🏆 How I'm advancing my career without neglecting my life. "New year's resolutions" done right.
(🎁 Template inside) This guide shows software engineers how to align life stages, balance priorities, and use yearly reflections for faster success. A yearly review done right
The tech world moves fast—why shouldn’t your career?
Career growth isn’t just about improving your coding skills. It’s about intentional action, reflection, and leveraging your strengths. No matter how talented you are at coding, the key to progress lies in understanding your current life stage and aligning your actions with your values.
By the end of this post, you’ll have actionable steps to accelerate your journey toward senior roles, financial stability, and meaningful impact.
⭐ In this post you’ll learn
Principle 1: Life balance is crucial for fulfillment.
Principle 2: Doing too many at once means you’ll spread yourself thin across them.
The solution is understanding the areas of life and the philosophy of life stages
Paid subs will have access to a template to do your yearly review, based on the template I’ve used for 4 years already. Read until the end to get access to it
🎡 Areas of life
Life isn’t a sprint, but I wouldn’t call it a marathon either. It’s more like a series of races. Trying to improve every area simultaneously is a recipe for burnout and limited progress. The key is prioritizing different areas at different times.
Jim Rohn’s Wheel of Life simplifies this idea: it highlights six life areas that collectively define fulfillment. Ignoring any one of these for too long leads for to imbalance.
For software engineers, the temptation is often to overinvest in career and financial growth.
This newsletter is mainly centered about business/career, and I don’t intend to be a life coach. (That’s not in this life stage for me, who knows about the future 😉). However I can tell you there’s no point in pushing for your career.
Without attention to health, relationships, or personal growth, you’ll start hitting diminishing returns. At the beginning, 1 unit of effort in career may achieve 1 unit of results. But at some point, that same 1 unit of efforts produces only 0.5 units of results.
At any point, one area will yield the highest return on your effort. Identify it, and focus your energy there. This idea echoes the theory in The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt—there’s always a single bottleneck, and addressing it creates the biggest impact.
🌱 My personal philosophy: Life stages
Life is long, don’t spend 40 years doing the same thing. Designing your life in stages creates urgency for action and clarity for what’s next.
Each stage has unique priorities. Here are the main ones I’ve experienced:
Childhood and Student Years: Dependent on family; building foundational skills.
Early Career: Independent of family, learning workplace dynamics, and finding direction. Build a financial foundation.
That’s my subjective experience until now. I can’t really predict the next stages, they’ll depend on decisions like getting married, having kids, switching jobs, founding your own company…
There are multiple philosophical/psychological theories of creating a new life stage. Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, proposed the following stages:
Ages 0 to 7: A period focused on physical growth and the development of basic motor skills.
Ages 7 to 14: Emotional development becomes prominent, with the onset of puberty marking significant changes.
Ages 14 to 21: Intellectual maturation occurs, with individuals seeking independence and forming their own identities.
Ages 21 to 28: Individuals establish their place in the world, focusing on career and relationships.
Ages 28 to 35: A period of self-reflection, where individuals reassess their life choices and direction.
Ages 35 to 42: Spiritual development becomes significant, with a deeper search for meaning and purpose.
Ages 42 to 49: Individuals often experience a desire to contribute to society and mentor others.
Ages 49 to 56: A time of introspection, where individuals evaluate their life's work and legacy.
Ages 56 to 63: Acceptance and integration of life's experiences, leading to wisdom.
Ages 63 and beyond: Reflection and preparation for the end of life, focusing on spiritual fulfillment.
Many people get stuck living the same year repeatedly after their mid-20s. Without intentional reflection, it’s easy to plateau. Life stages prevent this by guiding your attention through the different areas, ensuring you grow holistically.
🎆 Yearly reflection
Now that we are clear on why this is important, let’s go over the steps to follow to reflect on your year.
I’ll warn you, doing this intentionally will take multiple days. I like reflecting on my previous years for an entire week, coming back to this multiple times a day to catch anything that I’m missing.
🪞 Step 1: Reflect on the past year
To grow, you need to know yourself.
Reflect on your values and priorities in your current stage. They aren’t fixed; allow them to evolve.
Celebrate your wins. Document your successes and understand what made them possible. These insights can guide bigger challenges.
Identify growth opportunities. Instead of fixating on failures, use them as data to improve.
