Everything I Learned In 2024 Condensed Into 2.5 Hours

Boom. Welcome to my 2024 yearly review video, where I break down everything that happened so that my 85-year-old self can watch back at every single year of my life in one giant chronological video. This is the third video in the series, and my goal is to make these every single year such that I can watch them in the future, my family can watch them in the future, my friends can watch them in the future, and I just wish other people would do these types of videos because I personally learned so much for them or from them. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to recap everything that I had going on and sit back, relax, and hopefully you emerge with one thing that you can take away into the new year that will make your life better. Let's do it.

All right, what we're going to cover in this video: First, we're going to do a little bit of a kind of background primer on how I do my yearly review. Then we'll dive into the personal life recap in bullets, then the business recap. Then I'll talk about the lessons and realizations that kind of apply to every um area of my life, and then we'll finish with what I'm excited about for the year ahead, give a little bit of a a sneak peek on some goals I have and my plan to achieve those.

So uh, if you only care about certain parts, if you're only interested in business, if you're only interested in what I learned, if you're only interested in seeing my goals, there'll be timestamps below this video where you can kind of jump around, cuz I'm filming this part at the beginning, but my guess is this is going to be a decently long video. So if you only care about certain parts, you can dive into the specific timestamps below. And then also there will be an audio version and a text version uh with links below this if you prefer to just listen on the go or if you want to read. So I know some people have different ways of learning things, kind of um extract takeaways in different ways, so all those options are there. Without further ado, let's dive into my 2024 review.

So let's start with my process for doing the yearly review that I've been doing now for about 5 years, but this will be the third video. And basically, it starts with having an entire week blocked in some point of December, so either the first week right after Thanksgiving or this year it was the second week, and I go somewhere else. I completely change up my environment, and my only goal is to make the space to react uh review, read through everything that I put together this year. So these are my journals from 2024. Uh I guess actually a couple of these are empty, so really it was these three were my main journals from 2024, and this is probably the least I've written handwritten this year. Um I also have a ton of journals from um my computer where I probably spent six months of this year writing by hand and six months typing my journals. My immediate takeaway as I started to do this review was how much clearer my thinking is when I start my day with handwritten journaling. In in the Quest for efficiency that I always found myself on, I uh during the summer kind of got back to handwritten journaling, which is really nice, but for the first four or five months of the year, just with a lot of things going on, uh and that'll be a common theme throughout this video of the the things I mistakenly cut from my life uh as I took on more. But that's the process is I start by just reading through everything I put together to kind of get a recap of my year. I look at my calendar, I do little end-of-day Recaps on my phone, I read through everything just to kind of get like a lay of the land, and I've immediately see all the things I forgot that happened. It's crazy what you can cover in a year. When you start all the way back in January, you're like, wow, that almost feels like a completely different lifetime.

Once I have all that information kind of in my head, I start with a bullet point recap of everything that happened by month. So I just list out all the months of the year, and then I list, you know, six or seven bullets on where I was, what I was doing, what I was worried about, what I was working on. And then once I have that, I will take those like Milestones, I call them, and turn them into bullet point Recaps for my personal life and my business life. So that'll be the rough outline of this video is I'll start with a personal life recap and kind of walk through each bullet, and then my business recap, walk through each bullet. And through that kind of distillation process of everything that happened, I'll get a sense for how I felt throughout the year, so what was going well, where I was struggling, mistakes I was making, wins I was having. And then I'll try to distill all of those into um some broader Frameworks or lessons, realizations that I've learned about myself or the world or other people or just the way things operate and try to crystallize those to take away from the year. Because the winds are good, things that happen are good, but really I'm just trying to learn and iterate every single year on every area of my life. And the more that I can distill those into either phrases that I can remember or small pieces of writing or just reminders to myself uh to not make mistakes or do things a certain way in the future, that's really the goal. So once I have that, I finish with taking all that information and think about how do I want to change in the year ahead by setting some goals, setting some things that I don't want to do any longer, setting some things that I want to continue doing. And so that is the rough outline of this video. Like I said, that's the overview of how this whole process works. Let's dive into the first part, which is my 2024 in bullets personal life recap.

Number one: I visited 10 countries on three different continents. Number two: I slept in 21 different apartments, hotels, and houses across the world. Number three: I learned to DJ in Amsterdam, which was a lot of fun. Number four: I hit a record net worth, record income, and record spending—a lot of lessons there that I'm excited to talk about. Um, number five: I passed the First full year without my dad, so some takeaways on that one. Number six: I experienced the most mental and emotional stress I ever have in a year and expanded my capacity as a result. Number seven: I celebrated my first one-year anniversary. Number eight: I learned to box with immersive one-on-one training. Number nine: I provided significant support uh as the main provider for my mom, my sister, and my girlfriend. And then number 10: I struggled to make consistent health and fitness gains throughout the year. So that's the full recap. Let's dive into the very first bullet, which is visiting 10 countries on three different continents.

So listing out the countries: Germany, Austria, Colombia, Canada, Amsterdam, Spain, France, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro. It's a lot—a lot of countries. And it's fun to put that list together because, starting—I was rewatching my annual review from last year and I started with how many cities I visited, and most of them were in the US, because before 2022 I'd only left the country once, time, and it was to Japan during a college football uh like trip—we played a team over in Japan. And it hit me toward the later part of 2022 that I had unlocked this ability to work remotely, travel with my own business, and I hadn't really put any of that into practice. And so 2022 and early 2023 I started to travel, travel around the US, went to a bunch of different cities uh which I talked about last year, and then this year I really accelerated that and basically spent my entire year traveling to different places. And so I'll talk about that in the next bullet, some of the like different setups that I found myself in, but basically I traveled a ton this year, and I'm glad I did because the main reason I'm doing this is I'm in a data-gathering period of where I want to find a long-term headquarters. So I know all the places in the US that I could potentially live at any given time that I would actually see myself enjoying—Scottsdale, where I am right now, Miami being the other main one—but I know that over the long term I want to find three places to have like my own personal headquarters: one in a city, one in the mountains, and one on the beach. And so I'm looking to experience tons of different cultures and places to figure out where I want to start that headquarters. I say headquarters like it's this Tony Stark, Iron Man thing, but no, it's just where I want to have like a main apartment as I start to kind of settle down a little bit more. And I can honestly say I've gathered a ton of data just over the last two years with these different countries where I feel like now anytime someone mentions like a South American culture or a Western European—I have not done much Asia, so that is probably um over the next two years I want to get out to Japan more, uh Bali, some of those places—but anyway, I digress. Right now I feel like for Western—like US, South America, and then Western Europe—have a very good sense of the different cultures there because of much time I spent. I can have nuanced conversations about them; I can talk about the pros and cons. And I want to expand that in the new year, starting in Mexico, going to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and at that point I'll probably have a good idea of where on the west part of the world I want to start, and then like I said, do a little bit of Asia towards the end of next year or maybe 2026. But the big pros are those that I feel like I can have a conversation; the cons—I feel traveled out at this point, not necessarily that I don't want to travel anymore, cuz I certainly want to, but the amount of logistics that I had uh to plan and execute and think about this year were a little bit just a lot. I'm not going to say too much cuz I I handled it fine, but it wasn't—I I just felt that I was rewriting, trying to figure out so much that a lot of my mental bandwidth was spent there and taken away from other areas where it's probably better spent. So I just don't want to repeat this year again in that I'm just constantly constantly moving around, where I'd way rather have like three or four places that I spend a lot of time rather than rack up another 10 or 12 countries. So that was a big one, bullet number one. If I was going to describe the year, it's like I traveled a ton, and in doing that travel leads me to the second bullet.

The second bullet of my 2024 personal is that I slept in 21 different apartments, hotels, and houses across the world. So I have a long note on my phone where I list out every time I go to a new hotel, and I add in a couple things of what I liked about it, what I would change about it if I was going to build like my long-term um headquarters like I talked about, what would I take from this place and add there. But in listing out every single one of those places, I understand now why I feel a little bit traveled out and unsettled because, relative to the prior 10 years of my life, I probably didn't sleep in that many different like houses or apartments or hotels, whatever you want to call it. And I underestimated how much mental bandwidth goes to redoing the basics in every place. So we get to a new hotel, I got to figure out if I want to sleep well, how cold can it get, can I black the lights out, where is the coffee, where's the gym relative to here. And those things that I take for granted when you have them nailed down of your healthy habits and things being on autopilot, I lost that this year, and that probably contributed to some of the feelings I had around just general like travel fatigue. Was it not—it wasn't that I didn't didn't want to go to new places, I was just tired of figuring out all of the little things that make my life feel good every time I got there. Where if I was staying for under a week, it was almost not worth it; it would be the fourth or fifth night I'd finally get a good night of sleep because I finally figured out how to get the AC to a certain level or whatever it was, and that just took a lot of mental effort. But like I said, the goal—I feel at this point I know all the different things I like about a place, which allows me to pick a hotel or pick a place while I'm traveling. The biggest mistake I made during this travel season this year was wasting so much time trying to find the perfect spot, where you can't even tell until you get there, and I would spend hours just like comparing contrasting hotels, um pros and cons of like how close it was to a cafe or a gym or did DAV SAA. And I have an assistant, but it just like I wasn't able to describe to her what it was that I was actually looking for, so I still had to do that work myself, and that is what I want to avoid. So that's the main takeaway from all the different places I went and why I have this as a bullet of what I want to remember is like try not to do that again this year. This is a reminder—I'm going to make constant reminders to myself throughout this video of just don't make this mistake again. And 21 different places—just too many. My goal this year is to keep it to like 10 that I really really enjoy being in; if it's more than that, we'll see, but but that's bullet number two is that I really explored so many different living environments that had a ton of pros but definitely some cons as well.

All right, bullet number three on my 2024 personal recap is I learned to DJ in Amsterdam. And I kind of crack up to myself as I say learn because I'm a complete beginner still, but it's been a long-time uh dream of mine to be able to really produce—not even produce, but mix music at a high level such that I have a a very simple indicator, which is if a friend of mine throws a party and there's like 100 people there, they would let me DJ and no one in the crowd would be like, "Who is this DJ? Get him off the stage! This is horrible." That's like my bar. And then I also want to publish one uh like a full set. But anyway, I started this—I talked about this in my last year's video—and I had a coach in Miami when I was living there in 2023, and I didn't vibe with him that much, and it turned into where I just did like five or six lessons, and he wouldn't let me use my own music at at a certain point, cuz he's like, "You got to learn the basics on this stuff." I'm like, "This music sucks!" And I was going at like 5:00 p.m. on a Friday where I was cooked mentally, so I just stopped. I was like, "This maybe I just don't want to do this." Uh, but I learned from those mistakes and I made the switch when I was in Amsterdam this year—like a two-week period where I went every day with a personal coach that I actually liked—and I learned more in those two weeks than I did in like the three or four months that I was trying to do it in Miami. This is something I want to do a lot more of next year because there are very few times where I felt more in more of a flow state than when I was in my this like awesome DJ room—sick lights, just me, my own music, and like two or three hours I would just completely immerse myself and lose all track of time. It was so much fun, and I would leave there and it was like I got a brain massage; it was like the whole time I was at ease, I was letting like other thoughts and ideas marinate in the back of my head, and I want to just do more of it this year. And it's so fun to put this video together cuz I'm like, yeah, of course I should have that way higher on my goal list um that I put together for next year because this was the thing that made all the other parts of my life even more fun when I was doing it. So that was a lot of fun this year. Like I said, my goal for the next year is to publish my own set on YouTube, and I'll talk about that during my the end of the video with all my different goals, but that was just a bullet that I wanted to remember is that that two-week immersion of DJing was a lot of fun and a reminder to myself to double down on that in 2025.

Okay, my fourth bullet on 2024 on the personal side is that I hit a record net worth, record income, and record spending. So this deserves its own video because it is a a topic I think a lot about; I talk a lot about. But just to give the TL;DR on a couple of the different lessons: Number one, more money and more problems is definitely true, and I say that not to sound like a douchebag, but I have experienced that firsthand this year, and that it's not necessarily more problems, it's just more weight, where I found the weight of having more ability to generate income is usually tied to more people depending on you, more people expecting things of you, more people relying on you, and then internally there's like psychological beliefs um habits around money or beliefs around money that require continuous like training like any other muscle. And it's such a multivariate problem—like there are multiple things going on here—because as you make more but save more but spend more, like how do you get comfortable with that? Because if you just look at the raw numbers, it's going to look like that's way up, but then on a percentage basis is that up? So again, deserves its entire own video, but the takeaway is that enjoying the money you've made and feeling good about it is an extremely important skill that I have just continued to underestimate the importance of, where I I made a couple choices this year around where I would stay or who I would help that again required like a rewriting of beliefs. And not to mention the volatility that comes from just a raw numbers perspective when you have a bigger business—is the swings month-to-month are the same percentage-wise. Like, for example, if a business does 800k in a month and the next month it drops 20%, that goes down 160,000, so it's still a 20% decrease just like 80 to 60,000 would be, but when you're at that level the raw numbers of the swings are bigger, which is harder psychologically. So that was just something I recognized this year is that as you ascend levels, it's not that you learn them in a lower one and now you just get to keep them; it's you have to relearn them at each level that you go to, and that was just something I experienced this year.

