ATHLLC3532125833

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.080 | - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks,

00:00:04.800 | a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

00:00:07.680 | Now, just a few weeks ago, I read a few posts

00:00:10.400 | that really had me thinking more

00:00:11.800 | about how I wanna optimize 2023.

00:00:14.440 | One was about conducting a personal annual review,

00:00:17.240 | and the other was about 23 ways

00:00:19.200 | to make 2023 an amazing year.

00:00:21.680 | They were both fantastic,

00:00:23.160 | and they were both written by my friend Sahil Bloom,

00:00:25.800 | who is one of my favorite creators.

00:00:27.960 | But he actually started his career in private equity

00:00:30.360 | and then spent a decade investing professionally

00:00:33.120 | before he turned to writing about finance

00:00:35.160 | and sharing his frameworks

00:00:36.520 | to have a more fulfilling life and career.

00:00:39.440 | And to prepare for this conversation,

00:00:41.040 | I actually ended up coming up

00:00:42.200 | with so many topics I wanted to cover,

00:00:44.600 | but we're gonna have to get to them another time

00:00:46.520 | because we're gonna focus today

00:00:47.900 | on conducting a personal annual review,

00:00:50.160 | which is nothing like the arduous process

00:00:52.280 | of a performance review at work.

00:00:53.840 | It's actually just seven questions you can ask yourself

00:00:56.760 | that give you the perfect opportunity

00:00:58.440 | to reflect on the past year and plan for what's ahead.

00:01:01.920 | Then we're gonna walk through some of Sahil

00:01:03.880 | and my top recommendations

00:01:05.720 | for how to make 2023 an amazing year

00:01:08.400 | across your work, health, life, and money.

00:01:11.840 | I'm so excited for this conversation,

00:01:13.560 | so let's get started right after this.

00:01:15.840 | Sahil, welcome to the show.

00:01:18.880 | Thank you for having me, man.

00:01:20.200 | As an avid listener,

00:01:21.240 | I'm excited to make my debut appearance here.

00:01:23.800 | Yeah, and we'll probably get to this at the end,

00:01:25.400 | but there might be some future appearances coming,

00:01:27.520 | but it's January.

00:01:29.200 | There are a lot of people out there

00:01:30.360 | trying to make their resolutions,

00:01:31.900 | make their intentions for the year.

00:01:33.840 | What do you think people get wrong

00:01:35.040 | when they go through that process?

00:01:37.120 | The biggest thing I think people get wrong

00:01:38.880 | is focus on the planning side

00:01:41.240 | and not enough on the reflecting side.

00:01:42.920 | There's this quote that I love,

00:01:44.440 | John Dewey, an American philosopher,

00:01:46.840 | and basically what he said was,

00:01:48.920 | "We don't learn from experience.

00:01:50.640 | "We learn from reflecting on experience."

00:01:53.200 | And I always thought that was a really powerful way

00:01:54.960 | of thinking about your year.

00:01:56.320 | You get to the end of the year

00:01:57.520 | and everyone's instinct is,

00:01:59.760 | "Okay, I'm gonna look forward.

00:02:00.880 | "Let me make my goals.

00:02:01.760 | "Let me do all that."

00:02:02.680 | And that's just the way everyone operates.

00:02:04.520 | It's the standard.

00:02:05.620 | And not enough time is spent reflecting

00:02:07.640 | on the year that just passed.

00:02:08.880 | And what did you learn from it?

00:02:10.080 | And how can you actually take those learnings

00:02:12.440 | and drive yourself forward

00:02:14.000 | and do a better year going forward?

00:02:15.840 | It's funny, I was hoping you'd say that

00:02:17.000 | because I wanted to talk about your personal annual review

00:02:19.640 | because I've seen you tweet about it,

00:02:21.600 | and then you actually produced this document

00:02:23.380 | that people could download.

00:02:24.760 | I kind of want to walk through it.

00:02:26.040 | So do you think we could just give people an overview

00:02:28.520 | of how you structure an annual review?

00:02:30.240 | And then if anyone listening wants a copy,

00:02:32.120 | we'll definitely link to it in the show notes.

00:02:34.320 | Yeah, it's a pretty simple structure, as you know there.

00:02:36.600 | I've been doing this for the last five plus years,

00:02:40.480 | I would say, in this format.

00:02:42.200 | And you've had or had discussions

00:02:43.880 | with a few of these people,

00:02:44.800 | but I've taken inspiration over the years

00:02:46.600 | from a lot of the giants that I really look up to

00:02:48.880 | and admire like Tim Ferriss or James Clear,

00:02:51.120 | who have written about in the past

00:02:52.880 | their annual review structures.

00:02:54.620 | And so I've sort of adapted that,

00:02:56.200 | but basically the whole thing

00:02:57.200 | is framed around seven questions.

00:02:58.800 | So maybe we can just go through the questions.

00:03:00.920 | You and I can chat about them a little bit.

00:03:02.680 | I'm curious for what your perspectives are

00:03:04.960 | on your own year on these.

00:03:06.480 | Maybe we can go from there.

00:03:07.600 | I'm so glad you put this together

00:03:08.920 | and that we're having this conversation

00:03:10.320 | 'cause I went through and I started going through

00:03:11.960 | all of this myself.

00:03:13.000 | And I don't think I would have done that

00:03:16.400 | without your prompt.

00:03:17.840 | It's like you jump in and you're like,

00:03:18.840 | "Oh, I got all this stuff to do this year."

00:03:20.320 | So I think this was a great process for me.

00:03:22.300 | I hope other people take that away from it.

00:03:24.200 | But let's just jump in, number one.

00:03:26.420 | So the first one that I always start with

00:03:28.400 | is what did I change my mind on this year?

00:03:31.680 | It's the first question I always ask.

00:03:33.640 | And the genesis of this is really just this idea

00:03:36.480 | that if you're not changing in any way, you're dying.

00:03:40.400 | Like we need to adapt.

00:03:41.560 | We need to have those like software updates

00:03:43.840 | as I like to think of them to our mind

00:03:45.400 | to rewrite the old code and refresh it with new things.

00:03:48.480 | And so at the end of the year, I always like to ask,

00:03:50.320 | like what are the big things

00:03:51.420 | that I really changed my mind on?

00:03:53.460 | And if there's nothing, I start to get really worried.

00:03:55.920 | That's when the tension starts to build.

00:03:57.600 | So that's always the first question that I ask.

00:03:59.600 | I'm curious for you specifically,

00:04:02.040 | what are some of the things

00:04:02.880 | that you feel like you changed your mind on this year?

00:04:04.480 | And I'm happy to give you mine.

00:04:05.800 | So I'll run through it,

00:04:06.640 | but I have one quick question,

00:04:07.640 | which is for each of these things,

00:04:09.840 | is there anything you do that helps jog your memory?

00:04:13.260 | For me, I was like looking through my photo albums,

00:04:15.960 | like where was I this year

00:04:17.140 | to try to just anchor some points on things?

00:04:19.680 | Or I was looking at my work calendar,

00:04:21.360 | like I was trying to figure out,

00:04:23.080 | it's not that I didn't change my mind.

00:04:24.520 | It's like, how do I find the things I changed on

00:04:26.440 | without too much recency bias?

00:04:28.040 | I'm like, what did I change my mind on in December?

00:04:30.440 | Part of the value of this whole process

00:04:32.340 | is that it requires you to pause

00:04:35.840 | and actually look back at your work, writing, projects,

00:04:40.040 | things that you did during the course of the year,

00:04:42.280 | because that actually gives you the zoomed out perspective.

00:04:44.780 | The whole value of doing an annual review like this

00:04:47.880 | is really that you're constantly living

00:04:50.540 | in a first person view.

00:04:52.040 | You're zoomed in as far as you can possibly be,

00:04:54.760 | and this forces you to zoom out.

00:04:56.460 | You're like a bird flying to 10,000 feet

00:04:58.720 | and now observing your full year and being able to do it.

00:05:01.000 | So for me, I'm a writer.

00:05:03.180 | That's kind of my primary thing.

00:05:04.640 | So I can actually go back and look at all of my writing

00:05:06.980 | during the course of the year and see, find those trends,

00:05:09.540 | look at things that I was talking about, thinking about,

00:05:11.760 | and how those might've morphed or changed.

00:05:13.740 | For a lot of people, it can be journaling,

00:05:15.720 | notes that you've left yourself

00:05:17.000 | during the course of the year.

00:05:18.500 | Some people send themselves emails.

00:05:19.980 | I like doing that a lot from time to time.

00:05:21.840 | Note documents.

00:05:22.920 | Sometimes it's just conversations with friends.

00:05:25.120 | It's also a reason, by the way,

00:05:26.780 | why these annual reviews are often really productive

00:05:30.100 | to do in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting

00:05:33.260 | with another individual that you trust,

00:05:35.140 | because it tends to lead to a slightly more active discussion

00:05:38.300 | and pushbacks that actually make you think

00:05:40.100 | a little bit more deeply

00:05:41.420 | and avoid that recency bias that you mentioned.

00:05:43.860 | For me, for some reason,

00:05:45.400 | and maybe it's that I live in the Bay Area

00:05:47.180 | and there's no seasons, so I don't have this like,

00:05:49.380 | what was happening when it was snowing?

00:05:50.740 | What was happening during summer?

00:05:51.940 | I like to use the calendar

00:05:53.560 | and go back and look at calendars and photos

00:05:55.600 | to just jog my memory of like, what happened in spring?

00:05:58.120 | Oh, I went on this trip to New York or Boston or something.

00:06:01.220 | Oh, what was going on at work around the time I did that?

00:06:03.460 | So that was my version.

00:06:04.500 | I've done that recently, by the way, with my wife.

00:06:06.980 | So we just had our sixth anniversary

00:06:08.840 | and we were on a walk and we started thinking about,

00:06:11.300 | okay, what did we do each year since we got married?

00:06:14.000 | Like, what were the big milestones, trips, things we did?

00:06:16.660 | And it was such a fun and interesting exercise

00:06:19.020 | to think about like, what our mindset was

00:06:21.300 | at each of these points in life.

00:06:22.620 | We got married and then we kind of had,

00:06:23.980 | you have the honeymoon period

00:06:25.100 | and you're going on all these trips

00:06:26.140 | and what were you thinking about and doing?

00:06:27.740 | It's actually a really fun relationship exercise

00:06:29.820 | for people that have been in longer term relationships.

00:06:32.700 | - I'll share one thing

00:06:33.540 | and then I'll promise I'll answer your question,

00:06:34.820 | which is starting in, I don't know why, March of 2014,

00:06:39.060 | I started logging this doc,

00:06:40.900 | it's just a Google sheet called Monthly Experiences.

00:06:43.020 | And my goal was that every month for the rest of my life,

00:06:46.220 | I needed to have an experience

00:06:48.260 | that made that month memorable.

00:06:50.180 | I first was like, was it monthly memorables,

00:06:51.860 | was monthly experiences?

00:06:53.060 | And it didn't necessarily have to be

00:06:54.300 | some crazy skydiving kind of thing.

00:06:56.500 | One of them was like, I had surgery on my foot

00:06:59.300 | because I had this thing called a Morton's neuroma

00:07:01.180 | and it'd been a pain in my life for a long time.

00:07:03.220 | And finally, I was just like, I'm gonna do this.

00:07:04.980 | One was, we were in Colorado where my wife grew up

00:07:07.580 | and it was like so much snow, it was so cold.

00:07:09.500 | And I was like, I'm gonna go build an igloo.

00:07:11.100 | Like get a chainsaw, cut blocks of ice

00:07:13.380 | and build an igloo. - Oh man.

00:07:14.540 | - Things like that.

00:07:15.580 | June, 2015, we got a dog.

00:07:16.980 | This was one way, it has nothing to do with an annual review

00:07:19.740 | but it was, I wanted to make sure that every month

00:07:22.220 | of my life, there was something memorable.

00:07:24.380 | And I was like, gosh, it really dropped off a cliff

00:07:26.220 | when I had kids and the pandemic hit

00:07:28.540 | and I need to resume it.

00:07:29.820 | But it was like, oh, when the pandemic was here

00:07:31.300 | and you have kids, yeah, there was something memorable

00:07:32.940 | with childhood development each month,

00:07:34.460 | but it felt weird to be like, kid smiled, kid said dad.

00:07:37.700 | Like it was so focused on that.

00:07:39.660 | So I gotta get it back going,

00:07:41.300 | but something to encourage everyone to consider

00:07:43.740 | if you're wanting to make sure each month

00:07:45.300 | has something exciting about it.

00:07:46.140 | - I love that idea, it's great.

00:07:47.900 | - So a few of the things for me was that

00:07:50.540 | one was around outsourcing.

