How I'm advancing my career without neglecting my life. "New year's resolutions" done right.
This guide shows software engineers how to align life stages, balance priorities, and use yearly reflections for faster success. A yearly review done right (Template inside)
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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