Measuring Your Own Goals
In order to accomplish your goals successfully, you need to have good measurable indicators for your success, for example:
If your goal is to become a better developer this year, a possible success indicator can be the amount of programming courses you completed in a year, but will it ensure that you are now a better developer? another indicator can be the amount of positive feedback you are getting about an open source project you’ve built. In contrary to the first indicator, the second one is unbiased to the fact that you can’t control how good you think you are. However, if people start appreciating the code you are writing - you are de facto becoming a better developer
If your goal is to have more impact at work, one success indicator can be arranging 4-5 internal meetups on topics that are important for you. Another indicator can be the amount of feedback you get about your initiatives and how many “copy” from you. Defining “success” indirectly will assure that your efforts are important to the culture.
Defining indirect success indicator is important for protecting yourself from biased indicators that can be easily manipulate for declaring “fake” success because of being afraid from admitting a failure.