The second one would be it's not about how much you have, it's about how much you make monthly that delivers financial comfort for me, where the way I measure things is I look at myself as a business, business, and I try to just calculate my operating margin each month. So if I have X amount coming in, how much after taxes and spending am I saving to invest? And I look at that as like operating profit. And again, I can't wait to make more videos about this, especially in the new year, because I want to crystallize some of these things for myself, but I learned basically my income went up this year, but my spending did outpace that increase on a percentage basis, so my net margin this year was lower even though I made made more—so I saved more, I made more than I had any year in the past, but the percentage of that was lower. So it's this like interesting like psychological mental game of like, yeah, I'm the gross amount is better, but I'm I'm like on a thinner margin, and so which one of those are you optimizing for? And I realized that I was making financial decisions strictly around how much was coming in each month, not how much I had. So if my net worth was up a certain amount relative to the year before, I found that I was still making purchase decisions with the same level of like analysis because my monthly income was not that much different than the year before. So despite having more, I was still anchored to how much I was spending and that was what or how much how much was coming in each month. So that's what like delivered the comfort for me, and that was just—I I always thought that once you had a certain amount saved you would start to think differently, but I don't think that's true. I think the only point of having money saved is how much it generates you passively on a monthly basis, so I would factor that in of course. And if you had $100 million, then yeah, you make 5%, so you're making $5 million in interest, that would obviously be much more comfortable. So it's just a a constant ebb and flow, but I have recognized that measuring myself like a business on a monthly basis is still what I want to get to. So you can either make more or you can spend less, and part of my um goals for the next year will be to dial that in because I think when you have the ability to, and you look at it on that basis, like ideally as you make more your margin actually goes up—like you have operating leverage, you would call that in business—we're getting a little advanced here—but if you like if you make if you spend the same percentage-wise when you make a million dollars in a month or 10,000, that probably isn't worth it—like that additional spend at that level is just not it. So I want to figure out like what are the things that are driving me happiness and what are the parts that I may have overextended myself or just weren't worth it that I thought might have been worth it and I had to try; now I can kind of dial it back. So on that front, I rented here in Arizona the nicest house I could possibly rent, so for three or four months—we were here for September, October, November, December—so four months I went on this website that allowed you to rent like luxury homes, and the reason I did this—longer story—but I wanted to have my with me, I wanted people to be able to visit, and I found the coolest place I possibly could, and this place is awesome. I'm filming this in this office that is a dream office, but I did it for two reasons: one because I could, and I wanted to like normalize success to me, because if this is as cool of a place as you could possibly get, like I had to experience that. But I can verifiably say—I don't want to say it was a negative return, but it it might have been because it is a full-time job keeping up with this place, and I didn't expect that or know that. And recognizing that I don't want a house like this was—I went into this experiment saying I want to learn whether or not I like this for the future, now when I'm way older and I got a family and things like that, maybe it makes sense to have a place like this, but it's a full-time job keeping up with all the BS that just made me crave like a one-bedroom apartment where I just had all my things right in the right place and didn't feel that I had like things broken or it's like a big trek. I understand how this sounds if like former me listening you like, "Oh yeah, complain about your big house," but it was just such an interesting experiment for me to max something out and recognize that I actually didn't like it, and therefore in the future I would way rather have like two to three small places that I really enjoy being in.

are Cozier than one big place that I don't even enjoy being in. So I had a bunch of lessons like that this year, of trying new experiences that were previously out of my capacity financially, and then recognizing that I actually didn't like it, or the marginal return of that extra dollar was not as high. And so I'd rather just like dial it back in and have something simpler. And that's going to be a big focus of mine for the upcoming year: is like what is actually worth it and what is not. And I learned a lot of that this year, and that was a big theme overall. All was just paying for things to test and then see if I like them, and then recognize if I did or didn't. Because yeah, I could have come into this like, "Oh, this is it; I want this Mansion; I want all this," like all the time. That wasn't it for me. And that was a lot of people where I feel unfortunate. Imagine if I had lived like 20 years like really saving and scratching and clawing and thinking like this big whatever was going to be the missing piece, and then getting there and feeling that level of like, "I actually don't want this."

I tried to accelerate that this year. I think Tim Ferris does the same thing with like mini retirements, where if you really think that you want to go and do like a completely different career, just give yourself a test of it. Uh, you probably find out that you could do that with way less, or you don't really want to do that full-time, whatever it is. So that was the big takeaway for me: is I did this; it was that I want a simpler lifestyle than something like this would create. And that summarized a lot of the money stuff this year: is that just 'cause I had the ability to, I felt almost obligated, but now I found the Finance back in my BlackRock days; they would call this like the efficient Frontier of everything. So at a certain level, like what is the best way to allocate that? It's a portfolio question, but that was something I found this year, and I want to start talking a lot more about um, money and money beliefs and money skills, because there's a lot of information on how to make it; not a lot of, not a lot of information out there of how to spend it well, how to allocate it well, um, while also enjoying life, buying memory dividends, some of the things I talk about a lot. So, so that's like the year of money summarized, where yeah, record across the board; some of those records felt better than others. Uh, either way, I learned a ton, and I now have a better footing for how to properly allocate things into 2025 and beyond.

All right, my fifth bullet on the personal side of 2024 is that I passed the First full year mark without my dad. So I, I opened up on this a lot in my last year's video. I lost my dad in June, June 1st of 2023, and passing that first full year mark was an interesting one, because along the way, I should talk about this more; I don't talk about this too much because I don't think it applies to that many people, but maybe the people that it does apply to, it will really help. But I find there's, there's no road map for this, and as someone who really benefits when they see a road map for something, there's no road map for grief. And I think I spent a lot of this year stuck between two feelings: one, thinking that I might have been repressing it by not feeling grief that often, like in a visceral sense, because um, there's no like, if I remember him once a week or once a month, like is that too little, too much? It was just an interesting like feeling to probe. Um, so that was one end of the spectrum, and the other was thinking that spending any more time on it like might have not been serving me, where I couldn't really figure out like how much it was worth probing into, because consciously I didn't feel that it was like limiting me in any way, but it's probably more subconscious. So there were a few specific scenarios on that one, Mark, where I did feel it and was like, "Okay, there's probably something here that deserves being dug into a little bit more." It was on his birthday, which is 4 days after mine, and growing up, my birthday is February 18th, and it was always kind of fun because the 22nd was like 4 days later, so be, and his, we do like joint birthday stuff together. So that was it. And then on the one-year anniversary of losing him, I felt it a lot, where it didn't really hit me until that morning as I journaled; I wrote out the date and was like, "Ah, okay, this is going to be a like recurring date that has a lot of significance for me." And then like I said last year, every time I was at a sporting event, I would always text him, growing up, well, not even growing up, but like as I kind of got older, because we went to a ton of sports games together, and I felt that there were a few times where I'd like take out my phone and have that gut reaction like wanting to send him a picture, and I couldn't.

So this is something I want to unpack a little bit more in the new year with the cognitive behavioral therapist that I've been working with, who is awesome, helping me really unpacked and kind of look at the texture of my mind, the way I think, the way I operate, and I want to figure out if there are subconscious ways that's affecting me, and if not, like if there's any unprocessed blame, or for myself or other people. That's a topic that I want to dive into more, because I know um, probing into that is going to be fruitful, even if it's painful in the short term. And lastly on this front, a big reason that I'm making videos like this, and especially really just the annual review videos in general, is I have very few artifacts of him. Like I couldn't tell you that I have like a bunch of videos of us talking together. Like what I would do right now to have a podcast that was like three or four hours where I would um, have a conversation about his life, how I met my mom, his business, um, his childhood, what he thinks of what I'm doing, things like that. I would literally do anything; I would pay any amount of money to have that. And so it's just a reminder to myself, one, to get that on the calendar to do with my other family members, because the second you want it, it's probably too late. And then part of why I'm making this is like, how cool would it have been to watch his annual review over the last 50 years, where I can look at my children one day and go, "Okay, when you're 10, start watching my," I wish I had this when I was 10 years old, but I don't, but they can watch my journey, and we can maybe make like a highlight reel of it or something like that. But I want more, more artifacts of me, such that other people in my life can rewatch things like that in the future. And so as I put together videos like this, it's through that lens of like, "I wish I had more of him; let's make sure that that doesn't happen for my future family or children or things like that." So anyway, First full year, ups and downs on that front, but um, I really enjoy putting this bullet together and recognizing, yeah, that's a painful bullet to put out there, but it's going to be one that I can take, continue to learn from, continue to probe, continue to just soak as much growth out of it as possible, um, and that starts with probing it a little bit more in the year ahead.

All right, my sixth bullet on the personal side of 2024 is that I experienced the most mental and emotional stress I ever have in a year, and I greatly expanded my capacity to do so as a result. So maybe I should have made this the first bullet, because it really summarizes how I felt a lot of this year, but it was the most challenging um, mentally and emotionally, by far, of any year that I've had. And it was only through the reading of my journals that I really recognized that, of how I really felt. I was a bit more negative, or exasperated, or frustrated this year than at any point. And there are tons of reasons for that that I'll expand more on throughout the video, but basically, I took a step up in the number of people who had Direct access to me, and that meant employees, Families, my significant other, my environment, my living space, things like that. And at the same time, I significantly cut a lot of the mental and emotional processing time. Like I said, I journaled less this year and had fewer free mornings where I do a lot of that deep thinking and processing um, than ever before. So it was like I greatly ramped up my, well actually, let me explain the framework first. So this book, I read this whole book on my retreat, *The Power of Full Engagement*, highly, highly recommend for anyone who is leveling up uh, in any area, because he's got a great framework here all about stress and recovery. And maybe you're like me, when someone's like, "Oh, how do you deal with stress?" I'm like, "I'm not stressed; like I, I don't, I don't deal with stress," whatever. But he really simplified it for me and said that stress is anything that expends energy; recovery is anything that adds energy or recovers energy. So I was like, "Oh, okay, so at any time you were either stressing or recovering," and that was so liberating for me because it gave me words to describe how I felt this year, and that I spent far more time with stressful activities: so hiring, being in a relationship, growing that relationship, family things, traveling, and significantly less time on recovery activities, like sleeping very well, or meditation, or sonical plunge, or just taking time off to relax in general. And from that, he says there's actually, so you have stress and recovery, and then you have three main types of energy: physical, mental, and emotional. And again, this gave me such great language to use to myself and to the people that I care about of how I felt this year, which is physical energy, yeah, you understand; mental energy is anything that requires thinking or processing or decision-making; and then emotional is like love, um, sadness, anger, all the different like ways you feel about whatever's going on. And so I increased significantly all of the stressful activities across all three: so physical, I traveled much more; I slept in different environments that greatly made it harder to sleep well versus like my perfect Miami apartment; uh, and I, I dealt with some injuries this year that took a lot of the physical like ability to recover away, because I wasn't getting as good of workouts. On the mental side, we significantly accelerated the business; I'll talk a lot about that in the business recap, but we accelerated everything on the hiring side, which takes a ton of decision-making, a ton of planning and thinking, and just like resource allocation, and then a lot of the logistics of travel is a very mentally taxing activity, where the more that you move around, the more decisions you have to constantly make and remake, and you just, you lose out on the efficiency that you can gain from having all your things set up in one place. And then emotionally, um, growing a relationship, I'll talk about being something that is extremely emotionally taxing, because you are constantly giving to another person and like deploying energy on that, and there is emotional recovery on, on that um, that comes, but at certain points in a relationship, one person might be significantly more like in need of emotional support, and that usually creates like a one-way um, flow of emotional energy that balances out in the long run, but over the short term, and especially during a couple of periods this month or this year, um, it was more one-sided, and so I felt more emotionally drained. And then hiring team members is like one of the more emotionally draining things, because you just, especially ones that Directly rely on you for either mentorship or management, it is an emotionally taxing thing because you have to respond to their energy levels.

So anyway, I say that because all those stressful activities ramped up, and my recovery activities ramped way down. So my sleep was worse; I journaled way less; I had less time to myself, just purely myself, because I traveled with someone throughout the year. And I don't say this to like complain; it was more that I was very grateful um, and honestly relieved to find like a framework that explained the way I felt this year, because it's like, yeah, of course you felt a little bit more exasperated, a little bit more challenged, a little bit more like down, it's not the right word, but I just felt that I was more drained as a default throughout the year, and that came from the mismatch of stress and Recovery activities. So how I take that into the year ahead is like anything that requires Progressive overload to improve, like weightlifting or Focus or other things, I have reframed this year of more stress as capacity expansion, such that if I was able to make it through this year with all the different things that I had going on: business, relationship growth, um, all the different pieces, traveling combined into one, and still am able to put together a video like this, and despite looking tired 'cause I was a little bit sick, but like I took on a lot this year, and I feel really good about what that means for my future. So it's funny, but as I started to set goals for the year, the big thing I'm focused on is recovery first. So rather than try to program in recovery things like meditation or sauna or just long walks without my phone or massages or whatever, sporting events, EV, comedy podcasts, I'm actually starting with those as the big rocks, where I understand now that I can push way harder in every area because of that capacity expansion that I put together this year if I have recovery programmed first, such that I know that I have the space built in to recover from all the stress that I put out. So I feel really good about this; I'm excited about it, despite going into my interview review exhausted, and then I read through my first Journal; I was like, "Oh my goodness, like I just, my handwriting, like I just could tell the stress," and I had multiple people when I was on the phone with them this year um, like say, "Dude, you, you sound like something's going on; you sound a little bit more stressed; you sound a little bit more like things aren't flowing as well." I was like, "Yeah, because they're not," and it's been a nice month in December here where I've kind of gotten out of that, where we've taken time off in the business; I got some time solo; uh, I could film this video, which is like a cathartic release in itself, where I now understand how to prevent that feeling in the future, and I, that is what brings me great excitement. It's like I can make this big macro iteration on the entire year based on this review of like, "Okay, do not allow yourself to be under recovered in 2025," and that means starting my day with meditation, really getting my sleep environment dialed in, all those things that they're the Basics, but I'm not going to let those slip this year; I'm going to build those as the foundation that everything else must fit around. Now that will require a lot of communication to my partner, to my family, to the business, because I found this year that the first thing to go was my personal recovery, and then therefore I was not able to show up as well for the other people in my life. Great realization I have in a year rather than after 10 years of doing it, so now I need to take that and put it into practice in the year ahead, and I'm very excited for it.

