2023 Reflections—Losing My Dad, Doubling My Business, And Traveling The World

2023: What a year. Once again, for the 27th year of my life. The single biggest year of personal growth and professional growth that I've experienced. And in this video, I'm going to recap everything that happened and everything that I learned after spending two weeks in Germany, completely off the grid, looking through my journals, looking through my calendar, looking through my photos, with an attempt to take everything that happened and package it up for two people: one, my future self. So in 50 years when I look back on 2023, I can look and say this is what happened and this is what I learned. But I also want to distill all my mistakes and failures and things I tried, things that are working, down into some actionable frameworks that you can use in your own life to either avoid things, the paths that I've taken that were incorrect, or follow the path that I've been on that has been working well for me.

So I appreciate you clicking onto this video. If you stick around till the very end, I promise you're going to walk away with quite a few lessons, and that's my goal. So the overall structure of this video is: I'm first going to talk about the bullet points that summarize everything that happened this year, because that's how I start my review. I just make a big long list of everything that happened and try to summarize my year in 10 bullet points. And then from there, I'm going to dive into the lessons and realizations I had across health, wealth, relationships, business, travel, hobbies, everything. And that will be the full script of the video; that's how things are going to go. I'm going to keep it raw; I'm not writing anything; I'm not using the teleprompter; I'm just kind of jamming on this stuff.

So one quick thing before we dive into what happened and what I learned this year: if you want to do this process for yourself, I've created a comprehensive guide to doing your own yearly review at the yearlyreview.com. This is the entire process I used during my time in Germany to distill everything I learned this year and everything that happened. Also, I filmed this video after outlining the blog post that I've written, or will have published by the time you're watching this, that breaks down everything that happened and everything I learned this year in text form. So if you prefer to read, or if you're looking for some holiday reading to see this in a visual format, or whatever format that is, you can check the first link in the description here to read the blog post version. But without further ado, let's dive into 2023.

So like I said, my goal was to look back on all of my journals and photos and calendar and to-do list and everything to distill everything that happened into a list of bullet points that I could revisit in one year, two years, five years, 10 years, 50 years, to summarize 2023. So to do that, I came up with 12 bullet points. Number one: I bulked up 28 pounds. I hired seven team members. I averaged 18,000 steps a day. I built my dream production studio. I crammed at least 500 espressos. I doubled the profit of my business. I flew my mom first class to Greece. I gave the eulogy at my dad's funeral. I got into my first real relationship in years. I took 34 flights, visiting 18 cities and six countries. I learned how to sell and run a sales team. And finally, I developed a pure financially abundant mindset.

So now I'm going to do a little bit of a mini deep dive on each one of those. I could make entire videos around each of those bullet points, which I'm not going to do in this one—maybe I'll do in the future if there's interest on specific topics—but basically, I'm going to go one by one down that list, because that's exactly what I did. I came up with how to summarize the entire year, and then I said, okay, what went on within each of those, and then that led me to the lessons and realizations which I share in the second half of this video. So let's dive in. Bullet number one: on 2023, I bulked up 28 lbs. So if you put a side-by-side of myself during this time last year and last year's 2022 review video, I look a little bit bigger. I went from about 180 lb to 208 lb, which sounds like a big jump until you realize I used to be 280 lbs four years ago. So I went from 280, got all the way down to 180, and then I spent the last year rebuilding my strength and my general hypertrophy training, looking to get bigger because I wanted to kind of wipe the slate and then rebuild from there.

So a couple things that happened on the health and fitness front this year: I stopped running. So at this time last year I was running 10 to 15 miles a week, and I didn't like the way that was manifesting my body composition. I think if you look at a lot of runners, they don't hold a lot of muscle mass because it's hard to strength train and recover enough to build muscle when you're putting in that kind of mileage. I also know that I can run long into the future, but my window to get bigger and stronger is kind of limited, given I'm 27; I think that time is slowly running out. So I stopped running this year and instead focused on following a low-volume, high-intensity strength training program, kind of following the Dorian Yates, Mike Mentzer—again, another rabbit hole that you could go way down—and basically said, said I'm just going to get bigger all year. I'm going to try to add half a pound a week, which is, if you looked at the chart, I basically went from 180 to 208 in a straight line, very slowly, very linearly. I ate the same thing most days: six eggs and chicken breast in the morning, ground beef and rice for lunch, steak and potatoes for dinner; basically repeated that as long as I could throughout the year. I didn't stick to that during the summer; I was in Europe hanging out and maybe didn't put on the best weight during that time, but all I did was focus on training hard all year, and I kind of continue—I plan on continuing to do that all of next year—where my plan is to—I think everyone in their 20s should undergo like a two-year bulking cycle where they just try to get bigger for two years, starting from a place of relative leanness. That's the plan I'm going with. So I plan on doing that at least until September/October of next year, because that's kind of when I started in 2022. And then from there, I know I can take on all the different areas of health and fitness that I eventually want to, like learning how to fight, do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, boxing, etc., given I built this kind of foundation of size and strength that I can maintain for the rest of my life. So that's my general fitness plan. I learned a ton this year, and I plan on talking more about what I've learned and how I generally operate in my plans going forward, so be on the lookout for some future writing and videos on that front.

Bullet number two is on the business side, which is I hired seven team members. So we grew a ton this year; the business ended up doubling, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But at this point last year, I remember thinking I didn't want a team above four or five. I didn't like the idea of having a ton of people reporting to me, having to spend a lot of my day on the management side, being unable to kind of do deep work. And my deep work definitely took a sacrifice, or took a hit this year as I had to spend more time hiring and training. But I realized that just because we were operating at an 80 to 90% margin business at this time last year versus what we're doing now, like 60—the big difference in that 20-25%—is those are really payments you're making to yourself to handle all those roles, where now I've removed myself from a lot of the operational things that I was doing on a day-to-day basis that, for some reason, I thought I needed to continue to do. But as I've removed myself, I've been able to double down on the activities that help grow the business the best that I'm uniquely positioned to be able to do, same with Cole. And it's also just a lot more fun. I think there's this big idea of the one-person business or solopreneurship, and everyone who talks about that has some kind of story that starts with, "I worked for horrible people," or "I had a horrible boss," or "I had a horrible team," and I just haven't had that experience. I've played both of those now; I've worked at a big company; I've basically run a business on my own; and then I've surrounded myself now with 10 A-players who show up ready to ball, and I enjoy talking to every single day. The third one is by far the most lucrative, by far the most fun, by far the most fulfilling, because everyone is incentivized to do their best; the business compounds on itself because everyone's doing a better job rather than you trying to wear all these different hats where you're—I've hired people that are better than me at the role I was playing, which I didn't think was possible because that was just in my head of, "Oh, I'm the only one who knows how to do this," but you quickly realize that when one person gives that area all of their attention, they're much better at it than you. So I learned that this year. We had the entire team out here during—I think it was late November—for the first time, where I got to meet half our team in person. We operated very quickly, very remotely; not a lot of synchronous communication, but it was so fun to have everyone out here for the shipyard. We made a video, both with takeaways from that and general takeaways on the entire business side that we can link here that you can go and watch. I'm not going to dive too much deeper into general business lessons because I did an entire video on that, but that was just an impactful change for me this year, and I couldn't summarize the year without that one.

Bullet number three is I averaged 18,000 steps per day. And to a lot of people, that's crazy. To me, that's kind of been my standard for the last three or four years. Walking is the foundation of my health and creative habit, which are the two areas that I've wanted to pay the most attention to over the last few years. So I don't own a car here in Miami; the shipyard where I'm filming this right now is like a 4-minute walk from my apartment, which is actually taken my steps down a little bit, but 18,000 steps comes out to like 2 and a half hours total of walking per day, really like two. And if you think about, I walk to and from the gym, which is about 15 minutes; I walk in the morning for 20 minutes just to clear my head; I walk for 20 minutes after dinner; and then general steps I take throughout the city—if I walk to a coffee shop and back in the morning—doesn't come out to that many, but most people own cars, and so the longest walk they make most days are walking from their house to their car. So I just like to keep recognizing that is the foundation and something I want to continue to do for a long period of time because clearer thinking, more creative, I burn more calories, which allows me to eat more, which I enjoy, and it's just generally how I want to live forever. So I put that as a bullet there because it surprises most people, but it's become extremely obvious and extremely normal to me. But if you're not walking at least 10,000, I highly, highly recommend it. You'll feel better; you'll have more creative output; it's just everything starts for me with, "How much am I walking on a daily basis?" And when I'm cooped up, unable to walk, like I was in Germany and it was cold and I wasn't walking outside, I could just feel myself getting stale; I had lower energy; I was less creative; it all comes back to walking every day. So I just want to make a point to remember that for next year.

Number four is I built my dream production studio. Here we are. If you compare this setup to last year's setup, it's a little bit different. And again, this—we have an entire deep-dive video on that—I filmed with my business partner, Cole. This was one of the cooler things—things—to ever happen to me in my life, because I remember three or four years ago when I was still working on Wall Street, I just—I was watching all these fitness YouTubers at the time; they were all building these cool spaces that had gyms and filming setups, and I just remember thinking, "Am I ever going to be able to do that, or am I just going to watch other people do it?" And we got to a position at the middle of this year where if we didn't make the decision to do it now, we never would have done it. And this—I don't know how many square feet this room is—came on the market; it's right next to my apartment building, and it was available for a great deal, and we signed the lease on it. We ended up investing over $100,000 into building this entire space—worth every single penny—because everything that it enabled: we have an office; we meet up in person; I get to film in a studio like this, which we're going to double down on in the year ahead; we have couches; we hang out; my desks here; it's so much fun to have a physical space that allowed us to bring our whole team here—everything—and now I recognize this is not the last physical space we're going to build. We're going to make some transitions; Cole's going to move to Arizona this year; I'm going to kind of go a little bit more nomad and then maybe spend some time in Arizona at the end of the year, and we're going to have to move this entire space again, and it's not that hard. I think that was a big mistake, or faulty belief we had in our head that like building these are some kind of magical thing that no one knows how to do and it takes tons of effort. It's like we hired an agency; they came out and built most of it, and now we know that we could do it again, and the next one we're going to build, it's going to be bigger; it's going to have a gym; it's going to have a grill; it's going to have a lot more because we know, "Okay, we can build it once; it wasn't that difficult," and the returns on it are so high if you use it to its fullest potential, which I know I will. So I'm very excited about that—that—for the year ahead, but building the V1 of my dream production studio definitely a big highlight of the year.

