Have you ever considered using the Steem blockchain for storing your memories permanently? Does it appeal to you to have an immutable but public record of things important to you? You can frequently see @lukestokes storing the memories with his family on the blockchain. It is so inspiring to see him do that. I myself have used the Steem blockchain to store important milestones permanently. My goals for 2018 are of great significance to me and while I have them written on the diary and the whiteboard, the ease of seamless online access, without a fear of loss or censorship, is what makes recording them on Steemit a much more lucrative option.

Image designed via Canva.com and background image is free to use from the inbuilt gallery. 

At the end of 2017, I was able to record a summary of my achievements and failures during the year, thanks to a contest by @anomadsoul. I also did a funny review of my 2017 goals on new years eve, which included a goal to reach 60 reputation score from the 59.857 at the time of posting. It happened before midnight of 31st December. I was able to achieve the goal to have at least 1000 Steem in the first week of December, 2017. A recent milestone of reaching 3000 followers is also recorded on my blog. In short, I love recording moments of joy and the aspirations of future on the blockchain.

My 2018 Goals

Having too many goals can overwhelm us at times. Not having any goals makes life a random occurrence and that is not a good way to live life in my opinion. I have been setting goals properly for three years now after educating myself regarding goals. This education through online courses, articles from credible authors like Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy, and book reading has enabled me to have and pursue worthy goals. In fact, one of my earliest successful blog posts on Steemit contained the 8 steps to effective goal setting.

I have set 9 goals for myself in 2018 which are listed below, including the current progress. My year in terms of goals starts from 1st February so it's been just one month of progress on all of the goal; except Steemit, which is what I do regularly. I hope you will enjoy going through these goals.

1. 70 Reputation & 10,000 Steem Power

I started Steeming in June, 2017 and had a goal to reach 60 reputation score and 1000 Steem at the end of last year. I had more than 1500 Steem (Steem+SP) in my account before new year. Having achieved the Steemit goals of 2017, I set for myself an ambitious goal to have 70 Reputation and 10,000 SP in 2018. I understand that both of these goals are hard to achieve unless I invest heavily in terms of money along with the time and effort. Money is not a luxury that I enjoy very much at the moment so my time and effort would be the main way forward in achieving these milestones.

About reputation, I knew that every next level is many many times difficult to reach than the previous one. If you study how reputation score works, you can truly understand how difficult it is to go from 60 to 70. However, there has been some massive progress on this front and I have already reached 63.282 as of the moment of writing.

However, looking at the following screenshot from steem.cool (a tool developed by @blueorgy) will give you an idea of how difficult it is to reach every next level of reputation. I took it immediately after reaching 63 reputation score. 

What it really means is that in order to reach 64 reputation score, I need to do 29 % of all the effort it took me to reach from 25 to 63. That's more than 1/4th of everything I have done on Steemit so far in 9 months. (4836 is 29 % of 16708).

As far as the SP is concerned, I plan to keep being active on Steemit and engage with the community in more beneficial ways. Reaching 10,000 SP just through content and curation is an uphill task and it would take some smart decision making to make that happen. But I wish to have at least this much influence on Steemit so that I can give more.

2. Reading At Least 10 Books

Reading books is a habit I started developing in 2016. Outside the Harry Potter series and a few novels that I read in my teenage, I had little book-reading experience. I read 8 books in the initial year of revival and the number increased to 10 last year. 

This year, I am going to read at least more books. The number of books is same as the previous year but the volume of books is such that completing this goal successfully would be an incredible achievement for me. I am slow at reading. Here's a picture of all the books that I intend to read in 2018.

It's a big pile of books.

I started studying How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie in early February. I have read more than 1/3rd of it already. However, I forgot in a colleague's car two weeks ago and got it back three days later. Compelled by my habit to always keep a book with me (which I learned last year from The Mastery Manual by Robin Sharma), I took The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho with me wherever I went until it was finished on 24th of last month. 

My best hope is to have finished reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by the end of March and also to read a significant portion of the next book on my list; most probably Give and Take by Adam Grant. I have shared lessons from the books I have read, like the secrets to becoming rich from The Richest Man in Babylon. I also reviewed some books, for example Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I intend to do that this year as well.

3. Support Education of 4 Poor Kids

Two is the least number of kids I should be supporting in terms of education. Academic session is about to begin for most children in my region and it means that I have successfully supported the four children under my supervision last year. They continue to receive my support so there are four, possibly five, kids to look after. Paying monthly fees is not a problem for me as I have a stable income through my job and can happily afford educating these young minds.

Educate One Child is my initiative started in April 2016.

However, start of the new academic cycle means requirement of new uniforms, bags, books, and stationary etc. This is a difficult moment for me as I have so much of financial responsibility in my personal life as well. Anyway, I will manage to support these kids. When I say support, it means paying every penny that these children need to get their education.