All right, my seventh bullet on the 2024 personal recap is that I celebrated my first one-year anniversary. So if you're watching this, listening to this, you know who you are; I love you, and took a lot of great strides on my relationship this year. I spent about 80% of the Year traveling uh, with my girlfriend, and we passed our one-year anniversary, which was the first time that I've been in a serious relationship Beyond one year, and so that was a cool Milestone to experience, because I've talked about this um, my past end-year videos, where I spent a lot of 2021, 2022, 2023 really building out my personal foundation, and as I've, it started with really taking care of my health personally, getting myself in good shape, and then I built the business Foundation, where in 2022 and 2023 that was my big Focus, uh, and then I started to say, "I have a lot of these foundations built; let's expand into nurturing and building a relationship," because I've said that those are the big three ways to really force yourself into personal growth, and they're a triangle, meaning connecting this to the previous bullet, they all take the same amount of resources, different resources, but energy resources on their own, and require different ways of recovering. And admittedly, the relationship side and the emotional development that came with that was the area that was most underdeveloped for me coming into this year, and so it required a lot more energy and more resources overall relative to the other two, where I'm very glad I did them in this order, such that I understood the basics of the first two and then could deliver more resources and attention to the third. But what I recognized was the amount of mental and emotional energy that goes into building a relationship is really as much as building a business, probably more. Now that I said that out loud, like I think it's definitely more, because in the same, like the amount of energy that goes into taking care of your health, I, I would say as I continue to develop this framework of like the three ways to really force yourself into personal growth, and I'm sure like having children is one that I just haven't even started to comprehend yet, and it's probably 10 times bigger than these first three. So you know, in five other five years from now or whatever it ends up being as I make videos about this, I will, I'll probably say, "Yeah, I thought that was what led to personal growth, but like this one is 100 times bigger." So we'll see. But recognizing that as I built out this triangle, I had to deliver a lot more resources to this one, which came at the extent of the other two. So the business, yeah, accelerated this year, and we're going to talk about that, um, but my health did not really significantly accelerate this year, and it was just learning how to integrate all three of these things into my daily life that took a lot of new thinking and skill building and communication that I didn't really get the hang of, but feel that I'm just coming into figuring out how to balance and integrate and harmonize all three of these, uh, especially as I head into the new year and kind of have a new environment um, that I can build around these three. So my goal for the year ahead, like I said, is to allow these to become a flywheel, where resources from each of them invested in the other make the other spin faster. So when I take better care of my health, that allows me to better take care of my business; better taking care of my business and having like a lot of attention put there actually strengthens the relationship; strengthen the relationship allows me to continue like all these things I just want working together, where I felt that this year it was like I was in the middle, and then I was deploying resources to each of them, but none of them impacted the other in a positive way. And because of that, I was unable to, how do I say it, it's like because I under prioritized my energy and only sent it out to the other three and probably less to the health side, which has a positive effect on all the others, I just didn't have the best way of integrating them this year, and that was a big realization. It's like, yes, when you don't have, when one doesn't lead to recover in the other, it's just constant like expand or U like exhaustion of energy to each of them; it leads to how I felt towards the end of the year in November and early December. But now I have such a strong Foundation going into this year and learned so much where it's like any business is getting it off the ground is a lot of the hard part, and then all the benefits come once you start to kick in on that compounding, and that's where I feel that I've gotten on the relationship side. If I can then better integrate that with the business and with my health, I really think 2025 will be my best year of full expansion of everything, and I'm very excited about that. So it took a lot of mental resources this year; it was worth it across the board, and I'm excited to now build that, take that relationship as something that definitely strengthens other areas of my life rather than something that I had to deploy and over-index resources towards um, before I started to see the benefits everywhere else. So excited for 2025, uh, I know she's watching this hopefully, so I love you, and this has been one hell of a year, and I need to go rewatch the video you made, but that's it on the uh, relationship front.

All right, my eighth bullet, getting close to the end here on 2024, on the personal side, on the health and fitness front, I learned a box this year with immersive one-on-one training. I really wanted to make a dedicated effort this year to improving uh, my combat ability, because I just kind of felt that I didn't know what I was doing; if I was going to get in a fight, I'm like, "That's probably not a good skill for like life uh, to operate with." So I'd way rather feel that I had like a basic combat background, where if I'm in a room, I feel that there's like a 90 to 100% chance that I could either outrun or kill anyone in the room with me. I think that's the Scott Galloway-ism, so I don't want to take that from him, but like it's a great mental model for why you should train: you should either be able to kill or outrun anyone in any room. And I feel like I could outrun a lot; um, don't feel like that I had the ability to kill anyone that I was with. So anyway, I found a coach in each of the different areas that I lived this year that I really enjoyed. So in Miami, I found a coach that I did like a three-week immersion with; in Amsterdam, I found a coach that I did like two months of once-a-week training. It was such a different feeling of training than like lifting or running, where I had just such full presence during it that I didn't get in any kind of other activity. And so I want to double down on this year in the year ahead; um, I didn't push that hard over the last few months on this, but I think there'll be seasons of this year where if I'm traveling more, just bringing or finding like a local boxing gym as the very first stop and just saying, "All I'm going to train is boxing," because it's by far the best thing for my cardio that I enjoy the most, um, and I know I can make significant progress on that rather than if I, I don't have the best gym, or if I don't have the best setup, um, I probably won't lift as hard, etc. But I know that if I just have like a trainer for boxing, I will box very hard, and I just enjoy it. So that was like bullet number one, or the main point on my health and fitness this year that I'm proud of.

All right, wrapping up the last two bullets of the year. So this is bullet number nine: I provided significant financial support for my mom, my sister, and my girlfriend. So like I said, with more money came more responsibility this year, and, and I became throughout the year more or less the main provider for um, not all the time, but for a large chunk of the time this year for them three. And my sister's in medical school; I'm helping her because she, I want her to be able to give full attention to her studies, and so

That comes with inability to have a job and so covering some light expenses there. Um, I I debated like sharing this in the video, and I think it's worth it, primarily for me because I want to like put words to what it means to become a provider, and watching and charting that path for me is very important because yeah, four years ago I couldn't even provide for myself.

And so anyway, I digress. On that with my mom, I own her home and she lives there, so helping her with all things uh, on the life front there and then making sure she's supported when she comes and travel and accommodations like that. And then yeah, my girlfriend lives with me as well, and so basic living expenses I'm I'm covering right now.

And so I say this because writing it out gave me mixed feelings. Like, of course I wanted to get there, and this was where I wanted to be uh, when I was much younger. It's like, yeah, of course you want to be able to provide for everyone, but it seemed to just happen quickly as I like reflect on the years like, oh yeah, that that became a thing across the board, and I probably wasn't there em Al before I was financially like financially I got there, but emotionally you're you're still lagging and catching up there.

And so with that, the increased weight—it's not significant weight, but it's weight—and that is what results from that is a little bit less risk-taking, a little bit more default stress because you are there are just more people depending on you. Like, yeah, it'd be much easier to have the level of income and business and things like that and support no one in my life. Like I I me, that's the alternative, and that is strictly not what I want.

And so I don't put this bullet together as like feeling bad for myself or like trying to get a bunch of credit; it's more just like this is a significant Milestone bullet in my life that I want to document because like I said, it did it comes with more weight, more tough conversations, more expectation management, more emotional um, engagement, but of course that leads to more growth, and that's why I'm pursuing that path path.

So anytime I feel a little bit stressed about this—cuz yeah, sometimes I wake up like, damn, I got more people depending on me—like, it this could be way easier if I didn't like this feeling I have of, you know, having to perform at a certain level. But then I compare it to like three different scenarios: number one, my younger self. So like, imagine telling 10-year-old me that this is what you get to do: you get to support all the people that you love in your life because of the business and things that you've built; you'd be ecstatic. And even like 3 years ago, I'd be ecstatic about that.

And then my older self, who if everything goes to plan, I have hundreds—maybe not hundreds—but great grandchildren across the board, and my entire generation is multiple Generations are supported by me—that's the goal. So he's laughing at me, and right now he's like, oh, you thought that supporting like a family of three was a lot at your age, well now I have 80, and their colleges are all taken care of, and their like businesses are all going to be funded by you and all that. So if that's where I'm headed, like I know future me is like, yep, you're just on one of the Milestones here to the next one to the next one to the next one. So this weight is only going to increase—you just get better at managing it, and that's what I think my older self is telling me right now.

And then the third is just my current self at this age—if it was flipped and if I couldn't provide, and how frustrating that would be if I really wanted to and I didn't have the financial or mental resources able to do that. And so when I do that little exercise, I'm like, yeah, of course I' I would take this scenario over all of them—the additional weight is just part of the territory, and so I feel good about it, and I have certainly increased my capacity to handle this, but I want my capacity to expand Beyond like faster than the weight increases, so it's not like I'm like constantly catching up; it's like I build a little bit of excess capacity. And so as I expand this, I feel a little bit better. Like a lot of this year I felt like I was pushing my one rep max; it's like I'm right on the edge of this, right on the edge of this, and I'd rather like take the intensity down a little bit.

So I love the people I support in my life, and I encourage anyone who has any kind of financial goal to separate it from yourself, because my first three or four Financial Milestones had nothing to do with me; it had everything to do with getting my mama house or like having the ability to travel with people I love; it wasn't any like personal number; it was all focused around the comfort of other people. And so in achieving that, I was able to push harder than if I was just like having things for myself. So this was an awesome milestone for me this year, and now my goal is to just get more comfortable with that and also just embrace the growth that comes with it—the conversations, the boundaries, the the yeses, the nos, the you know, just it it continues to be a source of growth for me, and so I'll pursue that with everything in my life. Anytime either a new relationship or a new new business or like a new Department whatever leads to the path of most growth, it requires me to learn the most skills, iterate the most um, probe my mind the most, I'm going to keep pursuing, and so that is this path right now.

And then that leads to the 10th and final bullet of uh my personal life in 20124, and it's I struggled to make consistent health and fitness gains this year. So I started the year with some nagging injuries and I'm ending the year with some nagging injuries, and that's frustrating because my my left knee I've had some problems with it really since I was like in high school, and I struggled to train around that this year. I think there's like a deep meniscus issue; I've got an MRI, didn't have anything inclusive, but that was earlier in the year, so I'm going to go again next week. And that contributed to I think some of the stress of just like I didn't feel that my body could perform at the level I wanted to, which meant I wasn't doing the workouts that I wanted to do—the mental weight of like if I tweaked it, it would be all I was thinking about for like a day or two or two weeks. So I had that happen; I didn't make the big Improvement of it because I just didn't prioritize it throughout the year. Like with traveling, it would feel a little bit better, and then it would click on me, and I'm like, shoot, I can't do anything about this because I don't know any of like the trainers in the area; it's very hard to improve something like that remotely.

So once I got to Arizona for this three-month period, it really took till the last month I found a personal one-on-one trainer who was taking me through a lot of injury prevention stuff, and this is the first time that I ever worked with a one-on-one coach, and I love it because I trained so much much harder with someone pushing me. And the way I was explaining this to a buddy of mine, I'm like, well, if you train like two or three reps harder when you have a trainer with you, that means that when you don't have them you're always like two or three reps away from True failure, and if most of the growth on the health and fitness side comes when you really push that boundary, you might as well not train for the physical benefit—like the mental benefit you definitely get even if you're training on your own, but like a lot of the physical benefit comes at that edge of failure, and if you're not getting there on your own, you're probably not—or at least I don't—like I train, I just don't push myself as hard, and that's something I've recognized.

So in the year ahead, I'm really prioritizing always having someone to train with, either a friend or a one-on-one coach who is going to take me through a lot of the thing—like the the points of failure that I wouldn't push through on my own—and also just do my programming for me, where I wasted so much so much mental bandwidth trying to put together my own workouts, my own um, new nutrition plans, my own cadences, and then I would just end up like either a little bit injured or not training as hard as I want to, and I'm like, why am I doing this? There's someone out there who's way better at this that I can pay like fractions of what my time is worth to do a better job than I would; it's like someone cleaning your house—like I don't really like to do it, and someone who I pay for cheap is going to do a lot better than I would, so why wouldn't I do the same thing with my health and fitness? So that's what I'm going to do in the new year is really prioritized having a coach that I constantly work with.

And the number one goal I have going into next year is to emerge from the year injury-free, where I know that every other area of my life gets so much better if I'm able to train without consistent nagging aches and pains that then take a lot of bandwidth because all you think about when you're injured is being not injured, and so that is just eating up uh mental mental bandwidth that I can be reapplying elsewhere. So not that much to update on the health and fitness run; I kind of stayed around the same weight all year; I did get a lot stronger in my upper body because that was the only thing that I could train very consistently, and I I probably incline benched every single week for 50 weeks of the year, so it's not like I didn't make any gains at all; it's just the holistic gains that I really wanted to make I didn't. And so again, reminders to myself as I head into the new year that I really want to prioritize injury U First, healing, and then injury prevention with all of my training, because that sets the foundation for the mental benefits of exercise, for the physical benefits that I have to build that like injury-free Foundation First.

All right, that wraps up the personal side of things; a lot going on this year, a ton of lessons there that I'm excited to talk about in not the next section, but the section after that, but that's it. I feel very strongly about the year in terms of all the different new challenges I underwent, all the new areas of growth I had, all the realizations that I've had, and like I said, expanded capacity across the board on the personal side that um I think is set a foundation for extreme growth in 2025 and Beyond, so I'm thrilled about that. From here, let's dive into to the next section, which is fully recapping my 2024 in business.

All right, on to the fun part—maybe the fun part—maybe the part you skipped to if you skipped immediately to the business recap; I don't know; some people like to know personal stuff; some people are only interested in business, so here we are, the 2024 business recap section of my yearly review. The quick rundown in just 10 bullets: We grew our Revenue by roughly 40%; grew the team from 13 to 28 members; I learned how to operate and grow with paid advertising; we relaunched ship 30 as an async digital product; we launched an overhauled version of our PGA curriculum; I wrote the least new content I have in my four years of writing—excited dig into that one; we added a one-on-one CSM division to our group coaching program, which really took the accountability to the next level and thus the program to the next level; we added four new closers to expand the sales team that I ran personally; we hit 1 m milon in a month, a massive business milestone for us in November; and lastly, we launched our best digital product yet during Black Friday, our category newsletter Creator. So that's the entire 2024 in 10 bullets; let's dive into each one.

All right, starting with that first bullet, we grew our top line revenue by roughly 40%. We're still waiting on the final numbers to come in; this is December 29th as I filmed this—yeah, 29th—and so still a little bit more to come in, especially cuz we have an end of the Year campaign going on right now, but looking like around 40%, give or take, and I'm thrilled with that number, especially given the personal life recap that I just ran through and all the travel and things that kind of went on during this year. But if you look back, I put together the list of um each year that I've been in business, what the revenue growth was that year: so 2021 was 20x the year before; then in 2022 was 2.5x; 2023, 1.8x; and then 2024, 1.4x. So it's been going down in terms of uh rate of change increases, which is just natural given we continue to grow, and it's harder to double a business that's doubled three times already.

But this year it was a big year of stopping a couple things that from a resource allocation perspective were great to get us to that 2 or 3 million whatever Milestone you want to look at, but we're not going to get us to 10, 15, 20 beyond that. And so we had to spend a lot of this year actually shutting some things down and reallocating our attention to the higher leverage Vehicles, which is just part of business; you're always going to do the thing at the beginning that is the most straightforward that you think is the best path to get to whatever your goal is, but then when your goal grows uh, you realize that what got you there will not get you to the next one, so you kind of have to backt trck a little bit. But I'm very happy with how this all went because we grew 40% despite shutting a lot of other things down. And so from a business line perspective, PGA doubled, but ship 30 dropped by about 50% because we didn't run live cohorts, and so I'll talk about that process throughout this recap, but basically we had to reduce the number of things we were doing to then give more attention to the thing that has the most scalable potential, and we might look back in 2 or 3 years and say that one got us to 10, but it wasn't going to get us to 30, and then we had to redo the same proc process, and I look forward to doing that because you just learn so much about yourself when you have to like unwind something that's worked, knowing that it won't get you to eventually where you want to get to go.