Bullet number five is I crammed at least 500 espressos this year. I'm actually breaking my rule 'cause I wanted a little bit of a longer coffee as I've been filming here for a couple hours. But basically, built my entire year around having espressos or the occasional cappuccino in cool places. So anytime I visited a new city or a new coffee shop or wherever, I try to snap a picture because it was just my working routine: I'd go to a new place; I'd go to a coffee shop; I'd order an espresso; I'd soak that in; I'd journal, and I'd write. And I—I didn't do the exact numbers; it would be a nice number to have, but it's got to be at least 500 because I had at least one a day, and on a lot of days during the more intense part of this year, I had at least two. So if you are an espresso aficionado and you have any coffee shops locally in any places that I'm going to talk about where I plan on going this year, please let me know; leave a comment; send me a DM, because not a day will go by where I will not be cramming an espresso in 2024.

Bullet number six is I doubled the profit of my business after tripling it in 2022. So growth was a little bit slower this year, but we started from a much higher point, so I'm extremely happy with how that came to be, especially because we came into the year pretty uncertain about the macro environment. A lot of people were saying, "You know, the online education space—good luck; it's not going to have as much upside this year." So a lot of people kind of completely removing themselves from this lifestyle, going back to their W2s, and I will just never do that; I will never work for someone else again; that is a staple for me. But at the beginning of the year, we kind of faced two choices: we could just kind of accept that and say, "Yeah, things are going to be down; we're going to do what we can; we're going to salvage what we can," or we could say, "Maybe this is an opportunity for us to double down on what we're doing; further invest in ourselves; further invest in our education; further invest in our media quality." And that's exactly what we did, and it feels good to sit here at the end of the year with—that feedback loop kind of fully brought to fruition—where it was super uncertain and risky to make the types of investments we made at the beginning of the year and throughout the year relative to what people were saying, but now we can comfortably say anytime we make an investment in ourselves, in our education, in our skill set, we are the type of people who make that a positive return investment. So that is both a confidence thing where I know I'm going to continue to invest in myself in the future, and it's also just—we're happy we did it. And I think anyone sitting in a position right now as we go into 2024—I—we're continuing to invest heavily; we're going to double down on everything we've done; we're going to reinvest into the business: more talent, more team members, better quality, better products, everything, knowing that it doesn't really matter what's going on externally. If you can continue to surround yourself with A-players, build a high-quality product, the general macro environment, interest rates, Fed—whatever people want to talk about—do not matter as much as you think if you can just remove all that noise and focus on giving it your full attention, whatever it is you're building. So really a reminder to myself—we talked a ton about—in entire business lessons, and you can click on that video over here—ju—you can throw that up there. So I'm not going to go down that list because that was like an hour and a half long video as well, but a lot happened on the business side. I'm going to keep this more focused on the personal, but it was a good year on the business front.

Number seven: I flew my mom first class to Greece for a dream vacation. This one was a lot of fun. So let's back up about two years to September 2021. Honestly, we could go all the way back to May of 2018 when my mom was first diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian—very emotional time for me. I was just graduating college; I was going to work in New York City; I was unable to be there fully for her during her chemo period and healing period because it was better for me to go start working in New York; she wanted me to be there, and so she dominated it. It's hard to not get emotional as I talk about that, but my mom's strength and resilience during that period was unbelievable, and she ended up completely just getting to the other side of that first diagnosis. Then in September of 2021, she was re-diagnosed, and at the time I was living at home, so I was—and we were still not required to go back into the office—so I was able to be her primary caretaker. And that one was a lighter diagnosis; it was not as intense, and again, she dominated it. But I remember what I promised her during that time was, "Once you get to the other side of this one, we're going to go visit Greece; it's going to be a dream vacation." It just put something on the calendar for her to be able to look forward to, and I delivered on that this year. So in—it was September of 2022—yeah, no, 2023. So two years after that second diagnosis, we finally made it to Greece, and I spared no expense; I went maxed out on this experience. We flew first class; we stayed at the coolest hotel in Athens; I put her in the best hotels in Santorini and Mykonos; we flew a helicopter from Athens to—to Paros, whatever island we went to—unbelievable experience across the board, truly the most memorable thing that I could have put together for my mom, and I'm so happy with it. And I know that's not the last awesome trip we're going to take together. So it's cool to put this one on here as the first of many incredible experiences I will have flying my mom to a cool place, immersing myself and travel with her. So tons of amazing memories there, and I used it also as a lens for personal growth where I got to see what my preferences were for travel, what hers were; it taught me a ton across the board. So there were more benefits just on the—just on the travel experience itself, but I'll talk a little bit later in the video about how I think you should approach spending money on experiences like this and how you can create and craft them to give you the most memory dividends that you can talk about in the future, which is exactly what I did for this one. So jump forward a little bit—probably 30 minutes into this video—and you'll see me talk about my approach to spending money on that front. But high level, that was a world-class trip; I'm so happy I did it, and I'm going to continue to invest in experiences like that with my family, with my relationship partners, everything, because the returns you just cannot measure.

All right, number eight, and I knew I'd struggle a little bit when I got to this point, but I gave the eulogy at my dad's funeral this year, and—it was unexpected. In June—June 1st, 11:50 p.m. this year—I got a call from my uncle, and—and I've actually never told this full part of the story, but I was on a date at the time; we were at a restaurant; it's like 11, and I saw the first missed call and I ignored it; I said, "Why is my uncle calling me? Like I don't—I've barely talked to him; I mean, we're close, but for him to call me—be completely out of the blue"—and I ignored it, but I just knew something was up, and—an hour went by; finished up drink; said goodbye; and on my walk home, I got back to my apartment, and just something felt extremely off in how I felt, and so I gave my uncle a call, and part of me—just I don't know why—why—but I just knew something was wrong, and he called me, or he picked up and said—he was definitely very emotional at the time—that my dad had died unexpectedly in the middle of the night from a stroke, and the next of kin on his records was my uncle and not me, so I wasn't the one to receive the call, as my uncle who got the first call. And that was not on my bingo card for 2023. Certainly, seven days later, I was giving the eulogy at his funeral. And I've spent a lot of this year—I haven't talked too much publicly about it because I think there was like—given I do a lot of public writing—I felt this internal pressure of talking about this more, and I just—I haven't had that much to share because my situation was so unique, and I've shared a little bit on some of the different resources I've used, but it just didn't feel like I needed to go and talk too much about it, and maybe I will in the future when I get a better grasp on exactly how I handled it, because it was just so unexpected; it was in the moment. But I'll talk later in this video about the core belief that shaped my year, which was believing that everything that happened to me was an opportunity for progress, and this—of all parts of the year—benefited most from that belief because I said, "How can I make this horrible—

Tragic experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone. A defining point in my life for the better, so it really accelerated my views on manhood, on masculinity, on what it's going to be to be a father. It helped me redefine my mission as eventually being a world-class father to a large family. And yeah, it's going to be, I think, the most difficult part about losing a a parent or a a close-loved one is you have the initial sting, which is more of a shock. And then it's the subtle reminders of when you do something for the first time without them.

So examples that happened this year that continue to come up were my dad and I; the last thing we did together was go to Ray's opening day, which we've been doing for 20 years together. I don't think we missed very many, and it was cool to be able to fly home and take him to that game. And that was our last experience together because I was back in Miami for a few months after that. And little things now, like the Rays got eliminated from the playoffs and I grabbed my phone to text him, and obviously I can't. And as I filmed this video, I know I sent him mine from last year and he said, "I'm so proud of your growth. So cool to see what you're doing." And I know that the next couple years, maybe for the rest of my life, you're going to continue to experience those first moments. And that is—I don't want to say it's the unfortunate part, but it's—I think that is the more painful part of losing a loved one is how each time you do something that you used to do with them, then it's a new opportunity to kind of pick that wound a little bit because it's the first time. So I'm trying to reframe that a little bit, where every time it happens, I, you know, I just tap my chest and look up and and know he's with me, watching over me every step of the way. But I know that that's going to be a defining point of 2024, so I'll share more about this, more resources for anyone who's had experienced something like this, but definitely a defining point of my life, certainly of 2023, and I know I'm better because of it.

Which I remember the first time I said that I was a little bit uncomfortable because it's like I'm not celebrating it, but part of me has reframed it into, "I'm glad that has happened to me because of the positive benefits that will eventually come from it," and I feel pretty comfortable saying that, and I'm doing my best every single day to make that a reality. Okay, bullet number nine: I got into my first relationship in years. So I talk about this later in the video how I think there are three vehicles for personal growth in your 20s: taking care of your health, building a business, and then dating. I've spent the first five years of my 20s focused more relentlessly on taking care of my physical health and building up a business foundation, but I gave relationships more attention this year, immersed myself in that world, and rather than focus so purely on myself, this was the first time I realized life is not a single-player game. Started to kind of put myself out there, explore that world. Very happy I did, but I I knew that I was not the type of person these last five years that was going to attract the type of person I eventually wanted to attract. But it kind of accelerated with the loss of my dad, where as I went through and rewrote a lot of my core beliefs on what it means to be a a man in this world, what it means to be mission-driven, I felt myself level up to the point where I was more open to letting other people into my life and kind of putting putting myself out there in a more vulnerable state. And it led to an awesome relationship that I'm in right now that I'm again learning more about myself in the world every single day. So obviously a big bullet that came from a lot of other bullets in previous years, building up to this, but feels good to be able to say that, and I continue to think 2024 is going to be an awesome year on that front as I continue to learn and grow and reap the rewards of the personal progress that comes from getting into a relationship where you just learn so much more about another person, how to deepen a relationship, how to be the type of person that is supportive in a relationship that you don't get if you're just surface-level dating. So very excited for that for the year ahead, and obviously a big bullet for this year.