00:07:53.060 | I think I have always been someone in multiple jobs,

00:07:57.140 | I've had the opportunity to have an admin

00:07:58.860 | and I just always said no, I always said no.

00:08:00.700 | I was kind of taking everything into my own hands.

00:08:03.060 | I loved optimizing.

00:08:04.300 | And finally, last year in 2022, I really started saying,

00:08:07.260 | okay, maybe I could hire someone to help do some research.

00:08:09.300 | Maybe I could hire someone to help

00:08:10.540 | with parts of the newsletter, with parts of the editing,

00:08:12.820 | with parts of the production.

00:08:13.700 | So last year was a year that I changed my mind

00:08:16.380 | on hiring people to help do things,

00:08:18.700 | to give you more surface area

00:08:20.140 | you can cover with your own time.

00:08:21.820 | So that was one.

00:08:23.180 | - That's a powerful one.

00:08:24.300 | That's gonna pay dividends for a long time,

00:08:26.100 | changing your mind on that.

00:08:27.260 | - Yeah, the other one, which I think was the hardest,

00:08:30.980 | was learning to spend money.

00:08:33.820 | And I know this sounds crazy,

00:08:35.060 | but I feel like myself and maybe a lot of people listening,

00:08:37.460 | we almost get to the point of optimizing and frugality,

00:08:39.940 | that it's very hard to spend money on anything.

00:08:42.180 | Like, I remember we're at a Japanese restaurant

00:08:44.500 | and I was like, "All I want is a miso soup."

00:08:46.300 | Like, that just felt like what I wanted today.

00:08:48.500 | And I was like, "God, they're charging $7 for a miso soup.

00:08:51.060 | "I feel like a miso soup should be $3 or $4."

00:08:54.460 | And I was like, "You know what?

00:08:55.540 | "I just need to stop worrying."

00:08:57.380 | Like, I'm so used to telling people,

00:08:58.500 | "Stop worrying about the latte.

00:08:59.660 | "It's not about the latte.

00:09:00.700 | "This is a Ramit Sethi thing."

00:09:01.780 | He's like, "The lattes aren't what's killing you.

00:09:03.180 | "It's these big decisions."

00:09:04.380 | And here I am, to use the Japanese restaurant example,

00:09:06.660 | not ordering a seaweed salad because I like it,

00:09:08.780 | because it's extra $5, or not getting miso soup

00:09:11.140 | because it's overpriced by $2.

00:09:13.340 | I found that when you can just let the small decisions go,

00:09:17.460 | happiness goes up, stress goes down, anxiety goes down.

00:09:20.620 | When it comes to optimizing my finances,

00:09:22.540 | where I am in my life,

00:09:23.580 | those one, two, three, four, $5 differences

00:09:26.460 | weren't having a big impact.

00:09:27.700 | And so I've changed my mind on that a lot.

00:09:30.540 | When I'm shopping online for groceries,

00:09:32.580 | I would pull up Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods

00:09:35.100 | and price compare strawberries and stuff like that.

00:09:38.260 | I've kind of gotten over the small costs of things

00:09:41.380 | and gotten comfortable.

00:09:42.220 | So those are two things.

00:09:43.380 | And the one small funny thing that I'll share,

00:09:45.260 | which I put in my end of the year learnings was mouth tape.

00:09:49.420 | When I interviewed Liz Moody,

00:09:51.220 | who has this Healthier Together podcast,

00:09:52.540 | she was like, "You should consider trying this out,

00:09:54.020 | "taping your mouth at night."

00:09:55.020 | And I was like, "That is the craziest thing."

00:09:56.900 | For six months, I was like, "That's the craziest thing."

00:09:58.900 | And then I was like, "You know what?

00:09:59.740 | "I'm just gonna try it."

00:10:00.820 | And it was awesome.

00:10:01.860 | - Changed your life?

00:10:03.020 | Were you a big mouth breather before?

00:10:04.580 | - It wasn't a thing that I processed in my mind,

00:10:07.140 | but there were just times where I woke up

00:10:09.380 | and my mouth was a little dry.

00:10:10.780 | And I was like, "Oh, I wonder

00:10:11.820 | "if I'm a really heavy mouth breather now."

00:10:13.500 | And then I tried it and I was like, "I woke up

00:10:15.460 | "and it just felt like my mouth was fresh."

00:10:17.420 | I know it sounds like a weird thing to say.

00:10:19.580 | - Well, it's deeply impactful for your health.

00:10:21.780 | Breathing through your nose.

00:10:22.860 | You should have James Nestor on at some point.

00:10:24.740 | He wrote the Bible on this.

00:10:26.580 | - Breathe.

00:10:27.420 | We've been going back and forth.

00:10:28.460 | - You should have him on and do an episode on breathing

00:10:30.260 | 'cause it's hugely impactful for your health.

00:10:31.940 | - So that was one where you write it off

00:10:33.980 | as like, "That's so silly.

00:10:34.920 | "Why would you do that?

00:10:35.760 | "That seems ridiculous."

00:10:36.700 | And last year I was like, "You know what?

00:10:38.260 | "Let's just try it."

00:10:39.100 | And now I have like a stack of hostage tape,

00:10:42.140 | which is like the most ridiculous name

00:10:43.540 | for a mouth tape company on my bedside.

00:10:45.340 | - There is a general rule of thumb there, by the way.

00:10:47.740 | And maybe it's like a David Foster Wallace,

00:10:49.780 | "This is water" takeaway as well of,

00:10:53.020 | anytime your bias is, "That's totally ridiculous.

00:10:57.140 | "That sounds silly.

00:10:58.220 | "That's wild."

00:10:59.420 | Just try it.

00:11:00.460 | Because half the time, those things

00:11:02.540 | that you're automatically highly certain of,

00:11:04.820 | you end up being completely wrong on.

00:11:06.980 | And maybe we would all learn a whole lot more

00:11:09.780 | about ourselves and grow in a different way

00:11:11.580 | if we just took on those things

00:11:13.020 | that we write off immediately.

00:11:14.940 | - Anything from your list this past year

00:11:16.620 | that's worth sharing?

00:11:17.460 | - The biggest one for me was a kid thing.

00:11:19.300 | I think you know this, but we had our first son in May.

00:11:22.780 | He was born and I had these like grand ambition

00:11:26.500 | prior to him being born

00:11:27.820 | of all the things I was gonna teach him.

00:11:29.820 | Like I had this long list that I had written out

00:11:32.020 | of all the stuff I was gonna teach my son

00:11:34.220 | and how I was gonna mold his personality

00:11:36.220 | in all these different ways.

00:11:37.500 | And I think somewhere around like the six month mark,

00:11:40.020 | which was later in the year,

00:11:41.380 | I just realized that I don't think it's possible.

00:11:44.580 | I basically think that kids come out with a sort of a kit

00:11:48.380 | and their personality and who they are

00:11:51.500 | and aspects of their character.

00:11:53.020 | It's sort of fixed.

00:11:54.020 | It's like genetic.

00:11:54.840 | They come out with it.

00:11:55.820 | And our job is actually not to try to teach them things

00:11:59.020 | around all of these specific values that we want.

00:12:01.680 | It's to be able to embody our values as a person

00:12:05.000 | and hopefully guide them in the general direction

00:12:07.000 | of what we believe is a strong set of values.

00:12:09.220 | But the idea of like being able to mold and shape my child,

00:12:12.780 | I've given up on as something that's possible.

00:12:15.200 | - It's funny 'cause just this morning,

00:12:17.440 | I had a moment that further re-emphasized this for me,

00:12:20.280 | which was there were these three little felt balls

00:12:22.880 | and my daughter was playing with them.

00:12:24.360 | And she's like, "Daddy, here you go."

00:12:25.480 | And she just hands them to me and I start juggling them.

00:12:27.960 | And she's like mesmerized.

00:12:29.740 | She's two and a half.

00:12:30.760 | She's obviously too young to learn to juggle right now.

00:12:32.800 | I'm sure there's some savant kid in the world

00:12:34.600 | who can juggle a two and a half,

00:12:35.720 | but that didn't seem impossible today.

00:12:37.040 | - A Rubik's cube probably solving it.

00:12:39.040 | - But I was thinking, gosh, I bet if I went to her

00:12:41.760 | and was like, "Hey, let me teach you how to juggle."

00:12:43.740 | She'd be like, "No, I wanna do things on my own."

00:12:45.940 | But just doing it.

00:12:46.800 | Like if you want your child to maybe do something

00:12:49.840 | that you do or learn something,

00:12:51.360 | letting them emulate you and watch you

00:12:53.080 | and maybe admire and look up to it

00:12:54.680 | is probably gonna be a 10 times more effective way to do it

00:12:57.480 | than trying to force them to learn this thing

00:12:59.400 | that you want them to learn.

00:13:00.720 | - Completely agree.

00:13:01.600 | That's why I bring my son with me in my garage gym

00:13:03.680 | so that he can watch me work out.

00:13:05.680 | - He's like seven months old.

00:13:06.640 | He's like, "I'm gonna do that one day."

00:13:09.660 | - Awesome, okay.

00:13:10.840 | Question two.

00:13:12.040 | - Let's do it.

00:13:12.880 | - All right, so the second question and the third

00:13:15.200 | are all around energy.

00:13:16.520 | And the second question is basically

00:13:18.960 | what created energy for you during the course of the year?

00:13:22.320 | This whole idea is to go back and look at your calendars.

00:13:24.880 | You said you were already doing this for the first one,

00:13:26.720 | but go back and look at your calendars from the year

00:13:29.200 | and try to identify the trends

00:13:31.760 | in what actually created energy in your life.

00:13:34.960 | What were the activities?

00:13:36.280 | What were the work projects?

00:13:37.920 | What were the meetings?

00:13:38.880 | Who were the people?

00:13:40.240 | What were these trends that actually brought you energy?

00:13:44.120 | - So this was a fun one.

00:13:45.000 | I guess people listening to this

00:13:46.000 | are probably not gonna pause and go do one

00:13:47.880 | before finishing the episode,

00:13:49.080 | so they won't have this problem.

00:13:50.080 | But I would definitely encourage people to listen

00:13:52.200 | or read all of the topics of the personal review

00:13:54.920 | and then go back and look at your calendar.

00:13:56.760 | Otherwise, you'd go back,

00:13:58.040 | learn a bunch of things you changed your mind on

00:13:59.480 | and then have to repeat the process.

00:14:00.680 | So this was really interesting

00:14:02.840 | because I think this past year was the first year

00:14:06.480 | that the world opened up and I was a creator.

00:14:08.960 | And I met a bunch of other people,

00:14:10.840 | creating podcasts, YouTube, all kinds of stuff.

00:14:13.440 | That's just never been a part of my career.

00:14:15.320 | I met a lot of founders and investors

00:14:17.280 | and people in finance and financial advisors and planners,

00:14:20.320 | but I'd never really met a lot of creators.

00:14:23.760 | And that was one thing that gave me a lot of energy

00:14:25.840 | because this is my new job

00:14:27.320 | but I just have never been in this industry.

00:14:28.880 | So that was a big one for me.

00:14:30.800 | And then going on adventures with my daughter,

00:14:34.160 | just me and her, and we have two now,

00:14:35.760 | but we would ride our bike.

00:14:37.120 | I'd put her on the back.

00:14:38.040 | We'd ride the bike.

00:14:38.880 | We'd hop on Caltrain.

00:14:40.160 | We'd ride like two stops on Caltrain.

00:14:42.440 | We'd get off.

00:14:43.360 | We'd go to the donut shop.

00:14:44.680 | We'd like buy a donut.

00:14:45.800 | And then we'd like bike back home.

00:14:47.400 | - That's so awesome.

00:14:48.240 | - It's like those adventures were so much fun.

00:14:50.320 | I have a bunch of other ones,

00:14:51.320 | but those are two I'll share.

00:14:52.640 | - And then the question to ask yourself,

00:14:54.200 | by the way, after you identify those activities,

00:14:56.920 | those people, the projects,

00:14:58.840 | is really, did I spend enough time on those?

00:15:01.880 | Go look at it.

00:15:02.720 | Was that like 2% of my time spent?

00:15:05.520 | And I was actually just spending the rest of my time

00:15:07.400 | on other stuff?

00:15:08.240 | Because that's a question that you then need to answer

00:15:10.280 | as you think about what your next year looks like.

00:15:12.440 | So for me, I probably have a somewhat similar one to you

00:15:16.120 | in that I get a ton of energy out of creative activities.

00:15:19.520 | And that's writing for me is a huge one.

00:15:22.600 | Conversations with smart, interesting people is another one.

00:15:26.160 | Extremely broadly, by the way,

00:15:27.440 | this isn't like talking to successful people

00:15:29.880 | is what I get excited about.