But I say all that because we spent a lot of this year either experimenting with what to do—so trying out new platforms or new advertising methods—or building capacity for the next level of growth, so either experimenting or building capacity, and that was kind of the theme across all areas of my life this year was building excess capacity or expanding capacity through what I was working on. To be honest, I I don't know if we have it all figured out exactly where we're going to go from here, but I do know that we have reduced the number of commitments that we have uh in terms of like daily and weekly time allocation that will allow us to go full force into the next level of growth, and we've also built team capacity, that means we could double triple our traffic and probably double triple our business given we have the resources to capture and convert all of that demand. So if we jump 40% next year, I'd be pretty happy; that would take us firmly into the eight figure territory and would surpass every business call I have, but I do want to set potentially a more aggressive goal because if I shoot for 40% and we get there, it'll feel good, but if I shoot for a double and we get there, I be ecstatic because worst case we probably end up like 60 or 70%, and the type of thinking, the type of intensity, the type of commitment that comes with growing at that level I would rather force myself to level up into.

But there are pros and cons of that because I think now that I said that out loud, I would rather grow between 40 and 60% rather than 100, but I think shooting for 100 probably gets us to that 40 to 60% growth because I'd rather grow 40 this year, 40 next year than 100 and then zero. Because one of the big business realizations I've had this year is you just want continued expansion everywhere rather than rapid expansion and then stagnation because a business that is not growing steadily, it's hard to run from an employee perspective because they don't see as much upside; it's hard to get yourself to do the behaviors that you know are leading to long-term success if you don't see growth in the interim. And so so when you're just stagnating, it just feels horrible, no matter what level you're at—like stagnating at 10K a month, 50k a month, 500k a month, a million doll a month; stagnation is stagnation, and that's painful, and I want to avoid that at all costs. So I'd rather build something that I know could continue to compound rather than hit like another big leap of growth and then sit through a slog because that's kind of what we did this year—like late last year, early this year we hit a new run rate consistently and then kind of stayed there almost all year, and so it didn't feel as good as if we just like marched our way steadily up there the entire time.

And so my goal this year is one to more publicly document a lot of this; I spent a lot of this year not talking too much about what was going on in the business side; I didn't film very many videos on it because to be honest, I was just figuring it out so much that I didn't even feel like my main process is to learn and build in public and like learn in public is really how I think about things, but I was just not lost but like figuring it out so much so that I didn't even think I had like Frameworks to share on it uh on expanding the sales team on cracking a new platform; I did a little bit here and there talking about my process for learning it, but I didn't have that much to add to the public, so I built more things internally than I did externally this year, but I want to flip that next year with a lot more public documentation about what I'm learning, what's working, what's not working, and this is kind of the start of that as I reset up this video setup; I was like, yeah, I actually enjoy distilling what's going on and talking about it more, so that's the number one bullet is that Revenue grew by 40%, and in the bullets that follow we're going to kind of talk about all the different ways that happen, what we built, what we set up, what we stopped doing, Etc.

All right, the second bullet on the business recap 2024 is we grew our team from 13 to 28 members. It's awesome to say out loud; I've been tracking this throughout the year, adding faces to this little grid of our whole team, and we really accelerated the hiring between July and November. So we grew Top Line by 40%, like I said in the previous bullet, but our bottom line we only grew by about 20 because we significantly increased the investment in our team, and this was an active decision because primary the primary driver of our business was PGA, which is a group coaching program, and I heard this awesome framework broken down where you do this analysis of what business business you're actually in, and this was a horos podcast where he's like a lot of supplement businesses think they're in the product business, but they're actually in the marketing business—like athletic greens has a good product, but they really their main like problem to solve is getting enough people to buy it; marketing. We thought we were in a education business, and so that a lot of people think that an education business is a marketing business; they only focus on marketing; as some other people think it's a product business; it's whoever creates the best product. We recognized that PGA is actually an accountability business, and that is extremely important distinction between product and accountability where we feel very strongly that someone who comes through our program and does everything that we've laid out will see results, and we have verified proof of that—that given you go through every single assignment, the success rate I don't have the exact number, but it's high—and we recognize that the problem that we have to solve is getting every sing person who joins our program to commit to the actions that they commit to when they join, and so that is accountability at its finest, and we recognize the best way to scale accountability—there's software you can use, there's things like that—but it's really a people business, and so the best way to provide accountability is to have one-on-one coaches.

And so that's the the primary growth of our team was adding six dedicated one-on-one csms, which I'll talk about in one of these upcoming bullets, but basically I understood coming into the year how to build an organic business to like 10 employees to 3 to 5 million a year, and I could repeat that process very sustainably in any Niche, and I feel pretty strongly about that; however, to expand a business to colder and cold colder audience, to see better and better client results, and to just grow to a certain size that almost like decentralizes myself from the business and turns it more into an asset rather than just I paying job, I knew that my personal bottleneck was going to be cold traffic, cold traffic advertising, and the hiring, training, and ongoing management of a team of both management and leaders. And so those were the two big business bottlenecks that I attacked this year; still have not figured them out as I read this; I'm like, yeah, still that's probably going to be my big bottleneck going into next year, but like I said, we had to kind of reduce the amount of attention we gave to other areas so that I would have the resources available to learn Cal traffic and learn how to better hire, train, and manage.

So at this point with 28 team members, I don't see very much team expansion into really a doubling of revenue from here, other than potentially two more like midlevel or I guess senior managers uh on the sales and marketing side that allow us to have basically every team member fully incentivized with upside while also having a team of either Executives or department heads—I I'd say department heads—um, also incentivized with the performance of their team. So so much of this year for me on the business side has been learning how to craft incentive packages, learning how to manage and align departments to single kpis that then contribute to the whole business; it's been a lot of fun to learn that because it it's definitely the part of the business that I find the most fulfilling to do and to put together and to think about; however, I didn't spend as much time on that as I would like to because I was still playing a lot of the management roles, especially on the sales side, and there were Parts throughout the year where I was really running—I still run the marketing team—and was doing a lot on the um success side of things too. But anyway, how I kind of looked at that was I went and mapped out all the different hats that I wear in the business, both from like an executive level and on the department heads, trying to identify where I could remove myself through a hire, and as I put together an or chart, I was like, yeah, I'm playing like three or four roles that there is someone who would do a better job at this specific role than I would that I need to go and hire. And so I'm still in the process of making those hires, and like I said, it's primarily Sales Management. With those pieces in place, I feel that I have removed myself from in the trenches operations that allow me to then manage uh the company almost with like a spreadsheet where I look—there's a hand of numbers that are reported to me.

And then I'm able to deploy resources to department heads that are properly incentivized to go and make those numbers in the right place, because they know that they have a bigger impact, and they earn more, and it's very clear, like management by objective; that is where I'm ultimately trying to get to. Because if I can crack that and then duplicate that process to the long-term vision of having like a holding company where I'm more or less managing the overall strategy of several companies—companies that I know I have incentivized leaders to go and put the things into practice and kind of mirror my thinking on bottleneck analysis within each individual business—that's like the dream of where I want to get to. Because that frees up as much time for me as possible to write, create educational assets, both internally and externally, and that is where I want to spend my next 10, 20, 50 years. So this was a great year in taking steps towards that hiring and training bottleneck, because once I have that, I feel that I've built out like the basics of actually operating a business, and then I can ascend to more leadership, more training, more like working on the business; and it's kind of a cliché term, but that's ultimately where I want to get to. So that was the second bullet: growing from 13 to 2018 team members. All right, the third bullet in the 2024 business recap is: I wrote the least new content I have in my four years of writing. It's kind of funny to put that, given we run a writing-based business, but it just lined up this way, and I have a few reasons, uh, in reflecting on why and how that happened.

The first: during my first two or three years of running Ship 30 and PGA, the main marketing that drove the business forward was my writing. That through me writing and learning in public about the craft of writing, I was able to build an audience and sell a product. This was awesome because I was getting better, and through getting better was creating better content; it was a nice little flywheel that was just attracting a lot of people. However, let me just read this one: at this point, what I'm doing is now no longer—what I'm learning is now no longer directly driving attention for the business; it's more improving internal employees to better uh, monetize and deliver results on the attention that I'm able to generate, so—and my business partner, obviously. So instead of having all this creative time throughout the year of like creating public-facing content that attracts attention, I actually was allocating a lot of that internally to hiring, managing, creating trainings, giving feedback, and that was where a lot of my like deep work time went. And so it was a strange feeling where a lot of the things that would grow the business from an attention-gathering perspective, in terms of mass attention on the craft of writing, I had said all of that. And then having someone fully operate my Twitter and LinkedIn in terms of posting and reposting and repurposing things that I'd said in the past, I like removed myself from content creation. It was strange, but it wasn't that I had someone writing all my stuff; they were just taking things that I've already written and repackaging them, knowing that if I was able to grow a business to a certain size, all I need to do is continue to remind people of those key Frameworks that got that—got the business to that size. Like I had validated ideas around journaling, writing every day, how to write well, copywriting, all that—that I didn't need to sit down and create new content about that; I needed to now give new attention elsewhere. However, because the business was running on the back of that content, I didn't have like a slot, for lack of a better term, to create or write about the things that I was growing on the business side, because it just wasn't that relevant to a lot of people. Now you say the same thing about this video, and I still make this video anyway, and that was a big takeaway for me is like I should just continue to talk and make videos about whatever I am learning and whatever is working, because it almost nurtures an audience in a completely different way, while still understanding that like my basic content is taken care of, and we have enough people talking about our products, um, enough content coming out of my different platforms on the thing that drives the business attention.

So just an interesting takeaway when I sat down was like, what were the big things I wrote this year? I just wasn't—and it makes sense; I wasn't spending as much time trying to create public content as I had in the past, because it was not the bottleneck of the business; we had plenty of traffic; now we needed to better convert that traffic. However, I did feel that uh, there was like a lack of creative outlet where I just would find myself rusty; I'm like, I'm just not thinking as clearly, I'm not as excited to like explore new content or other people's ideas, because I didn't have the vehicle to share them. And so during my end-of-year retreat, I was thinking, I don't want to be sitting here next year without like a very strong recap of all the new things I wrote or created, and so I'm making an intention in the new year to significantly increase my video and newsletter writing, where social content—social content—it's going to stay the same; like I know what works there, I know how to operate those platforms, I know how to generate attention, and I don't see that changing very much. However, I want to build a different vehicle for talking about other topics that are less social media friendly—not friendly, but like they're less conducive to putting on social media, like this video only makes sense to put on a video in a very long-form format. And in the preparation for this, I learned a ton about myself, about distilling my year, things like that. So I want more vehicles for that kind of thinking and growth, and that's going to come on the video side. So starting the year, I'm going to build out a podcast/video/newsletter kind of trifecta, all with the same content, just in different vehicles, and make a commitment to do that for at least 13 additions and really see how it feels to have a vehicle for long-form creation that I'm actually excited about. And with that commitment comes a necessary time blocking of deep work, deep thinking time that I think was lost for a good bit of this year, given the travel, given hiring, given other things like that. So it was just a good realization; I'm glad I put this as a bullet because it's a reminder to myself that I—I want to make sure that I align some kind of incentive for myself to continue to create, crystallize, educate, think; and this year I had less of that, so I'm going to change that in the year ahead.

Now, if I was spending a lot less time writing publicly, where was I spending all that new time? That leads us to the next couple of bullets. The fourth bullet on the 2024 business recap is that I learned to operate and grow with paid advertising. So last year the big focus was learning how to run a sales team; that was 2023, and I talked about that in my video. This year, of all the skills that I learned how to do, it was learning—or at least trying to learn—how to operate a business that primarily targets cold traffic, or at least uses programmatic advertising in some way. That was by far my biggest skill deficiency; it's still my biggest skill deficiency. I had a big Dunning-Kruger effect where it's like I started doing it—homogenous—and then I quickly realized how much more difficult it is to convert attention from someone who's never seen you before to becoming a customer within um, the minimum amount of time possible, because that's what makes a paid ad business uh, work the best is if you can know that you're going to get a return on advertising within like a 7-day period; let you forecast, let you spend more, let you scale more. That's a more nuanced topic, but basically I understood that running—I—I thought that running a paid ads business was going to be easy; I thought you just click a couple buttons, you film some ads; it's the same thing as organic. And so in the beginning, I was directing a lot of our paid advertising traffic at our organic funnels; they are completely different businesses. The difference between running an organic-based business and a cold-traffic-based business—I can't even say; there—there are almost no similarities in terms of converting attention from someone who has listened to hundreds of hours—maybe 10 hours, 20 hours—of your content on YouTube, read tons of your like content on socials, on Twitter, LinkedIn, looked at a bunch of your Instagram reels; during that process you can identify it, but the quote-unquote sales cycle from the time someone discovers you to the time that they take action on a purchase is probably like one, two, three months. You just don't recognize that because you're not measuring a return on your ad spend, where you're not tracking like from the time someone saw you for the first time to the time they purchase something from you, how long that window is; you don't do that when you have an organic business, but when you have a cold-traffic business, or at least a business department that tries to capitalize on on cold traffic, you—I love talking about this, by the way; this is—I can't wait to talk about more of this uh, in the year ahead—but basically you get away with so many things that are suboptimal on an organic business because people have built up a relationship with you, and they've almost like—they want it to work, whatever they put into it, so you just see better results. And however, it is unpredictable—in—predictable—whatever the word is there—to scale an organic business because it—if you don't have a way to profitably and programmatically acquire a new customer, you cannot scale your team because of that volatility that comes with it.