Bullet number 10 is: I learned how to sell and run a sales team. So again, this is more on the business side, but if you look at a progression of skills that I've had since I was working full-time on Wall Street, uh, trying to escape, I started with writing, which led to copywriting, which led to social media writing, which led to ghostwriting, which led to newsletter writing, then email marketing, then leadership, then operations and automation. Sales was the last skill that I've built, and if I could do it all over again, I would start with sales because I'll talk about later in this video how life is sales, and every single skill is somehow improved if you learn the fundamental uh psychology, persuasion, everything. So for the month of February and May, in two separate batches, I completely immersed myself in this world and recognized that everything I was doing was now magnified because I built this skill. So whether that was the correct time in my journey to learn it, if I would have been better off learning it at the beginning versus now, I don't know, and to be honest, it doesn't really matter, but I'm very happy to look back on this year and say the single number one skill I built was the ability to sell and run a sales team because now I can apply that skill to every other area, every new business I start, every business I continue to grow. So a big, big bullet on this year that I know I want to remember for future years.

Bullet number 11: I took 30 flights this year to 18 different cities and six different countries. So I don't actually have this here, but I'll try to rattle it off the top of my head. I know I went to Amsterdam, Greece, Mexico, Germany, Austria, and that's it country-wise. I went to Austin, Phoenix, LA, Joshua Tree, New York City—tons of different cities. Where this was by far the most travel I've ever done in a single year, and it hit me in the middle of the year that I'd kind of unlocked the life I'd wanted for the last 5 years, which which was having a job that allowed me the flexibility to travel without trading off ambition. So my buddy George, who I spent a lot of time with this year, says now, post-2020, the tradeoff of ambition and exploration is no longer a trade-off; you can be just as ambitious and travel just as much because of what the internet has unlocked. And that clicked with me in a big way, where in June—again, this was right after losing my dad—was kind of in a like reevaluation period. I said, "Why aren't I traveling more? Why aren't I taking the fact that I'm running an internet business with pure freedom that I can actually just operate from my laptop?" So I booked a ton of trips. I booked—I spent the entire summer in Europe that I didn't expect to at all. I was supposed to go back two weeks and ended up spending two months there. And I said, "What's the point of having all this freedom if I don't ever use it?" And so that's exactly what I did. And then I went to Germany at the end of the year because I thought, when I did this end-of-year reflection, "Why would I limit myself to being in the US when I could go to another country?" So that's exactly what I did, and I learned a ton about how I like to travel. I'm not going to recap every single trip this year, but basically the big ones were: I spent the whole summer in Europe, spent it mostly in Amsterdam, did the Greece trip with my mom, did a Germany trip. To recap this year, I spent a week in Houston—so much fun. And I look back as I'm reflecting on this year, like, "What do I remember?" It was those trips, it was the small memories of the restaurants I went to, or renting the car in this place, or the picture on the top of this building somewhere. And so I'm going to double down on that this year, where if I am not in a monk mode sprint working, I'm going to be traveling. And so as I design my entire year, I can clearly see what parts am I going to be working hard and not traveling because I think, yeah, you can still work hard when you travel, but it's just not as easy to where I can chain myself to a desk when I'm in my home base and I know where the restaurants are, where the gym is, everything that I can just fully give myself over to work. But then if I'm not doing that and kind of in more of a maintenance mode, I want to take advantage of that in travel. So I plan on going to Italy, France, uh, Croatia, Portugal. I want to spend some time in Colombia. I want to go to Argentina. And then in 2025, I'm starting to outline an Eastern Asia trip where I want to kind of dive into the world of religion, world religions tour, that I want to go to Japan, tons of places that I want to go. So if you have any recommendations on those, be sure to let me know. But basically, I got the travel bug this year because I recognized that I have the ability to, and I want to double down on that in the year ahead.

And my 12th and final bullet of 2023 is that I developed a purely abundant relationship with money. So this year I made more than I had, and I spent more than I've had, and I learned more about the best ways to spend money, which I've—entire lesson and realization on—I spent the whole year figuring out what it means to have a better relationship with money. And I talk about this later, but basically, growing up the poorest kid in my school, in my neighborhood, everything I've had to re-evaluate my relationship with money. A lot of the beliefs that have not served me that have been holding me back on the financial side, I had to untrain this year. And then I untrained a lot of them last year, but it was a big goal for me this year to continue to think and understand that money is abundant; it flows to the people who send it out the most; it flows to the people who see it as unlimited in a positive, some world, rather than some fixed amount that they need to go and capture as much as possible. So I took another big leap forward on that, and this is a topic I want to make more videos about and write more about because there's not a lot of good advice out there on how to really strengthen your relationship with money and how it's earned and how it's made and how it just flows. So I'm going to make a deep dive on that, but it's just a staple of me to be able to identify at the end of this year that I'm purely seeing the world financially more abundant than when I came into the year, which I hope to continue to do every single year because I'm by no means perfect. I still fall for sunk cost; I still look at the price of things that I probably shouldn't; I still like feel a general anxiety around money, and is it all going to go away, and all that—it doesn't—those feelings that you grow up with are not something you can out-train in one or two years, but it's something that I know I need to continue to work on. So I put it as a bullet as a strong success for this year, but also something I'm going to continue working on in the future. Okay, so that was a quick rundown of everything that happened to me this year, and that's exactly how I do my reviews is I start with creating that full list of bullets that summarizes everything, and then I try to say, "What did I learn? What are the frameworks, the lessons, the realizations, the general theories about the way I operate or the way the world operates that I can continue to use next year and the year after and the year after that?" So I'm just progressively building up my mental models for how the world works every single year. And so that's what we're going to dive into next, where I started with a list of everything that happened and then said, based on what went well or what could have gone better or what was unexpected, "What did I learn and what did I realize about the world?" So let's dive into those now. All right, my first lesson and realization of 2023 is that immersion and intensity beats consistency in the beginning of learning anything. So I see a lot of tropes on the internet around consistency beating intensity, and I think that's true only for areas limited by biology because I look at any skill that I've ever built, and I've never once made progress doing it for 20 minutes per day. On the other hand, my health and fitness, since you're limited by biology, it is important to build that consistency and do it every day. So to explain that, I'm going to look at two examples: one, running a marathon, and two, learning paid Facebook ads. So for running a marathon, consistency wins. You could do two different ways of training: if you tried to go out and run for 10 hours on your very first day, your body's going to break down; you're not going to be able to train the next day or the next day or the next day, and that much intensity your body cannot recover from because, again, you're limited by biology. But instead, if you ran for 30 minutes a day or an hour per day for a long period of time, you'll slowly build up the ability to run for longer and longer periods. So in this scenario, consistency wins. On the other hand, let's look at learning paid Facebook ads. If you took those same two paths and said, "Okay, I'm going to run for or I'm going to learn Facebook ads for an hour for the next 30 days, or I'm going to do 10 hours a day for the next week," it's my opinion and my personal experience that you'll make much more progress on the 10 hours per day, pure immersion, than 1 hour per day trying to learn a little bit at a time. So to me, the advice of getting 1% better per day is not great advice for anyone trying to build a skill because most people hear this idea and it sounds great; they're like, "Oh, 20 minutes per day, I can totally do that." Then they give it a whir for a week or two; they don't see any results because they haven't done enough input or volume to get good at it; they conclude that consistency doesn't work for them, and then they totally fall off. I've always kind of intuitively felt this, but this year I saw it in action with two specific scenarios that I'll break down where I had different results for each of them. I tried to learn two skills this year—I tried to learn many skills, but two main ones: one, learning how to sell and run a sales team, take sales calls, and the other, a completely different skill, learning how to make house music. The first one I approached with complete immersion; this was learning to sell, take sales calls, and run a sales team over the span of four weeks. I read six books on sales, inhaled two courses, took 50 sales calls—basically every second of the day for 28 days. It was all I thought about, and what do you know, I acquired the skill very quickly. I was able to learn it myself and then hire two people to train it to them and then hire another person to train them, basically because it was all I thought about for a long period of time. Now, on the other hand, I approached learning to DJ with consistency. So I signed up for one-on-one coaching for two hours per week, every single Friday, trying to say, "Okay, I'll get a little bit better each week." But every week for six weeks, the cycle kind of repeated itself; I would get to my end of the week; it'd be Friday; be tired; I would kind of be like, "Oh, do I really need to go do this?" I'd show up for the first hour and a half; I would just spend the time trying to relearn what I learned last week, and most of the time I never even got back to that same point, and then the last 30 minutes were kind of a waste of time where I'd be frustrated and again thought I wasn't making any progress. So I was frustrated; that led me to think I didn't like DJing at all, and I eventually stopped. But as I reflected on the year, I realized that my $1,500 for private DJ lessons were not completely wasted because I learned this lesson, which is: had I approached learning to DJ like I learned sales, with one or really a week, at least probably two weeks of of complete immersion, multiple multiple hours per day, my guess is I'd be spinning tracks pretty well right now. But because I tried to just do two hours per week, I wasn't making any any progress; I didn't get the addictive feeling of getting better at something, so I didn't want to go back the next time. And you could tell that because I didn't immerse myself, I didn't build that feedback loop of a little bit better and then better the next day and then better the next day; it was just too slow of progress. So that's what I plan on doing this year with anything I'm trying to learn. So I do plan on learning to mix house music again, but when I do it, it's going to be a two-week immersion during the summer in Europe where it's all I think about, and then I will have that skill for the rest of my life. And I think this is how I plan to learn anything forever, which is: rather than try to show up a little bit for a long period of time, I want to immerse myself, whether it's meditation, whether it's a hobby, whether it's a relationship; the more that you can frontload as many iterations into as little bit of time as possible, then over the long term you can maintain that with consistency. So for example, if I was learning to DJ, that 2 hours per day is not going to help me learn the skill, but if I immerse myself for two weeks, then over a long enough period of time I can maintain my ability to DJ by just doing it for two hours per week. So if I was going to summarize this lesson, it's immersion and intensity beats consistency when you're learning a skill. So again, if this is health and fitness, if it's your diet, if it's anything you're going to do forever, consistency wins, but in intellectual domains like learning, it's intensity, intensity, intensity. And then this kind of creates a second point, which is: if I'm not in a position to immerse myself in learning a skill, I shouldn't start learning it at all. Rather than try and just do a little bit here and there, like learning a language, for example, I tried to go to or I went to Germany this year and tried to learn a little bit of German for an hour per day leading up to it; it was a waste of time because I got there and realized that I didn't learn anything. But during the week I was there, I just practiced speaking it to any any person who spoke German, which was everyone in the entire city, and I learned far more than I did in the four weeks prior. So again, another little reinforcement where I've just seen this pattern throughout my life of anything that I've learned has been from pure immersion, and I really want to think about that in anything I learn in the year ahead. And then the final point on this is: I want to continue to remove things that I'm giving a little bit of attention to, free up as much as possible to give one thing all of my attention.

