My 2022 Wins, Failures, and Lessons Learned

2022 was the single biggest year of personal growth I've experienced in my entire life. I left my job on Wall Street. I got in the best shape I've ever been in. I tripled my business. I moved cities, and honestly, so much more happened that we'll dig into in this video. But I needed an entire week in Sedona, Arizona, with my phone on airplane mode, to recap everything I did this year. I spent the entire time reflecting, hiking, reading through six long journals, trying to capture and distill everything that happened this year, and that is what this video is. I'm going to talk about my biggest wins and accomplishments, my biggest mistakes and failures, and areas I came up short; lessons and realizations from those wins and losses; and then I'm gonna end the video with everything I'm excited to build in the year ahead. So, not sure how long this video is going to be; I'm sure that it's longer than any of my other videos. You're going to get kind of a deep dive into all the different areas of my life that I split into: health, wealth, relationships, experiences, and business. I'm gonna go through all those; I'm gonna share successes, share failures—a lot in this one—so feel free to jump around. We're gonna have timestamps underneath in the description here. But before we do any of that, toss the video a like, leave it a comment if you're watching. I'd love to know. Without further ado, let's dive right in to my biggest wins and accomplishments of the year.

Actually, two quick things before we get into the wins and accomplishments. If you want an entire step-by-step guide to do your own yearly review as we approach the end of the year, you can go to yearlyreview.com and download the exact framework I used to do my review. And it's how I'm making this video—is basically going through all the questions I answered there, looking at the wins, accomplishments, lessons, failures, all of that. And so you can download that guide to do it yourself. And then also, I took this video and basically made it from a long-form blog post that I wrote and posted on my blog, where I go a lot deeper on some of the topics in this video. So if you like to read that kind of thing, you can look at the link in the description below, and you'll find a link to the blog post. But that's it. Let's dive right into these wins.

All right, let's dive into some of the things that went well, starting with number one, which was: I took extreme ownership over my health this year. Now, anyone who knows me knows I've been on quite a fitness journey over the last five years. I played football at Princeton, weighed 280 pounds; today I weigh a little bit over 180—I'm about 185—so more or less 100 pounds in five years. And I've really spent the last five years kind of re-writing my approach to health, my nutrition, my exercise, all of that, because I knew that the way I was operating in college, which was basically getting paid to lift, eat, and hit people, was not going to last in the real world. So I came into the year in pretty good shape, um, about 195 pounds at 13% body fat. I've been getting quarterly DEXA scans to kind of keep a tab on that number and look to improve it over time. But I really took things to the next level this year, which included hiring a coach, learning the ins and outs of hypertrophy training, learning the ins and outs of cardio training, kind of just immersing myself in the world. I took it pretty seriously before, but I definitely took it to a new level with attention to detail, running my own experiments, tons of different things. So that was the number one kind of win and accomplishment of the year, is that I feel like I'm in a better health foundation than I've ever been in my entire life. So I'll run through some of the highlights on that front this year.

I got to 173 pounds at 10% body fat. That was the leanest I've ever been. It felt pretty dang cool to have abs for the first time in 25 years, after going 25 years without them. That happened over the summer, and that's when I really learned what it was like to diet down, take control of your calories, get all the way to a level of leanness that I'd never achieved, and I realized how much actually goes into doing something like that. I got to learn so much along the way. I'm not sure if I'll ever go that lean again, because I think there's trade-offs for sure, and it was definitely a challenge. But I'm very glad I did it, because I learned exactly what I need to do if I ever want to do that again. But over the last three or four months, I've been in a nice caloric surplus, kind of steadily gaining muscle again, and that is a lot more fun than uh, not eating very much on a given day. But it was fun to officially hit that 100 pounds lost, and I felt pretty good at the time.

Another highlight on the health and fitness front was: I ran 556 miles in 2022, after running maybe 10 miles all of 2021—so about 11 miles a week throughout the year. And that kind of came in waves. So I started out way too hot, running around 18 to 20 miles to start the year, and that accelerated into April and May. I was trying to run a six-minute mile and a 48-minute 10K, which was a little bit under eight minutes per mile. I ended up crushing the 10K, but I only ran a 6:04 mile—I never got under that six minutes—so that'll be a goal for the new year. But I learned along the way just how much running is about injury prevention. I learned that the hard way in July when—and I'll talk a little bit about this and kind of the mistakes of the year—but I basically had to go the entire month of July without running at all. So I'll throw a chart up on the screen here with my running mileage throughout the year on a weekly basis—was about 20 up until July, until I—my calf injury that I had battled throughout the year—really started to wear on me to the point where I couldn't walk for like three or four days, and I said, "Okay, I gotta adjust this," and I cut my running mileage all the way down to zero, really dove into the ins and outs of lower body injury prevention, calf training, ankle training, shoes—which is a whole rabbit hole—and then I slowly built that up through the end of the year, and now I'm sitting about 10 miles a week, and I've gone three or four months with zero injuries, so feeling much better on the running front there. I think I've hit a sustainable cadence where I can focus on lifting rather than running, but still maintain that level of cardio. So in the long run, I definitely want to run a marathon; I want to run a sub six-minute mile; I have tons of goals on that front. But for now, I'm going to stick with that 10 miles a week pace, and I'll talk a little bit more about my running journey in some future videos and some future writings—will be on the lookout for that.

One more highlight on the running front: I actually ran my first and only race of the year on Thanksgiving Day. I was in Columbus, Ohio. I signed up last minute with my mom; she did the walk; my sister did the walk; I did the run; and I had never raced anything, so I had no clue what to expect. I'm like, "Where do I go? Where do I start?" Whatever. We just signed up last minute, and I was very happy with my time. I ran five miles at a 7:31 split; my goal was eight minutes. But two or three miles in, kind of the adrenaline of actually running a race, of people around you—it was really cool. So I plan on doing some more races uh, throughout the year, not necessarily training for any kind of specific time, but they're just fun. It turns running, which is mostly an individual sport where you're kind of in your own head the whole time, into a little bit of competition. Because as I was running, I was like spotting people in front of me, saying, "I'm gonna keep this pace, and then I'm gonna pass that person, pass that person." It kind of turned it more into a competitive sport rather than an individual sport, which I enjoyed. So there'll be some 5Ks, some 10Ks on the docket this year that I just kind of signed up for last minute as a way to to have some fun and keep running fresh.

Now, on the lifting front—so that was running—the lifting front, it was my most consistent year of lifting by far. I did not miss a single lift. I lifted four times a week throughout the entire year—upper, lower, upper, lower. I was working with a coach, Francis—if you're watching this, shout out Coach Francis on Twitter, he's the man—he really changed the way I thought about progressive overload and making slight tweaks and paying attention to detail. So some highlights on there: I've squatted 265 for 10 by the end of the year, and I've come a long way—in college I squatted 500 pounds for for two reps, which still kind of is crazy to to think about—but slowly making my way back there. I don't know if I'll ever get to 500 pounds again, but I'm on—bench press 176 for for nine reps—so small gains across the board, especially relative to what I've done in the past, but it felt good to really learn what it means to progress on the lifting front for years at a time rather than hit it for 10 weeks and then fall off, and then six weeks and fall off. So hitting a really consistent cadence, and I plan on sticking to that and prioritizing it throughout the rest of this year and probably the next three or four years, because I'm kind of of the view that I can run later in life, but adding muscle is much easier in your 20s than it will be in your 30s or 40s or 50s, but maintaining it is not any more difficult. So I'm definitely focusing over the next four or five years on adding as much lean muscle as I can, knowing that it's only going to get harder as I get older to build, but you can maintain—it's kind of—I heard Alex from Rosie call it a passive income body—or if you add a lot of muscle in your 20s, holding on to that is not very difficult, especially as you get older; you really only need a couple lifts a week to do that, and which puts an added emphasis on doing that early in life. So that's my goal right now. I want to keep running and maintaining that level of cardio, but I'm really prioritizing lifting in the year ahead.

Two more highlights in this: I really simplified my diet this year, and I've—over the last five years—I think I've tried every single diet there is: keto, carnivore, high carb, low carb, fasting, all of it. And I definitely settled this year on the fact that calories in versus calories out is all that matters, and single-ingredient whole foods are the number one way to feel good all the time, have high energy levels, and kind of avoid a lot of the crappy foods that are out there in most of the restaurants and things like that. So honestly, I'm just going to read here: on any given day I pretty much eat the same exact thing; I just kind of change up how I prepare it. And that allows me to lift well; it allows me to have super stable energy levels; there's no ups and downs or crashes; and lets me hit my goals because I'm kind of in more control of what I'm putting in my body versus who knows what goes in kind of restaurant food. But eggs, spinach, ground beef, steak, avocados, rice, potatoes, Greek yogurt, and fruit—that's pretty much all I eat every single day, and I've never felt better. It's funny because for years I thought dieting was either complex or I needed to be on a certain thing, like keto or not eating before 12, and that's what was going to do it. But I really simplified everything this year and realized it's all about finding the foods that work for you and actually paying attention to that—how does—how do things digest, how they make you feel afterwards, how they make you feel in the morning—tons goes into that, and it was fun to kind of experiment with it, and now I have a good feeling of a diet and a nutrition plan I could stick to for a long, long time that is going to keep producing good results. So that was another highlight. And then lastly, I built a yoga routine into—or a sustainable yoga practice into—my weekly routine. So right up the road here, there's a hot yoga studio, and I go on Wednesdays and Sundays on my off days from lifting, and I love it. It is such a nice way to reset—6 a.m., that get my day started on the right foot; I sweat like hell; it's—I feel so good after; it's like a little bit of euphoria; take a cold shower after that. So finding that has been a big thing in preventing injury as well with my lifting and my running. So all these kind of came together to really set a foundation for the year where I'm going into 2023, and I find that a lot of the time going into the new year in the past I've said, "Oh, I gotta start doing this, and I gotta stop doing that, and I gotta do all these different things." But this year it's just—I'm gonna kind of stick to the the dead simple basics that I've been doing for the last three or four months that have been working well, and I could stick to that for 5, 10, 15 years easily. That's what I feel so good about right now, is for the first time—like the last five years I've known that I was going to be in a different approach to health and fitness for a long time—I was going to get to a level of wiping the slate clean, and then I'd kind of go from there. And now I can say, if I just stick to what I'm doing, the results are going to take care of themselves for everything I'm looking to accomplish, and that feels very good.