00:15:31.280 | I have fascinating conversations with Uber drivers,

00:15:33.960 | with people that are helping me

00:15:35.320 | with things around the house.

00:15:36.400 | I find that you can learn from almost anybody

00:15:39.720 | when you open up to it.

00:15:41.400 | And I get a ton of energy

00:15:42.600 | from hearing different people's stories,

00:15:44.520 | different people's struggles.

00:15:45.480 | It ends up inspiring a lot of the things

00:15:47.080 | that I end up writing about as well.

00:15:49.040 | So that's a huge energy creator for me.

00:15:51.040 | And then the last one is sort of productive leisure

00:15:54.280 | as a category.

00:15:55.360 | And I think about it, walking is a huge one for me.

00:15:58.280 | I probably averaged close to 20,000 steps a day in 2022,

00:16:02.720 | which was a huge number for me

00:16:03.960 | relative to anything I had done in the past,

00:16:06.160 | largely because my son would only sleep

00:16:08.320 | when he was taking on walks outside.

00:16:10.000 | And so it forced me to be outside a lot.

00:16:11.680 | And I just found that I was getting so much creative energy

00:16:14.760 | from walking and being out in nature.

00:16:16.600 | So that was another big learning for me.

00:16:18.480 | - To compliment that with what drained energy

00:16:20.200 | is the next one, right?

00:16:21.600 | - Yeah, and it goes in tandem.

00:16:22.880 | As we said, when you look at your calendar,

00:16:24.600 | you're figuring out what were the things

00:16:25.800 | that created energy.

00:16:26.640 | And then you're looking at the same time

00:16:27.920 | at what was the stuff that just drained me.

00:16:30.400 | For a lot of people, this tends to be stuff

00:16:32.440 | like back-to-back meetings, phone calls,

00:16:35.160 | the meetings to talk about future meetings,

00:16:37.720 | processing email, doing things

00:16:39.760 | that are sort of monotonous activities

00:16:42.320 | that happen to hijack your day a lot of the time.

00:16:45.200 | So figuring out what those activities are,

00:16:47.120 | what the trends are in them,

00:16:48.520 | and then figuring out if you allowed those

00:16:51.040 | to take over your entire day,

00:16:53.320 | or if you were able to sort of manage the balance

00:16:55.920 | that has to naturally exist across the energy creators

00:16:58.600 | and the energy drainers.

00:17:00.360 | - Funny enough, I think I took this

00:17:01.440 | in a slightly different perspective,

00:17:03.240 | which was it wasn't the back-to-back meetings, all that stuff.

00:17:06.720 | There were two things that I put here that I'll share.

00:17:08.520 | One was fitting our children into our old life.

00:17:12.760 | So my wife and I probably clocked in four, five, six,

00:17:16.120 | seven trips a year when we were kidless pre-pandemic.

00:17:20.800 | Whether they were weekend trips or drives

00:17:22.600 | or international trip.

00:17:23.640 | And I think we had a great time in December

00:17:26.560 | going to London and Paris with two kids.

00:17:28.640 | But I think trying to fit two small kids

00:17:32.560 | into the type of trip we would normally take

00:17:35.000 | actually drained a lot of energy.

00:17:36.760 | And I think we probably would have been better off

00:17:38.280 | trying to think about the trip,

00:17:39.640 | not from a how do we get the best of both worlds,

00:17:42.680 | but how do we maybe have one trip a year

00:17:45.360 | where we can get away on our own,

00:17:47.000 | and one trip where we're taking it in a way

00:17:49.680 | that doesn't require as much effort and burden.

00:17:53.600 | Especially when kids are napping one, two, three times a day.

00:17:56.960 | It's just you're not gonna have that same experience.

00:17:58.880 | So that was one.

00:18:00.320 | And the other one was social media,

00:18:02.560 | just feeling the need to put pressure to,

00:18:05.920 | oh, I gotta post this much, this many places.

00:18:08.360 | I was like, I found the content area that I love right now,

00:18:11.280 | which is recording a podcast, writing a newsletter.

00:18:13.240 | I really love those two things.

00:18:15.040 | But it drained me every time I was thinking,

00:18:16.880 | oh, how do I clip it to a short form video

00:18:18.960 | and post it here and here?

00:18:20.000 | We'll get to this later 'cause I have some other thoughts,

00:18:22.280 | but that was one where I think it just drained, it drained.

00:18:26.960 | Just trying to think about those things.

00:18:28.760 | - Yeah, that one drains a lot of people

00:18:30.640 | in the creator ecosystem.

00:18:32.360 | You can spread yourself way too thin

00:18:34.240 | across all of these different platforms

00:18:36.440 | and get a lot of FOMO about like,

00:18:38.480 | oh, it's growing their podcast a lot by doing this and this.

00:18:41.040 | On that platform, it's just, oh, I need to be doing that.

00:18:43.560 | And it just like pulls you in that direction mentally,

00:18:45.720 | and the cognitive load ends up being, it destroys you.

00:18:48.840 | Anything that drained you?

00:18:50.240 | - The biggest one for me is always calls and meetings.

00:18:52.880 | Calls and Zoom meetings, I should say.

00:18:54.760 | I love in-person meetings.

00:18:56.240 | And so my big takeaway was calls,

00:18:59.760 | like the get-to-know-you calls,

00:19:01.720 | I'm just not doing anymore.

00:19:03.240 | We're just not gonna do those.

00:19:04.440 | My way to make sure that I still have

00:19:06.600 | those get-to-know-you things is doing them in person.

00:19:10.160 | And basically, I'm an open book

00:19:13.000 | of meeting people in person in New York.

00:19:15.320 | And New York, fortunately, tends to be one of the places

00:19:17.800 | that basically everyone comes through

00:19:19.920 | at some point or another.

00:19:21.200 | And so if someone reaches out to me

00:19:22.400 | and they live in Vancouver and they wanna get together,

00:19:25.080 | and I'm not doing calls

00:19:26.360 | 'cause I'm not gonna do a get-to-know-you call,

00:19:28.480 | they tend to be coming to New York

00:19:30.080 | at some point within the next six months,

00:19:31.480 | and we will get together in person and meet that way.

00:19:33.880 | And it's been awesome so far

00:19:35.640 | since I started implementing the change.

00:19:37.320 | Just the energy of meeting someone in person,

00:19:39.360 | the friendships that get formed,

00:19:40.600 | it's just on a different level

00:19:41.760 | from the Zoom call that you end up leaving and saying,

00:19:44.360 | hey, we should get drinks sometime,

00:19:45.680 | and you end up never connecting

00:19:47.040 | with the person in the future.

00:19:48.280 | That, for me, is definitely number one going into this year.

00:19:51.240 | - Going into this year,

00:19:52.080 | the other thing I'm gonna do on that point is,

00:19:53.680 | if someone says, can we do a meeting?

00:19:55.180 | I'm just like, can we just do the phone call?

00:19:57.000 | Not every video call has to be a video call.

00:19:59.340 | If this wasn't a video call,

00:20:00.480 | I feel like maybe we wouldn't connect as well.

00:20:02.920 | But when we had a quick conversation before this,

00:20:05.280 | we did it on the phone and it was fun.

00:20:07.000 | - And you can do phone calls while walking, by the way.

00:20:09.320 | Huge unlock for me is just,

00:20:10.640 | I'll do phone calls while walking now when I need to.

00:20:12.960 | And it's a big unlock.

00:20:13.960 | You actually think more clearly

00:20:15.160 | when you're walking that way.

00:20:16.160 | Unless you need to be in front of your computer

00:20:17.640 | for a specific reason, walking meetings are awesome.

00:20:20.200 | - And if someone pushes back,

00:20:21.840 | if you wanna prevent the pushback,

00:20:23.300 | they're like, hey, let's do a video call.

00:20:24.700 | I say, hey, you know what?

00:20:25.800 | I find that when I'm doing a call on my computer,

00:20:27.760 | I'm a bit more distracted 'cause there's email popping up.

00:20:30.200 | So maybe we do a phone call and I'll just go on a walk

00:20:32.440 | and I'll be completely focused on you.

00:20:34.220 | How's someone gonna push back there?

00:20:35.600 | You're like, do you want my attention

00:20:37.200 | or do you want part of it?

00:20:38.040 | - And it's 100% accurate, by the way.

00:20:39.880 | Think about how many windows you typically have up

00:20:41.880 | during a typical Zoom call

00:20:43.240 | and how often you're checking the notifications

00:20:45.240 | that pop up in the screen or looking at the internet

00:20:47.160 | or your email or whatever it is.

00:20:48.400 | It's totally true.

00:20:49.580 | Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be.

00:20:54.040 | I get it.

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00:23:20.640 | Okay, question four.

00:23:22.320 | This is one of my favorites.

00:23:23.640 | What or who were the boat anchors in my life?

00:23:28.640 | And boat anchors is a term that I created,

00:23:31.040 | so I need to explain it.

00:23:32.040 | As you would expect,

00:23:33.240 | it is the thing that is creating drag on your life.

00:23:35.880 | When I think about boat anchors,

00:23:37.040 | I typically think about them as people,

00:23:39.000 | and these are the people that are trying to hold you back.

00:23:42.240 | It's the people that sort of snicker or laugh

00:23:45.120 | when you tell them what your ambitions are.

00:23:47.480 | It's the people who put down your accomplishments

00:23:49.640 | or try to say that they're not as impressive

00:23:51.800 | as they otherwise were.

00:23:52.640 | It's also the people who are saying that about others

00:23:55.080 | when you're talking to them,

00:23:56.240 | and they're putting down others

00:23:57.440 | just in the general context of conversation.

00:23:59.840 | These are boat anchors.

00:24:00.920 | These are people that are literally placing a drag

00:24:02.920 | on your progress and holding you back from achieving

00:24:05.360 | at the next level that you're trying to get to.

00:24:08.040 | So identifying who they are,

00:24:10.120 | sitting down and reflecting on the relationships

00:24:12.360 | and the things in your life

00:24:13.600 | that might be holding you back in that way

00:24:15.680 | is a huge part of this reflection process

00:24:18.760 | because developing a plan to start minimizing the impact

00:24:22.040 | that those people have in your life is really key.

00:24:24.800 | For the sake of not being boat anchors ourselves,

00:24:27.840 | I would say let's just skip through

00:24:29.240 | trying to talk about who these are in our lives,

00:24:31.320 | not be negative,

00:24:32.160 | but I do think this is a productive step.

00:24:34.600 | We all have these people.

00:24:35.880 | And so it's just being really clear.

00:24:37.480 | We don't need to talk about who ours are,

00:24:38.760 | but we all have these people in our lives

00:24:40.360 | and thinking about it clearly

00:24:42.400 | and sitting down and really reflecting on it.

00:24:44.240 | And it doesn't have to be that you tell the person,

00:24:46.280 | "Hey, you're cut out of my life, by the way."

00:24:47.800 | This is an important point.

00:24:48.960 | You can identify these people

00:24:50.120 | and just slowly minimize their role within your ecosystem.

00:24:54.560 | You don't need to hang out with them all the time.

00:24:56.560 | Maybe you don't need to touch base with them

00:24:58.080 | quite as much as you did,

00:24:58.960 | or tell them about the things that you're working on

00:25:00.960 | or thinking about.

00:25:01.840 | It's just figuring out a way to minimize the impact

00:25:04.400 | of their drag in your life.

00:25:06.560 | All right, question five.

00:25:08.560 | What did I not do because of fear?

00:25:11.480 | So this goes back to Tim Ferriss,

00:25:14.200 | who developed, I think it was in 4-Hour Workweek,

00:25:17.440 | the first time he talked about it,

00:25:18.360 | but then there's a very famous TED talk

00:25:20.040 | where he talks about it, fear-setting,

00:25:21.840 | which is generally the idea

00:25:23.720 | that we allow our fears to distort our reality

00:25:28.400 | and we build them up in our minds

00:25:29.960 | as much worse than they really are.

00:25:31.440 | And so the concept of fear-setting

00:25:33.160 | is to get much closer to your fears,

00:25:35.000 | to really deconstruct them and figure out,

00:25:38.160 | were they as bad as I thought?

00:25:39.800 | And what's the worst case that could happen?

00:25:41.360 | What's the upside if I actually go and do this

00:25:43.760 | and then proceed accordingly?

00:25:45.960 | So the whole idea is to go back and look at your year

00:25:48.240 | and figure out, what did you actually shy away from doing?

00:25:51.400 | And then think about, okay,

00:25:53.120 | well, let me break that fear down.

00:25:54.720 | How real was it?

00:25:56.040 | Because at the time,

00:25:56.880 | you just passed on the opportunity due to that fear.

00:25:59.840 | For me, this was just going full-time on all the hacks.