My second lesson and realization from 2023 is that you can only accelerate one area of your personal life and one area of your business life at a time. Now, my biggest leap of progress by far this year came during the month of May, and during the month of May, every morning for 28 days, I woke up and I read two goals: one, launch our premium ghostwriting academy, and two, complete a 4-week mini-cut to dial in my body weight. Every single other area of my life during that 28-day sprint went on the back burner; I didn't think about it. So I wrote zero new content; I didn't shave or get a haircut; I talked to nobody outside my team; I had every meal decided in advance; I listened to zero podcasts and read zero new books. And guess what? I succeeded heavily in both of my two goals because I gave them all of my attention. One of them was my personal life; the other was in my business life. I got in the best shape of my life before my fifth college reunion and basically launched an entire business from scratch that ended up doubling our monthly revenue run rate. Now, aside from the importance of focus, which I've learned that lesson many many times and we'll continue to learn that lesson because I will continue to forget it, this one taught me an important difference between acceleration and growth. So here's what I mean: acceleration is, if you're a physics guy, the rate of change of velocity. So when you do something faster than you used to, you are accelerating it. So if I'm going 10 miles an hour and then I am suddenly going 20, I accelerated by 10 miles an hour, whereas growing something you can just stay on a constant state state of growth, trending upward. So you can stay going 20, 20 miles an hour, and you will get to your destination eventually. So let's take an example here and say you're not currently working out, you're not meditating, and you're not journaling. So you are—your growth in all three of these areas is zero. If you try to start working out, start journaling, and start meditating all at the same time, you would fail because you are accelerating all of these. To take any of them from a zero to something you're doing consistently requires new effort, and I'm—it's my personal opinion and I've seen it from my personal experience—you can only accelerate one thing at a time. So rather than try to do all three at once, you would pick one and say, "Okay, for the next 30 days, I'm going to focus all my attention on learning how to build a journaling habit." Then if you did that for 30 days and you got that to, "Okay, I'm doing that consistently," then you could start to meditate and build that on top and say, "Okay, for the next 30 days, I'm going to continue journaling and start meditating." So I'm not accelerating my journaling anymore because I've already brought that from zero to doing something consistently, but now I'm going to accelerate my meditation, and then 30 days later I'm going to accelerate working out. So that's been an important difference for me of: if I'm applying new effort to anything, I can only apply new effort to one thing at a time. But I've also realized that you can continue to grow many things. So the example I just gave: once you are already journaling and already meditating, you can maintain that habit very easily and then start working out on top of it. But if you try to start all three at the same time, you're not going to see success. So the same idea holds for your business: if you try to start three different initiatives at the same time, you're not going to, because each of those are an acceleration. I really want to beat this over my head into the year ahead where anytime I'm in the middle of a working sprint, I want to be able to point very clearly to, "What am I accelerating, and what is everything I'm leaving on the back burner?" Because I know and I've seen it time and time again: when I give one area of my personal life and one area of my business life all of my attention, both of those end up accelerating, but when I try to do, you know, build a relationship…

And start a new workout plan. And start traveling. And on the business side, we try to launch a new platform, build a new product, and hire a new team member. None of them end up working. And it took me three years of making that mistake until May of this year when I said, okay, wow, I finally realized that you can only do one of these things at a time. So I'll probably continue to make this mistake; I'll probably find myself doing too many things in the year ahead. But if I can just remember what am I accelerating and what am I leaving on a constant state of growth, I know I'm going to see a lot more success, a lot faster this year. Okay, my third lesson in realization of 2023 is that there are three vehicles for personal growth you can have in your 20s: taking care of your health, building a business, and dating.

Now I spent my years 22 to 24 figuring out my health. When I graduated college, I weighed 280 lbs. So I spent those three years losing 100 pounds and completely rewriting my life operating system. I spent time learning how to lift correctly, meditate, journal, optimize my energy, manipulate my body weight, time my caffeine and calories, style and my sleep routine—basically everything that I needed to do to take care of myself and get myself on the right track. Now this process was a painful mirror for all of my character trait deficiencies. As I tried to do this, I figured out where I lacked discipline, where I lacked ownership, where I couldn't be consistent, where I lacked intentionality, where I lacked willpower, and my ability to delay gratification. These were all, as I picked something to improve, they stared me back in the face and said, hey, you clearly are coming up a little bit short in these areas because I wasn't making any progress. But because I gave this one my full attention, I was able to use this as a vehicle to strengthen all of those traits. At this point, I consider myself a consistent, discipline-led, intentional person who was able to take their entire health and fitness philosophy and rewrite it, where now I know that I have that as a foundation. I'm 27 now, so I've had that for the last couple of years, and I think that is the gateway drug, uh, to realizing anything else can happen in your life.

So during those three years as I completely changed everything, I said, wow, what are all the areas that one, I could change the way I did things, and two, how could I take this and apply it to the next one, which was learning about how to build a business? Now, from age 25 to 27, I built my business skill set foundation. So for the first three years out of college, I worked as a hedge fund trader on Wall Street. It paid well in money, but I was not learning anything new. And I looked around at all the people who were on my floor who were, you know, 10 years older, not living very happy lives, and said, okay, this is clearly not the path I wanted to take. Around the age of 25, I realized again, this is not what I want to do forever. So I committed to learning skills that would allow me to eventually escape and build my own business. Now I'm not going to shell out my entire business journey here, but basically I spent the last three years building a foundation to build any business, which is, I think, copywriting, ghostwriting, email marketing, sales, sales management, offer creation, AI prompt writing, operations and automation, onboarding, customer success, hiring, training, management, and leadership. I spent the last three years building several different businesses, each to over seven figures in revenue, just as a way to learn these skills. I picked a business and had to pick something to get started. Is it the business I'm going to run forever? Who knows. And maybe I'm looking back on this video in 20 years saying, yeah, that was the business I ran for four years or five years or six years. Who knows? But I know that it's allowing me to build skills that I could eventually reapply to everything else. And again, by no means did I learn all these at once, or did I have any kind of plan. All I've done is followed a cycle where I picked something to start, which three years ago was writing a newsletter. And as I tried to grow that newsletter, I'd run into into a plateau. I'd figure out what the plateau was, what the skill that I was lacking that allowed me to break through that plateau was. I'd immerse myself in learning that skill, and then I'd repeat the cycle. And I followed this cadence of just-in-time learning for the last three years, and I plan on continuing to do so, where rather than go read a bunch of business books that don't have any application on exactly the problem I'm looking to solve now, it's try to grow the business, recognize where I'm coming up short, build the skill that allows me to break through that, and then continue that cycle.

Now those first two—building up my health and fitness and building a business—were great mirrors to show me a lot of character trait and skill deficiencies. Now the last year I started giving dating and relationships a little bit more attention after giving it the bare minimum during the previous four years. It was my game plan and opinion that if I took care of the first two, the third would become merely a byproduct, and that was kind of true. But once again, as I gave this more, more attention, just like health and fitness, just like business, each bottleneck started showing up right in my face, face one by one. I learned how to control my ego. I learned what it meant to frame a situation, empathy, adaptability, vulnerability, fear of rejection, outcome detachment, emotional intelligence. Each of these came up as, hey, you need to go learn how this works if you want to continue to progress in this area. I think since I learned how to identify bottlenecks from the business and the fitness side, I was able to accelerate this much faster. And from a sequencing perspective, I'm pretty happy I took this route, or I did the first two, and the third was a lot easier because how I treated the first one. And here's the beauty of it: these three vehicles, I, I might even change this to these are just three vehicles for personal growth forever, because they don't end. Like, now I'm in a relationship, I'm scaling a business from a strong foundation, and I'm learning to fight and AD my, adapt my training style. So again, I'm going to have three new lenses for personal growth just as I continue to go deeper on these three areas. And the big realization here was that the dating and relationship side was kind of the missing piece I felt on the overall, um, kind of building of my character, where yes, I could take care of my health, yes, I could build a business, but those were almost single-player games. And now I'm learning how life is not a single-player game. And I know that over the long term my mission is to build a generational family. And so again, it's not going to be just a single-player game this entire time.