One more win on the health and fitness front is: I actually went 12 months in a row this year without taking a sip of alcohol. I drank a lot in college; I drank a lot in New York. I think it was just part of the culture; that was just what people did. I think it's pretty normalized. And I graduated in 2018 and went into New York City, so towards the end of 2019—so about a year and a half after being there—I slowly started to realize that the negative effects for alcohol were becoming more and more present, impacting me more and more, especially as I realized that I wasn't going to live the New York life for the rest of my life and was kind of running out of that initial, "This is the coolest place in the world" phase that happens when you moved there in the first year. When we went home in 2020 and started working remotely, I really cut my alcohol pretty dramatically during that year, just because there was nothing to do, and I was busy writing and kind of starting to build Ship 30 and all that, which I'm going to talk about later in the video. But towards the end of 2021, I realized that I had not gone more than a month without alcohol for about 10 years, and that was kind of a shocking thing—to be 25 years old and look back to when I was 15, had my first drink in high school, and honestly had been drinking at least on a monthly basis, but probably more likely on a weekly basis since then. And that was just normal; like, I think the number of 25-year-olds for that is true is shockingly high. And so I said, "I'm gonna go 12 months; I'm gonna see what happens." And 12 months in, I am very, very happy with that decision. It's caused me a lot of reflection on the role I want alcohol to play, and I knew that I couldn't reevaluate that relationship if I was still having one or two drinks here and there. So cutting it to zero was just much easier for me; it allowed me to have that clear, "Hey, I'm not drinking for a year," and I'm gonna continue it. But I'll talk about a couple of the small realizations—I think I'm gonna make a full video on this—because one of the things I realized—so it'll make more sense as I talk about some of these realizations—but number one is: mild hangovers are the ultimate momentum killer, and avoiding them is the key to sustaining momentum. So having zero days hungover for an entire year is pretty powerful; you really realize how much that used to affect you, even those slight, slight hangovers from having one or two drinks—we just kind of felt off. Eliminating those has been very easy to keep momentum, especially on the weekend, where I'm never going into Sunday or Monday like a little bit off my game; I'm always kind of hitting the ground running. So that was a good—a positive reinforcement.

Another one: people's reaction to me telling them I wasn't drinking was a very strong filter for the type of person I wanted to continue surrounding myself with. So really, there were two reactions: one, someone would be fascinated and say, "Oh, that's awesome! I've been thinking about doing that. How do you handle this? What do you do with that? Like, how do you feel?" And then other people would immediately realize that that clashed a lot with their worldview and kind of get on the defensive, like, "Oh, why are you doing that? You know, why aren't you missing out on having fun? Or it doesn't affect me like that." And so they kind of just almost argue for no reason. And I started to realize that those people—it definitely immediately was like, "Oh, no, that makes me confront something that I probably should confront; I'm gonna go on the defensive"—and if you didn't have a positive reaction—am I telling you—is probably a good indicator that that wasn't the type of person I wanted to be around for the long term. So that meant quite a few either potential new relationships or old relationships kind of fizzled out when without having that unifying lens of drinking. So that was the next realization: alcohol was the only thing holding together quite a few very shallow relationships from either high school or college where if it wasn't we were getting together to drink, it was like, "What are we going to talk about? What are we going to do?" And so I think that's a net positive when you realize that you don't have as much in common with those people; it's much easier to kind of leave and shed those relationships that are no longer kind of bringing you up or serving you over time when you have that filter.

Another one was: tons of people are very interested in trying it when I would tell them, but they are far too worried what people will think about them saying, "I'm not drinking." So that was always the number one question; it was, "How do you handle this exact situation? Like, you just told me you're not drinking; how do you handle that?" I point to the point above or that I talked about a second ago—of if someone has a negative reaction, it's a very strong indicator that I don't want to be friends with that person anymore. So that was always kind of freeing for them too. So I think I inspired quite a few people to at least go a month or two without it and kind of reevaluate it, cut it to zero, and and see the role it's going to play. The last realization: alcohol will definitely have its time and place in my life. I don't think—think I will go my entire life without drinking alcohol again, but I want it to have extremely specific circumstances. So I'll give you a couple examples: if I'm in Argentina and I'm on a vineyard and I have a giant steak in front of me, I'm gonna have a glass of red wine; if I'm celebrating a momentous occasion, there's champagne. I don't want to be the one who's like, "Not grabbing the champagne and giving it a toast." But the idea of having one or two drinks kind of sitting around is definitely off my list because of—I just think there's zero upside the next day of feeling slightly hungover. And I learned to really enjoy drinking soda water with lime; that's my go-to drink whenever I'm out in a social environment. That makes it much easier to—you're not just kind of holding a water walking around and people like, "Oh, well, why aren't you drinking?" Whatever. It looks like you are; you can kind of avoid that conversation—not that I really need to avoid it because a lot of times it led to interesting conversation which would be talking about that—but I'll be writing on this topic; I said I'll make a video on it as well. If you have questions, throw them in the comments; reach out to me on Twitter, because I think it's something more and more people are going to do, and I think it's important to do, and I think it's going to serve a lot of people. So that was my second big win of the year: going 12 months without alcohol.

All right, the third win, accomplishment, area that went well is: I was very consistent with journaling and reflecting this year. So I've been journaling for about five years now, almost every single morning, and this year I made it a point to really up the amount of reflection, distillation, kind of crystallization of what was happening, because it was the biggest year of personal growth that that I've ever had. And I ended up—I don't have them next to me, but I'll throw a picture on the screen—I filled up six journals this year, just getting my thoughts out throughout the year because of how much was going on, how much change, how many big decisions I had to make. And that led to a lot clearer thinking that I think I otherwise would have. Now, was it overkill to fill up that many journals? Maybe. Uh, it did allow me to do this comprehensive review because I just had so much raw material from this year to draw from. Will I continue handwritten journaling quite as much as I did this year? I don't know. In big years where I'm making a bunch of decisions, probably. But like in 2023, when I'm more than likely just going to be executing the things I know what I need to be doing, probably less reflection necessary. So I have a feeling that looking back on 2022 will be one of the more pivotal years of my life, just given everything that happened, the new directions I went, the skills I learned—obviously some of the things I'll talk about in the in the upcoming wins—the big life transitions that I had this year. It's going to be a lot of fun looking back in 50 years, kind of rereading these journals. So I'm very glad I did it, but will I journal quite as much going forward? Probably not. But I'm very happy I did it this year, and so I count that as a win.

All right, so the first three wins were all on the health and fitness front, and the fourth win was that this year I—I left my full-time job at BlackRock to write and build on my own. So I debated putting this as the number one win of the year, because to be honest, it's definitely the biggest change I made, the biggest decision I had to make. But I think of my health and fitness as my foundation, so I like to leave that as the first couple wins. But this was definitely a huge, huge win and accomplishment of the year. So I worked for BlackRock for my first four years out of college, and it was my dream job. And in fact, not only is it the only job I've ever had, it's the only job interview I've ever had. I was only 20 years old when I interviewed there. So I interned there going into my junior year and my senior year of college, worked there for four years. And if you'd have told me right when I graduated that that was something I would do for for the rest of my life, I would have totally agreed with you, and I thought that for the first two years working there. But towards the end of 2019, I realized I didn't see myself taking the same path that the guys ahead of me were taking and being super fulfilled over the

Next 30, 40 years, so I started to kind of think, what else could I be doing? And that led me to start writing on the internet because I'd read so much about the ways that attracts interesting people; it brings opportunities to you rather than you having to go explore new opportunities; it turns you more reflective; it helps you think clear. So all those benefits led me to start writing in January 2020.

I've told that story a couple times, but I basically spent the first nine months writing on my own blog that no one knew existed, and I was ready to give up. But that led me to start writing on Twitter instead of my blog in September 2020. Everything accelerated there when I went on a personal 30-day writing challenge. That writing challenge led me to start Ship 30 in November 2020, and then that was a side hustle for all of 2021. So writing and building Ship 30 as a side hustle was awesome because I was working remotely, so I had time in the morning, had time in the evening, had time throughout the day throughout that year to kind of write and build and explore, all still while doing my full-time job.

Because when you don't have people looking over your shoulder all the time, you realize you don't have quite as much work as you think you have, which meant I could work on other projects throughout the day throughout 2021. On the demands of running Ship 30 were growing because it was seeing more success. Not only were the demands growing, but the opportunity cost of not giving it my full attention and splitting my attention between Ship 30 and BlackRock was getting higher and higher because Ship 30 obviously had exponential upside of owning something and and growing it on your own versus the capped corporate salary. So I was kind of feeling that throughout 2021 of when am I going to eventually take the leap out of here, do my own thing, continue to build this, which I was having more fun doing at the time.

But then at the end of 2021, Ship 30 already hit an inflection point in that January cohort, and at that point it just made no financial sense for me to continue working for BlackRock. So I knew that it was going to leave, but it's still a very tough decision. I mean, I I journaled and reflected and talked to tons of people and weighed the pros and cons, and all that, trying to project the five-to-ten-year path that I would take if I left or if I stayed, the ups and downs, what could happen in the near term, long term. I did a comprehensive—I mean, it was a tough decision because this, like I said, it was my dream job, just two or three years earlier. But eventually I used a lens of what decision would the person I'm trying to become make, and I knew that in the long run, 20, 30 years, I wanted to be taking risks under my own name, have my own things, my own businesses, be in control of my time, and that made this decision kind of very easy. So March of this year, which is crazy, crazy to think that that only eight months ago I was still working a full-time job, because I feel like I've crammed 10 years of personal growth into the last eight months, but I left in March of this year, and eight months in, I can confidently say it's the single best decision I've ever made. And luckily my team there was super supportive; left on great terms; I still keep in touch with a lot of them. It allowed me to really confidently go and grow something on my own. Since giving Ship 30 my full attention, things have continued to accelerate there, and so that validated my decision.

Right when I left, I was definitely in a bit of a panic mode throughout March and April, like I gotta grow this thing; if I don't, I made the wrong decision. Waking up two weeks later after I officially left and not seeing that kind of corporate paycheck hit the account was definitely a little bit of a wake-up call of like, all right, you have full ownership of of what's going on right now. And to that, I actually really enjoyed throughout the year, and that was a big, big win, big transition. Like I said earlier on all the reflecting and journaling I did this year, a lot of it had to do with that: how do I want to spend my time? The the paradox of having a ton of time is that it starts to magnify some of your bad habits, so I was kind of disorganized going into that; I only felt that level of disorganization even more when I had way more time. But I eventually got through it and uh have come out on the other side. So eight months in, very happy with how things are going. If I know anything for sure is I will never work a corporate job again; I will never have someone else kind of dictating when I can work, where I can go, vacation time, any of that. It served the role for me at needed and allowed me to start and leave um confidently. So that's a massive, massive win of the year. I debated putting this one number one because of the impact it had on me, but leaving BlackRock, starting Ship 30, or giving it my full attention was another big win of the year.