If you have done this exercise for multiple years, now it’s the time to re-read your previous year’s reflections and goals
🗂️ Step 2: Set goals and plan with intention
After reflecting
Once you understand your priorities, turn them into actionable goals.
Define clear milestones for all your areas of life. Personally, I like to categorize the areas as “PUSH” or “ON HOLD”. This determines how much attention I pay to that area. It has helped me to realize areas I’ve put on hold for multiple years and I was lagging behind on them
Break big dreams into manageable tasks. You can break it down by quarter. We usually underestimate the things we can achieve in an entire year.
Balance goals across life areas. Remember: Career and Money aren’t the only areas for a fulfilled life.
🚀 Step 3: Stay motivated and focused
Motivation wanes without clear priorities. We don’t want to be like the people who set a new year’s resolution to go to the gym and forget about it by February
Regularly renew your passion by reflecting on your progress. Don’t leave this up to chance, schedule weekly/monthly/quarterly reviews as they see fit. Personally, I do weekly and quarterly.
Use tools like the “Big Three” method: pick three priorities each day and focus your energy there. Make sure you review the priorities in your yearly reflection to ensure each day you are acting according to your priorities.
Avoid burnout by scheduling downtime. If you check again the Wheel of Life, there’s an area for Recreation & Fun. I am someone who forgets about this area, so I have to set it in the calendar. Same thing with money, you need a budget to avoid overspending in some areas and avoid underspending in others. I’m someone who was underspending in “fun money” and having the data forces me to correct this.
A last note: You’ll make mistakes when setting goals. I’ve set big goas for the year in a new area that after dedicating some time to research, I realized that wasn’t the best idea. If a goal no longer aligns with your stage, refine it. Don’t act based on sunk cost
📬 Bonus: This newsletter’s yearly recap
My life’s reflection of 2024 I’ll keep for myself. But I want to share some numbers from this newsletter
2024 was my first full year of writing this newsletter. Thanks to your support, here are the numbers:
Subscribers: From 1.9k to 15.3k
Paid Subs: From 0 to 41
ARR: From $0 to $2.02k
What’s next for 2025? Writing consistently—because consistency drives results. In 2024 I have missed 4 weekly newsletter articles and many days of daily post in LinkedIn and Substack notes. I want to address that for 2025.
🎯 Conclusion
Fast career growth stems from self-awareness, intentional planning, and focused execution.
The real value of yearly reflection isn’t just in the immediate insights—it’s in the compound effect of doing it every year.
At the start of 2024, I realized more career effort would only bring diminishing returns. Instead, I focused on improving my romantic life, and I’m happy to say I improved it. It brought more happiness and fulfillment than any job promotion or change could offer.
And funnily enough, I had pushed already in Career and Money enough so keeping these areas “on hold” brought better results in terms of projects and earnings than previous years. Your efforts today will bring results for multiple years ahead.
Start today. Reflect on 2024, and set three clear goals for 2025. Which area of your life will give you the highest return on effort?
I’ve added the template I’ve used for 4 years in a row accessible right now for paid subscribers. You have access to this and more templates from this page
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👏 Weekly applause
Some good content I read recently:
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. An explanation of the modular monolith architecture with based on how Shopify implemented it at scale- . I’m always drawn to a list of books around a topic. If your goals in 2025 are about leadership, get inspiration from these books.
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How I Achieved More in 2024 (and It’s Not by Working Harder) by
. This is a reflection I also share: Putting boundaries on the time you have available will make you focus on what matters.
This was fantastic, Fran! As a 36-year-old, I totally resonate with spiritual development and the search for meaning and purpose.
The Wheel of Life is a great concept I saw first at Ali Abdaal just recently. But before that, I had a different analogy for life: I was thinking about a chair and different aspects of life would be the legs of the chair.
Technically, the more legs your chair has, the more stable it is. For example, if someone maxed out their career but neglected everything else, they'd be sitting on a pretty unstable chair...
This was a great reflection. You had amazing growth, and I wish you all the best in 2025. Thanks for supporting my newsletter and for all the shoutouts you do. I appreciate it. 🙇♂️
The Wheel of Life concept was a game-changer when I discovered it a few years ago. Since then, it's been a daily reminder of the balance I try to accomplish. Even though a balance is not possible, imo, striving for a balance is the way to go. Some days or weeks, we might work more, while others, we might spend more time with friends and family. Self-awareness is crucial.