4. Complete Construction of My Home

This goal has been carried forward from last year. There was a little progress last year but the more significant progress has happened in the last two months. I have the goal to complete all the construction and finishing work till 30 April, allowing me two months more to accomplish the task.

So far, the progress has been rapid and a lot has been done already. However, construction is something which won't go away easily. A lot remains to done. I am out of resources at the moment and am waiting for a good bull run to cash out some of the crypto investments but only on profit. The amount of SBD in my wallet is also waiting to be withdrawn at a good price. I don't know what may happen but I am waiting patiently.

5. Buy a Car

It will be my first ever car. As already mentioned, I do not possess enough resources at the moment but there are some promising investments that I made in crypto which may make it happen soon. Also, the SBD I earn from my Steemit efforts are reserved for the two major personal goals; constructing my home and buying a car. A good bull run is all I need to get the required money.

My first ever highway driving experience was timed terribly wrong. We started the journey at the midnight on the busiest road in Pakistan. Thanks to @saadzafar10 whose car it was (he joined Steemit recently on my insistence).

I know that my financial resources are at risk of market conditions right now. Having much of my money invested in crypto is a risk I took knowingly and I have been patient in dealing with the crash so far. In 2017, I was the worst cryptocurrency trader. In 2018, I plan to have better titles. I will lease a new car on a manageable down payment and pay the rest of the cost through monthly installments, which I can afford with my salary as well. I need to buy the car by end of this month in order to complete this goal. Let's see.

6. Complete The "MBA" Course

Online education has been my interest since 2014. Last Black Friday, I enrolled in an interesting course. It is called An Entire MBA in 1 Course and is a popular course on Udemy with 147,516 students enrolled so far. I thought I had made a steal but I guess all the people are using discounts as a marketing gimmick. 

Profession wise, I am into supply chain management. So, this course interested me a lot, especially due to the fact that I have not done an MBA myself. Online education through concise courses appeals me more than the on-campus rigor of years. So far, I haven't done much towards this goal and there's a need to include it in my daily routine. I hope to complete this 16 week course by end of June. 

7. Marriage

Another carried forward goal from the last year is marriage. I was so close to completing the goal of tying the knot last November but it wasn't meant to be for us. It rather become a bitter shock because of the abrupt break up. I am shaking it off still and haven't moved on yet. My aim is to complete my immediate goals (home and car) for now. Once enough healing has been done from the previous scars, I will start working on the goal of getting married.

My best hope is to have the goal accomplished this goal by September. I don't know for sure if it will be achieved by that time or before that because of the complications involved. Wish me luck!

8. Physical Activity at Least Once a Week

I am an ex 100 meter sprint gold medalist. Add to that 12 years of active competitive football (soccer) and some field hockey as well. In short, my past is full of sports and athletics. But all of it is in the past. I am worried about my physical condition due to lack of physical activity. It's something I should do something about.

The Ilyas in the yellow is about to become 100 meter dash champion! 

So far, I have been guilty of doing nothing about this goal. Football field is where I belong and after I recover from my current sickness, I am going to play football regularly. Let's see how I fare.

9. Study Quran with Translation

People say that Quran (Koran) is the religious book of Muslims. I disagree. I have neither found it to be just a religious book nor it is only for Muslims. Quran was revealed on Prophet Muhammad (ranked the # 1 in The 100: A Ranking Of The Most Influential Persons In History; a book by Michael H. Hart) more than 1400 years ago. Even then, it contains facts that science proved just a few years ago. Let me share some verses from the chapter 41 of Quran.

That's how the universe and our earth was created. Did you notices the distribution of heaven into 7 layers? NASA says there are 6 layers of Earth's atmosphere but excludes the 7th one; the magnetosphere. 

Here's a quote from the magnetosphere article linked in the caption above.

Planets having active magnetospheres, like the Earth, are capable of mitigating or blocking the effects of solar radiation or cosmic radiation, that also protects all living organisms from potentially detrimental and dangerous consequences.        

Quran is divided in 30 parts, containing 114 chapter of different lengths. I studied 5 chapters last year and intend to complete 10 more chapters this year, all of which still remain to be studied. The more I read Quran and try to understand, the more my inquisitive mind is fascinated by its wisdom. 

Conclusion

I know that these 9 goals have their individual challenges and achieving them all would be an incredibly difficult task. However, these goals are fundamental to my intellectual, relational, educational, financial and personal pursuits. I may be sleeping over a few at the moment but I do intend to integrate them all in my daily or weekly routine. 

With this post, I have created something to get back to and check my progress on the goals. The fact that this post will remain permanently available to me for ready reference is an amazing aspect of Steemit. I would like to know if you use Steemit for storing important information as well. Let me know in the comments below. 

If you wish to help me in pursuit of my goals, you can do that by upvoting this post and resteeming it. Believe me it's a great support for me. Thank you!