All right, the fifth win, accomplishment area that went well is that I continued to develop an abundant financial mindset as opposed to a scarcity mindset. So my relationship with money has always been interesting. I had a challenging upbringing on the family side; we faced significant financial hardship, which probably felt worse than it actually was, only because I was surrounded by wealthy friends, and I was always kind of the one who had sympathy from the other parents or who needed kind of money to to do anything on the weekend. But that started to kind of show up on both sides of the equation as I got older, both earning and spending. So I'll tell you a couple examples of that: I found ways to earn money throughout high school and college by tutoring on the side, which allowed me to be financially independent from my parents when I was 16 or 17. But I was stuck in this loop of every time I found a new level of earning, I would immediately think that it was all going to go away. So instead of trying to double down on that income source, I would maintain it at whatever it was and then try to ruthlessly cut my spending on everything else. And this is the definition of scarcity mindset: it was seeing the amount that I could earn as capped and seeing the amount that I could save is kind of infinite, like I could always spend less on food, or I could always spend less on clothing, or going out, or whatever. That served me well in the beginning when I was just starting out and I needed to save money, and in high school, yes, that's the right choice; in college, yes, that's probably the right choice because you're you're earning is capped. But it took me a while, and I'm still working on this, to realize that the amount you can save is limited, but the amount you can earn is unlimited. That's shown up time and time again, and when I started to earn income on Ship 30, I've realized for the first time ever, because I wasn't earning from a corporate salary and I was earning from something I created, that that is something with infinite earnings capacity. Right, if you give it more attention, if you do a better job with it, if you attract more people, if you create a better product, you can earn more and more and more. Versus I also realized that when you're growing your own thing, the returns on spending less are negative. Right, if you are cutting your spending on high-quality food, or if you're cutting your spending, living in apartments that you don't like, or not upgrading your desk setup, or all these other areas, it's actually going to negatively impact your ability to earn more. So I've been battling that relationship and growing it over time from scarcity to abundance, and I I definitely took some good steps on that this year of starting to spend more on health and convenience and upgrading my environment because I could see the tangible returns. And I think that this mindset is hard to have when you have a full-time job with a more or less fixed salary because you do see that as scarce; it's hard to earn more. But that sweet freedom of earning something on your own, whether it's starting a side hustle or whatever that is, you realize that that is infinite scaling potential. And I say all the time that up until you earn that first dollar, and then you have more or less the biggest feeling of euphoria that you could ever possibly have, and then you spend the rest of your time building things on the internet chasing that feeling of making that first dollar. In so that's what happened for me; that shifted from scarcity to abundance, and I'm I'm still making strides there because still throughout this year I let 10, 20, 30 purchases like take up mental bandwidth when they were clearly not worth my time, but I made a strong move in that direction, and I want to continue to write about this because it has been the single biggest financial mindset shift that has led to positive income gains for me is realizing that there was no more I could cut on the spending side, but if I just acquired more skills or developed new character traits or had different beliefs, I was going to be able to earn more, and I made that shift throughout the year, so I count that as a big, big win, and I hope to continue making that in the future.

Okay, so the first couple wins were on the health and wealth front; now I'm going to talk a little bit about some of my experiences, wins this year, and that brings us to the fifth win of the year, which I traveled to 10 different cities, and I settled in a new one. During my first four years out of college, I did relatively little travel, pretty much zero travel, because I was always kind of hesitant, being the youngest person on the team, to take vacation or take an extended vacation or kind of talk about like I'm going to this different place. I don't know, it was probably a faulty belief in my head, but with my newfound personal freedom that I unlocked in March of this year, I made it a priority to be a bit more exploratory, go on some more trips, visit some new cities, soak in new experiments, kind of download new data sets of different places of the world, and I'm very happy with how all that went. I ended up taking 10 trips this year, easily the most I've ever traveled in a single year, and here's a quick recap of all the places I visited. I'll throw some images up on the screen to to kind of highlight the best parts. I went to Austin—this is my fourth time in Austin—but I discovered that Greater Goods coffee shop in East Austin, hands down the best espresso of any place I went to this year, and I had a lot of espresso, so that was awesome. Sedona, Arizona, where I did this long reflection—that was the most beautiful, whole natural place I've ever been. I didn't I'd never seen kind of the red rocks or big, you know, canyon-style mountains like that before. I loved Arizona, but this picture traversing Devil's Bridge—that was the most beautiful eight hours of my year, that hike, and that was a really cool picture, too. I spent two weeks in Costa Rica, one of the most beautiful and peaceful places I've been to, but this 20, 40-ounce Tomahawk steak cooked in front of me on a wood-fire grill—that was definitely one of the biggest—that was the best part of of Costa Rica. I went to Atlanta, Georgia, for the Oregon-Georgia first week of college football—that was a lot of fun. I'd never been to Atlanta, but this meal I had at Kevin Rathbun Steakhouse—single best meal of the year; I still think about that one every day—but really liked Atlanta; that was a lot of fun. Columbus, Ohio—I went for Thanksgiving; I got tickets to the Ohio State-Michigan game with my mom—that was a lot of fun, really special experience for her; she grew up going to the game with her dad and hadn't been back to that stadium in 50 years. So getting to experience that, even though they lost—hopefully they they do well in the college football playoff this year—but that was an awesome place, and this cafe in downtown Dublin called Rebel was just super aesthetic, awesome espresso as well, and so that was another highlight. I went to Dallas to watch the Bucks play the Cowboys; a lot of my travel this year was around football and sports. Love football, love sports, obviously still do, loved it in college, and I'm still follow it all today; it's kind of my personal hobby that lets my brain turn off; it's just throwing on a football game, and it helps me stop thinking about business or anything else. But AT&T Stadium where the Cowboys play—that was one of the coolest stadiums I've ever been in; it's basically a giant city, everything surrounding it, big Jumbotron in the middle. I'll throw another picture up, but really cool there. I went to LA; LA was a lot of fun, and the coolest part is the LA Venice boardwalk. I hit a five-mile sunset run on Venice Beach—that was absolutely beautiful, a lot of just good energy around that area when I was there, so I plan on going back to LA every once in a while. I went to San Diego for a wedding, but the best part was the weather; it was 70 degrees, zero humidity, basically the entire time, so I was there for a wedding and speaking on my first panel at a conference—that was a lot of fun. And then Minneapolis—wow, it's fun to recap all these trips, and I definitely want to start either making videos or doing more writing about these trips uh in the year ahead, so I have a little bit more tangible way to remember some of it—but Minneapolis, I really like the architecture of the entire downtown area; industrial, sharp, modern, square. I was there for a wedding as well, and that was a very cool city that I'd never never would have gone there if I didn't have an excuse to go there like a wedding, so very happy I went, and that was a lot of fun. And the last one, Miami, Florida, where I've been for the last seven months. What's cool about Miami is basically three cities in one: you have Brickell, you have Wynwood, and you have South Beach; they're all very different; they have different pros and cons; they're unique; some are funky, some are flashy, some are peaceful like the beach, and they're all about 10-minute Ubers away. I don't have a car here, here, but I can Uber anywhere; I walk to the gym; I walk everywhere I need. So as I make this video, I'm in a one-bedroom apartment in Miami where I've been for six months, and living in Miami has been awesome. So visited nine cities, settled in a new one; I was in Tampa before this, and I live in Miami, and why I'm here is my co-founder, Nicholas Cole, moved from LA to Miami this year at the same time, after we'd gone 18 months working remotely, we said, hey, if we want to take this thing to the next level, we should be working together in person, and that's been incredible, working with him uh in Miami, out of WeWork, just getting things done; it's kind of like we have accountability partners where it's like we're showing up to the gym at the same time, we're working together, we're making good progress, and that has been really cool. And it's the first time in my entire life that I've actually lived alone; so I have roommates in college, roommates right when I graduated, and then when we went home to work remotely, I was living at my mom's house, so I've gotten to learn a lot about what it means to actually live on your own, which is a little bit harder than you think, uh more than I thought for sure, of dealing with all the errands that go with running an apartment, but I figured most of that out, and I definitely see myself living in Miami um for the foreseeable future, but I want to find an apartment that I can call my own, because I've been bouncing around between neighborhoods, three different neighborhoods, four different Airbnbs my time here, and I want to start to lay some foundational roots, have an apartment that I call my own that I can design that'll let me kind of have events with a wider group of friends, start to meet more people, host things at my place, worse—I I just kind of felt like I've been on a mini vacation for these six months that I've been here. So in the year ahead, I want to find my own place and lay down a longer-term foundation here; maybe buy a house, I don't know, a lot of things that could happen; who knows what's going to happen with real estate. But travel in general, a massive win for the year; I love getting to experience all these new places; it's going to continue to be a priority in the year ahead; I want to get international; I want to go to Europe; I want to go to Argentina; I want to go to Cape Town in 2022 or 2023. We'll see if I make it to all those places, but that's a priority; finding a new apartment in Miami that I can call my own is a priority, and just upgrading my environment in general, the people I'm around, my travel, all that—I'm going to continue doing, but that was a big win for this year.

All right, now let's dig into some of the wins and accomplishments on the business front. First, I grew my audiences across Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and my email list pretty significantly. So for my first nine months writing on the internet, I was writing just on my own blog; basically no one knew it existed except my mom, who diligently read every single one. Towards the end of 2020, I switched over to writing on Twitter every single day, and that was by far the best decision I've ever made; that allowed me to start Ship 30; it allowed me to meet new people; everything good came from going from writing on my blog to writing on Twitter. So if you're writing on a blog, make the switch; start writing on Twitter; start writing on social platforms where you put your writing in front of people. But I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Some highlights from the year on that front: so I added 162,000 Twitter followers, ending the year just over 300,000; hitting that milestone felt pretty cool. I tweeted over over six thousand times; I wrote a hundred Twitter threads, over a hundred atomic essays, and generated—and this is crazy to read—113 million impressions on my tweets. That's absurd to think about how many times the words I've written have shown up in front of people's eyes, and that just shows the power of writing in a social environment, because there's just no way you can generate that many views on your own blog. But when you have aggregated attention like you do on Twitter, it goes a long way in helping spread your message, and that's been the fuel of the business; it's been the fuel of my relationships; everything good I can point back to writing on Twitter, so very happy with how things went on that front this year. And I didn't set any goals around hitting this many followers or anything like that; all I said was I want to put something out every single day and publish something a little bit longer for them, so whether that was a thread or atomic essay as consistently as I could, which ended up being one or two times a week, at least once a week, but most weeks I ended up doing more than that. And that level of consistency—like someone asked how do you get to 300,000 Twitter followers, and I said, tweet twice per day and write a thread every week for 30 months in a row, and you'll probably get there—and they hear that and they're like, oh, well, that sounds like a lot of work, and yeah, it was, and it continues to be, but I really enjoy doing it, and so I will continue doing that in your head. I grew my personal email list to 11,000 readers, up from 4,000, and what's funny is I didn't write a single email this year uh to my personal email list; it was just people finding me on Twitter and then subscribing somewhere, either on my website, so that was kind of cool to see, just something grow very passively just by having kind of opt-ins across the internet. But I want to get back to writing that uh in the year ahead. I posted 530 times on LinkedIn. LinkedIn—very powerful; Amanda Natividale who's on Twitter described it as corporate TikTok, and I really liked that because there's a mismatch of supply and demand, which means if you were writing something high-quality, you can really stand out there, and that worked, so I I generated 12 million views there; I went from zero to about 50,000 followers in just nine months, and my game plan was just take what worked on Twitter, put it over on LinkedIn, and that worked, so I plan on upping my LinkedIn writing cadence; I think there's a lot on that platform, a lot of smart people; the people are nicer there than they are on Twitter sometimes because you have to be a real person and your employer is watching you, so you're less likely to kind of just leave negative comments or anything like that, but that's a different rabbit hole, and uh so but I will continue to write on LinkedIn and give it even more priority. I appeared on nine or ten different podcasts; a lot of those were fun; I'm gonna be taking some clips from those and putting them on my YouTube channel going forward, so that was a lot of fun, and I got to meet some cool people doing that. I really enjoy going on those podcasts; they're hard to schedule because they take a good bit of time, but I like batching them, doing three or four in a row, because they definitely take a lot of energy out of me to show up and give a good presentation and talk well and make sure that the listener gets value out of it; you kind of got to bring your best stuff when you go on those, so I'm always a little bit tired afterwards, and all honestly, I'm a little bit tired after filming videos like this because I am definitely an outgoing introvert; I like being around people; I enjoy being around people; I enjoy conversation, but it definitely takes a lot of energy out of me where afterwards I need to recover a little bit. So those podcasts, I want to continue doing them, but just knowing the the limits of my energy when I do them. And then I started out on my own YouTube channel, so if you're watching this, shout out to you, and if you're watching at this point, big thanks to you—obviously this is a long video—but let me know if you're still watching at this point because you're the type of person I want to continue getting to know; anyone that's interested in what I'm doing, I'm always a fan of having conversation, so be sure to reach out, but or leave a comment. Creating eight videos on my own channel, got to 1,100 subscribers; there's no tighter feedback loop than watching yourself on camera, because if you go watch some of my first couple videos, I don't think I blinked a single time; a lot of learnings there; the YouTube comments can be ruthless, but truthful, and I needed to hear that, and so I got a lot better talking on camera, and for no other reason than that. And those are kind of the big wins on the audience and content creation front. I explored a ton of different topics; I didn't just write about writing, which is what I did most of 2021; I talked about just about everything I possibly could um and it was really nice to have that creative forcing function and allow me to explore different topics without kind of only talking about one thing. But there is a little bit of downside of writing on the social platforms, and it's that the content kind of disappears, where Twitter and LinkedIn, to get a new follower to find some of my best writing is difficult; I have to be kind of creative about how I resurfaced that, make sure that they can find it, and I have to repeat myself a lot versus something like a YouTube channel or a blog compounds over time and keeps all of your content in a nice, easy-to-consume.