So we started with a very low-hanging fruit that I can't believe I spent the first three years of my business—and anyone that's watching this that runs an organic-based business, this is probably the most valuable tip in this whole video—having programmatic retargeting ads across all platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook/Meta, where basically someone comes down our rabbit hole and they uh, see our content on YouTube or Twitter or LinkedIn for the first time and they come to one of our landing pages, you're then able—and I didn't know this coming into the year, and it's wild—you can then show them ads programmatically for very cheap across all platforms just based on that one visit, and you just immediately go from—they see you the first time, and then suddenly they see you everywhere. And once you recognize this, you—you'll start to see the people that are doing this very well, building their brands; they have just omnipresent retargeting going on at all times, such that you almost build this like authority bias for them; the second you see something for them, you go to another platform; it's like boom, there they are; how's that happen? It's actually very straightforward how that happens; and—and we started to put that into practice this year, and just—it exploded the business in the middle of the year when we started to do it. That was by far the lowest-hanging fruit, where right away someone sees something; now they see 10 pieces of content from us; we send them the best stuff; we know that there are like a handful of things that they need to be educated on in order to make a purchase with us, or at least nurture their relationship; and so we put that into practice, and then from there, that is like the V1 where you do build a good bit more predictability into the business. However, the skill to do that was far less than I thought, and not really anything complicated, such that I didn't feel that I learned a ton—well, I guess I learned a lot just from being able to do it—but like I didn't feel that I was doing anything new. And then we said, okay, with that down, let's try to acquire very cold customers from Facebook or LinkedIn that don't know anything about us. It is so much harder—so much harder—trying to make a sale to someone who only knew you for 48 hours versus three months is like a completely different thing. And that's basically what we're going to spend almost all of next year doing is figuring out how you take an organic buyer journey that is this much content over this amount of time and condense it into like 72 hours with videos or testimonials or um, educational content, whatever it is. And if you can crack that—this is just me talking to me—if you can crack that, you have the ability to build any business for the rest of your life, because it is such a different skill set that you can then reapply to any—any niche, industry, um, domain, business area, whatever—you: SaaS, group coaching, newsletters, brick and mortar, whatever it is; if you can profitably acquire a customer that doesn't know anything about you and then deliver a result that has them tell their friends, that is business 101—or like 901, I really should say—but if you can crack that, you can run any business forever. So I'm excited to do that, but also the benefits of trying to build a business that works in creates customers from cold traffic is that it just makes your organic business run that much better, and that was a big realization for me this year is if you can build something that works on colder traffic, it is 100% verifiably going to work better on your organic traffic, where organic traffic, like I said, it's very forgiving; you can have a lot of suboptimal things, but people will just gloss over them because uh, they like you, for lack of a better way to describe it. And so I want to figure out the marketing methods and sales methods and product methods that turn someone who doesn't know who you—who you are before two days ago into a lifelong customer, and it's not going to be easy; it's going to be a lot of fun, but it's going to be fun in like the suffering. I can't believe I chose to tackle this problem when I could just write a newsletter and sit on the beach for the rest of my life uh, at this point, which—who knows—at a certain point I probably will want to take that path, but for now it's like, let's just continue to pursue the path of most growth, and on the business side that is acquiring cold-traffic customers. So that was a big thing I worked on a lot this year. Uh, if I had to forecast the like big business takeaway from next year, I'm hoping it's that I was able to learn this skill and really redefine the way we operate as a business to—to—ENC—like just build something that works no matter how much you know us, because right now we rely a lot on the organic content; I want to keep making it, and so it's definitely something that complements the paid ad process, but I do want to figure out if I didn't have organic, how would I start a business from scratch? It would be through cold traffic, and that's a whole new skill, a whole new ball game. So that's where a lot of the attention is going to start the year. All right, the fifth bullet on our 2024 business recap is: we relaunched Ship 30 for 30, our flagship cohort-based course, as an asynchronous digital product in May. So I'm kind of jumping around; we didn't start cold-traffic ads until June—is May—May—May—June of this year—and I knew that to give that my full attention, we had to shut down—or not shut down, but like reallocate the attention of Ship 30. And that was for anyone who's watching this who was unfamiliar; it was one of the biggest—I'd say one of the biggest cohort-based courses on the internet, uh, a 30-day writing challenge that helped beginners write and publish every day for 30 days. We ran that from 2021 all the way through 2023, with our last live cohort being on January of 2024. Now we knew that that was the perfect business to get us to 3 to 5 million a year, which is where we capped out on that—just that front end, back end—um, with a product and a membership on the back end of it. However, we knew that we were not going to be able to scale that profitably to cold advertising, or just in general; the cohort model was capped, both from how many people you could realistically create or turn into customers during like a 13-week window when you were marketing it, but also just—we kind of got tired of it; we were repeating ourselves a lot, and we were no longer growing that much internally, like as people running that business. And so we wanted to again allocate our time towards building new skills and learning new things, so we had to shut this down; we probably should have shut this down in like February and made the full transition, but we spent like three months of the year allocating resources towards PGA while having Ship 30 not for sale, and it was like the—the maybe one of the strategic mistakes I made this year was not recognizing that we should have done that first instead of letting it linger and then shutting it down in April. But anyway, um, it is what it is. And so we gave this our full attention in April; all of April we said, PGA is going to go on hold, everything else is going to go on hold, and we're just going to turn this into an async uh, digital product, cut the price, make it for sale at all times. So that's what we did in April: entirely new launch videos, 30-day follow-along curriculum; Cole and I just locked ourselves in the shipyard and filmed a ton of videos, and it was a lot of fun. However—I don't even want to say however—it was just one of the big realizations of the year was that anytime we dedicated our attention to one thing like this for like six weeks at a time—it was four to six weeks—we saw the biggest leaps in the business, and anytime we were splitting our attention, trying to move like three or four things forward at the same time, we—we were just not seeing the same level of new result. And so we really gave this our all, and it was interesting because at this point it makes significantly less money per month than our live cohorts did—roughly 50% as much—but realizing that now it takes for—really 1%—I would say 1% of the effort that it took to run a live cohort to make—maintain this—this digital product. So in terms of return on time, it is far higher and still operates at a level where it brings in significant amounts at 99% margin that we're very happy with. Did I expect it to have that sharp of a falloff? I don't know; I didn't really forecast too much of it, but at this point this is all business strategy 101 is at this—for us—it's figuring out—we could spend our limited team resources on this thing, and that's going to generate this return, or we could take 99% of that allocation away, dedicate it to something else, and still keep 50% of the upside; that is from a—I feel strongly that I did the right thing from operating the business; I feel really good about putting that number on paper; it's like, of course that's the right choice. And so I'll probably have to make more decisions like that in the future of how can I—the upside of this is no longer worth relative to the other opportunities that we have, but not chase shiny objects in the meantime. So those are the types of things that I want to spend more time on, but to be able to do so, I have to be out of the day-to-day like nitty-gritty management of things. So that was all of April, and we're very happy with how Ship 30 has continued to perform since then, and just not having to do live cohorts really freed up a lot of time for us to invest in other things; the first one being taking us to our next bullet, which was a big reinvestment of—not even reinvestment, but an overhaul and foundation for scaling for PGA.

All right, on to bullet number six; and the next handful are all to do with PGA, which was the significant like lever of growth for us on the business side this year. Uh, I keep saying PGA—like everyone who knows—everyone who watches this knows what PGA is; it's a premium—it's our premium ghostwriting academy, um, group coaching program that helps freelancers and nine-to-fivers become ghostwriters, which is—running educational content for other businesses; links to that all in the description. But um, PGA was the single biggest lever for us this year, and it started in February. So like I said, there was a decision to make in the first few months of the year of: should we shut Ship 30 down and fully turn that async before diving into PGA's curriculum upgrades, or should we do the curriculum upgrade first? Neither one really mattered uh, in terms of which one we chose; if I could do it again, I'd flip the order, but that's just because it would have allowed us to give more attention to this sooner rather than like whiplash of attention: PGA back to Ship 30, PGA back to Ship 30. That was the first big initiative of the year for us was: we learned so much during 2023 on what makes a really high-quality group coaching—now one-on-one coaching program—and we needed to implement all of that. We thought it was going to take a few weeks; it ended up taking about six to eight weeks, and it was the best investment we made—ah, second best; next bullet point's going to be the best investment—but the second we implemented that new curriculum, we saw student results accelerate; we saw NPS—net promoter score—accelerate; um, we just felt that we'd put together a much better product, and that allowed our sales team to sell it even harder; it allowed me to feel even better about the people we were helping; it just really set a foundation uh, at the beginning of the year where it's like, okay, great; we—we got the product to another good-enough level; now let's go fix other parts—go fix other parts. And so that was the part of the year that we saw the least expansion in sales because we were again laying a foundation that then would allow us to start the next bullet. And so the seventh bullet is that we added a new one-on-one client success manager division with six new CSMs and two lead CSMs. So we now have a student success department um, that's bigger than any department on our team; it's eight. And once we built that new curriculum, and like I said at the earlier part of this video of: we are in the accountability business, we knew that we needed to overinvest because that is going to be the flywheel that really helps us accelerate everything from here. And so we overhauled the curriculum, but then we needed to overhaul the way that curriculum was delivered, where it used to be we had two CSMs who kind of worked with everyone; now we have individual CSMs who work with someone from the entire beginning to the end of the program. That took a lot of compensation structure decisions; it took a lot of hiring decisions; it took a lot of conversations internally about who we should promote and how and how that should work, but it was again—like I said—this was the biggest impact on the business uh, in terms of great investment, because now we have capacity to service so many students and under—and know that they are getting so much attention that it then lets every other part of the business work even better, because you have people referring other students; you have the marketing that's able to say uh, we have this level of support that no other program has; and then we have the sales team who feel such conviction in what they're selling based on the amount of support that we give that it's really just a powerful flywheel that we feel super strongly about um, overinvesting in. And now—like I said—we have capacity to—I keep saying like I said—I'm just calling that out to myself—now—but we now have expanded capacity to take on even more students because we think that roughly each CSM can work with 15 new ones a month, and that 15 new ones a month with eight CSMs, we can—on something.

Like 130–140 uh, new students, which takes our business to the ultimate revenue level that we're trying to get to next, which is around a consistent $1 million per month. So that was a big part of setting the foundation.

So as I look at these in order, right, it was: we redid the curriculum; then we needed to shut Ship 30 down; and we did those two. And then with those two out of the way, we said, “How can we continue to deliver better results?” Which was: we added a new CSM division that had more capacity on the marketing side—or sorry, on the success side. Then we allocated attention to learning paid ads because that would create a more predictable traffic source. And then we found a new bottleneck, which was: we didn't have enough uh, sales reps to convert the attention that we were generating from cold and have the ability to uh—since we had a bigger success team, we can now service more of them. So that led into the eighth bullet, which was: we added four new closers to expand our sales team.

So there's really like—I'm just going to kind of riff on this—but there was such an interesting problem to solve this year on the business, which was like you have this triangle, which is like marketing, sales, and success, and you have to thread the needle of raising the marketing such that you fill the sales capacity that you built, such that the sales can then fill the success capacity that you built. But if you build too much marketing without enough sales, you're wasting money; and if you build too much sales without enough success, you uh, are going to have a poor product and poor experience, and that's going to work against you. And then all the while you're dealing with humans where humans really like to see growth and upside potential and don't want wasted time. So if you bring on sales and success and then marketing isn't taking—like isn't accelerating enough—then sales is hungry, and then success is hungry at the same time. So such an interesting problem to solve, like this iterative framework where it was like at any time we faced a bottleneck that we had to work in reverse, where we started with success—now we had enough to service them; now we needed more sales to then fill their, like, pipeline, for lack of a better word; and then once we had enough closers—enough sales capacity—we could then ramp up the marketing. So we had to work in reverse, and that took like four or five months. And that was July to November—was the most intense period of the year from a hiring perspective, where we added like 13 people because it was a full build-out of an expanded sales team and an expanded success team. However we have it, and that's awesome to put out there.

Now, the beautiful thing about that triangle is that marketing—if you can predictably acquire customers using cold traffic—then that's like buttons on a screen, where I film one ad, I write one landing page, one VSSL; I can then pay by clicking buttons to have more people see that page. But you cannot do the same level of like button-clicking to hire sales reps or hire success. So you have to almost over-re—or like over-invest, I guess is the right word—in those two, knowing that then you can turn the dials. And so all of our attention now is figuring out how to turn those dials correctly. So that was really the second big piece of expansion: we expanded the success team, then expanded the sales team, and now almost all of our attention can go towards figuring out how to get the right people seeing our stuff, building a relationship with us.

And then all the while, through those like team expansion activities, I recognized where we still lacked leadership in terms of like the higher-level management, director position for the sales team that I was running. And so I got so sucked into that that then I lost part of the big picture, and so I wasn't getting as much strategic thinking done because I kind of had to go build that whole department. And now I've got it to a place where I can hire myself out of the management there and then get back to, like I said, overseeing the business almost as an asset from a spreadsheet. And of course, that's not going to be exactly how it works because there's still people involved in everything like that. So anyway, we—let's see if there's anything else on the sales side that I could share, but I do want to talk a little bit about that throughout the year in terms of videos because I think I've come up with a somewhat unique way of doing sales management based on different people that I've studied and mentors and masterminds that I've been a part of that I think I've done a decent job there, and I've really enjoyed building that team to where it is. Do I think I want to be a sales manager forever? Absolutely not. Um, it's just an energy-intensive process that I—I'd rather—I like to spend more time thinking and building and doing strategy than like boots-on-the-ground, nitty-gritty, like direct management and feedback. And so we'll see how that evolves. I learned a ton about the type of person that I like to work with. We had two turns on people who—it's not that I didn't like working with them—but I probably knew earlier on in the hiring process that it wasn't going to work out longer term, and I should have just cut them earlier. But other than that, um, expanding the sales team was a big project throughout the later half of the year, where at this point we have the foundation to grow by 50% until we need to add more team members, which is a really good spot to be.

Now, from here we entered November, which was the best month of the year as we headed into Black Friday and launching our best digital product, which was separate from PGA. So let's talk about those two. All right, wrapping up the last two bullets on the business recap: in November, we launched our best digital product yet for Black Friday. This was Category Newsletter Creator, and I am so proud of what we put together here. I truly think this was the best educational product we could possibly have created on the topic, and it showed with the results that we had. So we took basically three years of knowledge from our last Black Friday launches—21, 22, 23—and really knocked it out of the park in this Black Friday launch because it was the perfect combination of so many different skills that we've learned, both on the product side, on the marketing side, on the sales side; it all came together, and it was like, “Wow, we have so much new like knowledge to put into the product and to market the product correctly,” which you can also turn into a product, which we did, which was a full like recap of all the stuff we did to launch it. Um, that was a nice upsell that delivered a good boost to the whole revenue um, of the entire launch, and that felt really good to sit in.

