About

This repo maintains revisions and translations to the list of 40 questions I ask myself each year and each decade.

See related blog posts:

• 40 questions to ask yourself every year (October 2016)
• 40 questions to ask yourself every decade (January 2022)

Translations

If you’d like to help translate the questions, you can submit your translation via pull request. Place the translated files into a folder named using the ISO 639-1 two letter language code. See the /translations folder.

ISO 639-1	Language	Year	Decade
en	English (original)	link	link
ar	Arabic	link	link
bg	Bulgarian	link	link
ca	Catalan	link	link
da	Danish	link	link
de	German	link	link
el	Greek	link	link
es	Spanish	link	link
fa	Persian	link	link
fi	Finnish	link	link
fr	French	link	link
hi	Hindi	link	link
hu	Hungarian (Magyar)	link	link
id	Indonesian	link	link
dv	Dhivehi	link	link
it	Italian	link	link
ja	Japanese	link	link
ko	Korean	link	link
lt	Lithuanian	link
lv	Latvian	link	link
ml	Malayalam	link	link
nl	Dutch	link	link
no	Norwegian	link	link
pl	Polish	link	link
pt	Portuguese	link	link
ru	Russian	link	link
sv	Swedish	link	link
ta	Tamil	link	link
th	Thai	link
tl	Filipino	link
tr	Turkish	link	link
uk	Ukrainian	link	link
vi	Vietnamese	link	link
zh-hans	Chinese (simplified)	link	link
zh-hant	Chinese (traditional)	link	link

40 questions to ask yourself each year

One of my rituals at the end of each year is asking myself these forty questions. It usually takes me about a week to work my way through all of them. I find it to be one of the most valuable exercises to reflect on what happened, good and bad, and how I hope the year ahead will shape up.

What is more interesting than each individual answer are the trends that emerge after years of answering the same questions. I’ve shared this list with my family and closest friends, and always enjoy discussing answers as we reflect on the year.

Feel free to add or remove questions, and share your edits with me. This is first and foremost a personal exercise, so make it a tradition you can enjoy for years to come.

40 questions to ask yourself each decade

Some time ago I had answered Proust’s famous questionnaire, and thought I would try answering it again. While the yearly questions help me reflect on what happened, Proust’s questions are more about personal philosophies and traits, and thus change less frequently over time.

Going through my answers to the Proust questionnaire, I was inspired to work on a new questionnaire that I could use for the next few decades. I tried create a set of questions that I would enjoy reflecting on in ten years. This list combines questions from Proust’s questionnaire, and others I’ve been collecting ad hoc.

It will be ten years before I can tell you whether this worked well or not, but join me on this journey if you’d like! Again, consider editing this list with questions you would like to know your own answers to in ten years.