Library so someone follows one thing I write on a social platform and then go down the rabbit hole. So in the year ahead, I want to build up this library on my blog, where I posted this entire review as a blog post, and this YouTube channel. Because I think it just creates a little bit deeper of a relationship when you have some of that longer-form video, longer-form writing. And so that'll be a big, big priority. And I want to get back to writing my personal newsletter, probably on a monthly basis. So if you're not subscribed to that, you can go to dickeybush.substack.com, because I'm going to start tuning out my writing and my videos there.

Overall, very happy with the content creation this year. I feel like I got a lot better at writing; I definitely got a lot better on video. I still like watching that; if you go watch the David Ogilvy video I did, I did not blink for about five minutes—and obviously not an entire five minutes—but I was learning how to read from a script and all that, and it was a lot of fun. But all my videos have been a lot better since that one, and so I'm glad I made it. But yeah, that's the content creation from the audience front; a lot of good things there, and I'm going to continue to build that in the year ahead. And hopefully, at this time next year, we're talking about bigger numbers, even more content, maybe a book—lots of ideas there. So stay tuned. Alrighty.

The last and final win, accomplishment thing that went well this year was everything that had to do with Chip 30 on the business front. We tripled it in 2022 relative to 2021, and it evolved from just a course into a full-blown thriving community. So if you're not familiar with the Ship 30 story, it started—it's nothing more than an accountability Slack channel back in December 2020. I was building it on the side while working full-time, and for the first nine months of 2021, it was nothing but a side project, something I worked on in the mornings and evenings. But that started to accelerate at the end of 2021, last year, into the beginning of 2022. And I'm very happy with how things went this year. Given people returning to office, there are some economic headwinds; the general online education industry definitely faced some headwinds this year. I think there's a big bump during 2021 when everyone was at home and in 2020, and I think you started to see some of that. So we're very happy with how things went, how things are ending this year, and the trajectory we're on, uh, in the year ahead.

But more than on the business metric side, Ship 30 definitely evolved this year from just a course into a full immersive, community-powered learning experience. We upgraded everything: live sessions, templates, onboarding, curriculum, customer support—you name it, we improved it. But at the same time, it just feels like we're scratching the surface with what Ship 30 can become. Because with every improvement we make, we recognize an area that we can improve as well; like something new emerges. The beauty of running a business like Ship 30—we have continuous new customers all the time—is you just get more and more feedback than you know what to do with, that you have the time to act on. But that's what makes it fun—is that we always have something we can improve. So I think about it as: yes, we tripled this year, but that was despite having hundreds of different things we could continue to grow and make better, which makes me confident going into the year ahead. Because if we just kind of do the simple things that we know are going to grow, we know we're going to deliver better results; we know we're going to make a more immersive and valuable community and course experience for everyone; the growth is going to take care of itself. So very happy with how things ended up.

I'll give you a couple of highlights from a high level across the board. We held five cohorts this year: January, March, April, August, October, totaling 3,193 new students. That's awesome—just crazy to think about looking at a whole year like that. But our mission is to help one million people start writing online, so we are 0.31 of the way to that goal. So we got a long way to go, but very happy with the number of new students this year. We launched the Captain's Table, which is our exclusive alumni community. This was completely new for 2022. Last year, it was just a one-and-done experience; you wrote for 30 days, and then there was nothing else you could do afterward. But we found so many people wanted to continue their writing and building journey; they had new problems that we could help solve. So we spun up a back-end community where everyone who really loves Ship 30 ends up joining to continue learning from us, to continue growing. We have a ton of cool stuff in there and a lot of ideas for what's to come, um, on that front. So very happy with launching the Captain's Table.

We grew the email list by 41,000 subscribers, ending the year at just under 60,000, at 58,156. This came from starting a newsletter, which was a lot of, uh, work to get off the ground, but people are loving it so far. It's highly educational; it's actionable; it comes out every single Monday. You can subscribe at digitalwritingcompass.com; we'll throw the link on the screen. Our start writing online email course that had a good number of opt-ins; we launched a free ebook called The Five Pillars of Digital Writing; and we launched our yearly review guide—all those compounded to really grow the email list. And the email list is the number one thing that helps grow the business, so it's pretty simple how those two are correlated. We continue to provide value with free things, with free emails, and the customers kind of end up joining as a byproduct.

Another highlight: we built out a beautiful wall of love from all of our students, collecting testimonials. We barely did that in 2021; now I think we have over a thousand testimonials on a single board that people can kind of flip through, search, find people relative or unique to their situation that they think, "Oh, there's no way this works for me." We can point them to a testimonial that shares a story that's relevant to them. So we have so many wins that are popping up of people building big audiences, launching products, courses—all that. So we started to highlight and collect those, so that was awesome. We launched two free downloads that were a lot of work to do, but really people found valuable: our Five Pillars ebook and our yearly review guide. Given that we've raised the price on Ship 30 from $399 to $699 this year, just given all the things we added, we want to continue to provide a lot of free value for people who cannot enroll in the course. So we made sure that we were launching tons of free educational materials to help people start their online writing journey. Very happy with that.

Couple others: we grew the YouTube channel to 8,500 subscribers. If you're not subscribed to the Ship 30 YouTube channel, go ahead and do that. We have weekly podcast episodes called The Espresso Hour that we're doing where Cole and I kind of sit down; we, we cram some coffee—or double espresso, to be exact—and we answer some questions from Twitter, and we also put that on our podcast feed, which is getting around 5,000 downloads per month, and that's been a lot of fun. Two more: we grew TypeShare, which is our SaaS platform that helps people start running online with templates, analytics, and hosting, from three thousand a month to 29,000 a month of recurring revenue. Very happy with that growth, but running and growing a software business is hard, and we learned that this year. I'll talk about that in my lessons and realizations, but it takes so much more effort, a level of attention to detail, resources—everything that goes in—that it's not easy. And so we have a lot to improve there, and we've learned that, uh, this year on the amount of investment that is required, and we're going to continue to learn those lessons I think in the year ahead. But we're happy with how things are trending; we have a bunch of new upgrades ready to roll out, so big ones there. And then lastly, we expanded the Ship 30 team. So as the number of students has grown, the number of operational things have grown; the amount of attention required to run it has grown. So we added our executive assistant, Jamie; we added a writer, Justin, who helps us repurpose content and write our newsletter; we added a financial operations manager, Vib; we've added a lot of people on the community side. All of these have helped Ship 30 really turn into a three-person operation with me, Daniel, and Cole, and instead turn it into more of a team. There's more of a culture; there's interesting connections; it went from side hustle to full-blown business this year, and we are going to continue to prioritize that in the year ahead. So a lot of wins on the Ship 30 front, and I sure hope so, because I gave it—outside of my health and fitness—more or less all of my attention this year.

So as I was doing these wins—what I like about the review is starting with wins and accomplishments immediately illuminates where I was over-tilted—and I was definitely over-tilted on the health and fitness and business side. Pretty much everything else I said I'm going to maintain, or I'm going to let kind of slip, and that's okay. I plan on having periods and seasons of my life where I prioritize different things, but it is funny to see, just in this video as I read off the wins and accomplishments, where so many of those were focused this year, and that was intentional—very intentional at the beginning of the year, especially when I left BlackRock. It was, "Look, I have basically nothing else to do right now other than take care of my health and and grow this business and deliver a better experience for for Ship 30 students." So a lot of fun, a lot of wins this year, a lot of accomplishments, a lot of growth, but not everything was perfect or good this year. And I always start these reviews with all the positives, just to kind of set the headspace of, "No matter what happens or what had happened this year, there were things to celebrate." But definitely some areas I can improve, and so let's dig into those now. All right.

Now I'm going to rattle off some of the things that I think I could improve this year. These were kind of my mistakes, my anti-accomplishments, things that could have gone better. These aren't going to be quite as long, because it's much easier and more fun to talk about wins, and I have a kind of a section after this of lessons and realizations where I take all the areas that I failed or came up short and kind of tried to distill or crystallize the reasons or frameworks that I can use to guide me in the year ahead. So these are kind of lighter, but just like I did in the previous section, these are going to be health, wealth, relationships, experiences, business, kind of in that order. So first, one thing I can definitely improve next year is preventing injury. Like I talked about in the earlier part about running, the only thing that held me back from progressing this year was getting injured, and I've made good strides with it by the end of the year, but I definitely let my calf injury and some lower back stuff kind of linger for longer than necessary because I just kind of kept trying to push through it, push through it, and never sat down and tried to find the root cause. And it wasn't until I really had to spend three or four days without even walking that I had to totally reevaluate my relationship with running, mobility, strengthening, flexibility—all of that. And that served me very well, having to face the fact that I could walk, to come to that realization. But in the year ahead, if I can simply avoid injury and really maintain the level of focus and prioritization that's been preventing that injury, my health and fitness goals are going to take care of themselves, because I know exactly what to do, and I know the system to continue to do to make these strides that I'm looking to make. So it's just about avoiding breaking that momentum, and the only thing that broke my momentum this year, outside of travel—which I'm totally okay with, because you can make things work when you're traveling—was those slight injuries. So that was the number one thing that, as I look back on the year, was my mistake. I think I've solved it, and I've made good strides by the end of the year on it, but that was the first one that stuck out—was preventing injury.