00:26:04.120 | And it was so funny because a friend of mine,

00:26:06.880 | shout out to Ben who worked with me at Wealthfront,

00:26:09.920 | who was like, why aren't you doing this?

00:26:11.680 | Like, why aren't you going full-time on this project?

00:26:14.560 | And I was like, well, if I were giving my friend advice,

00:26:17.680 | I would tell them that they need to go full-time on it.

00:26:19.600 | Like, it was so obvious.

00:26:21.240 | I could use all the mindset tactics

00:26:23.640 | that I've learned from interviewing smart people

00:26:25.720 | where it's like, oh, what would your friend say?

00:26:27.120 | If your friend says you should do it,

00:26:28.240 | then maybe you should take the advice.

00:26:29.400 | And I was like, well, I would give everyone advice.

00:26:31.040 | Like, you're at this point

00:26:31.920 | where this is the time to capitalize.

00:26:33.160 | And I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

00:26:35.320 | Part of it was like,

00:26:36.160 | oh, maybe I'll wait till the end of the year.

00:26:37.760 | Maybe I'll wait here

00:26:38.680 | and I'm on parental leave and all this stuff.

00:26:41.040 | And I'm happy that I did it,

00:26:43.320 | but I spent a decent amount of time

00:26:45.440 | trying to figure out why it took me so long.

00:26:47.920 | That was one that I just needed to break down

00:26:49.680 | and spend more time reflecting on.

00:26:51.200 | - The waiting for the perfect moment

00:26:52.760 | is the bias here that almost everyone has.

00:26:55.880 | We tell ourselves we're gonna do X at the perfect moment,

00:26:59.440 | and it's not the perfect moment now.

00:27:01.000 | And the reality is it's never the perfect moment

00:27:03.480 | to make those big leaps and to do those big jumps.

00:27:05.920 | I've written about this.

00:27:06.760 | Sometimes you literally just need to open the door

00:27:09.800 | and jump out and hope the parachute was packed tight

00:27:13.160 | and just make that leap.

00:27:14.800 | And so deconstructing your fears

00:27:16.120 | and going through this exercise is really helpful.

00:27:18.520 | I had the same one, by the way,

00:27:20.080 | when I was thinking about making the leap

00:27:21.640 | to full-time into these personal pursuits a year earlier.

00:27:24.680 | So in 2021, that was my thing that I held off on doing

00:27:28.720 | because of fear that ultimately sort of got forced upon me.

00:27:31.800 | But that was definitely mine in 2021.

00:27:34.120 | - The other one is, and I still have this fear,

00:27:36.840 | all of the businesses I've run

00:27:38.280 | have been venture capital-backed businesses

00:27:40.400 | where all the money you have as a company,

00:27:42.800 | it's not like you get to keep it.

00:27:44.160 | Basically, it's always in the company.

00:27:45.520 | So you're really motivated to spend it all

00:27:47.520 | to try to grow and build a really big company

00:27:49.640 | because the benefits to you only come

00:27:52.280 | if that company really succeeds.

00:27:54.000 | When you run a small business,

00:27:55.320 | which I'll call a podcast a small business,

00:27:57.440 | it's like if that podcast makes money, you get the money.

00:28:00.480 | That's how businesses that you own yourselves

00:28:02.040 | and you don't have investors work.

00:28:03.240 | And so one thing that I'm struggling with

00:28:05.600 | is to take that money and go reinvest it

00:28:09.160 | into the business, if you will.

00:28:11.400 | Hiring someone to help research or book guests

00:28:14.600 | or edit and produce.

00:28:15.920 | And I feel like I've been able to chip away

00:28:17.640 | at smaller pieces, but making a big investment

00:28:21.320 | is something that I haven't been able to do yet.

00:28:23.680 | And I see all these stories of successful business owners,

00:28:28.160 | not the venture capital startup founder kind of people,

00:28:30.440 | but the overwhelming theme is that they all reinvested

00:28:33.680 | in their business to grow it.

00:28:35.200 | And so it's like, I know I need to do it.

00:28:36.720 | I know I should do it.

00:28:37.560 | I would give my friends advice to do it,

00:28:39.440 | but it's so hard when it's basically

00:28:41.800 | like reinvesting your own money.

00:28:43.760 | And I think the mindset shift that I had

00:28:46.240 | that was so productive for personal savings

00:28:48.640 | was that every dollar I earned,

00:28:50.480 | I just immediately shelved in my brain

00:28:53.200 | as if it was my savings.

00:28:54.840 | So I know a lot of people, the way they budget

00:28:56.720 | or the way they spend money, they spend their money,

00:28:58.680 | but everything that's leftover, they save

00:29:00.440 | or they save 500 bucks a month

00:29:02.880 | and everything else they can spend.

00:29:04.680 | For me, 100% of the money was savings.

00:29:07.400 | And I treated every single purchase as if I was saying,

00:29:10.640 | do I want to dip into my savings to buy this coffee?

00:29:13.640 | Do I want to dip into my savings to have dinner out?

00:29:16.360 | That was my process, which made me incredibly frugal,

00:29:18.880 | probably not spend enough money and do enough things.

00:29:21.720 | Now, I have that same thing applied to business

00:29:23.920 | where it's like, do I want to dip into my savings

00:29:26.000 | to hire someone to do this thing?

00:29:28.600 | And it just makes it harder to spend money.

00:29:30.760 | That's interesting.

00:29:31.720 | I kind of did a structural thing from a business standpoint

00:29:35.400 | that might be useful for people

00:29:36.960 | that has been sort of a behavioral hack for me,

00:29:39.320 | which is I have an S-corp that's set up

00:29:41.680 | that has all of my kind of personal holding company

00:29:44.640 | entities running through it.

00:29:46.560 | And all I do is with an S-corp,

00:29:48.480 | you have to pay yourself a salary,

00:29:50.080 | a reasonable salary out of it.

00:29:51.280 | And so that reasonable salary is what

00:29:52.800 | covers all of our home expenses and our whole life

00:29:55.400 | and everything there.

00:29:56.360 | And so because of that, because it's two separate businesses,

00:29:58.960 | it runs from my S-corp that pays a salary out

00:30:01.640 | to our personal joint bank account as a family.

00:30:04.400 | I then just think of that S-corp bank account

00:30:06.760 | as it's the business, it's the working capital.

00:30:09.160 | And so everything there, in my mind,

00:30:11.160 | is segmented as totally separate.

00:30:13.720 | I need to think about reinvesting.

00:30:15.240 | What does it look like?

00:30:15.960 | What's the margin profile?

00:30:17.120 | What's the return on this investment, et cetera?

00:30:19.440 | And that's been a hugely helpful behavioral hack for me overall.

00:30:22.440 | So I just did my S-corp election at the end of the year.

00:30:26.000 | Smart man.

00:30:26.520 | So this is something that maybe will make it easier next year.

00:30:29.240 | Yeah, it definitely will.

00:30:30.320 | It definitely will.

00:30:31.160 | The salary thing definitely makes a big difference

00:30:33.200 | versus the LLC.

00:30:34.280 | Six, ready?

00:30:35.240 | Yep.

00:30:35.740 | Greatest hits and worst misses from the year.

00:30:38.800 | The reason for doing this one is because we are all

00:30:41.440 | swayed by our natural bias.

00:30:43.600 | So a optimist will see all the hits from the year.

00:30:46.280 | They'll look at their year and pat themselves on the back

00:30:48.640 | and say, wow, I had a great year.

00:30:50.000 | Look, this and this.

00:30:51.080 | And the pessimist stares at their year

00:30:53.440 | and says, oh my god, this was the worst.

00:30:55.760 | I had all these things go wrong.

00:30:57.120 | It was awful.

00:30:58.200 | Doing a actual explicit list of your hits and your misses

00:31:01.680 | forces you to be balanced and actually take

00:31:04.800 | a real look at the two sides of your life and success

00:31:07.680 | from a scoreboard standpoint.

00:31:09.160 | So writing them all down, I find, is hugely helpful.

00:31:13.120 | Which side do you skew on?

00:31:14.720 | I would say I skew towards being self-critical.

00:31:17.160 | I am-- it probably comes from my athletic background.

00:31:20.920 | Negative self-talk was always how I motivated myself

00:31:23.560 | athletically, which is a funny thing to say these days

00:31:25.880 | because everyone is very big on positive self-talk.

00:31:28.240 | I always motivated myself by telling myself

00:31:30.440 | it wasn't good enough or the things I was doing

00:31:32.360 | wasn't good enough.

00:31:33.160 | And as a result, if I sit down and think about my year,

00:31:35.440 | I tend to just glaze over the awesome things that happened

00:31:38.360 | and think about, oh, well, this didn't work out

00:31:40.360 | or I failed at this, quit this too early, whatever.

00:31:43.080 | And so it helps for me to zoom out and actually

00:31:44.960 | think about the wins to balance all of that out.

00:31:48.040 | What about you?

00:31:48.720 | When it comes to the future, I'm definitely in the optimist camp.

00:31:53.120 | I'm like, it's always going to work out.

00:31:55.200 | Kids are going to not even have jet lag when we travel.

00:31:57.960 | I'm always the one like, what's the brightest side of things?

00:32:00.440 | But when it comes to myself, I am always

00:32:03.480 | the person that's trying to find how to improve, at least

00:32:06.920 | crave the criticism.

00:32:08.400 | So if I'm cooking dinner for family

00:32:10.400 | and everyone's like, this is great, I'm like, sure.

00:32:12.560 | It's great.

00:32:13.040 | What wasn't great?

00:32:13.880 | Yeah, like, what could have--

00:32:15.400 | did it need a little more salt?

00:32:16.680 | Could I have cooked it a little longer?

00:32:17.940 | I know that I'm not Thomas Kell--

00:32:19.480 | I'm not a three Michelin star chef.

00:32:21.320 | So telling me that this is fantastic,

00:32:23.240 | I want to know how to make it better.

00:32:24.780 | It's weird.

00:32:25.280 | Forward looking, I'm much better at thinking optimistically.

00:32:28.980 | On myself and reflection, I'm more like, oh, god,

00:32:31.640 | I could have done this better.

00:32:32.920 | I definitely don't want honest feedback

00:32:34.640 | on my cooking from my family.

00:32:35.920 | Like, if I make steaks on the grill,

00:32:37.400 | I just want everyone to say, these are amazing.

00:32:39.160 | That's so funny.

00:32:39.840 | When everyone says these are amazing around our table,

00:32:42.160 | I get so frustrated.

00:32:43.280 | I'm like, no.

00:32:44.200 | There's no way that this is a perfect steak.

00:32:46.120 | What could have been better?

00:32:46.840 | Well, you're going to end up accelerating as a chef,

00:32:49.040 | and I'm going to kind of stay at my low baseline.

00:32:51.640 | That's OK.

00:32:52.200 | I probably shouldn't focus on my cooking as much.

00:32:54.120 | I'm clearly not going to have a profession in the culinary arts.

00:32:56.680 | That's a good one, though.

00:32:57.760 | OK, final question.

00:32:59.320 | What did I learn this year?

00:33:01.240 | This is just the best place to wrap these up for me,

00:33:03.880 | because it sort of captures everything.

00:33:06.240 | You just did all of these questions.

00:33:08.000 | You sort of boil it all down and sit down and write down

00:33:10.440 | a list of the things that you learned.

00:33:12.280 | And how did you grow?

00:33:13.320 | And how did you learn?

00:33:14.040 | And how did you develop during the course of the year?

00:33:16.240 | So I always find this to be a great way

00:33:17.920 | to kind of summarize the whole exercise

00:33:19.680 | and really have a set of key takeaways.

00:33:22.080 | So I did this one wrong.

00:33:23.680 | So I'm going to share my failed experience.

00:33:25.960 | What did you do wrong?

00:33:27.080 | I took it way too literally.

00:33:28.480 | And I was like, what did I learn?

00:33:29.280 | And I was like, oh, well, Nick Gray

00:33:30.760 | taught me how to throw a good cocktail party.

00:33:32.600 | That totally counts.

00:33:33.560 | I think that's great.

00:33:34.520 | Sure.

00:33:35.000 | OK, so maybe I didn't take it wrong.

00:33:36.560 | But what I didn't do was, what did

00:33:39.240 | I learn from going through questions one through six?

00:33:42.920 | I didn't do the tie it all up in a bow summary

00:33:45.440 | version of number seven.

00:33:46.920 | I did the, here are all the things I learned.

00:33:48.880 | And I was like, wow, I could just go to every podcast.

00:33:51.000 | I learned a bunch of stuff each episode.

00:33:52.680 | I just had this massive list of all these things I learned.