Now to summarize, the only reason I'm able to realize this is I can look back on my last five years and say, what are all the skills that I built, and how did I actually go about building them? And every single thing has been through the identification of I'm trying to improve one of these three areas, I'm unable to, why? And rather than go back five years ago and say, okay, here are all the things I want to go learn, I need to go read all these books on them at the same time. I'm very happy with the path I took, and I think if you're watching this and you're in, you know, your early 20s or whatever stage in life, if you're about to start progressing in anything, it's you have to pick something to become a mirror. And if you treat it as a mirror where you can go and say, I'm going to just kill my ego here, and anytime I'm coming up short, recognize that it's completely something in my control to go and improve that'd be the lesson I'd like to share with you. So high level: building a business, taking care of your health, dating. If you say I'm going to go try each of these things and then figure out where I'm coming up short, you're going to improve rapidly as a person, as a business owner, as everything.

My fourth lesson in realization of 2023 is the single most powerful personal belief you can have is seeing every circumstance as an opportunity for progress. Now I can't remember where I heard it, but I remember hearing on a podcast someone asked the guest what are some of your core beliefs that you don't think everyone would agree with you on. And again, I don't remember what their answer was, but I remember hearing how quickly they rattled off three answers; they clearly they kept top of of mind all the time. And so I like the idea of developing something like that, especially, uh, given I didn't have any answers that came to mind when I heard that question. So during the summer I started to think about what those beliefs were to me, and my goal was to kind of find a handful of lenses that I could apply to everything that happened in my life and say, okay, I'm going to filter it through this, and it's going to help me make the decision. So I spent some time iterating the list; started with a long list of 13. 13 was way too many. I remember trying to read all 13 every morning, and because I had 13, it really meant I had zero, because I'd be going through my day-to-day thinking, oh, which one of these could I apply? It was just, it was far too many, but at least I started there. Then I spent some time iterating the list, trying to get it down to three. And basically what I did was I took my list of 13 and I'd rotate which three I would read each morning for a couple of weeks at a time, just to see what stuck, which ones resonated, and which ones, as I went about my day-to-day, could I actually feel myself applying.

Now this all happened during a period of strong, significant personal growth for me. It was during the summer; I was on my own; I was traveling through Europe for the very first time; and I was just six weeks removed from unexpectedly losing my dad at the age of 72. And admittedly, at the time I felt a bit lost. I was looking to use this construction of these beliefs as a way to kind of rebuild my perspective and outlook on life. And on one of those many summer morning walks through Amsterdam, I started to circle around the idea of having three core beliefs. I don't know how these ended up at the top of my list, but it was: everything that happens to me is 100% an opportunity for progress; number two, every outcome I want in my life is 100% my responsibility; number three, everything in this world is 100% rigged in my favor. I guess I just got lucky that day, and those were the three of 13 that ended up at the top of my list. But right away, with those three as kind of a triangle, I felt a noticeable shift in the way I saw the world. So believing everything was rigged in my favor kept me extremely optimistic, where I just assumed everything that happened to me would end up working out in some way, shape, or form. Believing that everything was 100% my responsibility kept me proactive. So yeah, things are rigged in my favor, but the world wasn't just going to put itself in my lap; I had to go and make things happen. And but lastly, believing everything that happened to me was an opportunity for progress had the biggest immediate impact because suddenly life became more fun. I was willing to try new things because rather than feeling a fear of failure or judgment, I just said this is going to be an opportunity to learn about myself. My dating and relationship life accelerated because reaming any kind of fear of rejection was just again an opportunity to improve. I tried new content styles, put new business ideas out there because risk now turned into an accelerated chance to figure out what works and what doesn't. It was just this compounding feeling of, of course, I'll go and try that, or of course, I'll step out of my comfort zone in this thing because I know it's an opportunity for me to grow. And any negative situation I found myself in, like if my flight was delayed, blah, it was a chance to flex my patient muscle. Or if I dealt with a rude service worker, it was a chance to flex my empathy muscle. It just was this perfect lens where anything that happened to me I said, how is this an opportunity for progress? Most importantly, it was able to, uh, reframe by far the most tragic event of my life, which was losing my dad at the age of 72, because now I said, what am I going to learn from this? How is this an opportunity that's going to, I'm going to look back in 10, 20 years and tell this as a key pivotal part of my story where I could define myself better, define my values as a man. And the feeling of no matter what happens to me is an opportunity for progress is by far one of the most addicting feelings I've ever experienced. I tell everyone now that that's my number one core belief because it's allowed me to learn and approach everything as a, just I don't know, I don't know how to describe it. And it's say every day I wake up and say, no matter what happens to me today, I'm going to learn, learn. And so part of my daily reflection process is at the end of every single day I distill my lessons and realizations, just like I'm doing now in this video. So the 13 lessons and realizations I came up with this year, really, I found as a kind of curation and combination of all the lessons and realizations I had on a daily basis, which came from this core belief. So I've read this single thing every single morning for the last five months, and I've yet to find a place where it didn't serve me. So again, if you're looking for a single core belief that you can run with in 2024, just start to identify or truly believe that every single circumstance you come across you're going to grow from. Again, life becomes a lot more fun, and it's something I keep, I plan on keeping this top of mind every morning for the rest of my life.

My fifth lesson and realization of 2023 is that you should be investing your money in five places: buying memory dividends, normalizing success, paying down ignorance tax, convenience, and improving your energy levels. And none of those have anything to do with the market, crypto, stocks, any of it. There's a lot of advice out there on how to make money, and there's very little advice on how to spend it. There's plenty of advice on how to invest it in the market, but there's very little tactical advice about how to properly invest money in yourself, in your skills, in your life experiences. So this is really an outline for a book I want to write over the long term about unconventional investment advice that has nothing to do with dollar-cost averaging into the S&P 500 or buying crypto or any of that. Now I've learned these five different areas through a lot of trial and error, where over the last few years I've been trying to better develop a financially abundant mindset, where I grew up the poorest kid in my neighborhood, my entire school, my friend group, everything, everyone else that I surrounded myself with had more money, and I grew up also with a family background of scarcity. It was, hey, this much money was coming in, and we needed to save as much as we could, and there was no way to think about making more of it. There was probably a little bit of a, uh, rich people are evil, building wealth, the accumulation of wealth is evil. And I've spent quite a bit of time trying to untrain those beliefs as I've realized that you are paid, and the wealth that you are able to generate is just a proportion of the value you create for the world. Again, that deserves an entirely different deep-dive video that I plan on making. But basically, I've now recognized as I've become more financially successful and started to spend money and learn how to, that these five areas are the clearest way to generate a return on the income you're making, especially early on in your 20s as you're kind of striking that balance of saving, starting to earn more, but also reinvesting in myself to build my capacity to earn more.

So just to break down each of those five areas, the first is memory dividends. So this comes from the book *Die with Zero* by Bill Perkins, single-handedly the best book I read this year. It has completely changed my relationship with investing in experiences. So high level, the concept of a memory dividend is that when you buy an experience, so I'm going to use an example of when I was 24. I spent $7,000, which was a large, large chunk of money to me at the time—I don't remember the exact percentage, but a sizable amount—to buy a ticket to go to the Super Bowl during the 2020 season, where the Bucks—I'm from Tampa—Tom Brady, first year in Tampa, Super Bowl in Tampa. So was going to be the first home game Super Bowl winner if they won. I remember thinking, this is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity; I will never ever certainly have the chance to see Tom Brady, the best quarterback of all time, play in my home stadium that I went to a bunch growing up for my hometown team. And so I spent a significant amount of money for that. At the time I thought, okay, if I buy this, great, I get to go to the Super Bowl; it's a lot of fun. And I still ended up doing it. But this last year when I learned the concept of a memory dividend, I understood through that context how powerful that purchase was. Why, when you buy an experience like that, you're not just buying how much fun you had that single time; what you're really buying are all the future times you get to relive that memory and tell that story to someone else. So the, the concept of it is basically the experience itself; you're buying an asset, and then for the rest of your life that experience pays you in dividends. So right now, as I retell the story, I just collected a memory dividend on that investment. Anytime someone mentions Tom Brady, I get to tell the story of going to the Super Bowl. Anytime someone mentions the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, or anytime someone mentions football in general, I can tell that story. That has clicked for me in a big way because now I see the positive returns on travel, and as I construct some of the different trips that I took this year, how I can make sure that in each place I'm doing something that is going to generate a memory dividend. So rather than just go somewhere, how can I upgrade to do this experience that I know I'm going to have awesome pictures from, or I'm going to be able to tell people about? How can I go to a sporting event, because sporting events generate tons of memory dividends, or a music festival or something like that, where I know I'm going to be able to talk about that experience to other people and relive it positively. So this again deserves a deeper dive on how you actually figure out what memory dividends to invest in, and this is the type of content I plan on making in the year ahead. So leave a comment; let me know if you want me to do a deeper dive on this, but that's the first area that I think everyone should be investing their money and learning how to create a framework for how am I going to generate memory dividends this year rather than spend them on material goods that do not generate a memory dividend. So that's the difference: when you buy an expensive watch or something like that, you don't actually get future returns of telling people about that. Maybe a watch is not the best example, but any consumable thing that you don't get any future value from. I used to think, never spend any money on that, and I thought about travel a little bit the same way, but now I recognize that those experiences are the first time you get to experience it, and then you get to relive it time and time again and get those memory dividends back. So that's the first area. Second is normalizing success. So again, this has nothing to do with the market, but you should slowly be investing in places or events or moments where you can see that there are people who treat that as a normal experience for them. So some tactical ways are joining a mastermind where you get to see other business owners who make more money than you who don't treat it as anything special, or upgrading to a five-star hotel from a four-star hotel for a couple extra $100, where again you see the people who this is just normal for them, or I wish I'd have done this earlier. If you can upgrade from an economy class seat on a flight to business class for $200, $300, it's worth it every single time because you just see people who that's exactly what they do. This is, it's a hard skill to recognize that you're actually paying to build that skill of normalizing success, because otherwise you'll just get caught in, hey, I never actually invested in anything that if I made 20 times more money I would actually just think of as normal. And now I'm learning slowly, slowly, slowly my income and financial wherewithal has improved, that you actually have to go out of your way to make sure you continue to do that as you go higher and higher. Third is paying down ignorance tax. So this is anytime you feel like you have a skill bottleneck. So I talked about in the last lesson in realization that as you pick these different vehicles to build skills, you're going to get greeted with, hey, you don't know this, or hey, you need to better understand this concept. And the fastest way to learn it is invest in a specific book or course or coaching in some way that is going to help you eliminate that bottleneck from your life by teaching you that skill. Every single leap in those three areas I talked about came from immersing myself in some kind of course or book or learning, but only because I knew exactly what to immerse myself in. So the return from a skill improvement perspective was so fast because I knew, hey, I will get to the next level if I learn how to do this, so I'm going to go invest some money to pay for speed rather than trying to do it on my own, because I know I'm going to continue to improve faster and faster and faster if I tighten up that feedback loop of identify the bottleneck, remove it, pay for it, make it faster, find the next one, find the next one, find the next one. So now I have enough evidence in myself that anytime I invest in education, I'm the type of person that gets a positive return from that. I only bought my first course on the internet three years ago; it was Jack Butcher, *Build Once, Sell Twice*. And I remember being so terrified to spend $350 on something that I split it with one of my friends. But to this day, every single time I've invested in myself, I've been the type of person who said, I need to go redeem or get maximum return on that investment. So it brought about a new level of effort. So it kind of has this like compounding effect where when you invest in yourself in learning something new, you're more likely to go bring the level of effort to get a positive return on that, and you just continue to compound that all the way. Same with the one I just talked about, normalizing success: when you splurge a little bit for the better hotel or the better apartment or the better plane seat, you're naturally a little bit more motivated to make that regular thing, which raises your level of effort. So all of these different ways of investing money that have nothing to do with stocks are figuring out how to make your new baseline level of effort and belief and skill the type of person who makes that a regular thing. Number four, this one's a little bit more tactical, but convenience. So I've hired someone to clean my apartment, hired someone to help me with travel; early on I hired someone to do meal prep for me; I have my groceries delivered; anything that wins you back time.