Second area that I think I can improve is building a better and more sustainable daily mindfulness practice. So I spent a lot of this year on autopilot, kind of doing the things I knew I was supposed to be doing, and that was intentional because I had a system; I knew that I needed to do this, that, this, and the results were going to be merely a byproduct of taking those actions. But I feel like the year flew by because I spent so much of that time more or less on autopilot, kind of missing out on some of the small beauties of life, having those those slight moments where I I lacked awareness. I think made the year seem so short, despite having all this in it. And so that's why I wanted to get away and reflect on this entire year, because I feel like it flew by, but I know so much happened. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do want to make it a priority in the year ahead to be a bit more mindful. So that's both figuring out when and how I'm going to build kind of a sustainable daily mindfulness meditation practice, but also just finding small moments throughout the day to be more mindful, to be more grateful, kind of slow down. And I'm looking forward to doing doing that. So this year was big execution; I knew what to do; the year ahead I'm going to be kind of in the same place, but I want to slow down, enjoy things a little bit more, make the year not fly by as much, and I think having a daily mindfulness practice will go a long way in accomplishing that.

Third area I know I want to improve in the year ahead is honing my attention and avoiding shiny objects. So although I would deem the year a success, I think a lot of these accomplishments and wins I talked about came despite a severe lack of focus throughout the year. I think directionally speaking, my efforts were aligned, meaning I had my priorities of building the business and building my health, and I was pointed in the right direction, but within those, I think I fell victim to a lot of distraction, a lot of shiny objects, and across multiple time horizons. So on the micro level, I probably check Twitter, Slack, email, messages, endless notifications, way too much, to the point where it prevented me from dropping into big states of deep work on multiple days. Checking Twitter in the more morning would kind of derail my whole day; if I posted something and needed to pay attention to it, I found myself struggling to recapture my focus after that. But then on the macro level, I think I I failed to do the hard work of prioritizing and saying no or yes, but later, to a lot of things where I'd end up pointed in the right direction but had my efforts spread so thinly across a bunch of different projects within each one, because I never took the time to say, "Which one of these actually matter? Which one of these is most important to do right now? Which one of these can I put off until later, because this one has a better return on my time right now?" And that is way harder than just filling your to-do list with everything that you think you should be doing and making a little bit of passive progress, because it's not that I have a shortage of things to do; it's I have too many things. So rather than sitting down and saying, "I'm gonna take three days to decide when I'm gonna spend the next month on," I would just take it all on, and I'd spend the whole month spread thinly across all these things, and I get to the end of the month and be like, "What did we actually do? What actually mattered? And what actually moved the needle?" So on the macro level it was shiny objects; on the micro level it was kind of the slight annoyances and distractions. And in the year ahead, I really want to make it a priority to hone my attention across these different time horizons. So I'm taking some extreme measures—I don't have it with me, but I got a second cell phone that has no Twitter, no Slack, no email, no Instagram, none of that; it's just for taking walks and taking notes. I have a second profile on my Mac now that is like my writing profile; all it has is note-taking. I just realized that I don't have the willpower to avoid a lot of the internet's distractions, and so I have to take more or less extreme measures. That's on the micro level. On the macro level, I just have to be disciplined about saying no, disciplined about prioritizing. I think I'm gonna—I don't have a good framework for this still, and it's still hard—like just this week I probably took on too many things. So this is still top of mind of of things I can improve, but it's all part of the game. I think I'm going to learn to focus over the next five years; I'll probably have to learn it the hard way; I'll make more mistakes; I'll still spread myself too thin, and I know that, but I'm aware it's a problem to be solved in the years ahead and could definitely be improved.

All right, the fourth thing that could have gone better this year was investing returns. Losing money sucks; losing money in areas that you have no control over the outcome sucks even more. And I think everyone who is invested in financial markets this year got to learn that the hard way, whether it was stocks, bonds, crypto—no matter what, markets were getting hit this year. And obviously with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to look back at how I was allocating my money at the beginning and throughout the year and say I was over-invested. But the truth is, I thought that markets were gonna go up into the right like they'd done the prior 15 years throughout the year, and it took a couple of painful "buy the dip" moments throughout the year where I was like, "Oh, now's the time to buy; now's the time to buy," and just kind of compounding losses on the way down because of the years of "buy the dip" mentality being trained into people—and that was a winning strategy. But I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of weeks how I want to be investing my money over the next 5, 10, 15 years, and I think we'll look back on the last 15—since 2008—it's definitely an outlier with everything that went on with money printing and expansion and zero interest rates and all that, and there's going to be some important lessons to unlearn from that time—i.e., that you know, "cash is trash," where now cash yields like four and a half percent, so it's clearly not trash, and that you should be fully invested in the stock market anytime. Just a lot of things that I think deserve more reflection, and there's no immediate action I can take other than thinking very clearly about every dollar that comes in: where do I want it? And I've settled on the fact that as an entrepreneur at this point, it's more important to have cash available to invest in things that I know I have control over or I have the resources to grow versus putting it in stocks or bonds or crypto where someone else is doing it. I think there's a portion of your money you should have there, but I think having a larger percentage of it in cash that allows you to capitalize on new opportunities and just have that sense of security that you could go pursue a new venture or take time off if you needed to. So this has all been a big learning experience throughout the year, and I learned some lessons there, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in the lessons and realization section, but that was something that definitely could have gone better. I think could could have gone better for everyone else, and I learned from it, so I count it as an anti-accomplishment as in this section, but I still think it's a win because I got to learn from it. But either way, it, uh, I think I speak for everyone in recognizing that this year sucked on the investing front, and that's okay, uh, hopefully next year's better.

The fifth area that could have gone better is fostering relationships. So I spent this year dramatically tightening my inner circle, kind of cutting down the people I talked to on a weekly basis, and I think that's probably related to going 12 months without alcohol; just I had fewer reasons to see people, fewer common events to go to. But I also kind of deprioritized meeting new people as well, and in the years before that, that was definitely a priority—was to meet as many people as possible. But it wasn't because I didn't want to meet new people; it's actually that I felt that after meeting them, I'd be so interested in either exploring the industry they were working in or figuring out, you know, "What is their business model? What are they doing?" That actually made it difficult for me to focus on my work. And there's so many smart people out there doing cool things that eventually all I want to do is learn about what other people are doing, how I can help them, get to explore new industries. But this year, meeting new people was worsening my shiny object syndrome, so I kind of I cut it down; I wasn't taking new calls; I was, you know, using the line of "My heads down building new things; kind of keeping a clear calendar; would love to connect to the later point," and I said that to a lot of people. And again, it's all okay; it was intentional this year, but it could have gone better. And I think in the year ahead and years going forward, I want to get back to meeting new people, but even within my tightened inner circle, I think I could have done a better job catching up with many of them. I put it as a priority for quite a few of the seasons this year that I wanted to build a time in my calendar where I would catch up with them; I just never stuck to it. And luckily, these are the kind of relationships that can weather a period of time without catching up, but I don't want to push the limit of that. So in the year ahead, it's going to be a big priority of mine to build some intentional time into the calendar to both meet new people and foster the relationships that I already have. This will be through a mix of kind of periodic periodic ketchup calls, organizing the occasional dinner where I can kind of meet a bunch of new people at once rather than one person at a time. There's just so many smart people here in Miami doing cool things that that is a nice way to get to meet them. And then I also want to coordinate and participate in some group travel; same thing—get a bunch of smart people together, maybe some people I know, don't know as well but want to know better, and try to coordinate some international trips or other events where it just brings people together to also explore new things. So fostering relationships could have gone better this year, but I think it was intentional in the way I went about it, but in the year ahead it will kind of move up on the priority list, and I'm pretty excited for that.

All right, the sixth thing that could have gone better this year is just general hobbies. I found myself really immersed in what I was building this year, and that came at the expense of really doing anything outside of work or working on my health. So, for—it's funny because I think that served me this year, and it might serve me again next year and the year after that, but I know in the long run, I have this long list of hobbies that I want to explore, that I want to learn more about, that I want to write about, make videos about, and that's what sounds the most fun for me over the long term—is getting to

Learn something new, get up to speed quickly, and then share it with other people who might be interested in doing that as well. So things like espresso coffee, golf, house music, Greek culture—I mean, I got a lot of things that I want to learn more about. Where I keep going wrong is thinking that I have to take on all of them at once.

So part of this reflection was, I made a big long list of hobbies, and I’ll actually put them up on the screen here. I wrote a small essay on it of all the things I want to explore. But instead of saying I got to start all these over the next year, I said, “Here’s everything I want to explore over 25 years.” And that completely took the pressure off of what I need to do, or if I just do one thing per two years over 25 years, I’ll have 12 cool hobbies.

So in the year ahead, I think I want to do two—one outdoor, one indoor. I’m leaning towards golf and playing golf and getting out on the weekend and kind of getting away. What I want these hobbies to accomplish is give me something that I can direct my full effort and attention to that is completely different than what I do in the day-to-day, but also allowed me to kind of master something. Like, I, I want to put a lot of focus into golf, and that’s the outdoor one. And the indoor one, I think is going to be learning to play house music, starting with mixing music and then eventually making my own. If I’m sitting here at the end of the year and I can kind of throw a little bit of a set down, uh, in front of a group of people without anyone being like, “Who the hell is this DJ and why is he playing this music?” I think that’d be pretty cool. And if I can play golf a handful of times…

Now look, I’m gonna be honest, I have a feeling that I’m not going to take those hobbies on this year, and then I’m going to continue to be relentlessly focused because my, my return on time is still best spent where it’s currently allocated. But hopefully I start them, and maybe that’s a belief I need to break. But either way, I’m looking for something that I can immerse myself in, to kind of let me turn my brain off, um, from what I do on a day-to-day. Because that’s when I have my biggest creative breakthroughs is when I break that cycle of just the same pattern of thought every single day. And so we’ll see which one of those I get to, but I pretty much did no hobbies this year. So if I can just increase that a little bit, in your head, I’ll count that as a win.

Right, the eighth thing that I want to improve, in your head, I kind of already talked about this one, so I’ll keep this one quick, is finding a solid apartment that kind of lets me lay a foundation. I didn’t like that I was bouncing around Airbnbs in different neighborhoods and all that this year. It kind of felt like, like I said earlier, I was on a six-month vacation, and I’d rather find a place that is unfurnished that I can furnish myself. So, and I think some deals are gonna be popping up here soon, so that’s a small one. I just want to make a point on it just so I remember because it’s going to be easy for me to just say I’ll stare and stay in another Airbnb for six months, but I think taking the time, finding the nice apartment, getting my roots down is going to help me think a little bit longer term here in Miami. So that’s something that can go better, and uh, I’m gonna prioritize it.