00:33:55.160 | What would have been maybe more effective, which I will

00:33:57.800 | probably do this afternoon or this evening,

00:33:59.680 | is let's take the previous six questions

00:34:02.920 | in this entire process and try to put a bow on the whole thing

00:34:06.080 | and what I learned and what that means for life ahead.

00:34:09.680 | Yeah, I think both are productive, to be honest.

00:34:11.840 | I love the fact that you went and learned

00:34:13.560 | how to throw a good cocktail party from Nick Gray, who's

00:34:15.640 | awesome and best in class at throwing cocktail parties.

00:34:17.960 | He threw an in-person event for Sam Parr and I

00:34:21.000 | that we hosted in New York this summer.

00:34:23.080 | And I've never seen something so well-coordinated

00:34:26.000 | and organized.

00:34:27.000 | It was amazing.

00:34:28.120 | That guy is world class.

00:34:29.960 | So that's a great one.

00:34:31.080 | I love that one.

00:34:32.040 | Obviously, we're talking about reflection.

00:34:33.760 | But I want to talk a little bit about the year ahead.

00:34:36.360 | But I do want to ask, you mentioned very briefly

00:34:39.000 | at the beginning things that made it easy for you

00:34:41.120 | to go back, like journaling or sending yourself emails.

00:34:44.720 | Are there things that people should

00:34:46.520 | be thinking about in the year ahead

00:34:48.880 | that will make this process easier in the future,

00:34:51.160 | whether it's a monthly review or journaling, things like that?

00:34:54.520 | Yeah, I do a monthly review that I think is super important.

00:34:58.680 | And I do this for a number of reasons.

00:35:00.280 | The biggest one for me is when you

00:35:02.040 | have a plan for the year, which if you're

00:35:03.960 | listening to this podcast, you're probably a planner.

00:35:06.680 | You probably like to set your course for the year

00:35:09.000 | at the beginning and figure out where you're heading,

00:35:10.840 | your North Star, if you will.

00:35:12.120 | But the biggest challenge with that is a year

00:35:14.040 | is just such a long time.

00:35:15.520 | And changing, you get the whole one in 60 rule

00:35:18.080 | that I think was in Atomic Habits is if you're off by one

00:35:20.400 | degree, you're going to miss your target by a mile

00:35:22.840 | for every 60 miles flown.

00:35:24.160 | And it's super, super impactful.

00:35:25.760 | And I think about it a lot.

00:35:27.280 | So I sit down at the end of every month.

00:35:29.240 | And I try to ask myself a set of questions

00:35:31.680 | and just reflect on the month from the past.

00:35:34.080 | What were the really important things in my life?

00:35:36.400 | Was I focusing on those?

00:35:37.800 | Did I actually spend time on the really important things?

00:35:40.280 | Or was my attention grabbed elsewhere?

00:35:42.400 | Are my daily systems, the things that I'm

00:35:44.200 | doing on a daily basis, actually in line and aligned

00:35:47.080 | with what my long-term goals are, my mid-term goals are?

00:35:50.160 | So I do sit down at the end of every month

00:35:51.960 | and try to either--

00:35:53.160 | for me personally, I like to write down by hand.

00:35:55.280 | Some people like using Notion or some digital tool

00:35:57.880 | or sending themselves an email.

00:35:59.360 | But for me, being able to have that then as a record

00:36:02.120 | that I can go back and look at, in addition to anything else

00:36:04.760 | I've collected from the year, like calendars, et cetera,

00:36:07.200 | tends to be a really helpful exercise.

00:36:10.280 | You've published, I think, somewhere that monthly review

00:36:12.520 | process.

00:36:13.040 | Is that right?

00:36:13.520 | Can we link-- we can link to that.

00:36:14.920 | Yeah, I released an annual planning guide

00:36:16.760 | after the annual review guide, which

00:36:19.400 | has my whole process for setting out the long-term goals.

00:36:23.200 | I think about checkpoint goals that

00:36:24.640 | are in between the daily systems that come there,

00:36:27.360 | the anti-goals, what we want to avoid, the Pyrrhic victory,

00:36:30.520 | like avoid winning the battle but losing

00:36:32.400 | the war with these goals.

00:36:33.600 | And then finally, how to think about tracking and adjusting,

00:36:36.200 | which is really that monthly review process.

00:36:38.200 | So I did have that out somewhere and people can find that.

00:36:40.720 | We can put it in the show notes.

00:36:41.840 | Perfect.

00:36:42.320 | And journaling is something that I haven't adopted as a habit,

00:36:45.440 | but it seems like the data out there

00:36:47.080 | is like it's a really good habit.

00:36:48.640 | It seems like everybody should be doing this.

00:36:50.680 | It's the best habit.

00:36:51.800 | I finally figured out how to do this.

00:36:54.200 | I spent five years-- to be honest, like five years--

00:36:57.400 | telling myself at the beginning of every year

00:36:59.360 | that I was going to become a journaler because of the impact

00:37:01.680 | that it has on your mental health and your ability

00:37:04.080 | to change course and reflect.

00:37:05.560 | And literally, I would come into the year--

00:37:07.920 | every year, I'd say I was going to do it.

00:37:09.760 | I would set up this complex journaling process

00:37:13.040 | with these fancy notebooks and these pens and all this stuff

00:37:15.600 | because that's just how I'm wired--

00:37:17.280 | and set aside 30 minutes a night to sit down and reflect

00:37:20.560 | and do all this stuff.

00:37:21.560 | And without fail, five days in, I would miss a day,

00:37:25.480 | and then the whole thing would get derailed,

00:37:27.320 | and I wouldn't journal for the rest of the year.

00:37:29.320 | And so I finally made progress and figured out

00:37:31.640 | a system that works by just simplifying it

00:37:33.840 | to a two-minute process where I just do--

00:37:36.240 | I call it my 1-1-1 method.

00:37:38.120 | And it's one win from the day, so one thing that went well

00:37:41.640 | that you did well, one point of tension, anxiety, stress,

00:37:45.600 | like one thing that's just on your chest

00:37:47.440 | that you need to get off and get down on paper,

00:37:49.560 | and then one point of gratitude.

00:37:51.060 | It can be as tiny as a smell that you really

00:37:53.320 | enjoy during the day, or it can be

00:37:54.720 | huge-- the health of your family, whatever it might be.

00:37:57.200 | But writing those three points down every single night,

00:38:00.080 | it has just been this enormous unlock for my life.

00:38:02.800 | And it's so simple that literally anyone can do it,

00:38:05.520 | and you don't have an excuse not to,

00:38:07.060 | because it can take one minute to go and sit down and write

00:38:09.560 | it.

00:38:10.060 | And if you are struggling on one of those three things,

00:38:13.520 | do you sit there and think it out, or do you just skip it?

00:38:16.240 | Or what advice would you give to someone who's like,

00:38:17.820 | God, I just can't think of something?

00:38:19.400 | I try to do it from complete word-dump mindset.

00:38:24.480 | I don't want to overthink it too much.

00:38:26.280 | I want to just do the first thing that comes to my mind,

00:38:28.280 | the first win that I can think of from the day.

00:38:30.240 | It can be as simple as, I got up at the time

00:38:32.240 | I said I was going to get up.

00:38:33.680 | Because it just gives you a nice pat on the back,

00:38:35.800 | where if you feel like you lost the day,

00:38:37.480 | you feel like you had a tough day,

00:38:38.920 | that first win that comes to your mind,

00:38:40.540 | and you can write it down, it's so impactful.

00:38:43.120 | And everyone has tension or stress.

00:38:46.360 | No one is ever going to be without one

00:38:48.160 | of those from a given day.

00:38:49.240 | You always had something.

00:38:50.480 | So it tends to be either the win or the point of gratitude

00:38:53.840 | is tougher.

00:38:54.600 | The win is usually the hardest for people.

00:38:56.640 | Open up the aperture of what qualifies

00:38:58.680 | as a win in your life, if you will.

00:39:00.600 | Everyone thinks it has to be some amazing big thing,

00:39:02.920 | but it can be as tiny as, I got up out of bed when I thought.

00:39:05.480 | I took a shower in the way that I wanted to.

00:39:07.920 | The smallest little thing can count as a win in your life.

00:39:10.840 | Last night, I had an apple instead of dessert.

00:39:14.000 | And for anyone who--

00:39:14.840 | Help, God.

00:39:15.720 | Yeah, I know.

00:39:16.240 | That's how I felt. It's that meme where you're like,

00:39:18.760 | oh, I felt like a hero.

00:39:20.760 | And I recorded an episode yesterday

00:39:22.360 | with Jordan Schlane, who's a doctor, and he's awesome.

00:39:24.840 | And we talked a lot about this.

00:39:26.160 | So I think that episode will have already come out

00:39:27.880 | by the time people hear this.

00:39:29.080 | So you'll know why I was so excited about eating an apple.

00:39:31.800 | But that would have been my win if I had written that down.

00:39:34.240 | It's a great one.

00:39:35.000 | Do you write it digitally or do you write it with a pen?

00:39:37.320 | I write with pen and paper.

00:39:38.560 | I just find the process of actually writing on paper

00:39:40.720 | to be pretty therapeutic.

00:39:42.320 | I have terrible penmanship.

00:39:43.640 | I need to get much better about that.

00:39:44.920 | Actually, when I tweeted this whole method out,

00:39:46.800 | I tweeted a picture of my journal

00:39:48.080 | and got dunked on by a bunch of people

00:39:49.640 | for how bad my handwriting is.

00:39:50.880 | But such is life.

00:39:52.400 | So that's one thing to take into 2023.

00:39:55.000 | But I know you wrote a post that I really liked, or a newsletter.

00:39:58.760 | You've been very good at, here's my content.

00:40:00.680 | If you want to consume it on Twitter,

00:40:01.920 | you can consume it here.

00:40:02.760 | You want to consume it on Instagram,

00:40:03.880 | you can consume it here.

00:40:04.720 | Or you can subscribe to the newsletter, which I do.

00:40:07.040 | And one was about 23 things to take into 2023.

00:40:10.320 | So I thought we would wrap this up and go through highlights.

00:40:14.760 | We'll put a link in the show notes.

00:40:16.240 | Subscribe to the newsletter for sure.

00:40:18.040 | But just a few of these things, since you broke them down

00:40:20.160 | into categories, what do you think?

00:40:21.600 | OK.

00:40:22.240 | Yeah, let's do it.

00:40:23.000 | All right, so your first category was work.

00:40:24.800 | I'll let you hit on a few, your favorites.

00:40:26.880 | If unprompted, great.

00:40:28.000 | And if not, I'll prompt you with a couple

00:40:29.720 | that I think are worth bringing up.

00:40:31.160 | OK.

00:40:31.760 | Well, the first one connects directly to the annual review.

00:40:34.120 | So I think it's a great one to start on,

00:40:35.480 | because it'll help people as they

00:40:36.960 | think about this coming year.

00:40:38.160 | I call this my energy calendar technique.

00:40:40.120 | It sounds like something from like Sedona, Arizona

00:40:42.360 | with crystals in the room.

00:40:43.640 | Yeah, you got the vortex, the Sedona vortex.

00:40:45.920 | I love that.

00:40:46.480 | Sedona is amazing, by the way.

00:40:47.680 | Everyone should go there at some point in their life.

00:40:49.280 | The energy calendar technique is basically

00:40:51.240 | a simple color coding strategy to figure out

00:40:54.560 | over the course of a week or two what

00:40:56.440 | it is in your life that's creating energy

00:40:58.240 | and what's draining energy.

00:40:59.480 | So the way I do it is take a week when

00:41:01.640 | you're going to do this, go through a workday.

00:41:04.440 | At the end of the day, look at your calendar

00:41:06.520 | and make changes to the color of the things on your calendar

00:41:10.360 | based on what created energy, what was sort of neutral,

00:41:13.120 | and what drained energy from you.

00:41:14.760 | And literally go change the color of those things

00:41:16.760 | on the day that just passed.

00:41:17.880 | So if something created energy, you mark it as green.

00:41:20.080 | If it was neutral, you mark it as yellow.

00:41:22.000 | And if it drained energy, you mark it as red.

00:41:24.280 | Do that every single day for a week, maybe two weeks,

00:41:27.560 | and then go back and look at it.

00:41:29.240 | And you'll immediately be able to viscerally, very clearly

00:41:33.480 | identify trends in what created energy in your life, which

00:41:36.920 | you need to amplify and try to spend more time on,

00:41:39.360 | what was neutral, which you can kind of continue to leave

00:41:43.000 | or potentially try to delegate, and then what was draining

00:41:46.280 | energy from your life.

00:41:47.360 | And with those, the whole idea is

00:41:49.560 | to start slowly working your way towards being

00:41:51.600 | able to delegate or delete those from your life.