November—it's like we spent most of the year doing the monotonous, labor-intensive hiring, managing, training, etc.—but then there's like the small pocket of the team of like five out of 28 that really went extremely hard on building this product out over a month, and that was almost all of November. All the while, we continued to operate PGA with that new expanded capacity that we had. And so these two things came together in such an exciting way that allowed us to—this is the 10th and final bullet of 2024, and the one I'm most proud of—is that we hit $1 million in revenue in November, and that was a goal of mine. I can't even remember when I said it. I think in 2021, when I hadn't drunk any alcohol in like a year and a half, I think I said—I wrote something down—it's like, “I'll drink again when I hit a million dollars in a month.” And in between those two times, I probably drank like 10–15 times total because I introduced it back into my life for special events and occasions and things like that. But that aside, we hit a million doll—a month in November, and we did it by about $20,000. So less than 2% uh, was how close we were. And I remember as the product was going live, it was interesting because Black Friday—like the product launch ended December 3rd—and so a lot of the revenue ended up hitting three days after November. And so I knew we would do a million dollars over a 30-day period, but part of me just selfishly wanted—like the monthly number was like, “Yeah, that month we did”—so over a 30-day period we blew it out of the water, but I didn't think we were going to get there. And on the very last day, we had this boost on November 30th, and in our payment processor we have a couple—so we didn't hit a million in any individual one—but we found like an aggregation within our SamCart dashboard that I'd never seen before, and we—it said a million, $20,000 something like that, and I was just—I remember sitting there, I had a ton of stuff going on—personal life, uh, stress, family, all that going on at the same time—but I had one goal for November, and I read it every morning: “Hit a million dollars; hit a million dollars; what is required to do that?” And so every ounce of effort I put into the product with our—my business partner Cole, who created most of the—like pretty much the entire product—all his effort, all the marketing team efforts, all the while PGA also had their best month ever, and it took every single ounce of effort to hit that because of how close, razor-thin it was. It was just so liberating to me, and this is almost the first time I've really reflected on it of how it was to hit it by such a narrow margin because every bit of this could be a little bit better, or we could write this additional email, or we could tweak this subject line, or you guys could do this level of follow-up. Having a team of 28 come together from an individual contributor basis to bubble up to that number was so incredibly awesome and just fires me up to do that long term every single month because we raised the bar for what it looks like to launch a product and to operate the coaching side of the business that if we can make that our default, we're going to crush 2025. And so it just felt good for all of this throughout the year where a lot of the year felt like chewing glass, where we didn't know the next step to take, or there were just different pieces that felt like this was capped by this, so we had to first solve this, then we solve that, and then like it just didn't feel like we were making much progress until November came around where all those pieces came together, and I just had this idea that it would, and it did, was so incredibly fulfilling because it wasn't like we did this big revenue spike to like at the expense of a long-term audience because we launched this product with a 14-day, no-questions-asked, money-back guarantee, and we had under 0.2—like 20 out of 1,500 people requested a refund within that first 14 days, which was like blew my mind because clearly we put together something very high quality on top of all the different um, like we knew that that was an incredible product, so we felt good about that uh, having that like very, very generous guarantee or refund policy.

So I share that because I'm fired up with how the business ended up. It didn't feel that good throughout the year because you were just trying to figure it out, trying to get things to work, but—and I'll talk about this since the lessons and realizations—but like no matter what revenue level we were at, it's always going to feel frustrating when you're stagnant. And so to see that big pop in November, it was like that little bit of dopamine that I need to keep going. And I—as we head into the new year, I'll talk about different business goals and things like that—but November was a very fulfilling month for the entire team to have all this growth, all these new team members, these new products, shutting things down, trying new platforms—all this: “Is it going to work? Is it going to work? It’s not working; it’s working great; keep doing it.” It all came together for November, and that was a blowout month. And now that my goal is for that to be our floor in 2025, but I'll talk about all the business goals and things like that at the very end.

So that wraps up the 2024 in business—hell of a year, a lot of fun, a lot of growth, new skills, new people, new products, new team members, new mistakes, new lessons. And that is where we're going to head for the next part of the video, which is: after I put together my 2024 personal and business recaps for myself, I take a look at each of them: what went well, what could be improved, what did I notice, how did I feel, and try to extract 10 lessons and realizations about myself, the world, other people, and keep them as keepsakes of some sort that then I can take and apply uh, to all areas of my life the next year and every year after that. So let's dive into that section.

Moving on to my 2024 lessons and realizations—this is the most valuable part of the video for me to create because it sets the foundation. One—a lot of the ideas I'm about to talk about I have not really refined very much, and that will be something I do a lot in the year ahead: is taking the outline that is this video and really trying to dig deep on some of these lessons such that I can eventually expand them into long-form pieces; I can write books about them. These, to me, are foundational ideas that I know I can apply to every area of my life uh, to eventually just live a better life because of them. So I'm going to rattle them off um, not as a big list in a row like I have done with the other sections, only because they're a little bit more nuanced; they take a little bit more time. But there are 10 of them, and these are what have emerged from the ups and downs, the goods, the bads, everything that I've experienced this year that I want to take into every year going forward.

All right, my first lesson and realization of 2024 is: the most expensive tax is an unmade decision. And I felt this one especially throughout the year with business decisions and travel decisions, such that anytime there was an open loop of something that I either needed to do or decide on—like, um, for example, I'll give you some: if I was picking a hotel, or if I was debating where we were going to travel next, or if I was making a hire and I was debating between one or two people, or um, little things like what time of day I was going to work out—that that would be more on a micro level of like a given day—but basically you can adapt this framework to the macro and the micro—that anytime I was walking around with an open loop that needed to be decided for me to then take action after it was a subtle tax on my entire life experience, meaning I was less present; I just was less excited; I had less overall bandwidth; it was just—the best example is like having 50 tabs open in your brain; your computer is going to run slower. And I think I spent a lot of this year with unmade decisions or looming things that I needed to just decide on or execute or do that would allow me to take actions that came after that. And that is what it is—the foundation for a lot of these lessons are going to be around decision-making and moving quickly and being effective, etc. So that was one that I felt applied to almost every area where what I'm trying to do going forward is minimize the amount of bandwidth I have taken up by unmade decisions—or like, for example, if someone sends you a text and asks you for something—that's a very small example—but when that adds up—like five or six or seven people all with like unread text messages—I just feel that weight. And so I'm trying to be more effective with opening and closing loops and not letting decisions linger in my mind. And the way I'm going to remember this is: for almost all decisions, you actually don't need more time. The mistake I'll make is: if someone sends me a text, I'm like, “I need time to think about it.” You actually don't, for the most part, in my experience, need more time on a decision; you just need more information; need more information, or you need to act with imperfect information. And so James Clear has a really good explanation of this: there are three types of decisions: there's hats, haircuts, and tattoos. Hats are really small, reversible decisions; if you pick the wrong hat, you can just put another one on. Haircuts—a little bit less reversible; um, they will smooth out over time, but if you get a bad haircut, it probably takes a couple weeks, and then you're back to normal; that's like a haircut decision. And then a tattoo decision is one that you really can't undo without significant pain. And so my goal is to, at any time, identify what are the decisions: are they haircuts, hats, or tattoos? And where am I letting like hat decisions take up a lot of mental bandwidth when I really should be making bigger decisions and using all that same energy because the amount of energy to make a very trivial decision versus a very big decision are actually the same. And so if you're continuously deciding—this is how like a lot of these lessons apply together—from travel: if I'm constantly making a new—new decision—what—where am I going to go, um, where am I going to work today, what am I going to do today, where am I going to eat today—that just eats up so much bandwidth. And so I'm trying to recognize where I have those subtle taxes because if I found myself—which I did—less creative, less effective um, this year than normal, it was probably because I had those energy leaks of open tabs going a lot throughout the year. So that is my first lesson of the year: unmade decisions are the largest tax; they just subtly decrease quality of life everywhere. And so I'm trying to be as aware as possible: like, what are the small decisions that are unmade that I can make one decision that would prevent 100 future decisions? And then what are the big decisions that if I could just decide on—like where to live or who to spend my life with—those are the highest-leverage decisions that once you make, then so many other actions align for you to just build on that initial decision, but none of them can really happen until you make those big ones. And the big ones themselves—you actually don't need more time; you just need to sit down and recognize the pros and cons, which leads me perfectly into the next lesson.

All right, my second lesson and realization of 2024 is: there is no right path for anything; there are just bags of benefits and bags of problems; the only wrong choice is making no choice at all. So this is very similar to the first decision: that if I tried to delay a decision thinking that more time was going to help me make a better one, I was always wrong. And I will not make a perfect decision with more time; I must get comfortable making imperfect decisions with the relative risk-reward of, okay, is this reversible, like I said in the last one. So why I broke this out as a separate lesson—and it kind of dovetails nicely into the next one—but depending on the lens you use, you can look at any decision as the right or wrong one. If you say, “I’m going to identify all the problems that came from this decision,” it’s going to seem like the bad decision. So like if you, for example, say you’re going to go down this path or another path in the woods—where I go wrong is: I’ll make a decision, and then I’ll start to experience the problems of that decision; and then once I start to experience the problems of that decision, I’ll then think about what were the benefits of the other decision that I could have made, and then I will immediately feel like I made the wrong one because all I’m measuring are the problems over here, and all I’m measuring are the benefits or potential upsides of the other one. But had I just switched the decision and gone the other way, I’d be sitting on the other one, not looking at any of the benefits and only measuring the problems and then comparing them to the benefits of the other side. So it’s really the reminder to myself is: there are no perfect decisions, and the only wrong choice is to let that unmade decision just eat your mental bandwidth for so long where it’s better off to rapidly decide something and then identify the problems that you just agreed to by making that decision and then doing your best to remove them or proactively solve them or prevent them from happening—happening in general. That’s what I’m trying to remember is: whenever I’m weighing something, just recognize there’s no right choice; the only wrong choice is spending unnecessary time on it. Now, I’m not saying that if I have a big decision I need to make it quickly; in fact, I’m saying the opposite. I’m really trying to nail that for most trivial—even big decisions, honestly—they’re going to be pros and cons, and thinking that you’re going to make the perfect decision is just—I don’t even know—it’s just dumb. Like, I’m not going to make a perfect decision, and I’m trying to bury that reminder into my head because if you take the lens that you are always going to unlock new problems with whatever decision, it prevents you from being disappointed. And so that’s the second lesson: there’s no right path on any decision, and you can apply this to business, fitness, relationships, where you go to dinner, where you live, who you spend your life with, what you wear, what you eat—there are no right paths, just ups and downs, and you have to get comfortable making decisions knowing that and then applying the correct lens to see the upside in whatever decision you made rather than the downside. And that leads perfectly into the third lesson.

All right, the third lesson and realization of 2024 is: satisfaction equals reality minus expectations. So I’ve talked about this one a couple times and actually had the formula flipped, but it’s reality minus expectations. So two ways to improve satisfaction—so I’m a math geek; anytime there’s a formula um, with a subtraction—there are two ways to improve it: you can either make your reality better or lower your expectations. In reflecting on the more difficult periods of the year for me this year, by far the biggest source of frustration or disappointment came when I had a pretty good reality but worse than what I was expecting. And it’s so funny to—to see that because if you have the same reality and it was better than you were expecting, you’re going to feel good; and if it was worse than you were expecting, you’re going to feel bad. It’s a very simple—you know, people have talked about this for tens of thousands of years—and so I’m by no means saying anything novel; I’m just trying to remind myself and drill it into my brain—but if you can keep your expectations low on things, it’s—I to think like, “Oh, but that’s going to be, you know, I want high expectations”—but an example, right, is: I talked about in the bullet points of the year—the house I’m currently in is like the coolest house I’ve ever been in; every single part of me from a reality perspective is: this is the coolest, best pool, hot tub, you know, awesome office, every massive whatever—but I had the expectation coming in that that was going to be easy to live in a house like this, but then like a week in—all I was finding were things that I was disappointed in because I thought this house—it’s so big—or whatever—it’s—I’m—I’m spending this amount of money—like basic things should work—but like a light would break, or the hot water wouldn’t work, or um, just little small things that just like chipped away at my experience because I…

Had this faulty expectation that, oh, I did this thing because it's nice, then it should be perfect, and it just wasn't. And same thing with travel; like I would do all this time researching a hotel, and then I'd get there expecting all the awesome things that I saw online, and then experience like, slightly different than that. But because I had this big expectation in my head, I experienced a worse feeling.

And I'm going to talk about this ad nauseum, like an absurd amount this year, because I think the ability to keep your expectations in check in all things is the foundation for living a satisfied, like enjoyable life. Because I don't think that I want to live a long term where my reality is really good, but my expectations were higher, and I just feel disappointed all the time. I don't think that's healthy. I certainly, given the extent that like reality is subjective—well, reality is objective, and then everything else you're just measuring relative—I'd way rather have my reality be a little bit better than I was expecting and feel good about it.

And I've seen that study that's like, most people would rather make $50,000 if all their friends made 30 versus making $880,000 and all their friends make a 100. Like, objectively they're worse off, but they feel better. I don't want to have that extreme where I actually reduce my reality; I want like the best reality possible without setting expectations that make me feel bad about it. And if I can do that basically throughout the whole year or the rest of my life, I'm going to be much happier as a result, much more satisfied even with the same reality.

And how I'm going to do that is anytime I feel myself feeling subtly disappointed, I'm going to train my brain to recognize the perspective of when I had less, or when I couldn't unlock this, or in the future if I didn't have this—just put myself in a different frame where if that was my expectation, my reality would feel absolutely outstanding. That's my goal, and so it's going to take time, but I know that over the rest of my life hedonic adaptation is going to be the constant battle where if you unlock something awesome, you then get used to it, and then actually expect more such that that awesome thing now makes you feel worse than when you first got it. I am trying to avoid that at all costs. Everyone, every like big success—not successful, but like wise person I've ever studied—has talked about this idea that if you can keep your perspective in check and put yourself in the frame of mind of whatever your reality is is awesome, whatever you're comparing it to, I'm going to be much happier. So I smile as I say that because it is completely in my control, and that's something I—one of my just really foundational beliefs—is everything is in my control, um, whether that's actually in my control or my perspective of something that's out of my control. And that leads perfectly into the next one, but just to put a pin in it: satisfaction is reality minus expectations.

Anytime I was disappointed this year is because I had too high of expectations. A lot of other people on my life that um were less satisfied with how things went or just generally didn't feel good about a situation, whether that was macro or micro, I saw this too, so I'm trying to spread it to other people is like, what, what was your expectation? How could you have lowered that such that whatever ended up happening, even though it was good, you didn't feel bad about it because your expectations were too high. So that's mostly a reminder to me, but other people I think um experienced that as well this year. And so if you found yourself constantly like wanting more or disappointed, if you could remove expectations entirely and just be satisfied based on your reality, I know that I would personally have been much, much happier this year, so I'm trying to retrain that throughout the year. All right, my fourth lesson and realization of 2024 is the most empowering belief you can have is viewing every problem in your life as a personal skill issue.

This year I found myself more negative than I've been in a handful of years before, and just I don't know, there was more going on, more moving, more weight, whatever—all the things I've talked about in this video—and I had a higher expectation for how things would go, so that would ultimately like lead to that subtle feeling of disappointment or dissatisfaction. And also just, I think as a nature of traveling more, you are exposed to more inconvenience than I was used to, and that was just a general theme that the more I was inconvenient or less efficiency—that's something I like to unlock in my living spaces—so I was just dealing with more of that. But anyway, whenever I was facing those problems in the past, I would really just quickly reframe myself to like, that's an opportunity, that's rigged in your favor, that is exactly how it's supposed to be, now go learn from it. And I just didn't this year as much, and maybe it was the people I was surrounding myself with didn't have that pure, because I spent far more time with people this year—other team members, my significant other, my family, um, uh—than I have in the past when I was spending a lot of time solo where I could really just like, there was no external influence to that, and I think you, you do adopt the beliefs of the people you surround yourself with more and more, and that was just something that I experienced this year.

