Reflecting on 2017 and starting fresh in 2018

2017 is over, I mean it has been over for 3 days but I am late with posting this.

I got really sick after New Year's Eve. Something to with tiring myself out by working 3 night shifts and going a little too crazy with partying in the last 4 days of 2017.

Staying home at least gave me some time to rethink my life and figure out what I would like to do in 2018 and reflect on the last year.

2017

2017 has been an especially difficult year for me. Although the first half was more or less I fine, the second half is when it felt everything is going down the shitter.

To start off at the beginning of the year I started seeing some issues in the company where I worked at. A company that we, with the help of a few of my colleagues built up from scratch.

Our boss, the owner of the company provided us with guidelines and came to some of the more important meeting with us but after the first 2 months or so, we basically did everything ourselves. Sometimes we got told to do this or that but never really how to do it, which is fine, but our efforts or the way we actually did or achieved the things that he asked were almost always wrong and not how it is 'supposed to be done' and never really acknowledged eventhough it boosted the profits of the company. Needless to say that some of us never really saw a wage increase or bonuses when the company itself started making dough.

Well I suppose some of this happens in most companies.

At first I was planning to stay 5 years in this company, because one of my friends told me that having 5 years of working experience in an international company would allow me to get a working VISA in some countries. Japan was my original aim, but some people said even if I have 5 years of work experience I might have troubles getting a VISA there but I thought it would be worth giving it a try anyway. I don't plan to go to Japan anymore, except for a vacation.

Early into the year I got accused of stealing from the company, which by the way never happened and got blamed for everything that was not going well enough. This made me severely annoyed, to the point where I quit on the spot.

After this the year was kind of a downhill ride.

Me and my friends formed a company and thought we had a really good idea, well, we still think it is a really good idea. But the idea is one thing, execution is a different one. We will still continue to work on it and I still have high hopes for the project, but it did not go as well as we thought.

Which resulted in a few things.

My girlfriend got into arguments about how I don't have a job, eventhough we had a registered Gmbh and were making some money, although not enough. The fact that the company did not pay my last monthly wage did not help either.

Since I was not making enough money that led me to borrow some money from family, which for me personally is quite a depressing thing, and to this date I could still not pay it back.

My girlfriend moved out around October after arguing about life, our future plans and many other things.

I held up relatively well, but still did not really felt good about everything happening with my life, I thought things will work out and eventually everything will be fine.

There was a time during last year when my aunt asked me to take care of my grandfather sometime, just one or two times a week.

I thought it would not be a big deal and since I had some time on my hands I thought it should not be a problem.

What really broke me down last year was when one day my grandfather completely forgot about me, and since then he still does not recognize me.

He has not been eating very much, nor drinking enough water for quite some time, and sometimes refuses to do so as well.

At some points last year it all felt hopeless and even had a few suicidal thoughts, but luckily I had some good friends around me that helped me through the shitty times to whom I am grateful for.

Plans for 2018

The above and some other things led me to more or less become a chainsmoker, went out to drinks with friends more often than I should have.

And now I realized that needs to change.

As a first step to live a more healthy lifestyle I picked up a new electronic cigarette to help out with quitting smoking.

Luckily I learned a lot of things about business, marketing and managing during the last 3 years. So I will be writing about how we built a company from scratch to a one that was 200.000 gross revenue per year. And about how you can avoid the mistakes we did while building it up. I hope that these articles will help you in some way during the future.

I also wrote out a business plan for a new crypto related company that might or might not work out. Whether it will or not it is always worth to try!