00:41:54.360 | The one thing that I'm going to try with this

00:41:56.360 | is there are times, especially when you're

00:41:59.200 | working on your own schedule like I am,

00:42:00.820 | where I'll be doing something, but I

00:42:01.800 | didn't put it in my calendar.

00:42:03.160 | I'm not as good as others at time blocking

00:42:05.320 | the whole perfect day.

00:42:06.280 | But at the end of the day, it'd be really easy for me

00:42:08.440 | to be like, oh, for this hour, I researched this topic.

00:42:11.200 | So if you do it at the end of the day,

00:42:12.780 | it could be really quick.

00:42:13.880 | So I'm going to go in back and also add other things.

00:42:17.160 | I'm also bad, by the way, at time boxing.

00:42:19.160 | I think time boxing is near a all who is amazing.

00:42:22.340 | And I think it's a great technique for a lot of people.

00:42:24.640 | I really struggle with having like every minute

00:42:26.880 | of my calendar filled.

00:42:27.960 | Just optically, it intimidates me about the day.

00:42:30.120 | Even if a block literally says, go on a walk with your son,

00:42:34.080 | it's intimidating to me to see at the beginning of a day

00:42:36.680 | every minute filled.

00:42:37.720 | So I have huge open blocks.

00:42:39.560 | So I actually do exactly what you just said.

00:42:41.400 | I'll go back and say, oh, I did this piece of research here.

00:42:44.440 | I did this here, et cetera.

00:42:47.400 | I love helping you answer all the toughest questions

00:42:50.320 | about life, money, and so much more.

00:42:52.760 | But sometimes it's helpful to talk

00:42:54.560 | to other people in your situation, which actually gets

00:42:57.500 | harder as you build your wealth.

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00:45:35.680 | Well, speaking of walks, let's talk about taking breaks,

00:45:37.800 | 'cause I know that was in there, number four.

00:45:40.000 | This is all about attention residue,

00:45:41.560 | which is a concept that I think one of your prior guests,

00:45:44.400 | Cal Newport, has written about in the past

00:45:46.140 | that I've become somewhat obsessed with.

00:45:48.360 | Generally, just this idea that

00:45:50.160 | we're always context switching

00:45:52.300 | because of the world that we live in

00:45:54.000 | with constant notifications.

00:45:55.520 | So, you'll be working on something

00:45:56.920 | and then you decide to check your email.

00:45:58.640 | And when you check your email,

00:45:59.800 | there's this tiny cognitive load

00:46:02.160 | that is now stuck in that email

00:46:03.960 | when you come back to the work.

00:46:05.680 | And you're just getting spread thin.

00:46:07.340 | You're literally just like leaving

00:46:08.620 | your kind of mental capacity

00:46:10.200 | in all of these different places,

00:46:11.440 | in your messages, in your emails, et cetera.

00:46:13.120 | And so then, when you're going back

00:46:14.400 | and working on the really important thing,

00:46:16.140 | you're operating at like 60%

00:46:18.000 | of what your optimal mental capacity is.

00:46:20.060 | And obviously, as a result, your work is gonna suffer.

00:46:22.640 | So, this whole idea is we need to minimize

00:46:25.280 | the impact of attention residue.

00:46:26.960 | Attention residue is that actual scientific side of that

00:46:30.040 | when that happens and your attention

00:46:31.860 | is grabbed in different places.

00:46:33.200 | And taking breaks is really a key way to get around this.

00:46:37.120 | And so, the biggest way that I think most people

00:46:39.920 | can put this into their schedule and into their lives

00:46:42.640 | is schedule 25-minute meetings

00:46:44.720 | instead of 30-minute meetings.

00:46:46.140 | And immediately, you'll see a difference.

00:46:48.280 | Rather than having the context switch

00:46:50.440 | that comes from having back-to-back meetings

00:46:52.840 | that are just pushing you from one thing to the next

00:46:54.920 | when your mind is still in the prior meeting

00:46:56.760 | while you're in the new one

00:46:57.600 | or your mind's on the next meeting

00:46:58.800 | while you're in this one,

00:46:59.760 | you create an actual separation window.

00:47:01.960 | You can go for a quick walk.

00:47:03.320 | You can sit and just breathe.

00:47:04.880 | It has a massive impact immediately.

00:47:07.360 | And by the way, if anyone doesn't know this,

00:47:09.080 | it's a setting in Google Calendar

00:47:11.180 | to turn on speedy meetings,

00:47:12.560 | which takes 30-minute meetings, makes them 25,

00:47:14.760 | takes hour meetings, it makes them 50 minutes.

00:47:16.600 | So, you don't even have to work hard to do it.

00:47:19.620 | You could just enable the feature.

00:47:21.040 | And then, when you drag an hour-long meeting,

00:47:23.100 | it auto readjusts to 50 minutes.

00:47:25.600 | - That's a great hack, I love that.

00:47:27.080 | I think this pairs well with your number seven

00:47:30.220 | about batching email into Windows to process.

00:47:34.000 | - Yeah, this one has been a huge push for me personally,

00:47:37.520 | which is I just found myself constantly checking emails

00:47:40.800 | and texts throughout the entire day.

00:47:42.480 | And so, when I started really focusing

00:47:44.000 | on minimizing attention residue,

00:47:45.340 | I thought about what's the best way for me

00:47:46.920 | to minimize the impact that has.

00:47:49.400 | And what I did was I just set a one-hour block

00:47:51.840 | late in the day,

00:47:52.840 | which was when I was going to actually check email.

00:47:55.400 | And initially, I definitely wasn't perfect about it.

00:47:57.520 | I'm still not 100% compliant.

00:47:59.240 | I will still pop it open

00:48:00.460 | because I have the finance gene in me

00:48:02.820 | where I feel like I need to be on email 24/7.

00:48:05.820 | But having a window of discrete time

00:48:07.880 | when you're actually gonna process those emails

00:48:09.800 | allows you to minimize how it impacts

00:48:12.480 | the other parts of your day.

00:48:13.680 | And then also, you really focus on the emails

00:48:16.040 | and you think clearly about the things

00:48:17.560 | and the questions people are asking

00:48:18.800 | when you're working on them

00:48:19.660 | because that becomes the core thing

00:48:21.640 | that you're doing during that time,

00:48:23.120 | rather than it being just a little distraction

00:48:25.920 | and you're trying to process it

00:48:27.280 | as quickly as you can between meetings.

00:48:29.040 | So that one's really impactful.

00:48:30.480 | It depends on what your career track is

00:48:32.960 | and what you're working on

00:48:34.480 | to think about how many of those windows there need to be,

00:48:37.000 | how long they have to be.

00:48:38.240 | If you work in professional services,

00:48:39.760 | if you're a lawyer, if you're an investment banker,

00:48:41.480 | if you're a consultant,

00:48:42.840 | it's rich for you to think

00:48:44.600 | that you can have a one-hour window

00:48:46.160 | when you're doing email.

00:48:47.000 | It's ridiculous.

00:48:47.820 | I worked in finance.

00:48:48.660 | You can't do that.

00:48:49.480 | But can you have three of those windows during the day

00:48:52.440 | and get away with it?

00:48:53.280 | Probably.

00:48:54.120 | You could probably have one early in the day,

00:48:55.440 | one around lunchtime and one in the evening

00:48:57.640 | and be in a good spot

00:48:59.080 | where you're still getting those periods of deep work

00:49:01.280 | when you can really think about things,

00:49:02.940 | but then you also have those fixed times

00:49:04.880 | where you're processing and moving through stuff.

00:49:06.600 | So I think there's a happy medium for everyone to find

00:49:09.480 | that'll really optimize this.

00:49:10.980 | - I don't know the science behind this,

00:49:12.280 | but my gut would say

00:49:13.720 | that part of the reason we love checking our emails,

00:49:16.120 | 'cause every time something comes in,

00:49:17.700 | it's like someone's wanting to talk to you.

00:49:19.180 | There's this dopamine hit of seeing this thing.

00:49:21.640 | I can say that when you start batching your emails,

00:49:24.280 | you just increase the likelihood

00:49:26.000 | that some interesting thing is gonna be there

00:49:28.280 | every single time you check your email.

00:49:30.520 | So at the end of this recording,

00:49:32.760 | I'm gonna go check my email

00:49:33.920 | and I'm gonna be excited

00:49:35.280 | because I know that there's actually something interesting.

00:49:37.640 | Whereas when you're in the habit

00:49:39.000 | of checking your email all the time,

00:49:41.040 | 90% of those times, it's just some stupid spam thing.

00:49:44.960 | It's something unimportant.

00:49:46.080 | But now when I batch my emails,

00:49:48.040 | every time I check my email,

00:49:49.280 | if it's only two or three times a day,

00:49:50.920 | there's usually something valuable and interesting in there.

00:49:53.400 | So I actually get a lot of satisfaction

00:49:55.420 | when I've gone without email for a little while,

00:49:57.320 | is I get that dopamine hit of like,

00:49:58.760 | oh, there's one great thing every time.

00:50:01.280 | - You're a really positive guy.

00:50:02.480 | I like this about you.

00:50:03.320 | That's great.

00:50:04.140 | I'm a dread email guy.

00:50:05.240 | I'm trying to avoid the stressful thing

00:50:07.160 | that's coming into my inbox.

00:50:08.760 | - Oh, no, I'm excited.

00:50:09.800 | I'm like, what exciting thing could be here?

00:50:11.400 | - And by the way,

00:50:12.220 | doing the same thing with text messages

00:50:14.000 | has been a great change for me

00:50:15.680 | 'cause it's the same exact impact

00:50:17.200 | when you're checking texts throughout the day.

00:50:18.920 | My goal for 2023 is to try to do this with social media

00:50:22.360 | because popping open Twitter once an hour

00:50:24.760 | and looking at things and doom scrolling

00:50:26.640 | and seeing what notifications or who's yelling at you

00:50:29.520 | or sending you mean DMs,

00:50:31.080 | just like super, super counterproductive for deep work.

00:50:34.000 | - For Twitter, one thing I've done

00:50:36.000 | is just relentlessly unfollow.

00:50:39.040 | You don't even have to unfollow.

00:50:39.960 | You can mute a person so you can still DM them,

00:50:42.000 | but you don't have to see their tweets

00:50:43.200 | to the point that there's just not that many people

00:50:45.560 | in your feed.

00:50:46.400 | So your feed is something you can manage

00:50:48.320 | and actually maybe complete in the day.

00:50:51.040 | - Did you turn to the latest tweet setting

00:50:53.840 | or are you still on?

00:50:54.760 | 'Cause now that they've changed the algorithm,

00:50:56.760 | the home feed is tons of stuff of people you don't follow.

00:50:59.520 | - Yeah, so I still use TweetBot

00:51:01.240 | because I don't like that in the Twitter app

00:51:04.320 | and I don't like seeing sponsored tweets.

00:51:06.920 | So I still use TweetBot as my main Twitter app

00:51:10.840 | and there are reasons it sucks.

00:51:12.560 | It's delayed on getting notifications from DMs,

00:51:15.240 | but throughout this conversation,

00:51:16.760 | I'm wondering if maybe that's a good thing.

00:51:18.080 | I would love to see the Twitter app

00:51:19.880 | be something that I could use more regularly,

00:51:22.000 | but I don't use it much right now.

00:51:23.960 | - The hack here is you go to the little star icon

00:51:26.800 | in the top right of your Twitter thing

00:51:28.120 | and just change it to latest tweets

00:51:29.920 | rather than doing the home.

00:51:31.400 | And it means that it just does it in chronological order

00:51:33.720 | and it's basically only people you follow.

00:51:35.640 | And so that cleans up your feed immediately.

00:51:38.000 | You don't have all the stuff

00:51:38.960 | that Twitter is serving up to you.

00:51:40.360 | - Does it sync between platforms?

00:51:42.720 | - No, it doesn't.

00:51:43.560 | I literally just checked this

00:51:44.960 | 'cause I had my Mac OS Twitter app was on latest,

00:51:48.960 | but my phone is somehow not.

00:51:50.480 | I'm now gonna go fix that.

00:51:51.760 | - TweetBot for me,

00:51:52.600 | since I only follow a handful of people

00:51:54.280 | and they're like news sources and people,

00:51:56.080 | I could just go on my computer

00:51:57.480 | and it's like there are 12 unread tweets.

00:51:59.160 | I scroll up and then when I go to my phone,

00:52:00.960 | it jumps right to that same spot in the feed.

00:52:02.760 | But- - I love it.

00:52:03.600 | - Hopefully Twitter can get their act together.

00:52:05.040 | The one thing I'll add to this,

00:52:06.560 | so I guess by the end of this,

00:52:07.560 | it might be 26 things or 27 things to take into 2023,

00:52:11.120 | is from my reflections,

00:52:12.520 | which is just learn to outsource tasks

00:52:14.640 | to increase the ROI of your time.

