework has haunted me for as long as I’ve been in school - I have a tendency to forget whatever it is that I need to get done, so being free from those obligations is a very deep desire. Rationally, I realize that this is quite unrealistic and won’t be something necessary for me when I’m older, but for now, the release from all of my obligations (cough summer break just ended cough) is truly blissful.

Financial Security?

Yes, I still want to be rich. Being rich is the best way to guarantee both financial security and freedom, duh. Is there really anything else to say here?

Not a Summary

So in summary, I decided to write about this today because it’s interesting to see how my hopes and dreams have evolved, but more importantly because these goals and aspirations are such an integral part of what makes me, me. Why am I sharing so much personal information with random people on the internet? Don’t ask, the answer is sad.

Anyways, thank you (my imaginary readers) for reading this obscenely long post. I just realized that I’ve spent about an hour writing this… hopefully I won’t burn out.