I wish I would have started doing sooner. I did a decent job of this when I was in New York and over the last couple years, but aside from the first three, of memory dividends, normalized success and paying down ignorance tax, convenience by far. When you are the type of person who uses your time well, you'll recognize that if I can just remove all these other things that I'm spending time on, I can reinvest that time into a higher leverage vehicle, which is exactly what I've been able to do.

And then lastly, anything that improves your energy levels: so a coach to do my programming for working out, so I'm always doing the right health and fitness thing; take care of my body; buying the highest quality food; getting the highest quality water; getting good quality coffee; anything that makes me more energized, more able to work, more charismatic, more outgoing has had a generally high return. So these are the five areas that I think if you have any money, rather than invest it in the market, if you're constantly investing into these three or five things, your ability to earn more goes up rather than putting it somewhere that you have no control.

Last year, one of my lessons was only invest your money in areas where you have power, which is the ability to influence the outcome in some way. The these five fully true crypto, Facebook, Google, all those other stocks that people are interested in investing in, you have no control over the outcome, so why would you put your money there when instead you can say, "I'm only going to invest it back into myself"? I remember thinking, "How do you actually do that?" So again, this deserves a little bit of a deeper dive, but those are the five areas that now at the end of every month I look at: how have I invested money into all of these? If I'm not investing enough, I just go figure out how to, and I basically have all my other dollars sitting in cash looking for opportunities to invest in one of these five areas, which continues to improve my life, continues to build my skill set, continues to build my belief system, which makes it easier to earn more and more and more. And I plan on doing this for the next 10 years at least.

My sixth lesson and realization of 2023 is that you need intentional, uninterrupted processing time every single day. In a best-case scenario, it's done first thing in the morning. Throughout this year, there were clear periods where I had enough processing time and clear periods where I didn't. Anytime I was consistently waking up early, delaying meetings until at least noon, spending my mornings walking and writing, I felt in flow, I felt in peace, and I had clarity over what I was doing and where I was going. But during busy periods of travel, life transitions, hiring new employees, etc., or taking early meetings when we were working on a couple new projects, I felt overwhelmed and in a constant state of catch-up. And honestly, there were multiple periods this year where I went three or four weeks without writing my journal, which I hadn't done for four or five years in the past.

And I moved quickly throughout the year, kind of immersing myself in different areas for weeks at a time, emerging on the other side with what felt like years of personal growth or business growth crammed into just a couple weeks. And then I'd reach the end of a sprint and feel so like there was just so much I needed to go and think about that I'd block three or four days and not talk to anyone and do all that processing all at once. That worked, but had I instead made a little bit of time for more processing during those sprints, I wouldn't have felt so overwhelmed at the end; they wouldn't have felt so intense; and I probably could have iterated faster during them, and certainly they would have gone by more slowly because I would have been documenting the process as I went. So this year it's going to be a big priority for me to make sure I allow myself ample processing time on a daily basis, and I'm building my entire calendar around at least two hours being able to do so.

Now, to me, I'm going to track this on a daily basis: time spent journaling in the morning, time spent walking without my phone thinking, and time spent sitting at my computer writing without distraction. Ideally, I get two hours of this first thing in the morning before the rest of the world wakes up, and when I'm on my own, I can easily make that happen. But I know that won't be the case every single day; life's not going to be that cut and dry. I'm going to be with other people; I'm going to be traveling; I'm going to have life; family; everything is going to pop up. And I certainly know over the long run I'm not going to have four hours of unbroken, un-broken focused time every single morning. My long-term goal is to build a generational family with tons of kids, a happy wife, all of that; multiple businesses where there's just—it's unrealistic to think about that I'm going to be a 27-year-old with all the free time in the world, which is what I am right now. So I want to start to build that skill of adaptability a little bit throughout the year where even though I'm not going to have that perfectly scheduled tons of free time block in the morning, which I will most days, but there are going to be a lot of days where I don't. And those are the days where I'm going to be able to flex this skill and flex that muscle. Because let's say I only have 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there, 20 minutes there; am I going to say, "Now I'm not just going to—I'm not going to do any kind of writing or processing because I don't have three hours," or am I going to build the skill of, "Hey, I got 20 minutes; I got to take advantage of it"? That's what I'm going to try to construct each day, obviously a long block, but I'm going to build the skill of taking advantage of those little blocks, which I kind of just said.

I know I need to do this every single day because of the returns it gives me. I'm a better person, partner, leader, educator, son, friend, mentor, everything, when—because I'm a little bit introverted—I prefer to process things on my own and without the distraction of the world. So I don't do that well in a busy environment trying to process everything that's happened to me. I like to have a coffee, some sparkling water, a nice view, and I just like to journal and think. So going to have to flex that muscle, but what I cannot let happen this year is have any period where I go fully without any kind of processing time, because that's when I start to feel anxious; I start to be shorter with people, so I just—I've learned that this year because of the periods of time where I didn't do that. I can look back and say, "Yeah, I just—I wasn't the best version of myself during that time." What was missing? The ability to iterate and reflect, which I think is my personal superpower. So that becomes a foundational block; every single day I'm going to try to map out: when am I doing my processing? Is it first thing in the morning? Am I going to block off some time in the end of the day? Do I have to squeeze in 20 minutes while I'm in line at the airport? Whatever it is, I just learned that this year I cannot go without that time, so I want to staple that to my eyelids for the year ahead.

My seventh lesson and realization of 2023 is that you can bring so much more effort and intensity to anything if you have a defined start and end date. Now, my biggest three leaps of progress during 2023 came during February, May, and November, and as I reflect—reflected on these three different periods, each had three things in common: one, I was completely immersed in one personal and one business project, like I talked about and can't remember which number it was; I had a clear start date of the sprint that I could look forward to; and I had a clear end date to the sprint where I'd reevaluate everything and know that the effort and less sleep and general stress that I was creating for myself was going to end eventually. And similarly, I looked at my most productive days and realized that the same thing held true: I was completely immersed in one area of my personal life and one area of my business; I had a clear start time, which was working right when I woke up; and I had a clear end time, which was going to the gym or having some kind of finish line for the day.

And then lastly, on the weekly level, my most productive weeks all followed the same format: I'd focus on one area of personal and one area of business; I'd hit the ground running with intensity Monday morning at 5:00 a.m.; and I'd have something on the calendar that marked the end of the week afterwards; I'd be relaxing, preparing for the next one; usually that was Saturday night or some kind of end-of-week dinner where I'd have friends, uh, and I could look forward to that. And I realized I can show up and do anything when I know when it's going to end. And the inverse is true: it's very hard to bring effort and intensity to something that you don't know when it's going to end. The Navy Seals use this in their training; they never tell their trainees how long the run is going to be, so they just start running, and some days it's a few miles, some days it's dozens of miles, some days it's 100 miles. And it's not the pain of actually running that causes these Navy Seals to quit; it's the uncertainty of how much longer the pain is going to last that has them go and ring the bell. So I take that into my daily life and say, "I need to make sure at any time I know from a macro level: how long is this current sprint lasting, or am I even in a sprint?" Like right now it's December 18th, and I'm not working very hard relative to other periods of the year, but I know come January 1st, once the holidays are over, once all of our team is aligned, once we are kind of through all the general family stuff and whatever you have to do, I know I'm going to hit the ground running because I had that start date. I'm able to relax right now because otherwise, if I didn't have that start date, I'd feel guilty being unproductive because I didn't know when I was going to turn it back on, but I've proven to myself time and time again that during those periods of intensity I bring it, and so I can rest and recuperate knowing I'm recharging for the sprint ahead.