00:52:16.320 | I will say, depending on what industry you work in,

00:52:18.560 | this may or may not be allowed.

00:52:20.160 | So check with your company.

00:52:21.280 | If you work for yourself, you have a lot more flexibility,

00:52:23.760 | but there are certainly tasks during the day

00:52:26.400 | that I'm sure someone else could do

00:52:27.880 | and give you more time to spend on the things

00:52:30.400 | that are the most high ROI for your time,

00:52:33.040 | especially if your company would support you,

00:52:34.800 | maybe hiring a virtual assistant

00:52:36.520 | to help do some of these things.

00:52:37.680 | I've seen a handful of examples of people,

00:52:39.680 | especially in sales,

00:52:40.960 | where they were able to hire people,

00:52:42.800 | their company wasn't gonna give them the budget.

00:52:44.520 | So they just personally freelance hired people

00:52:47.280 | and convinced the company that they should have the budget

00:52:49.360 | to bring this person on

00:52:50.600 | so that they could spend their time closing the deals

00:52:52.920 | and drive up the actual output they got,

00:52:55.760 | their salary went up,

00:52:57.000 | even net of what they had to pay out.

00:52:58.720 | So I think there are a lot of opportunities to outsource,

00:53:01.880 | to optimize where you spend your time.

00:53:04.080 | Yeah.

00:53:05.240 | All right, health?

00:53:06.200 | Health, all right.

00:53:07.200 | Well, there's a couple in here that are my go-tos.

00:53:09.960 | So the first one is something

00:53:11.320 | that I started doing in college,

00:53:12.760 | which I guess I will loosely call the 55530 method.

00:53:16.720 | And the reason I will loosely call it that

00:53:18.440 | is because someone else called it that.

00:53:20.480 | I put it in this like life hacks document

00:53:22.440 | that I did maybe six months ago,

00:53:24.160 | and then someone wrote a Twitter thread on it

00:53:26.240 | without citing me actually,

00:53:27.700 | because they thought that it was like a well-known method.

00:53:30.920 | And it was literally just something that I created

00:53:33.200 | and started doing in college that no one knows about.

00:53:35.760 | So it's pretty funny to me that it now has a name.

00:53:38.160 | But basically this is,

00:53:39.680 | as soon as you wake up and get out of bed,

00:53:41.880 | you do five squats, five lunges per leg,

00:53:45.360 | five pushups, and a 30 second plank.

00:53:48.360 | And all this does is just immediately sparks

00:53:51.600 | your energy and metabolism to start the day.

00:53:53.800 | It's like a simple thing, right?

00:53:55.440 | Five pushups.

00:53:56.280 | It's not like you're saying,

00:53:57.100 | "Oh, I'm gonna do 100 pushups as soon as I get out of bed."

00:53:59.120 | It's a low enough amount that it's not intimidating

00:54:01.600 | and you can force yourself to just quickly do it

00:54:03.520 | to start the day.

00:54:04.360 | You can do it while your coffee's getting made

00:54:05.680 | or literally as soon as you get out of bed.

00:54:07.440 | But it gives you this huge energy boost to start the day.

00:54:10.440 | And I think it's hugely impactful.

00:54:11.820 | I started doing it because we had

00:54:13.080 | these early morning baseball practices in college.

00:54:15.680 | And it's just a habit that's now stuck with me

00:54:17.480 | throughout my life.

00:54:19.000 | What else do you do in the morning?

00:54:20.480 | I'm curious.

00:54:21.320 | I think there are a few things in your health list

00:54:22.880 | that are morning routine.

00:54:23.920 | Yeah.

00:54:24.920 | I get out of bed.

00:54:26.880 | I drink a whole bunch.

00:54:28.560 | I keep a cold water on my bedside table.

00:54:30.640 | So as soon as I wake up, I drink a whole ton of water.

00:54:33.280 | I do the five, five, five, 30 really quickly,

00:54:35.760 | just like on the floor on the side,

00:54:37.320 | trying to stay quiet 'cause I wake up earlier than my wife.

00:54:39.960 | And then I go get in a cold plunge.

00:54:41.860 | So this is a new ad.

00:54:42.900 | I got the cold plunge in July of 2022

00:54:46.420 | and have done every single day since,

00:54:48.460 | three to seven minutes in it every morning at 39 degrees.

00:54:51.380 | And that's been probably the biggest impact in my life

00:54:53.780 | of a single thing that I've added to my routine

00:54:55.740 | in the last like five or 10 years.

00:54:57.220 | I've experienced just a massive set of benefits

00:54:59.540 | in terms of energy and in terms of the dopamine rush

00:55:02.420 | that I get from it.

00:55:03.260 | The surge that just lasts for hours

00:55:05.140 | that just makes me feel superhuman

00:55:06.860 | during the early part of my day.

00:55:08.260 | That's been the big ad for me.

00:55:09.900 | - Yeah, we've just created a space in our home

00:55:12.900 | where a cold plunge will one day go.

00:55:15.000 | - I don't know enough of the science to say like

00:55:18.160 | the brown fat and the metabolism and the immunity.

00:55:20.560 | And there's all this research.

00:55:21.800 | Dr. Huberman has talked about it, I think on an episode

00:55:24.920 | that shows all of these great health benefits.

00:55:26.960 | But if nothing else other than the dopamine rush

00:55:29.800 | and the feeling of doing something hard

00:55:31.840 | that makes the rest of the day feel easier,

00:55:34.220 | it would be worth it too.

00:55:35.120 | I've absolutely loved it.

00:55:36.200 | I think it's phenomenal.

00:55:37.760 | - Awesome.

00:55:38.600 | Anything else you do in the morning?

00:55:39.640 | Well, number nine was about a tech free walk.

00:55:42.680 | - Oh yeah, this is with my son now,

00:55:44.720 | which is even better on all of this.

00:55:46.720 | But waking up in the morning, doing those things

00:55:48.880 | and then just going out and getting sunlight.

00:55:50.520 | Again, this is like goes back to a thing

00:55:52.160 | that Dr. Huberman has talked about a lot,

00:55:53.720 | the impact of getting sun first thing in the morning.

00:55:56.200 | And that can be on a cloudy day,

00:55:57.720 | you just have to stay out longer, there still is sun.

00:55:59.880 | But having that kind of just being able to breathe,

00:56:03.080 | not having your phone on you so that you're not looking

00:56:05.560 | and checking messages, checking email,

00:56:07.720 | checking social media, et cetera.

00:56:09.440 | Is a great way to start your day,

00:56:11.000 | set your body in the right direction.

00:56:12.720 | It improves your mood, it improves your sleep,

00:56:14.860 | the next night, a whole host of health benefits.

00:56:17.640 | But for me personally, just from a cognitive standpoint,

00:56:20.160 | to start my day with a feeling of breathing and creativity,

00:56:23.200 | it has been a great habit.

00:56:24.680 | - I'm gonna add a couple, I'll do them quick

00:56:26.240 | 'cause they're actually four.

00:56:27.360 | And most of them came from this conversation I had

00:56:29.800 | about health a couple weeks ago.

00:56:31.280 | Technically I had a day ago,

00:56:32.220 | but by the time you're listening to this,

00:56:33.600 | it'll be a couple weeks ago.

00:56:35.040 | So one, we talked about how one of the most valuable things

00:56:37.800 | you could do is just time-restricted eating.

00:56:39.680 | So you call it intermittent fasting,

00:56:41.720 | you can call it whatever you want,

00:56:42.560 | but just keeping your eating window to a smaller time.

00:56:45.040 | That's something that I had done for a while,

00:56:47.020 | took a pause in the holidays

00:56:48.520 | and hopefully will bring back this year.

00:56:50.840 | Another is we talked about Jordan, who I spoke with,

00:56:53.600 | was like one of his diagnostic things

00:56:55.480 | is going through who are you

00:56:56.620 | and just collecting the basic data

00:56:58.280 | and diagnostics about your health.

00:57:00.720 | So I'm gonna encourage a lot of people

00:57:02.320 | who haven't done this to consider it,

00:57:04.600 | which is just like get your basic metabolic panel.

00:57:07.400 | Like your blood work done.

00:57:08.680 | I know a lot of us, when we're young,

00:57:10.000 | we're like, ah, everything seems fine,

00:57:12.080 | but trying to figure out,

00:57:13.280 | is there an area you need to work on?

00:57:15.080 | For me, it was cholesterol.

00:57:16.560 | That's my area right now,

00:57:18.000 | but for everyone else, it could be different.

00:57:19.440 | So just doing that.

00:57:20.320 | There are some great companies

00:57:21.400 | that can support that, by the way.

00:57:22.680 | You can look up the different ones.

00:57:23.700 | I'm not affiliated with any,

00:57:24.880 | but I've used InsideTracker in the past.

00:57:27.320 | It's relatively pricey, but it's an incredible experience.

00:57:30.220 | And they have a great kind of dashboard

00:57:31.720 | that allows you to track it over time as well.

00:57:33.560 | They are a partner of the show, so everybody gets 20% off.

00:57:36.160 | So bring that price down a little.

00:57:37.680 | Another one he pointed out was stop using alarms.

00:57:41.280 | And this'll be interesting one to hear your reaction to,

00:57:43.360 | 'cause I know you wake up early.

00:57:44.360 | And he said, switch from a wake-up alarm to a bedtime alarm.

00:57:47.320 | Once you learn how much sleep your body needs

00:57:49.520 | to naturally wake up,

00:57:50.960 | then instead of setting your alarm for 5 a.m.,

00:57:53.400 | which I think is something you do,

00:57:54.600 | figure out how much sleep you need

00:57:55.680 | and set your go-to-bed alarm,

00:57:57.160 | because there's just so much magic that happens

00:57:59.720 | while you're asleep that interrupting that process

00:58:02.720 | can have an impact on your health.

00:58:04.180 | And if you could force that to be different,

00:58:05.960 | that's better.

00:58:06.800 | So I actually don't use an alarm in the morning

00:58:08.800 | because I've gotten pretty good at waking up naturally

00:58:11.680 | around the same time,

00:58:12.560 | as long as I go to bed at the right time.

00:58:14.380 | That's an interesting one.

00:58:15.360 | I've always just loved alarms.

00:58:17.680 | So I'm not trying to take it away, just switch.

00:58:20.000 | I originally needed them

00:58:21.760 | because I just wasn't sleeping enough.

00:58:23.040 | And so I just needed to get up early.

00:58:24.360 | When I was working in finance in my early days,

00:58:26.000 | I was getting up at like 3.45,

00:58:27.760 | going to bed probably by 10.30.

00:58:29.480 | I just wasn't sleeping enough for like a period of six years.

00:58:31.800 | I've recently, over the last year and a half,

00:58:33.800 | started taking sleep very seriously.

00:58:35.560 | And now I just have a grandpa schedule, man.

00:58:37.400 | I'm asleep by 8.30 and I'm up by between four and five,

00:58:41.360 | depending on the day.

00:58:42.520 | And I get my seven to eight hours and I feel great.

00:58:45.080 | And I wake up and I don't have an issue with it,

00:58:46.860 | but maybe I should experiment with it.

00:58:48.320 | And then the last was along the lines of that apple.

00:58:50.840 | I had this like negative impression of fruit

00:58:53.440 | my whole like last few years.

00:58:55.280 | I was like, well, fruit has sugar.

00:58:56.440 | If fruit is sugar, can't be good for you.

00:58:58.720 | And if I'm going to have sugar, why not eat a cookie?

00:59:01.040 | My wife has told me that was crazy forever.

00:59:03.240 | And we finally dug into the science behind it.

00:59:06.000 | And it's like, fruit is actually pretty good.

00:59:07.440 | There are some fruits that are not as good as others.

00:59:09.680 | Like I think a mango,

00:59:11.120 | especially when it's dried or in juice form,

00:59:13.560 | is maybe more like a soft drink than something.

00:59:16.520 | But I'm going to try as part of this cholesterol plan

00:59:20.560 | to replace dessert with like fruit and dark chocolate.

00:59:23.560 | It's a great approach, by the way, for limiting calories.

00:59:25.600 | Like you get the sweetness hit,

00:59:26.960 | but you don't have the negative impact.

00:59:28.800 | So I love that one.

00:59:29.640 | That's a great ad.

00:59:30.460 | And the amount of fiber in an apple,

00:59:31.440 | like you just can't have five apples.

00:59:33.240 | Like I can tell everyone listening from experience,

00:59:35.360 | you can have five cookies.

00:59:36.720 | Like it is a physically possible thing.

00:59:38.600 | I don't think I could eat five apples.