The last three things that we could improve are kind of on the business side, so I’ll lump them together. The first is compounding my writing and videos. I talked about this earlier, but the thing about writing on social platforms or even making videos on social platforms like Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, all that is they all kind of disappear, and the library doesn’t compound. Whereas a blog where I posted this review and this YouTube channel keeps all of your content kind of in one place. I want to compound my writing library, so when someone finds one thing, it’s very easy for them to go down a rabbit hole and see everything I’ve written. So that means doing more long-form on the blog, taking the time to take my Twitter content and repurpose it for my blog, turn it into YouTube videos—all of that is going to be a big priority. I also want to write more about my travel experiences, for no other reason than I think that’s just a fun way to build your library of content and help people kind of get to know you a little bit better when you’re writing about, “Hey, I went here, here’s where I recommend.” I know I enjoy reading that from other people. So that’s one.

Second is turning Ship 30 into a more sustainable community and really improving the product experience more so than doing more marketing. And Alex Ramosie has a great question on this, of, “If you could no longer market externally and you could only get new customers from your internal community or your current list, how would that change the way you did business?” And I just, I think that’s the single best question you can ask at a point in your business journey where you have a product that people love—how can you get them to love it even more? And then that’s what lays the foundation for a long-term sustainable growing business. So we’re going to take some time and think about what changes we could make to the offer, to the model, to the community—little things like that that we know are going to just lead to better results, help people have more fun writing on the internet. And so that’s going to be a big area to improve in the next year. It’s just, how can we make this run for 5, 10, 15 years and not be so dependent on constantly finding new people, constantly writing and attracting them? Words instead we can just say we’re going to do such a good job teaching other people to write that they’re going to go attract future Ship 30 members for us. Another one is just building out even more of the team. This goes with the point above, is that we’ve done a good job staying lean up until this point, but I think given the number of people that are in the community in each course, we can deliver better outcomes if we hire more people to support them on their journey. So that’s either hiring some coaches, training more of the Ship 30 members to kind of ascend into bigger areas of responsibility within the community where it’s not just me and Cole delivering all the instruction, but instead we can kind of enable a, a team and have tiers in the community of people helping. So both of those kind of go one in the same, and it’s just this focusing question of improving the product—better, better, better, better—and that is going to lay a foundation for a long-term sustainable growth versus I think the cohort launch model that we’ve been using, which is very one-off. It takes a lot of mental bandwidth; there’s a lot of waves up and down of launch and then course and launching the course, and we’re thinking about how to turn that into a more sustainable kind of growth engine. And that’s not easy. It’s easy to stick with what is working, but potentially won’t work over 10 years versus taking the short-term trade-off and making the decisions that are going to pay off over 5 and 10 years versus just in the year ahead. Way easier to say that out loud than to actually do it. So a lot of thinking is going to go into that, but those are a couple areas on the business front that could have gone better or that I’m looking to kind of improve in the year ahead.

I think though, as I say those out loud, they weren’t necessarily mistakes; they were just things we didn’t prioritize that now I want to start prioritizing. So I kind of just lump them into this list, and that’s kind of it on things that could have gone better. I, I’m as I read this list, I’m realizing I’m very happy with how the year went in terms of what went well and what could be improved, and I need to spend some more time digging into these, but for so many years in the past, I’d get to this point in a year and say, “Here’s what went well, but like here’s all the things that went wrong.” And it feels good to put these out there and say, “Look, a lot of the year went right, but I think part of this journey is going to be looking closely at the areas that didn’t go as well, that maybe I haven’t fully touched on, and trying to find the key frameworks or ways of thinking or behaviors or beliefs that led to those and then slightly iterate and take those out for the year ahead.” And so that’s what the section of this video is—is I sat down and said, “What lessons and realizations and kind of frameworks can I take from what worked and what didn’t work this year and distill them down into things I can take for the year ahead?” So let’s dive into those now. All right.

So the way I came up with these lessons and realizations was by doing an 80/20 analysis, which, if you’re not familiar with, says that for any system, 20% of the inputs lead to 80% of the outputs. So after doing my big reflection on my wins and the areas that I can improve, I try to sit down and distill the frameworks or beliefs or thought patterns that led to all the things that went well and all the things that went poorly, and try to take those and turn them into kind of short frameworks that I can keep top of mind and apply, in your head, in the decades ahead that will both prevent me from making the same mistakes I made last year and help me double down on the wins that I had as well.

So the first big lesson and realization of the year was that all my good decisions came from operating in a place of abundance versus scarcity. So there were seasons of my life where scarcity played its role—budgeting, tight schedules, obsessive tracking, latching and saying yes to every opportunity—especially actually early on in my career, early on in my writing journey, it was just all about saying yes and and latching on to what I had. But ascending to the next level, I think requires a shift from scarcity to abundance, and that’s not an easy shift to make, but I’m slowly embracing the fact that there are always going to be an unlimited number of problems to solve, ways to improve, places to travel, relationships to build—there’s just a lot, right? There’s no shortage of, of anything in this world. So because of this opportunity, it’s one my responsibility to be highly energized, highly focused, and only try to do one thing at a time. And so the way I’m kind of remembering this is, I can do anything I want, but not everything, and only one thing at a time. So there’s tons to do; there’s no shortage of attention or hobbies or relationships or business opportunities or growth areas—any of that. I don’t have to latch on to anything and think that it’s going away, but at the same time, I have to recognize that because of how much there is to do, it’s never been more important to be energized and focused with that.

So a couple ways I’m applying this in the different areas of my life: on the health side, I’m just prioritizing being highly energized to take on these opportunities; on the wealth side, it’s, I’m gonna sit comfortably understanding that I will have the ability to generate wealth forever, that generating wealth is a positive-sum game, there’s enough to go around for everyone, and that really embracing that financial abundance mindset versus one of scarcity; on the relationship side, it’s understanding that relationships are going to ebb and flow, there’ll be new ones, some will go, some will come, and you don’t have to latch on to anything you had in the past because a big part of growth is shedding relationships that no longer serve you, and I think for a long time I said I had to hold on to what I have versus trying to form new ones and understand that that’s kind of a natural cycle; on the experience front, I want to continue to embrace all of the incredible opportunities there are—hobbies, travel, all of that—recognizing that that is what’s going to be the fun part of living and having the freedom of running my own business and all those different things. There’s a lot there, and not getting overwhelmed with it, understanding that over the long term I’m gonna get to do all that; and then on the business side, I want to sit comfortably knowing that there are always going to be infinite opportunities to grow a business, to improve a business, to start a business. I have the skills to capitalize on them, so I don’t have to latch on—again, this, this idea of latching on, seeing anything as I have as potentially going away—I’m, I want to, in the future, operate purely from a place of abundance. So that’s how I’m going to remember this, which is three short words: operate with abundance. When I’m making decisions, I want to ask, “Am I making this decision out of abundance or scarcity?” And the more decisions I can make from abundance, I know is just going to lead to, to better decisions in the long run. So that, to me, of all of the lessons and realizations this year, it’s reflecting on all the good choices I made from abundance over scarcity and the importance that’s going to play in continuing to level up.

The second big lesson and realization is that wealth is a spectrum measured by the time horizon of your thinking. So let me, I’ll give a couple examples of this. So on one hand, one end of the spectrum, you have the person who can’t plan past their next meal, right? They’re homeless, they don’t have any money, whatever it is, right? Their ability to think long-term is about as short as it gets; they can’t think past the next couple hours. And on the other end of the spectrum, you have the billionaires like Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musks—they’re thinking about their legacy for centuries or decades or who knows how long into the future. And I think that ascending levels of wealth is progressively expanding the time horizon of your thinking, and I’ve realized that this year. So I think the goal each year should be to plan and execute over a longer time horizon—at the end of every year, right? So it’s, you get to the end of the year, and then you’re starting to think five years down the future or 10 years at the end of every year versus, for, for me the last five, it’s always been, I’d get to the end of the year and I’d still be planning the next week or the next month. And part of this review has been stepping back and saying, “How have I become wealthier in the fact that now I can think and project over a longer time horizon?” So this is an easy, and it’s not like the chicken-egg where you become wealthy and then start thinking long-term. I think it’s an iterative cycle where you start to think a little bit longer term, and then you catch up to that, and then you kind of operate short-term until you get to a new point, and then you think long-term again. I don’t have the perfect framework, but I just know that I want to continue to develop my ability and capture the resources necessary to think longer term, and keeping that top of mind is important for the year ahead.

So a couple ways of applying this lesson, and I’m going to keep listing these off by area. So on the health front, if I just keep doing the right thing for decades, then I know I’m going to be in good shape over the long term, so I don’t have to think, I’ll obsess over every single day—just do the things you know you should be doing for a long period of time, results take care of themselves. On the wealth side, look, if I just keep playing in the game of business, I have a good feeling that everything is going to take care of itself; I’m going to continue to solve problems, things are going to compound, and I don’t have to think, “Oh, what am I going to do the next week or the next month?” Like, just continue to operate how I know and just keep playing the game—turn business from a finite to an infinite game, which is the goal is just keep playing. Relationships—this one’s a big one—one to only invest time in people that I want to grow with for decades, given that I can think long-term in over just the next month, but the next 10 years. That means that I shouldn’t be spending time investing in relationships that I don’t see myself fostering over the long term. So that’s one. On the business side, I think it’s slowly making the shift from short-term either direct response marketing or sales or things like that that you have to do to get a business going and instead say, “How can we turn this into a vehicle that could compound for decades?” And that’s what we want to turn Ship 32 into. Again, this isn’t like an all-or-nothing thing; that’s why I called it a spectrum. I think you have to progressively start to think longer term, but you’re not going to start thinking in decades tomorrow; you’re still gonna, I’m still gonna have to operate relatively short-term to start, but it’s just keeping this framework top of mind. So I’m remembering this by just repeating to myself, “Extend the time horizon, extend the time horizon.” Right? You’re never having to be in a rush when you think that way; you’re never like, pairing this with abundance, you know that there’s going to be plenty to do for the long term, so just kind of relax a little bit; it’s not so crucial to get caught up in the day-to-day. I want to progressively expand the time horizon on my thinking, and that is going to stay top of mind for me throughout the year.

All right, my third big lesson and realization from this year is that I should only invest my time, energy, attention, and capital into areas where I have power or in accumulating more power. So let me define the word power. And Alex Formos has a great quote on this, and it says, “Power is the speed at which you can go from idea in your head to finished idea or executed product in the real world.” So if you picture the most powerful person in the world, they would think about an idea, and it would be there, right? So your goal in becoming more powerful is to go from idea to execution faster. So the person with most power would think, and something would become, and the person with the least power would have, no matter what their idea is, they have, have no way of actually taking that idea from their head and putting it into the real world. There are a couple sides of that, and giving some examples drives it home. So I think every negative result I had this year came from allocating my time, energy, attention, or capital into an area where I lacked power, and I define power is either I have no say over the outcome or I have relatively little resources to actually influence the outcome overall. So examples of that are crypto markets, right? Having money in crypto, you have zero power there; you have no control. Stock market—no control, right? Very little power there. And like I said in the investing section, that is where I had negative results this year. Things like the Twitter algorithm, right? If I only write on Twitter, I have relatively little influence on some of that thing versus an email where I know I’m sending it and it’s going to hit that person’s inbox every single time. Working with contractors where I don’t know exactly the quality of work that they’re going to deliver, and I can’t influence the result that much—that’s an area where I lack power, and we had some negative results from some contractors this year because of that. Those are areas where I lacked power. I also had areas where I lacked resources to put something into the world, and that’s more on the personal side. So I either didn’t have the knowledge or didn’t have the skills to take that idea in my head and get it out into the real world. So those were the two things—all my negative results came from allocating to areas where I didn’t have any control of the outcome or I didn’t have the resources to actually make that outcome reality. It just all clicked for me when I looked at that and then looked at all the areas where I had success, and it was putting them into those areas where I did have power. Like on the personal health side, I have full power over that; I know exactly what to do and how to influence the outcome there. So it’s just an interesting dichotomy, and I’m realizing that leveling up is just continuing to invest and allocate your time, energy, attention, capital into areas where you have power or in accumulating more of it. Said in reverse, that were worst place to spend it is in areas where you lack power or in just wasting it—not accumulating more resources. So I’m still kind of working through that framework, but I, I think there’s a big thing there on just where you are investing your resources, and I’m just using this lens of, “Am I putting this over something I have control, or am I getting to a place where I have more control after doing it?”