And then similarly, in the middle of a sprint when I know it's going to end, I can push harder and harder and harder because, "Hey, I'm not doing this forever; I'm not running 100 miles; I have four miles left," and when you see that finish line, it's so much more powerful. So I want to keep that in mind throughout the year; basically anytime I'm working during the day, I want to work on a timer; during the week I want to have a dinner at the end of the week or some kind of party or some kind of rest period or some kind of free calendar day, whatever it is; and then on a macro basis, I want to know, "Hey, for the next six weeks we're dialed in; it ends on this day; we're going to reevaluate everything at this time." And if I can stay true to that, I can take all of the times that I made progress this year and learn from them, because that's exactly what I had during all those leaps of progress: I had the start date, end date, and focus on one or two things. Similarly, I know that anytime I'm not in a sprint like this, I can take my foot way off the gas because of the relative returns that these intense periods have when I give them my full attention. When I'm not working as hard as I am, I can be resting fully, which is what I'm doing now. So kind of a long-winded way of saying: set a start date, set an end date, and work on a defined sprint rather than let the uncertainty of when is that going to start or when is that going to end kind of lead to less—less effective sprints and less effective recovery time—time. So during the year I want to be fully on, fully sprinting, knowing when it's going to end, or fully resting, fully recharging, knowing when it's going to start.

My eighth lesson and realization of 2023 is that progress starts with rigidity, but the long-term goal is intuition and adaptability. So for the last five years I've been playing a single-player game, and that's served me well where I needed to set myself up financially, physically, emotionally to best serve the dual people that I wanted to bring into my life. However, my long-term vision is not to play a single-player game forever. I want to build a generational family with generational wealth, passing down everything I've learned and earned to a long—I have a vision to be a great-grandfather of tons of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all sitting on my estate. I think that'd be the coolest thing ever, letting them all run around. You can look at the lineage passed down year to year to year. Anyway, that deserves a deep dive as well, but if—if I look at what I'm doing now and where I've been the last five years, it's been pretty rigid. I've had set times where I worked, set types of diets, set types of things I said no to, and that only works when you were 25 years old, single, with a ton of free time, able to take full control of your schedule. I know that's not going to serve me over the long run as I attract a partner, as I have children, as I ascend to higher and higher levels of the business where I'm less doing the work and more overseeing the work, which means I have to start to build that skill of adaptability. This year I've talked about it a little bit throughout this video, but I need to make sure that I am flexible; I am able to switch contexts, because the idea of having this perfectly quiet, ideal morning routine where I don't talk to anyone until noon is not going to last if I want to live the life I eventually want to live. So that's just a reminder to myself where yes, because most people don't start with any kind of rigidity, so they never find out what their limits are and what the ideal scenario if they gave something their full attention would look like. So I'm glad I started there on pretty much every area, but I know long-term I'm not going to be able to bring that level of rigidity to everything I do, and it won't serve me. So I have to start to develop the intuition and adaptability, which I kind of already said, but the important part of this is I actually can get trapped in my own rigidity sometimes, and like I call it a rigidity bubble, where I think I'm doing everything correctly, and then something comes that kind of pulls me out of that, and then I break my routine for a bit, and I come back; I'm like, "Oh, that was kind of a waste of time; why was I doing that?" And I'm intentionally doing that multiple times throughout the year this year where every four or five weeks I want to go to a completely different city, go to a hotel, and then come back to my routine; or when I'm traveling, I want to constantly be breaking my routine or being around different people, etc., because it shows you which parts were complete waste of time, and otherwise I just think it's all worth doing. And so as I fill my plate more and more, I'm able—able to identify the parts of my routine that are essential, and that's what I'm looking to do this year. So started with rigidity; I know I want intuition and adaptability, so I have to go intentionally create that—the ability to learn what needs to stay, and I'll do that throughout the year this year, making some progress here.

My ninth lesson and realization of 2023 is that life is sales; literally every single part of life is sales. So let's define sales. I define it as influencing someone, yourself included, to make a decision that is best for them. And to help someone make a decision, there are a handful of pillars that you need to have secured: you need to understand their current situation; you need to understand their desired situation; you need to build rapport and trust with them; you need to see things from their point of view; you need to validate them for whatever led them to making this decision in the first place; you need to align your incentives with theirs; you need to get a sense for their preferred communication style; and lastly, you need to help them identify and help overcome any faulty beliefs that are keeping them from making that decision. That sounds a lot like life, right? And I agree, and I realized that this year as I immersed myself into the world of sales for 28 days in May, this was all I thought about: books, courses, calls, reps; I was obsessed with learning how to sell. I hadn't ever sold anything in my life directly before that, so I was like, "Okay, this is a whole new world; again, time to immerse myself in it." And with that lens so top of mind, I realized every single thing, every interaction I was having was sales of some way: hiring, sales; dating, sales; parenting, sales; leadership, sales; copyrighting, sales; personal behavior change, sales; talking to a customer support rep, sales; getting a nicer table at a restaurant, sales; every single thing. It took me until age 27 to realize this; I wish I would have learned it sooner. And now seeing that learning sales through experience is the single most important skill you can develop, I would have tried to do that earlier on in my general business career. So if I could go back to age 18, back when I was selling tutoring services, I would have figured out how to just get in front of more people to better flex that muscle. You know, I was able to build the skill because I built a lot of skills before that allowed me to sprinkle the sales on top of and have a vehicle to go and learn that, but high level, if you're a younger person watching this, actually doesn't matter what age you are, just start to learn sales; dive into the world of sales; sell something to someone, because every once you figure out, "Okay, I have to go sell something," you build different tangential skills that people call sales, which are really just how to be an effective communicator, effective human being, create things people want—all of it. So high level, I want to just inject that lesson in anyone watching: life is sales; start to learn it.

My 10th lesson and realization of 2023: slogs will precede big leaps of progress, and when things feel at their best, expect the Mike Tyson right hook. How did I learn this? Okay, so my biggest period of acceleration this year was April, May, and June; personal growth, business growth; every single thing accelerated in a massive way during that time. April was our worst business month of the year; we're shutting down a few products; we had to finish up fulfillment on them as we were shutting them down; we had a clear opportunity cost of a new business we wanted to start that was extremely lucrative, tons of demand, but we couldn't give it any attention, and we completely scaled ourselves out of what we were currently working on. That was maximum pain; every single day it just felt like I was chewing glass because revenue was down, team morale was down; we knew that we'd eventually get there, and all I had to do was focus on getting everyone to see that of, "Hey, we're doing this; it's one step backward to take two steps forward," but it was difficult; it was hard emotionally; it was hard on all of us. And then May, I've already talked about, I completely immersed myself in my health and business and took everything to the next level; I felt on top of the world; the pain of the month before was over; everything was finally coming together; we basically doubled our monthly revenue run rate in a month, and I was in the best physical shape of my life. And then on June 1st at 11:50 p.m., I got a call from my uncle that my dad had unexpectedly died from a stroke in the middle of the night. And just like that, when things felt at their complete best after the most intense work month of my entire life, I was completely humbled all the way back down, and it sent me floundering for quite a bit through the month of June, continued into the month of July. I was constantly moving; I refused to sit still; I think I spent 10 weekends traveling in a row outside of here just because I just—I was trying to fill the gap; I—I didn't like sitting still; I was still doing the processing; it just didn't feel like I was in a place to be by myself with my thoughts. And again, I—I look back on that period; I have plenty of empathy for myself because I think there are only a handful of life transition events that you can go through as an adult, and losing a parent is certainly one of them, and I got to experience that this year. But I've done the work from an emotional perspective where now I can talk about it without kind of breaking down, but I learned, and I'm ready to feel that again at some point in my life: of when things feel at their best, just be on your toes a little bit, and that's okay, where again I'm a little bit like, "Damn, things feel really good right now; I'm in the best place I've been physically, financially, from a relationship perspective." It definitely—I felt the slog in September, October of this year in the same way. So I'm not actively like playing defense by any means, saying, "Oh, something bad's going to happen," but I just know that that's part of the game; it's part of life. And so rather than think everything's going to be perfect for the rest of my days, I know, "Okay, something's going to pop up here and there; expect it; be ready to work through it." And again, it goes back to that belief I had and continue to think about every single day is that it's an opportunity. So I know that that Mike Tyson right hook, it might knock me out—knock me out, and then I'll get right back up; I'll learn from it; I'll progress from it. So this is just a reminder to myself that when things feel their best, something's coming, and when things feel their worst, a bunch of progress is probably right around the corner.