So instead of casting blame, what I ideally would have done and what I was trying to remind myself of constantly is anytime you're dissatisfied, it is a personal skill issue. And whether or not that is a skill issue that you can actually, like I said, go change the reality and impact it, or you lack the skill of reframing your perspective such that that problem is actually not a problem—it's an opportunity, it's a learning experience, it's exactly how it should be, whatever. And so I've started to, as I journal, write out like what's bothering me right now, because if that is subtly something I'm feeling more and more, I need to bring my awareness to it. And so I go, okay, what am I struggling with? What is the actual underlying skill issue that is preventing me from experiencing that in a good way? And so that could be a business problem, like I feel that I'm taking meetings before 1 p.m. too much; like I could complain about that, or that just recognize that is a management, delegation, hiring, training skill issue—go solve that. Like my knee is injured and that's pissing me off; okay, that is a skill issue because I don't know how to identify the right like medical treatment, to get the right person who might be able to help me bang to right back in my power. I'm not casting that to external sources or forces, uh, and I can go and fix that. So health problems, fitness problems, relationship problems—I'm trying to just train in my head that if I'm dissatisfied, it's a skill issue, because that's empowering. I love to learn new skills. I think of all the personal character traits I have, or what you know, superpowers, however you want to call it, my ability to learn something quickly is is what I want to build my entire life and career and business around—the, the path of the, or the process of iterating on something to get a little bit better faster, as fast as possible, is like what I love to do, and I've done it through every domain for my entire life.

And so the more that I can say, what is the skill that I'm lacking and how can I quickly build that such that I don't experience this as a problem anymore—that's maybe I should have put this number one—because every single thing comes back to if you can view every problem as a skill issue, my life is always better because it puts it back in my control. So that was just a visceral lesson this year that anytime I started to feel bad and then started to feel better, it was because I did like a come to Jesus style journaling exercise where it's like, you are lacking a skill in this area, you must go solve it, you have the ability to now go solve it, and then 2 months later it be much better. So that was a massive lesson for me this year that I really want to take into the rest of my life. Lesson in realization number five of 2024: if you want to change a habit, chunk up a level and treat the cause of the habit, not the symptom.

This one has been a more recent one, but I've talked a little bit about feeling more stressed this year, having less recovery capability, and just generally operating from a place of slightly more expenditure than I had coming back to me. And really my whole life, even when, when I was like growing up, I don't know, I developed—if there was one coping mechanism that I had, it would be eating—in food, because I never was that, I, I drank a little bit, but never was had like big vices like that, um, college, whatever, a little bit, but that was one that has been more prevalent throughout my life where if I was more stressed or worried, like when I was growing up, a reward would be like a nice meal out or a fast food, whatever it was. So I think I had that train in me a little bit, and I've become aware of that over the last handful of years, despite losing 100 lb, it was still like a constant thing that I had to deal with. And it's not like I have this super destructive habit, and that's what usually are the most difficult ones—are the ones that don't seem that destructive relative to like all the other opportunity or potential out there; it's like, it's not like I eat 10 candy bars when I'm stressed out and like feel horrible, but I'll have such a racing mind with all the things going on that the only way to quiet is to eat like a massive healthy dinner and then like do that right before bed, because otherwise I, my mind would be racing. And I didn't deal with it too much this year, but I there were a handful of times as I like explored my journal that that kept showing up; it's like, damn, I, I kind of got brain fog this morning, ate too close to bed last night. And I tried to do a bunch of things like accountability trackers and like measuring this intervention and like having a friend that I had a same problem and we'd like work together on it, and it wasn't until I recognize like how much of a waste of time that was until I started to read my journal, because I kept trying to treat a symptom by like, this was clearly not—this was a symptom of a bigger problem that I was trying to solve, when if I just chunked up a level of like, why am I experiencing that, or why am I using that as a coping mechanism to like quiet my brain or to fall asleep or whatever it is, I should treat that. And that was only—I was only able to recognize that later in the year when I did that big read through of all the things that I was stressed about and recognizing that I had relative under recovery there. And so I was talking about this with my girlfriend, but like if you experience a problem and you're trying to solve like a habit, chunk up a level and treat that. So rather than trying to measure the actual habit, treat the root of it, which would be too high of a stress level; what can I actually do such that I'm not turning to another behavior like that? So this works in reverse too, in that if you're trying to build a habit, rather than focus on the habit itself, build the identity that turns the habit into a byproduct, and that's like the reverse side of this. So rather than trying to build a meditation habit, just call yourself a peaceful person, and what would a peaceful person do in this scenario? They would obviously go and meditate more than likely. And so that is—I'm trying to really hone this in, and I want to be able to coach other people when I talk to them if they're struggling with something. Like I think I give off the impression that you know the key to solving anything is to create some kind of analytical habit tracking system or like addressing that itself, but in reality you should probably chunk up a level and either become the type of person that does or does not do that thing, and then the habit breaks away on its own. And I'm just trying to remember that one for, for the year ahead, especially as I build new habits um that I'll talk about in the goal section, but don't treat the symptom, treat the cause.

Okay, my sixth lesson and realization of the year is the more you look for confirming evidence, the more you will find it. And this is confirmation bias 101, where if you believe something is true, your brain becomes an evidence-finding machine to look for supporting evidence of that. So this is very much related to the earlier lessons around reality and expectations, or um, there's no right path, just bags of benefits and problems. If you go around looking for confirming evidence that you made the right choice, you will find it. If you go around looking that the world is rigged in your favor, you will find it. Or if you think it's rigged against you, you will also find it. If you look for ways that someone is evil, you'll find it, and if you look for ways that someone is awesome, you'll find them. And that's just been a reminder to myself, because anytime throughout the year that I found myself with a slightly more negative lens, I'm like, I'm just looking for evidence to confirm whatever I'm feeling. If I think that someone is treating me poorly, I'm going to just straight up find all the reasons that that is true. And it's kind of—I think it's called the reticular activating system, I could be totally making that up, but it's like the part of your brain that if I said look for the color yellow, you'd immediately find 10 things. And I just looked around my screen and saw like a bunch of yellow stuff. And so if that's true, you know that if you are primed with certain things, then you will find information to support that. And I want to keep that in mind with my morning routine this year, where if I felt that I was slightly more negative this year, slightly less like feeling that everything was in my favor, it was probably because I stopped priming myself with that in the morning. And these all work together, cuz I had less morning time this year, and with less morning time, less intentionality around my beliefs and habits and things like that. So long story short, I want to prime myself more for the types of beliefs that I want to look on a daily basis for confirming evidence. It's kind of why people start the day with gratitude, because if you prime yourself with three things you're grateful for, you're going to find 10 throughout the day, but if you started every day with why your life sucked, you would find a 100 reasons that your life sucked. So very simple lesson there, but again I want to create a reality where I see everything is my in my favor, is in my control, is, you know, for my benefit in some way. And so if I can just remember that, putting that lens on it's the first thing that I go to, uh, start the day with and the last thing I go to bed with—those two paired together, I think will help continue to rewire my brain to look for things as opportunities, as advantages, as um, rigged to work out in my favor.

My seventh lesson in realization is your relationship, your business, and your health are mere reflections of your internal state. So what do I mean by that? In reading my journal for the year, or all four of these—my fourth one's over there—but a lot of things here, it's very subtle, but I can see my internal state with my handwriting. So if I flip open like a random page here, I can tell you verifiably if I am stressed out or if I'm at peace. And in looking at the different chapters of the year in this book, I would find that there was an extreme correlation between like the scatteredness of my handwriting and how everything else was going in my life. If I felt my relationship was scattered or my business was scattered, it was always because my internal state was scattered. And the time of the year the business was calmest or the executing the best, it was always a function of how I was doing internally. And so connecting that to the earlier discussion around energy and recovery and stress, if I was not prioritizing my recovery and my energy and I was more scattered, more disorganized, more exasperated, it trickled down to my relationship where that would feel shaky, to the business where I would be uh worse decision maker, worse leader, worse just general operator, and then the business would feel worse, and then these all kind of work together. And so how I'm taking that away is if I have a lot of people depending on me or relying on me or looking up to me or you know, just in general operating like with me, but underneath in some certain way, like if I manage a team of 50, if I'm super scattered, the whole team's going to be scattered. And so the more that I can remember that, the more I will make sure that I am not sacrificing my space and my time to operate at my best just to appease other people or make sure that they are attended to, because I was the first one to go on my schedule this year where if I had multiple like, if my girlfriend needed something, my mom needed something, the business needed something, the first thing to go would be like my morning journal time, and that was a strategic mistake because in sacrificing the time where I recovered the most, both mentally and physically and emotionally, because that's what this book does for me, I operated from a more scattered state, and then I would then go into my events in a more scattered state, and the result of those events would be a more scattered team, more scattered relationship, more scattered family environment, whatever it would be. And so I love when I have this realization like this because I am again in control of fixing it. If I take that to be true, I now must build my entire day around making sure that my internal state is taken care of before other people's. That's a skill—skill issue—that I was unable to do that this year, but if I can fuel even 80% as much as I used to get on the personal time allocation side, every other area of my life is going to improve. So if I know that I want an even better business, even better health, even better relationship than this year during the next year, I must take this lesson into 2025—that take care of my internal state before I try to take care of anyone else, and as a byproduct of that, all of those other areas will improve.

All right, my eighth lesson in realization of 2024 is the main problem keeping you from ascending to the next level in any domain of life will be present no matter the vehicle. So let me break this one down. Let's just take business for example, and let's say that you build a business to $2 million in revenue, and you hit a bottleneck—you can no longer break through, you hit a big plateau. A lot of times people will reach that and then say, this is—I don't even want to use 2 million because that might seem out of reach—like let's say $10,000 a month, let's start there. $10,000 a month with this business, and you then hit a problem—like you, you can't solve this marketing challenge, or you can't um deliver this much service, whatever it is. A lot of people will hit a plateau and think that they need to switch businesses completely. And you could use the same example of like health and fitness where people will plateau on a diet, and they think the solution is just to switch diets entirely. All that happens when you do that is you get stuck at the same level you got to on the previous vehicle, just faster, and then immediately you—the same bottleneck, and then you must solve it. And so the wasted time of switching that vehicle and then only to arrive at the same problem—if you had just stayed in your current vehicle and tried to solve this one, you likely would have solved it during that same time period and then unlock the benefits of compounding to continue on. So there's so many different examples I could give here, but basically if you think about it as any domain—you like riding up, you're like climbing stairs, and each level is a different staircase, like rung, whatever you want to call it—you get stuck at a certain one, and a lot of people think you need to climb all the way back down, switch staircases, then climb all the way back up, but really all you're going to do is—let's try to bring this whole thing home—it's like you built an elevator to get to where you are, and then so you jump to another staircase, you take the elevator right back up, and you're stuck there again. And you thought that if you just went all the way down and you moved and then you went all the way back up, you'd suddenly just get over that problem. So if you're—let me try some more examples here. So for example, if you had a relationship problem and you're struggling to communicate with this person on an emotional level, a lot of people will then say, ah, she, she's just crazy, like I can't, I can't get through to her, it's got to be her not me, and then they switch, they date again, they get to the same stage of relationship, they get right back there, probably a little bit faster than last time; it's like, up, my inability to communicate my boundaries or my expectations is again the bottleneck, and therefore it was not the vehicle, it was me. I say all this because at any time that you face a bottleneck or a plateau is the time where you are most likely to make a poor decision of jumping ship to a shiny object or something else, when in reality you're going to lose out on the time that you could have just alloc towards solving this one and then for who knows, maybe you break through that one, and then every level above that is actually easier, but you just switch vehicles, same problem—ah, I need to switch again, switch again, switch again—when you could have just busted through that one on the first try, and then you're all the way up here. So this framework is going to be an extreme point of focus for me in the year ahead, which is every area—what, what are the things that most people, myself included, do when they hit a plateau that are incorrect, and how can you identify what you really should be working on in the first place? Because if this is a bottleneck in one vehicle, you will just get to that same bottleneck, but faster. And so this happened to me on the relationship side, on the business side this year, on the health side—no matter what problem you have, the solution is almost never to change vehicles, it's to sit and identify the current problem and chip away, chip away, chip away. Because the waste of time of switching vehicles should be better spent on that main problem.

Getting down to the end here, my ninth lesson and realization of 2024 is that generalities create anxiety while specifics create direction. And so that is all areas of life. If you are general about something, you will feel anxious, because if anxiety—I've heard a great definition from Alex Toros on this—is having too many options. If you are overwhelmed by the number of paths you can take, it's because you're being too general, where being extremely specific will create direction. So if you want to make more money, it's overwhelming because there are too many options, right? Should I pursue this vehicle? Should I do more work on my current job? Should I start a side hustle? Should I quit this job entirely, find a new industry? Should I invest in crypto? Whatever it is, that is a general ambition, and it's going to create extreme anxiety in you if you maintain that level of generality, because it's—you're unable to measure progress when you have something general. If I want to be a nicer person, what does that actually mean? There are

A subset of behaviors that actually make you nicer, that you could measure, that you could be much more specific about, and could verifiably tell you if you were getting closer to that general goal. So let's just go to the money example. If I said, "Make more money," or "I want to make $3,000 more per month," okay, now I immediately have a slightly more specific goal that's going to give me more direction. If I want to make $3,000 a month ghostwriting for SAS companies, even more direction, right? Because you can now reverse engineer the exact path to hit that goal. And this is nothing new here, like SMART goals—the very first "S" is specific.

So I say this because anytime I felt like I wasn't making progress on something, I just knew that I was being too general. And so we teach this to our sales team—of helping people understand why they would invest in something like PGA. They need to have a very specific reason for doing so, rather than, "I just hate my 9-to-5." It's like, "Okay, what do you actually hate about it? Why do you hate it? What do you want to do instead?" If you can be specific with yourself about what you want, the problem is it's extremely hard to do. It's so much easier to be like, "I just want more freedom." Like, "Okay, freedom to do what? Why do you want that? What does that actually look like? Where would you live?" It takes more work than people are honestly willing to do. It's much easier to put, "Get in better shape," because the reason I do this is it makes it impossible to fail, which is a hedge. If you just make a general goal, you can't verify that you failed. And so most of the time that I try to do that, it's because I'm avoiding the potential for failure.

And so if instead I just make something hyper-specific where I know—and I'll talk about this in my goal section at the end—I know that I failed, is a requirement for any kind of goal. Now, on the business side, on the relationship side, on the health side, I must be able to tell someone, "This is my goal," and they can look at it and tell me in six months if I failed or succeeded, just based on a couple of numbers. And so this is my buddy George's main framework: that anytime you feel anxious, you are being too general. And so the more specific you can get on every area—the type of person you want to be with, where you want to travel, what you want to do there, the type of business you want—I did this with the business goal this year of, rather than building a business to a certain size, I set like six constraints: I wanted this size, with this many team members, with this profit margin, with this number of days where I take meetings, with this level of like net promoter score from our customers. It was such a more specific thing because I go, "Okay, cool, we're here on this one, here on this one, not there on that one, not there on that one, not there on that one, so bigger business, extremely anxious, anxiety-inducing, hyper-specific list of things that I want to have the business boom. Now I have direction; I can go solve them one by one.