So a couple ways I’m applying this: I want to invest, on the health side, in building a health foundation that allows me to do anything I want because I have full control over that area. If I do the workouts I need to do, eat the things I know I need to eat, the results are going to manifest in the real world, so I have full power there. On the wealth side, I want to invest fewer resources into assets that I’m powerless—so that’s broad stock markets, crypto markets, bonds, all that—versus investing my own businesses where I know that a dollar in is going to generate more than a dollar out because I have power and control. You can kind of see how this, this framework starts to, and honestly, as I say it out loud, it’s starting to make more and more sense to me. Relationship side—I want to be a powerful resource for other people, meaning I want to help them get ideas from their head into execution, so that could be introducing them to more people or sharing a framework or helping them unblock a belief, and then I know that if I do that I will become more powerful, accumulating relationships just as a byproduct, whereas if I’m helpful to other people, I know it’s all going to flow back to me. On the experiences side, I want to use my hobbies and travel to unlock new ways of thinking. So I think I can become more powerful through my travel just by going a certain place and then recognizing that now I have a new way of thinking or a new way of understanding or a new data set with which to process, and to me that is accumulating more power. And then on the business side, this one is crucial—using this lens of, “What is the bottleneck of the business, and how can we accumulate the power to remove that bottleneck?” It deserves its own kind of video, but any bottleneck we have in the business, I either need to accumulate more resources, so whether that’s more team or more time or more skill to solve it, and if I can just focus on that this year of, “What’s the bottleneck to the business? What resources am I lacking to remove that bottleneck?” Go solve it, remove it, move on to the next thing, and I think honestly I could apply that to far more than just business, but that’s what’s top of mind for me. So I’m remembering this one by just accumulating power. I want to wake up in the morning and say, “How am I taking my resources and putting them either towards areas of power or accumulating more of it?” And I have a good feeling that if I can apply that throughout the entire year, I’m going to continue to level up.

All right, my fourth lesson and realization of the year is that short, defined periods of pure obsession can lead to big leaps of growth in any area. And honestly, I think I crammed 10 years of growth into the last six months on the business and health front because I’ve given them my full attention. I’ve

Experienced this across a ton of different areas of my life. I mean, I was an elite RuneScape player in fourth grade; I was a professional speedcuber in fifth grade; I played Pro Call of Duty in seventh grade; I played D1 football in high school; I majored in math and computer science; and now I'm applying it to writing and business. And I've realized that I thought this was a bug in my personality growing up—that I would start something later than a lot of my friends, but then I'd get better than them or level up quicker, just because I—I'd be like, "Oh my God, all I want to do is spend my time on this one thing," and I could apply a level of focus and obsession that other people kind of—it was almost off-putting. And I, for years, I thought that that was a problem, but I've realized it's 100% a feature, not a bug, in the real world, if I wield it correctly. And so it's either a superpower or a crippling bottleneck. So I think there's this delicate balance I'm always striking of finding that area to obsess over, dial things up, but then I struggle with how do I dial it back down to 20 after I go that full 100? It's not easy; I'm still working through it.

But when I pair this fourth idea of short periods of obsession with the first three—abundance, long-term thinking, and accumulating power—I really come together with this framework: over the next few decades, there's going to be no shortage of opportunities. So that's abundance decades—that's extending the time horizon—and no shortage of abundance of opportunities to accumulate more power. And I know that when I give them my full attention and focus, I can make leaps ahead in those areas. So it puts me at ease when I combine those first four lessons, and it excites me. It excites me to know that I'm going to get to live in a way of picking something, diving into it, immersing myself in it; and if I can then take what I'm learning, use these create native outlets of writing and making videos to then share what I'm doing along the way, I can see myself just having a lot of fun over the next 20, 30 years doing that—picking an area, obsessing, sharing, growing, continuing to build. I don't know, I'm rambling a little bit, but it just—these realizations started to build on one another as I was writing them out, and so this one just puts me at ease, and there's no real deeper dive to do on it.

So if you're kind of in my shoes and want to think about this framework, I'm just going to say it one more time: over decades, so thinking of a long-term time horizon, there's going to be no shortage of opportunity, and I've already experienced that—that you can travel anywhere, you can build anything, you can do anything—sometimes overwhelming—within those, I'm going to be able to learn and accumulate more resources along the way. So that's power, long-term thinking, and abundance. And then when you pair that with the ability to obsess in a short time horizon, I'm going to get to do that a ton of different ways and accumulate resources along the way. So, and how I'm remembering this framework is three simple words: lean into obsession. So recognize that my ability to obsess is a positive personality trait, double down on that, and pick the areas to really dial my attention, give it all my focus, knowing that I can cram a lot of growth into that period.

When I do the fourth lesson—a realization I had this year—is that maintenance requires way less volume and intensity than people think, but growth requires way more. So I'll tell you—I'll give you an example of this, right? Maintenance is the same level of difficulty at any level. So think about someone with a hundred dollars and a hundred million dollars; both of them can put their money in a bank account that yields three percent, keeps up with inflation, and they will maintain their same level of wealth. So you can also look at someone like a professional bodybuilder and a person in average shape; maintaining their current level of fitness is the same level of difficulty, whether you think so or not. A bodybuilder, once they get to that elite level, it doesn't take very much for them to maintain it; they're always trying to keep growing because it's part of their sport, but they could dial things way back and still be jacked for a long period of time. And this applies to a lot of different areas where getting to that level of 100 million dollars or getting to that level of elite physique bodybuilder, whatever, takes way, way more effort than people think, but once you get there, it's not that hard to maintain.

And this framework is just stuck in my head because it puts the importance on picking a few things, applying a ton of effort to get to a place where then you can maintain it over the long term. So I quote Alex from Rosie a lot in this video, but he has this idea of a passive income body and a passive income bank account, right, where once you get to a place of financial foundation and health foundation, maintaining that level is extremely easy, and that—that just stuck in my head. In the year ahead, I want to realize that I need to be very careful about where I put my efforts, knowing that doing anything well will require more effort than I think, which means I can't afford to spread myself so thin across all these other areas. So a couple ways I'm remembering this is one: not starting new things unless I feel comfortable in doing the amount of force and volume and intensity necessary to do that at a high level. So honestly, with YouTube, I started out with a bunch of videos every single week, and I realized if I really want to do it well, I don't think I have the energy right now, or in terms of priority, I don't think it's the highest leverage where the amount of time and team that would go into that—it's just out of the ballpark right now. And so instead of being able to apply that force, I just want to maintain, and that I can easily repurpose podcast appearances, occasionally film a kind of talking head video like this, but the idea of making the Matt D'Avella or the Ali Abdaal-like high, high-quality stuff takes so much more effort than I originally thought that I'm not going to do it.

But then I want to figure out the areas I want to maintain, so I'm going to pick the areas I want to grow and just apply a ton of force there, and then I want to pick the areas I want to maintain and then say, "What is the minimum amount I can do to maintain this level?" rather than living in this middle ground of like doing too much to maintain but not enough to grow. And I think a lot of people spend time there on a lot of areas of their life—me included—this middle ground of: I'm not seeing big outsized returns from my effort, but I'm doing way too much relative to what I need to to stay at the same level. And if I can just avoid that and be very clear of—in any area—I'm either applying the maximum amount of force to grow or the minimum amount to maintain. And there's a ton of different areas I'm going to apply this: so on the health front, I'm bringing a ton of volume and intensity to build a health foundation that I can then reap the passive—the passive body incomes—uh, income returns over the long term. Same with my financial foundation; I'm sprinting hard, building the business right now, knowing that if I can just build this foundation in my 20s, the rest takes care of itself from there, but it only gets harder as I get older in both of those areas. With relationships, it's like, "Am I giving—meeting new people—my full attention?" Not right now. How can I just maintain a level that's a lot easier rather than kind of living in this middle ground? Same with travel or experiences in general: when I travel, I want to maximize those travel experiences, but for the most part, I want to keep things very simple, have a set routine, minimalist, you know, few things, and then go the full other end of the spectrum to really soak in and experience and get the most out of it rather than do things halfway.

So you can kind of see how this is all coming back to finding the things to give my full attention and then finding the things to give my minimum level of attention, and then ruthlessly prioritizing those to grow certain areas and maintain other ones. And this is so much harder than it sounds; that's what's interesting about it—like, yes, this framework makes perfect sense, but it's like, how do you actually go and do the work to figure out where you're applying too much effort and where you're applying not enough effort? Because the middle ground is so easy to stick to; it's so easy to do a little bit, feel like you're making progress in all these areas where the hard work is actually sitting down and saying, "Which of these do I need to ruthlessly cut?" And that's going to be a big focus for me in the year ahead. So how I'm remembering it is: minimize for maintenance and maximize for growth. So figure out what I want to maintain, minimize my effort there, and then figure out what I want to grow and maximize—maximize my effort there. So I really like this framework; I'm gonna make a full video on this one because I think it's so important; it's going to be a pivotal thing I think about all the time this year—year. So be on the lookout for that one.

My sixth lesson and realization from this year is that liquids take the shape of their container—so choose your container wisely. So this one's a little bit of a cryptic one, but I'll explain it here. I think I have the unique ability to execute any system I put myself in with unwavering discipline. So this means creating the necessary stress or urgency, diligence to stick to any structured cadence I design, no matter how arbitrary. And the reverse is true as well—is that when I'm left without any of these guardrails, guidelines, routine, structure, I can melt into a period of sub-optimal behavior pretty quickly. So I think of myself as a liquid, right? I—I can melt into whatever container I take, which means I need to be very careful about the containers I put myself in. Wielded correctly, I think this behavior is a blessing, but without it applied to the wrong container or left without any container at all, it is a crippling bottleneck for me. I've learned this this year because I've just recognized my behavior patterns—that when I design a system, I will stick to it, and one left without it, I will melt. I can sit on the couch and watch Netflix for 12 hours, or I could stick to a health and fitness protocol down to the ounce for months at a time. In the year ahead, I want to be very careful about the containers I'm putting myself in in every single area. I think I've applied this to health and fitness and business, but it's also in anything I do; I want to be very mindful about what game I'm playing and knowing that I will do what's necessary to play that game well or to win that game, but I also want to look at areas where maybe I don't have any container at all, and I've fallen into that sub-optimal behavior because of it. So this one is a—it's a little bit higher level, but it just requires me to sit back and think, "What containers am I putting myself in, and how can I choose them wisely?" And hopefully this makes sense. I think for some people this will click right away; they feel the same way—is that when they have a plan to stick to, it's very easy for them to stick to it, but then left without it, they're kind of left without any guardrails; it's like everything falls—falls out of line. I don't know what—how you would describe this type of behavior, but it's just something I've learned about myself, so I want to be very mindful about it in the year ahead: choose my containers wisely and make sure that I'm picking the right ones.

