Wrap up '23 with my Personal Scorecard RAGE / Wheel of Life review

In 2016 I started to be more intentional with designing my lifestyle across my personal and professional streams. Without studying deeply the literature or taking personal development training courses, I used my  own work experience as a professional engineer to guide me in designing the framework, which I've called "RAGE" that stands for Reality Aspirations Goals Expectations. At the time, I treated myself as a product I'm building, using similes from agile software development, using the concept of Personas (typically products are designed to meet the needs of different user types, i.e. "personas"). Bringing these concepts into personal lifestyle design, I described my aspirations, goals and expectations in the form of agile user stories. 

This helped me in framing my goals to realise tangible outcomes. Almost eight years later, I've maintained discipline in applying the RAGE framework, year-on-year in my pursuit of the various aspirations defined in each persona, i.e. as a Husband, Father,  Professional, Friend, Individual, etc. Coming from an engineering background, I dived deep into prioritising these streams of life, first starting with 20+ personas, having stabilized on a handful of core personas from 2020 onwards.

Interestingly enough, this post, led me to learning about something called "The Wheel of Life". It so happened, according to ChatGPT, the exact date of the creation of the "Wheel of Life" model by Paul J. Meyer is not well documented in public sources -- but it is known that Paul J. Meyer founded the Success Motivation Institute, Inc. in 1960. Honestly, I'm not sure how I missed Meyer's model all this time, but I'm also comforted by the fact that I've created my own model from scratch through my own attempts in crafting a better version of myself through my RAGE model. Anyway, ChatGPT has helped summarize the differences between Meyer's model and Mo Khan's RAGE model in this post. I do like the radial diagram, which is something I hadn't included in my personametry insights as yet.

I'm writing this post in December 2023, the last post for the year - as I break away from the world and embark on a journey making the minor pilgrimage to Mecca (Makkah) for the first time in my life. I've waited a long time to save up for this journey, I made intention at the start of 2023 to do the Umrah, and by the grace of Allah (God), it is about to come true, finishing off 2023 with my most important '23 goal realised - Subhanallah (Glory be to Allah)! And aiming for Hajj (the major pilgrimage) in 4 years time insha Allah (God willing).

Work-wise, my last week was spent completing end of year performance reviews. At Amazon, we treat performance reviews with such seriousness, due care and attention to detail -- that I've never seen done before in other companies I worked with (a post for another day).  For some time now, I have taken mechanisms from my work life and adopted to my personal life. Just as in my RAGE model, breaking down the different domains of life-work streams, I've used business performance scorecards in my tracking progress through the year of my personal performance. If we maintain work logs, performance cards, "baseball cards" for our jobs, is not more important to track our all our streams of life?

Why should we only focus on professional performance reviews and not spare a moment to deeply reflect our performance as a human on this earth? How are we doing personally? How are we performing across the various dimensions of our life? If we live by a value system, how do we know how we're measuring up to that value system? When the year has come and gone, how do you measure progress? Is it only career that matters? Surely not? If not, then why don't we spend as much time, if not more time, doing our own self-assessment and scorecards?? Are we afraid of the reality check? How serious are we in terms of changing ourselves for the better? How are we improving? Do we need to improve? When someone asks you "How's life? How you're doing?" - what's your frame of reference for answering that question? What's the first thing that comes to mind? Is it our work, career? If we're going through a bad patch at work, does this mean our whole life is negative? Often this is exactly what happens. People anchor on the immediate negatives, closest, most recent experiences because without a holistic value system to reference, how should one respond to "How are you doing, really?"

So how am I doing, really - what's my 2023 Performance Scorecard like?

I am sharing my own personal tracking here, not as a means to show off - but as a means to help people, providing an example of how I've managed to use a system that is working for me. This system, called RAGE, may not work for you - but it should give you an idea of the kind of work you need to do, the kind of thinking you need to apply, and the kind of discipline your should consider -- if you are indeed determined to make a concerted effort at changing your current situation, and creating a new trajectory you can aim for to improve the quality, outcome and other aspirations you desire. 

Inspired by Vaugan from Scary Management Playbook's LinkedIn post, here is my Wheel of Life, unpacked in detail, according to my RAGE model. In January '24, I will follow up with the data analytics on time spent in my personas. Given my RAG status, it looks like my wheel of life pretty balanced and aligned with my life-work-stream choices.