My 11th lesson and realization of 2023 is that opportunities will flow to you the second you stop needing them. And that's primarily on the business side and the relationship side, where when you operate in those two areas from a place of abundance—meaning there's plenty of business opportunities to go around, there are plenty of relationship opportunities around—I'm not going to latch on to any single one of them; I'm never going to operate from a place of, "I need this one to happen"—everything just ends up flowing to you as a byproduct of that because of the energy you give off when you're operating from that state of abundance. When you have your own mission, vision, values, you're completely at peace on your own; you're extremely attractive from a relationship perspective, and on the business side, when you look at each customer and say, "Hey, I know what I have is best for you, but I'm by no means going to force you to buy this, but it's here if you want it"—everything people just pick up on that energy. And it's funny, I have a couple visceral examples of that when trying to sell certain products or trying to get in certain relationships: the second I became at peace throughout this year of, "You know, if it doesn't work out, that's fine; like I know that I'm the—the negative result will be an opportunity for me to grow"—all of them came to me; every single thing ended up happening that I wanted when I was operating from that place of scarcity. But the second I said, "Hey, it might not be this one, but it's going to come to me in some shape or form," they all ended up working out. And this is a pretty simple one, but if you find yourself in a position of operating from, "I need"

This to happen, or I need this person to like me, or I need this potential vehicle to be the one that finally works for me. Chances are it's not going to, but if you just say, "Hey, might not be this one, it's going to be the next one," there's plenty out there. Just sit back and patiently watch as they all start to flow to you. All right, my 12th and final lesson and realization of 2023 is that all progress starts with removal, but then accelerates with denial.

Earlier this year, I started to keep a log of whenever I felt off. So anytime I didn't feel good, or felt brain fog, or felt sad, or whatever—any negative emotion—I just started to keep a log of it. The goal was to figure out what were the habits and behaviors and environments that kind of preceded each of those negative feelings. It only took me about a week of tracking to recognize I had a clear list of four behaviors that consistently led me to feeling not good: Doom scrolling social media of any kind—so basically any unintentional time on Twitter or Instagram; comparing myself to people ahead of me and negatively judging myself because of that; seeking validation or approval from anyone outside of myself; and then eating too close to bed, which led to lower-quality sleep.

I had these four in my head and then had to constantly remind myself that the next leap of progress I wanted to make was not going to be starting anything new; it was going to be removing these four self-sabotaging behaviors that prevented me from starting anything new in the first place. So before I began any new initiative, I said, "I'm going to take care of these four things," and I'm still working on them now. Every morning during that period of time, though, I'd reread them to keep them top of mind, and I made a couple immediate changes to the way I did things that allowed me to avoid those entirely.

So rather than rely on willpower to stop Doom scrolling Instagram or Twitter, I just took them off my phone, which kind of took care of both the Doom scrolling problem and the comparing myself to other people, because now I just wasn't inundated with what everyone else was doing, and the external validation of posting on that platform, looking at who liked it, whatever. It is funny how silly that sounds when I say it out loud, but that I think a lot of people face that problem with Instagram. It takes up a lot of your time; it makes you not feel good; it makes you think that your worth is only other people's response to whatever it is you're putting out there. So anyway, longer deep dive deserved there. I also learned, from the uh, personal validation front, rather than seeking it from external sources or getting dopamine from external sources, the power of self-reward—so reaffirming to yourself that you're on the right path. I listened to a couple dopamine-focused books and podcasts that kind of taught me that. And then lastly, to stop eating close to bed, I just moved my workout time earlier in the day, so I'd eat dinner earlier, which led me to eating further away from my bedtime.

So by identifying those four negative behaviors, I was able to make the immediate changes, and those were easy. I did that in the first week and was like, "Wow, I've eliminated my bad behaviors," and just like that, my progress started to accelerate. I had so much freed-up mental bandwidth; my energy levels were higher; it was kind of a self-reinforcing virtuous cycle. But like I said, the initial removal was easy. I identified them; I was like, "Cool, progress starts with removal, great, I'm starting to see progress." But the real progress happens when you start to accelerate, and that comes from the continued removal, which I call the denial of letting those things back into your life. It's easy to eliminate them once; it's harder to eliminate them day after day after day after day, but that's where the real progress happens.

So I learned this firsthand. I'd have these bad habits beaten for a few weeks at a time, and then I'd wake up and I'd be Doom scrolling again. I'm like, "I, I redownloaded it to check something," and boom, I'd have it for the next week, where my dinner time would float closer and closer to bed, and then I was eating like 30 minutes before—like I'd eat at 8:30 and go to bed at 9:00—and then consistently have a lower sleep score. I don't know how this happens, but it just—these things creep back in when you start to take on new things; you default to the easier path, which is usually one of these four behaviors. So again, now I'm aware of it, but that doesn't mean I have it solved. I'm just trying to keep in mind this year that yes, I can eliminate them once, and that's going to be easy, but what if I eliminated them for a year? What if I didn't do any of those for—how much progress could I make if I did that for a year? That's what I'm trying to hammer home is yes, you can do it easily without them for a couple of days, but the real problem and the real difficulty is building the system that allows you to do it for a long period of time.

So I don't have a perfect answer for this one, but I've recognized that during the big, big leaps of progress that I've already talked about throughout this video, it was the continued denial of self-sabotaging and negative habits. So again, mostly a reminder to myself, probably helpful to anyone watching that has one, recognize that it's really not about what you start doing; it's about what you stop doing. But the real secondary effect of that, because I knew that coming into the year, I knew, "Hey, when you want to take another leap, you have to stop doing things," but it's easy to stop doing them once; it's hard to stop doing them for a long period of time, and that's what I want to remember this year. All right, and that pretty much wraps up everything that's happened to me and everything I learned this year.

My favorite part of reviews, however, is finishing with what I'm excited about. So I do this on a daily basis where I recap what happened and what I learned, and then finish with, "What am I excited about for the day ahead?" I do it on a weekly basis; do it on a monthly basis; so it only makes sense to finish 2023 with a big brainstorm of everything I'm excited to do in the year ahead. So on the health front, I'm excited to continue getting bigger and stronger, but I also plan on leaning down a good bit this year, so that'll be fun. I want to learn about the world of boxing and Jiu-Jitsu and start some combat training towards the end of this year, and I just want to continue to master my own mind, my own mindset, everything that I kind of have started to build on the meditation front, the self-awareness front, just to better understand what's going on up there at all times and how I can be more present in my day-to-day.

On the wealth front, I'm excited to learn more about how to effectively make money and spend money, but mostly on the investing side of how to improve my quality of life. I think I want to write more about this; I want to make more videos about this, of how to effectively invest the money that you're making so your life and skill set and everything improves, rather than just put it passively into the market where you, you don't have any control over the returns. On the relationship front, I'm excited to double down on the inner circle that I built over the last few years. I have a handful of close relationships that I really want to nurture this year, and I'm excited to do that both here in Miami for a bit, globally as I travel uh, to different countries, and just take the handful of friendships that I know I'm going to have for the next 50 years and invest heavily into them this year.

On the business front, I'm excited to do a ton. I got plans to make more videos like this; I plan on writing every single day for 90 minutes, which is going to leave an outline for a lot of those videos. I'm excited to learn some new skills like paid advertising. I've spent a lot of time working on organic traffic, but I want to well-round my skill set, just like I did for sales this year on the paid ad front. I'm excited, just in general, to immerse myself in whatever opportunities present, whatever problems or bottlenecks or opport—anything—I just want to immerse myself when I'm fully working, and then when I'm not fully working, I want to be fully relaxing. Speaking of fully relaxing, on the travel and hobbies front, I want to visit a bunch of new countries. I want to spend a little bit of time without a real home base, so I'm going to cut my lease here in Miami in May and then travel to Europe for the entire summer, and then maybe spend some time in Phoenix, maybe spend some time in Cape Town, Dubai. I have friends all over the place; I just want to see what it feels like to not have my roots anywhere and travel for a little bit more, knowing I could always come back to Florida, knowing I could always go to Arizona where Cole's going to live, just explore a little bit. I want to learn some new skills like DJing. I talked about I'm going to do at least a one or two-week immersion. I'm kind of interested in the idea of bow hunting and doing an elk hunt; that might get pushed to 2025, I don't know. I just want to continue to become well-versed, showing up with full intensity and immersion to learn whatever it is that interests me and build my lifestyle in a way that I can either be working or immersing myself in something new like that. That's what I'm excited about for the year ahead. Most of it is just to continue what I'm doing right now, which is basically a dream. I am living the life I dreamed about five years ago, across the board, because I have the opportunity to say that's what I'm excited about, and I have the wherewithal and the means and the setup to go and double down on all that, so I could not be more excited as we head into 2024, which means this review served its role, and now it's time to go execute.

All right, but that just about wraps up this 2023 review. I have one special thing here at the end, but that's pretty much everything I learned, everything that happened, everything I realized, everything I want to remember for the next 50 years of my life. And at this point in the video, I just want to give a massive, massive thank you to you for watching it, for being a part of this last year. A lot of people have clicked on this video, saw it was a little bit longer, and have clicked away, but not you; you stuck around this entire video, and I'd like to do something a little bit above and beyond on the personal level for this. So if you leave a comment that just says the word "thank you" in it—that's the secret word that I'll know that you got to this part of the video—you don't need to say, "Hey, that's a secret word; I'm saying thank you"—just leave a comment in some way, shape, or form that says "thank you," because I want to make sure I reach out to you personally and thank you because you're the reason I make videos like this; you're the reason I reflect on it, because I know it goes a little bit—it goes a long way for me, above and beyond everything, just the process of sitting down and reflecting on everything I learned. But my hope is to take all the lessons and pain and failure and everything that happens to me on any given year, or every—any given time period—and distill it so that other people can avoid those mistakes or double down on the things that have worked well for me. So I appreciate you watching and just wanted to throw that little Easter egg in here that if you leave a comment that says "thank you," I'm going to personally reach out to you to thank you as well. And I just wanted to share my appreciation for making it this far in the video. Other than that, thanks for being a part of this 2023 year. Be sure to check out the yearlyreview.com if you want to do this process yourself; highly recommend it. Be sure to click the first link in the description for the blog post version of this if you want a little bit of a deeper dive into some of these topics. Toss the video a like if you enjoyed it; subscribe to the channel; hit the notification bell; send me a DM; share this on Twitter; share this on Instagram; tag me—all that—I greatly appreciate you watching, and I'll see you in 2024. Peace.