Lesson and realization number seven is that attention is a power law—so mind your open loops. The difference between giving something 90% of your attention and 100% attention is not 10; it's 10 times. And so that's the definition of a power law. I found that my best results come from maximizing the amount of time or—I have as few open loops as possible. This has implications over all different time horizons. So right on the micro level, I get so much more out of focusing for four hours on one task with all notifications blocked, in this room with no windows where I can just focus versus trying to do 10 things at once. And I think everyone's kind of experienced this—of your ability to multitask is way worse than you think. Also on like a weekly level, it's selectively choosing what I work on because if I pick too many things, I'm going to spread myself too thin—that's kind of been a common theme throughout this whole video, in this review in general. There's so many things on a weekly or daily basis that kind of eat up a little bit of mental bandwidth, and I call those open loops—those things that just sit around in the background that you know you have to get to or you got to take care of—Aaron's calls, all those different things. So the goal to really maximize my attention is to figure out what all those open loops are and like systematize them where I don't have to think about them. So on the micro level, it's focusing; on the macro level, it's removing the number of things that I'm focusing on and figuring out the things that I know are eating up mental bandwidth in the background and creating a system that allows me to operate those without thinking about them all the time. And then lastly, at the highest level, I think having unfinished product projects or looming uncertainties that kind of eat up mental bandwidth in the background are present all the time, and it's not until you ruthlessly take time to shut them do you recognize that they're eating up bandwidth in the background. I think it's like a computer, right? When you have a bunch of things running, you start to hear it hum, and it—you—you know right away something's not right. I think in my day-to-day I have that feeling, but I don't often enough take the time to say, "What are all the things that are taking up mental bandwidth? How can I block a day and just get those all off my list?" This framework of realizing that attention is a power law, I want to prioritize into your head—really honing my attention—and that's how I'm going to remember is just repeating to myself: hone your attention, hone your attention, hone your attention; pick fewer things to work on, work on one thing at a time on the daily level, and then make sure that I don't go extended weeks or months just letting these things loom in the background without taking care of them. And if I can do that, I have a good feeling that I'm going to make even more progress because just that little bit of extra attention doesn't just yield a small bit more return; I think it yields power law type returns. Attention is a power law; mind your open loops. That was lesson and realization number seven.

Lesson and realization number eight is: better is boring—so learn to cherish the monotony. I got to experience this this year—but the sheer amount of repetition, minor iteration, and execution of the absolute dead simple basics that comes with achieving anything—it's enough to keep 99% of people from ever achieving it. I think the things that I did this year to make a lot of progress revolved around just monotonous repetition, and I lean into that, and I repeated to myself: cherish the monotony. When I found myself having to write another thing that I knew was going to work or eat the same meals that I knew was going to get me closer to my health and fitness goals or do the same workout, right? It's not difficult to figure out what to do; what's difficult—and I think success is rarely figuring those things out—it's rarely about, "Hey, I need to do these things." Most people know exactly what they should be doing; it's learning how to execute those things day in and day out—all the things you know you should be doing—for an uncomfortably long period of time, despite—this is true for me—every single bone in my body begging to add complexity, chase something new, or give up entirely. And I think that idea of better is boring, I just want to drill into my head with everything this year because I'm not starting very many new things in any of the areas of my life; it's going to be taking what I'm doing and just making it a little bit better, and that is going to be boring. I think my entire operating system is all about starting new things; I really enjoy that, and I do eventually want to lean into that at a high level, but this year—as especially in the next couple years—I know what to do; I know what needs to be done better, and I need to lean in and cherish that monotony of slight improvement, doing the same simple things over and over again, not adding unnecessary complexity. And if I can just avoid that and repeat to myself: better is boring, and—and just embrace it—smile when I feel myself doing the same rep or doing the same customer support or improving the landing page again, whatever it is we're doing, I know it's going to be a little bit of monotony this year, so I'm excited to lean into that. And I have this framework of repeating to myself: better is boring, throughout the entire year.

My last and final ninth realization of the year is that you are simply a byproduct of your physical and digital environment—so the food you eat, the spacious work you live in, the gym you go to, the group chats you're in, the people you follow, the writers you read, podcasts you listen to—all of this shapes you and your behavior 24/7, 365. And I started to recognize that this year as I listened to the same number of podcasts, I've read the same number of people; I—I kind of immersed myself in some mentors and really recognized their thinking was influencing my behavior in a way I'd never kind of experienced before. I kind of can become efficient water in that way—of getting in the same routines, in the same environments, and same people—and maybe not recognizing that is that serving me? It's so easy to kind of stick to what's comfortable, stick to what's useful. How I'm trying to incorporate this realization is: I need to mindfully and carefully craft my environment throughout the year, audit it often—so step out of it periodically—whether that's travel, whether that's wiping the slate clean of the podcasts I'm listening to, whatever it is—figuring out a way to kind of refresh my environment, perspective, and then come back new. Because every time I went on an extended trip this year and I came back, I quickly walked into my apartment and was like, "Oh, that shouldn't go there; that shouldn't, you know, this isn't helping me work more." Or anytime I unfollowed a bunch of people on Twitter and started following new ones, I realized my thinking changed, and I just had all these reinforcing events of recognizing that we're kind of just byproducts of what we're consuming. So I want to audit it; I want to craft it, but I also want to invest more resources in building all of them—so whether that's time, capital, attention—just keep it top of mind: how am I crafting my environment right now? I have a good understanding of this, but where I kind of go wrong is always thinking that the environment is something you—you set up and then it's done, but it's an iterative process, right? It's never complete; there's always going to be something I could improve or audit or remove, and keeping that top of mind. So it's craft your environment, but continuously iterate it and update it over time because people change, perspective change, goals change—all that changes—which means you need to continuously update your environment as well. So that's how I'm going to remember it: craft my environment. So that's, you know, going to a gym that motivates me, listening to a podcast that educates me, right, on the health side, on the financial side; it's following people who inspire me, listening to people that educate me, keeping a long-term vision that I think about all the time, right? All these things that influence my thoughts and behaviors and belief patterns—surrounding myself with the right people, carefully crafting where I work, where I live, where I relax—all that—where I just spend my time, what I wear—recognizing how much influence that has on the way I operate. I'm going to keep top of mind this year; I'm going to audit it; I'm going to craft it; I'm going to invest resources in it; and hopefully, at this time next year, I've reaped the rewards of being a byproduct of my environment and my inputs because of the time and energy I've taken to do a good job curating it and crafting it. And that pretty much does it on my lessons and realizations. So I talked about my wins; I talked about the areas that could go better; I talked about the things I've distilled and crystallized to take into the new year. And this video has been long, and so if you're still watching this right now, I greatly appreciate it because a lot of this has been me talking through these frameworks to better understand them myself. I know that 2022 was a massive year of growth for me, and it was a big priority to crystallize some of these things—that's why I spent an entire week off the grid to make sure that I didn't walk into—to next year without really sitting back and thinking about this. So I plan on watching this video in the future, and I emerge from this review process excited—excited to go into the next year, recognizing all the things that happened this year, all the learnings I have, all the great reflections, continuing to improve, and most importantly, not have this big long list of things I need to start doing. I think I've fallen victim to that quite a few times in my life—of new year, new projects, new systems—all that. It's this year I'm excited to—I'm just going to kind of rattle these off because right before I filmed this I was like, "What am I excited about doing for the year ahead?" So I'll make this the fourth and final part of this video is just: what am I excited to build in the future, continue to build towards? I want to continue to prioritize my health and fitness; made good strides on it this year; I just want to keep building that in the new year. I talked about this one: I want to build more mindfulness into my daily life—building a meditation habit, building more small moments of mindfulness, really doubling down on that. I'm excited to continue to increase my financial foundation, applying the amount of necessary force to get to a place where, hey, I could take my foot off the gas if I wanted to, knowing that maintenance is easy at all these levels. You can kind of see as I'm talking about these areas I'm excited; I'm trying to run them through the lens of these new frameworks I have, recognizing what strengths I need to pull—I mean, I'm just excited for the year ahead. I'm excited to travel, especially internationally; I want to get out of the US, download some new experiences, come back more powerful, able to make better decisions from a different place, and just kind of slowly over time build up this—this travel log. I want to build a better relationship cadence to foster relationships with my close friends, with my family, with new people, rather than just cut everything to zero like I kind of did this year; I think it served me, but I—I think building that back up—in your head, I'm excited, too. Excited to find an apartment I can make my own; I talked about crafting my environment; I want my own tastes to come out rather than just sitting in an Airbnb, so I'm excited for that. I'm excited to start a hobby I can master—talked about that one a little bit—golf, house music, honey, espresso; I'm still kind of picking it, but that excites me for the year ahead. On the business side, I want to write 365 atomic essays in the year ahead; that's the foundation for everything I do—ship daily mindset—putting out writing, sitting down every single morning.

Thinking for 90 minutes that flywheel spins everything else for me. If I'm writing and publishing something every day, that's going to be a personal challenge. I'm excited to do it. I'm excited to transition Ship 30 into a more sustainable, community-powered vehicle rather than just the one-off course launch. I talked a little bit about that. And to do that, I'm going to have to hire a team to better support the community, better deliver results, all that. And so 2023 is going to be an awesome year. I couldn't be any more excited for what's to come.

If you're watching this video, I greatly appreciate you watching this. I'm leaving energized; hopefully, you're leaving energized. Hopefully, you're leaving with some new frameworks. Or maybe, if you've been following me for some time and hadn't heard some of this, parts of my story or parts of my life, I think now you might emerge with a little bit, hopefully, a different and richer perspective of me and the things I'm interested in and all that, which was kind of the point of this video, too. Also, me in the future, if you're watching this—which hopefully you're watching this in 50 years—looking back on 2022 is a big area. What's another reason I want to make this? So just a massive thank you.

Uh, if you're watching this part right now, leave a comment. Shoot me a Twitter DM. I want to know what was your biggest takeaway. Leave a video a like if you enjoyed it. And here's to making 2023 an incredible year. I think I'm looking to take everything I learned, carry those lessons forward, actually apply them in a year ahead, continue to master the basics, continue to stick to those things that I know that if I do for the next 10 years, the results I'm looking for are going to take care of themselves.

So that's it for this review video. Make sure you read the blog post where I go a little bit deeper on some of these topics. You can see some more graphics and all that. That's all I got for this one. Thanks for sticking with me in this entire video. It was fun to film; hopefully, you found value from it. And I will see you in the next video, or next year, we'll see. Talk soon.