2022 Goals
So 2021 didn’t go quite as well as I wanted. It didn’t go bad I guess but it certainly didn’t go well either. But it’s time to put all that behind me and look forward to 2022. Like in the 2021 goals post I’ll be talking about my goals in travel, martial arts, and social media.
First is travel and honestly I’m not going to try to speculate too much with travel. I made the mistake of doing that last year and got let down. I had been hoping to post up in a hotel overlooking the beach for a couple days of relaxation during the Chinese New Year vacation, but Omicron popped up riiiight before vacation started. Because of course it did. If it gets under control quickly enough maybe we’ll be able to do something towards the end of vacation but right now it’s not looking good. Hopefully summer will be a little better, like it was last year, and we’ll get to do at least a little domestic travel but I’m going to keep my expectations down just in case.
I’m not really sure how to feel about martial arts. I started doing quite a bit at the end of 2020 and into 2021 but it burnt me out. Work, gym, more work, martial arts, writing and video editing, bed, wake up and do it again. By spring 2021 I was wrecked. I was so burnt out and tired. It wasn’t that I was sick of martial arts. I was just doing too much. Now I’m doing way less because of a combination of being tired and schedule changes (read a little about that here and here) and I’m not really sure where I’ll go with it in 2022. I’d obviously like to get back to everything but I’m just not sure I can physically handle doing so much stuff. I may have to stagger what I do. Do tai chi one week and wing chun the next or do fewer martial arts. Again it’s not what I want but I have to work within the realities of real life.
Social media is the last one. I like where I am with Instagram and Xiaohongshu (which means little red book and is the Chinese app where I post the photos I post on Instagram). Two weeks of travel or photography photos then a week of martial arts photos. Right now I post all three Instagram posts together in one post on Friday on Xiaohongshu. Earlier in the week I post some older photos from Instagram, since I started Xiaohongshu much later. When I run out of older Instagram posts I’ll probably need to think of something new to post early in the week on Xiaohongshu but I honestly don’t know what it’ll be. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.
I need to make a change on the short video apps but I’m not sure what it will be. TikTok seems to get worse every week and I can’t figure out why. I certainly don’t have the best content but I feel like it should be doing a little better than it is. Something needs to change but I’m not sure what. Douyin is still doing well but it seems to have plateaued. I had a couple of viral videos in 2020 that got me lots of followers but I didn’t have any of that in 2021. I had some kind of viral videos that got lots of views and likes but they didn’t get me followers like the 2020 videos did. Unfortunately, like with TikTok, I don’t know what change I need to make to improve. One thing I’m looking into is short fight clips. The sort of things that are in the fight videos I put on YouTube but just 10-20 seconds. No story or setup or anything. Just a small clip of the choreography.
Storyboard for an upcoming fight video
As for longer videos I think my biggest problem is consistency. I’d like to post one a week on YouTube but those videos take much longer to make and I often struggle to get them edited in time. In addition I feel like I’ll eventually run out of content if I do manage to post every week. I’m hoping to do more short films. The fight videos, ‘Justice Delivery,’ and ‘The Starving Vampire,’ made me realize I really like doing short (micro) films more than vlogs. Unfortunately they take much more time to do. Regardless I’m hoping to have a steadier release of fight videos. That’s something I hope for every year though. In both of the last two years I seemed to get more fight videos done earlier in the year before sort of fizzling out by the middle of the year. Hopefully I can avoid that this year. I also might try to make some non-fighting related short films but I’m not sure how that’ll turn out. I haven’t tried that before. Hopefully I can make at least one or two and see how they turn out.
Bilibili (the Chinese site where I upload my YouTube videos) is a little more difficult. Subtitling my short TikTok videos for Douyin isn’t a problem. Sometimes they’re easy enough that I can do them myself, and if they’re not Max can help. But the YouTube videos are much longer and more difficult so I have to get them translated and subtitled somewhere else. This takes some time. I have to make a transcript, then send it to my translator, then wait until it’s been translated and the subtitles have been added before I can upload them. I’ll probably look into finding some more people to do the subtitles so I can be getting multiple videos subtitled at the same time. It’ll cost more but hopefully I’ll be able to get a more stable upload schedule that way.
I’m a little more pessimistic about 2022 than I was about 2020 and 2021. Neither of those years worked out how I had hoped they would so I’m trying to keep my expectations a little lower for 2022. That being said I’m definitely going to try to make 2022 better than either of those years were. Underpromise and overdeliver.
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