So I'm trying to just cram that one into my eyelids: be as specific as possible with everything you are trying to do, every instruction you give, all the delegation you give, the boundaries you set. Everything gets easier when you have a very specific description of it because it creates the road map for you to get there. All righty, my last 10th and final lesson and realization of 2024 is: life is about learning the same lessons multiple times, just at different levels of significance. So every lesson on this list I have experienced multiple times. I have written it down dozens of times. I have learned it; I thought I've learned it. And there was a point of this year where I was writing down my lessons and realizations each week and publishing them, and I do it like monthly or quarterly as well. And I found myself looking for new lessons to learn all the time, when in reality all that was doing was making it so I didn't actually learn the lessons I was trying to learn. I was just like shiny object jumping to, "Like, oh, maybe that's a lesson, that's a lesson." In reality, I should have just repeated the same 10 lessons every week or every month or every quarter and said, "How did I learn this with a new example?" Because it's not until you learn a lesson—even if you've learned a lesson—like, for example, the generalities versus specifics. I've learned that many times by being too general, but I didn't learn it at the business milestone that we got to this year. I had to relearn it at that level of significance because, of course, I knew how to set goals when I was at 5, 10, 15K a month—like it's very easy to set the next goal and then hit it, and I got there because I set a specific goal. But for some reason, you forget these basic lessons that I've talked about here of reality and expectations. Like, of course, I know that when I had way less, I needed to improve my reality and reduce my expectation, but again, I get to a certain level where you think that those basic lessons just stop applying. And that was my experience this year is like I learned these lessons before, I then thought I could move on from them, when in reality I needed to just continue to study them. So I went back and watched my end-of-year video from last year, and I could have just repeated almost all of those lessons in this video with new examples, and I almost did it, but there is so much overlap between those example or like those lessons and these lessons that I just went with the newest, newer ones because I captured them throughout the year. But this—I have this one as the last lesson—because it doesn't mean you learned something when you experienced it the first time; it just means that's the first time you've learned that lesson, and you are going to continue learning it again and again and again. Learning a lesson is just how quickly you can identify that an experience also applies that lesson, if that makes sense. And so I'm trying to just keep like you haven't learned a lesson until it is natural—like until I never use generalities again. It's not whether or not I've learned a lesson; it's just to what extent I've learned it. I think that's the best way to describe it, where learning at the first time just means you've created the spectrum, but you're probably going to make that same mistake with that lesson time and time and time again, or not apply it correctly, or not even just think about it when it's very clear that you're falling into the same trap that led you, led you to learn that lesson the last time. And if I have one mantra—actually, I don't want to say that—but like if, as I head into the new year, I'm no longer looking for new lessons; I am just looking for supporting evidence of the lessons that I've already learned, to reinforce them, reinforce them, reinforce them. So if I get to the end of next year and all I do is look for ways to reinforce these ideas, and I refilmed this video for my 2025 lessons and realizations, and it's like, "I got the same 10 lessons, here's how I learned them in new ways this year," I'm actually quite okay with that. And so I'm no longer like on this shiny object of, "Oh, you know what else is the world going to teach me?" And I'm sure I'll find some, but at the same time, I'm more looking forward to finding reinforcing examples or counter-examples of these lessons that I've learned, because that is what allows me to take one lesson and talk about it with such granularity and clear examples, and just allows—like I could write a single book about, like an entire book on the last lesson of general—generalities create anxiety, specifics create direction. If I studied that as the single lens for a year, two years, five years, think about how well I could talk about that topic. So a lot of these lessons had a lot of overlap this year, mainly around decisions, goal setting, reality, perspective, and perception of how events go, and I feel good about them. I feel that this less—like level of, or or these lessons in particular are ones that that are are widely applicable enough that I can keep talking about them, where I think some of the ones from last year were like so specific to my situation, they weren't as broad and and widely such that I could apply them to each domain that I continue to enter into. But those are my lessons of the year. I know that I'm going to learn and relearn and relearn and relearn them for many, many years at a time, and I just want to avoid thinking that because I've written a lesson down that means that I am no longer going to talk about it; it's really the first time that I'm going to talk about it, and I'm going to look for just different stories, different examples, different periods of my life where that example has applied, and then eventually just have such a depth of wisdom for each of these that I can tell stories about forever. And that is the goal with each of these videos is just identify the golden nuggets that I can take forward for the rest of my life. And as I look back on this when I'm 85, I can go, "Oh, that was the first time I learned that lesson," and I will probably still be learning them at that time. All righty, that wraps up my lessons and realizations. So we've done personal recap, business recap, lessons and realizations. Finally moving on to the very last section. I have no clue how long this has been at this point, but I am excited to talk about my 12 big goals for 2025. I don't want to put a hard time cap on these that I have to achieve them by the end of the year, but these are the main targets I have in my life. And rather than do a big deep dive, I'm just going to rattle them off with a couple of comments around them.

So my first goal—and I have these, I haven't purely prioritized them, but like the first three or four are big, big, big priorities that I won't even look at ones further down the list until I've knocked these out. So first is: I want to build a daily 30-minute or more meditation habit. I really want to rewrite that to be 40 minutes. I have found that if there was one habit that I could have adopted this entire year that would have made it more enjoyable, less stressful, and probably gotten me to stop doing things that were worthless because I just let the thought fully play out during a meditation session, realize it's not even worth acting on, that is something I want to do. So I'm like 10 days into building that habit. I'm really enjoying having that as the staple, almost very first thing I do each morning, and I'm going to talk about it a ton this year, of the things I've been learning while doing that. So that's goal number one. Number two: build a daily schedule with no work meetings until 1 p.m., to allow for a morning of mobility, meditation, writing, and my daily workout. I've studied my calendar from this year, and I had 80% of days with a meeting before 1 p.m., and so that is just too much for me. I really value that deep critical thinking time, strategic thinking, creative thinking, exploration thinking that I get during those first eight hours of the day, and it was a requirement this year from a hiring perspective: you have to do interviews, you have to coach and manage and train, and that just happens more effectively in the morning. But I've now reached a point in the business where I feel that I can establish the right boundaries that allow me to do all the other areas much better. So that is the second goal—is just as much as possible, I want to be six out of seven days where I only have one day per week with a meeting before 1 p.m., and I'm going to very diligently uphold that. Number three: health and fitness. I want to lean down to 190 lbs—so I'm about 210 right now—while maintaining my strength levels. I just got to a point where I no longer feel that I look as lean as I like to, and so I'm going to drop 20 pounds over the first six months of the year and unveil what I think has been a good year and a half of up from 190, and I've gotten stronger on a lot of lifts, and I think that my overall physical capacity has improved. So I want to trim down, see what my run times look like, what my lifts look like at that, at that body weight. So I think that'll take about six months, and I like that as one of the the first couple fitness goals. The second fitness goal—so my—I'm just going to go fourth goal overall—improve my resting heart rate to below 50 beats a minute. In 2022 I was at 49; 2023 I was at 54, and then shows was like 56 or 57, probably a function of being more stressed and traveling more and things like that. I want to just—if if there's one marker of health and fitness longevity, it is to have a resting heart rate below 50, and I know that if I can do that, my cardio is taken care of, my sleep's taken care of. So that's just a big goal. Number five: heal my nagging knee injury to allow for pain-free lower body exercise. Like I said, that was such a mental bandwidth suck for me this year, where if my knee hurt, I couldn't do squats; if I couldn't squat, I wasn't getting this type of like full-body soreness that I really enjoy; if I couldn't do high-intensity cardio 'cause my knee would act up, it just was this negative feedback loop on all areas of my life that I want to avoid in the future. So I'm taking—that is actually my first health fitness goals—take care of that with proper doctors, MRIs, things like that, to really just knock that out, because every other area of my life will improve with those first three, if I order them again: of meditating, no meetings until one, and having a healthy knee, everything would improve. So I'm really giving those a lot of focus on to—really the main business goal is is to get to a million dollars a month consistently at 50% operating margins. So we hit that in November; it was awesome. I want to now build that as the long-term business for this year. If we could do that consistently for every single month, it just requires us to think differently, to be more efficient, to tap into new distribution channels, to build new products, things like that. So I like that as a North Star goal, and I tied to it—not really like I don't think that having a revenue goal by a certain time period is a healthy business habit because all it does is force you to think short-term—but that's like the the North Star metric I want to get to because I know that if I can build that for this business, I will have built a lot of skills that then I can reapply to other businesses in the future, or a portfolio of them, which would be the ultimate goal. So that's like the next milestone on my business vision, and I can make a full video about where I see myself going in 5, 10, 15 years on that. So that is like the North Star business one for this year. Number seven: I want to learn Spanish at a conversational level to allow me to fully communicate in any South American city, or Central American, or North American—any city that speaks Spanish primarily. I'm starting the year with 12-ish weeks in Mexico City, so I'm going to use that as a time—I spoke Spanish in high school, took it at a decent level, but I know that my life just gets a little bit better when I can communicate with anyone in Spanish, especially because I like South American culture, the food, the people, the the lifestyle, it's nice, and the time zone is awesome too. So I'm going to spend a lot of time in Argentina, um, doing some time in Peru, doing some time in Mexico City, and so I'm going to use that as a chance to learn Spanish. These are kind of flipped; I should have put this one before, but my eighth goal is to publish 12 YouTube, newsletter, podcast episodes, just like this. I want basically a new creative vehicle established where I talk about whatever is going on in my life or business and what I'm learning along the way. That's going to be all around the idea of iteration. Iteration—I have it on my whiteboard; you can't really see it right there—because I think it's the most important framework for me in terms of what improves my life the most; it's just a constant iteration. So I want to make videos about that, how I do that with journaling, how I do that with my health, how I do that with business; that is the lens I want to use. I haven't really ever done consistent YouTube creation, so that's going to be a new skill—talking to a camera like this the entire time. I'm excited for that one, and I know that that will build a foundation to help the business get to that level if I have a consistent stream of media creation. Number nine: I want to publish my first live DJ set on YouTube. So I talked about DJing earlier, how I learned it in Amsterdam. I'm going to do another immersion during the summer where I really get good at such a level that I can produce a set and put it on YouTube by the end of the year. That is my commitment, um, and if I am watching this video at the end of the year and I haven't done that, I'll be disappointed, but um, I'm going to prevent that from happening. Goal number 10: I want to reduce my average spending on a monthly basis by about 25% from this year because I have now identified what actually generates a positive return in my life and what actually generates a negative return from a spending perspective. So I want to re-underwrite that where I think I got just a little bit too comfortable on certain things that didn't really add to my life; I just did it because I could. I don't have specific examples because I haven't done a super deep dive into this yet, but I just want to spend a little bit less than I did last year and see my personal operating margin expand just from a comfort level and just recognize that like I'm a simple guy; I don't need a lot of the things that I ended up purchasing or using this year; some things were just not worth it—like different upgrades or hotels or things like that that just ended up stressing me out more than, more than were necessary, and that money could be better allocated elsewhere. Number 11: I want to establish a weekly cognitive behavioral therapy routine with a trained therapist. So I've been doing that for the last like six weeks right now. I love it; I think it is the most practical therapy method that I've personally tried because it doesn't just obsess over trauma or whatever; it's like, "Here's what my, here's what my brain is doing; how do I use my brain and mind better," my perspective frameworks, things like that; it just clicks with me in a way that I really appreciate. I really like the guy I've been working with, so I just want to maintain that throughout the year. And then lastly, goal number 12: by the end of the year, I want to purchase my first apartment in a major city to begin building a home base. So I started this video with the very first bullet of the year being: I traveled a lot, I learned a lot, here are all the places I stayed and went to and did. I want to now take all that information, do a little bit more traveling this year, but then make a decision of, "This is going to be my first home base," and start to build an apartment that I really enjoy being in, that's my home base, and delivers the quality of life that I really want while allowing me to retain the constant novelty of travel, knowing that I have a home base.

So those are my 12 big goals. I'm going to do like a reaction-style video at the end of next year's review where I just replay that, and I'll go, "Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang," here's everything relative to that, or maybe I'll do that as like its own video. But I feel really strongly about achieving those this year because of the capacity that I built that I talked about throughout this video, where none of these are absurd, none of these are super just like require dramatic change in my life; they're relatively straightforward things that I know exactly what I need to do to get there; I just have to allocate my attention correctly, solve them in sequential order where I knock out the meditation, the daily schedule, and my knee, because that unlocks everything else. And then once I have those down, I think all these other goals will fall into place, and I'm so excited for that. I haven't really got like pumped up too much in this video 'cause as you can probably hear, like I'm battling a cold, and today's the 29th, we're headed to the Rose Bowl for New Year's, and so this was like my last day to film this video, and I am just fired up for the new year because I'm simplifying a lot of things, I'm moving to a new city, I'm going to have a simplified environment, simplified business—just a lot of pieces that I think were all over the place this year are going to be just settled down a little bit. And I will take all of the expanded capacity that I had, or that I built this year based on everything that I just talked about for the last—God knows how long, like three or four hours—and really go into the new year with a good foundation, clean slate, with excitement, with high energy. And that's all I got. So that pretty much wraps things up here. If you're still watching this, I just want to send a massive bit of appreciation to you, or if you're listening, reading—I make these primarily for me and my future self to be able to watch, but I also just do it because I think I would do anything to, on my way up, and even right now—nothing, I'm not on my way up right now; I'm just continuing to climb. I would love to have watched end-of-year videos for people documenting their entire journey. Could I do more documenting like with vlogs and things like that? Sure. But these videos are so important for me to just put a pin in the year and set the foundation into the next one. And so if you have reached this part, you're the type of person that I want to spend more time with; we enjoy similar things. So if you could do me a massive favor and leave a comment on this video with one golden nugget that you're taking away, because what that's going to do is tell me what are the type of content frameworks, ideas, lessons that I should double down on talking about more in the year ahead, and it just guarantees that you didn't watch this whole three-hour video and walk away with no behavior change, which would make it a waste of time. So if you can identify one golden nugget—doesn't need to be that long—just something that makes me know that you watched this entire thing, I can send you a massive note of appreciation as well. And that pretty much wraps up 2024. We got some big ideas for 2025, lots to reflect on, lots to learn and take away from this year, and that's all I got. I'll see you guys in many more videos this year. But note to future me: 2024 was awesome—a lot of pain, a lot of growth, a lot of excitement, a lot of just everything. It was truly the year of expanding capacity, and I am excited to see where we head next. So thanks for watching; I'll see you next year.