00:59:40.240 | No, you definitely couldn't.

00:59:41.280 | And by the way, this all goes to one of my health hacks,

00:59:43.400 | which is to just do all of your shopping

00:59:44.960 | on the outer perimeter of the grocery store.

00:59:46.840 | If you just do that, you will immediately get healthier,

00:59:50.440 | lose weight, be in better shape, et cetera,

00:59:52.520 | because all of the good stuff is on the outer aisles

00:59:54.840 | and all the bad stuff is on the inner aisles.

00:59:56.840 | One fun financial kind of psychological money hack

01:00:00.720 | that I learned in an episode a long time ago

01:00:03.400 | was that if you walk the grocery store in the reverse order,

01:00:07.720 | on average, people save, I can't remember the percent,

01:00:10.160 | but they spend less.

01:00:11.080 | Because like the grocery stores, you think it's like,

01:00:12.800 | oh, they managed to put this thing on this aisle.

01:00:14.480 | It's like, no, they very meticulously engineered

01:00:17.600 | every aspect of your grocery store

01:00:19.640 | for you to spend the most amount of money possible.

01:00:22.080 | And just by going to the back

01:00:23.720 | and working your way around the other way,

01:00:25.880 | you will avoid certain marketing things,

01:00:28.160 | certain various elements that are trying

01:00:30.600 | to get you to spend.

01:00:31.440 | - It's like Ikea, man.

01:00:32.560 | Ikea has that maze that you have to go through at the end

01:00:34.760 | that is so perfectly engineered

01:00:37.120 | to make you buy shit you don't need.

01:00:39.440 | - I remember one time we were like,

01:00:40.280 | we just need to find an accent chair.

01:00:41.920 | And I was like, it is so hard to get to anywhere in Ikea

01:00:45.440 | without following the map.

01:00:47.240 | Like, there's like a couple like hidden doors.

01:00:49.720 | You're like, can I go through this?

01:00:50.680 | I just need a chair.

01:00:51.640 | - Oh, so good.

01:00:52.480 | - So that's health.

01:00:53.300 | Jordan and I actually talked about

01:00:54.140 | doing some follow-up episodes.

01:00:55.280 | So I wanna get more serious on that this year.

01:00:57.640 | I'm excited for Peter Attia's book,

01:00:59.120 | "Outlive" coming out later this year.

01:01:00.880 | All right, let's talk about personal

01:01:02.200 | before we wrap and money.

01:01:03.680 | - I just wanna thank you, Quik,

01:01:06.060 | for listening to and supporting the show.

01:01:08.360 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

01:01:11.200 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals,

01:01:13.900 | and discounts from our partners,

01:01:15.680 | you can go to allthehacks.com/deals.

01:01:19.220 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

01:01:22.460 | - Okay.

01:01:23.300 | Personal, again, going back to one of your prior guests,

01:01:26.820 | Cal Newport, I think this is back in college.

01:01:29.400 | I first read this from him.

01:01:30.520 | He had a blog piece about like a shutdown ritual

01:01:33.660 | or something like that.

01:01:34.820 | I call it a power-down ritual,

01:01:36.220 | but basically creating a very fixed separation

01:01:39.240 | between your professional life and your personal life

01:01:41.580 | is something that you can do

01:01:42.660 | that immediately improves your mental health

01:01:44.580 | and has definitely had an impact on my life.

01:01:46.820 | This is like establishing a sequence of events

01:01:50.940 | that you do at the end of your day

01:01:52.780 | that mentally and literally marks the end of your workday.

01:01:56.820 | So it might be like checking messages for the last time

01:01:59.460 | and firing off any last emails that you need to set.

01:02:02.180 | Might be doing the little bit of prep

01:02:03.980 | for your next morning's work

01:02:05.340 | to kind of set yourself up to hit the ground running.

01:02:07.460 | Might be checking Slack.

01:02:08.540 | Whatever it is, you kind of do this one set sequence

01:02:11.420 | of a couple of events.

01:02:12.580 | And then in Cal's original blog piece,

01:02:14.680 | he actually advocated saying something out loud,

01:02:17.460 | like having kind of like a nerdy,

01:02:18.980 | actual like shutdown sequence initiated thing

01:02:21.780 | that triggers in your mind that the day is over.

01:02:24.260 | And the whole goal is that

01:02:25.360 | once you do this shutdown sequence, you're off.

01:02:27.700 | You're not checking email.

01:02:29.100 | You're not going and looking at things.

01:02:30.860 | That's it for the day.

01:02:31.980 | And it's just a really helpful practice,

01:02:33.540 | especially in this hybrid and remote work world

01:02:36.100 | that we're living in where it's so easy

01:02:37.740 | to let professional and personal blur.

01:02:39.820 | I don't have a ritual yet.

01:02:40.980 | And I think people learn this when you have kids.

01:02:42.820 | It's like, you wanna have your quality family time

01:02:45.540 | 'cause you're working during the day.

01:02:46.860 | You kind of have to do this, but I don't have a ritual.

01:02:49.460 | And I feel like I'm gonna bring that one into this year.

01:02:51.900 | So it's a good one.

01:02:52.740 | I like that.

01:02:53.580 | Two more for you really quick on the personal side.

01:02:55.540 | If you're in a relationship,

01:02:56.860 | tell your partner one thing you appreciate

01:02:59.260 | about them every single night.

01:03:01.460 | And this can be the tiniest thing.

01:03:03.180 | It can be like, I appreciate how you picked up that one thing

01:03:06.340 | or how you let me know about X, Y, or Z.

01:03:08.760 | Just tell them one small thing

01:03:10.700 | because as relationships go on,

01:03:12.120 | it's really easy to just not think about all the good

01:03:15.260 | and to just have the stressful or the tension

01:03:17.420 | or the anxiety be the things that you hold in your mind.

01:03:20.420 | And doing this every night has had a really positive impact

01:03:23.340 | on my wife and my relationship.

01:03:24.940 | And then the last one,

01:03:27.740 | take yourself out for more meals alone.

01:03:30.340 | I do this once a month without fail,

01:03:32.500 | either a lunch or a dinner, dinner preferably,

01:03:35.060 | although probably doesn't happen quite as often now

01:03:37.220 | with the little guy.

01:03:38.380 | But just go out to a restaurant by yourself.

01:03:40.720 | It can be your favorite place or it can be a new place.

01:03:42.900 | Don't bring any technology or just keep it in your pocket,

01:03:45.300 | put it on airplane mode.

01:03:46.600 | You can bring a book, you can bring a notebook

01:03:48.400 | if you wanna journal and write things,

01:03:50.140 | but just sit by yourself and allow yourself

01:03:52.860 | to sort of be bored and just observe the world around you

01:03:56.860 | and have a nice meal by yourself.

01:03:58.500 | Huge unlock that not enough people are doing.

01:04:01.140 | I love this one.

01:04:01.980 | I'll share one that's similar for people with family.

01:04:04.940 | And it's, if the theme of yours was,

01:04:06.940 | you don't always have to eat with your partner

01:04:09.260 | or with someone else, you can eat by yourself.

01:04:10.820 | Mine is you don't always have to spend

01:04:12.420 | all of your family time with all of your family.

01:04:15.100 | You mentioned you'd take walks with your son.

01:04:17.080 | I think that it's important to have quality time

01:04:19.760 | as a family and it's also important to have quality time

01:04:22.320 | with people in your family together without everyone else.

01:04:25.880 | So that's for us, I would say,

01:04:27.760 | encourage people to find a way to get childcare,

01:04:30.220 | to go on a date, even if it's a lunch date

01:04:32.400 | in the middle of the day or dinner or something.

01:04:34.240 | And then also with your kids alone.

01:04:36.240 | Like I take my daughter on an adventure.

01:04:38.040 | So my wife and I are talking about what we wanna do

01:04:40.500 | with our family in the future and taking a trip

01:04:43.160 | with each kid without the other kid

01:04:45.800 | is something we wanna do.

01:04:46.820 | And spending time with lots of different

01:04:48.300 | like one-on-one stuff is also really important.

01:04:50.500 | So that's one that I wanna take into 2023.

01:04:53.440 | All right, last section is money.

01:04:56.120 | All right, money.

01:04:57.140 | I just had three in there.

01:04:58.340 | We can hit them rapid fire.

01:04:59.740 | First one is automate a direct deposit

01:05:02.260 | into an investment account

01:05:03.580 | that you basically never look at.

01:05:05.180 | One should do this.

01:05:06.060 | I mean, this is just like an absolute financial no-brainer.

01:05:08.400 | Allow the money to just compound.

01:05:10.060 | Don't think about how much money's in it.

01:05:11.540 | Just set some low number

01:05:13.020 | that feels not super stressful to you

01:05:15.220 | that automatically goes out in a direct deposit

01:05:17.940 | into this investment account every single month.

01:05:20.220 | Let compounding work for you.

01:05:21.580 | Number two, automate all the simple financial tasks

01:05:24.900 | in your life.

01:05:25.820 | I used to be a type of person

01:05:27.500 | that would just check all of my different bills

01:05:30.660 | and look at all the numbers and pay them all manually

01:05:33.100 | 'cause I figured someone was gonna be trying

01:05:34.580 | to screw me over.

01:05:35.780 | It never once happened.

01:05:37.360 | And I was just wasting a whole bunch of mental energy

01:05:39.500 | by going and looking at these things every month.

01:05:41.260 | So automating all of your bill payment and credit cards,

01:05:44.500 | investing, et cetera,

01:05:45.800 | anything that's pulling your mind away

01:05:47.540 | from things that really matter is easily automatable.

01:05:50.700 | And then the last one for me

01:05:51.900 | is this rule I have around material purchases,

01:05:54.960 | which is a way to save money and build wealth.

01:05:57.820 | Make a 48-hour rule about material purchases,

01:06:00.780 | which means if you put something in a shopping cart,

01:06:03.860 | walk away, and 48 hours later, come back.

01:06:06.660 | If you still want the thing, buy it,

01:06:08.740 | and there's no issue with that.

01:06:10.380 | But most of the time, you're gonna realize

01:06:12.180 | that the material purchase

01:06:13.260 | that you had put in your shopping cart 48 hours later,

01:06:15.460 | you've thought about it and you don't go buy.

01:06:17.340 | So it's a behavioral hack

01:06:18.660 | for avoiding the unnecessary purchases

01:06:21.340 | that we don't really need.

01:06:22.580 | And if you can invest that money instead, even better.

01:06:25.740 | I like it.

01:06:26.580 | I do both the first thing and the second thing.

01:06:28.380 | So I love all the automation.

01:06:30.100 | I'm not as diligent about putting in your shopping cart,

01:06:32.740 | but I'll add mine, which is everyone knows

01:06:35.020 | that's listening to this show that has in the past.

01:06:37.200 | When you're about to check out on something,

01:06:38.780 | go find all the ways you could save money for it.

01:06:40.300 | Ask LiveChat for the discount.

01:06:42.100 | Use Rakuten or some other platform to get cash back.

01:06:45.820 | See if you could buy gift cards at a discount.

01:06:47.620 | Use the right card.

01:06:48.500 | Obviously, we're all doing those things.

01:06:49.940 | Especially on miso soup, by the way.

01:06:51.620 | Yeah, you could save money on that $4.

01:06:53.380 | I'm gonna add two others.

01:06:55.380 | One is if you're not already tracking

01:06:57.460 | and organizing something in an automated way, do that.

01:07:00.540 | So I have two or three primary platforms for this.

01:07:04.260 | So I worked at Wealththreat for a while.

01:07:05.940 | People know that.

01:07:06.780 | They have a free way that you can link all of your accounts,

01:07:08.860 | see your net worth all in one place.

01:07:10.940 | I also use a product called Kubera,

01:07:13.620 | which is, I would say, if you want the free version,

01:07:15.940 | Wealththreat does a great job.

01:07:17.020 | If you want the full bells and whistles pro version,

01:07:20.140 | I think Kubera is best in class.

01:07:22.260 | Tracks all of your accounts across all places.

01:07:25.060 | It works well with everything from manual assets

01:07:28.300 | to crypto to real estate and everything.

01:07:30.660 | So I think it's a great product.

01:07:32.540 | And I use Trustworthy for managing all of life's stuff.

01:07:37.980 | So where are our old tax returns?

01:07:40.140 | Where are all of our COVID vaccine cards,

01:07:42.620 | our social security cards?

01:07:43.700 | I put all of our life stuff there.

01:07:45.500 | They've built like the family operating system.

01:07:47.660 | There is a price.

01:07:48.860 | But when you just think about the overhead you have

01:07:51.540 | of trying to manage and find and store all of this stuff,

01:07:54.820 | it's not worth it for me.

01:07:56.060 | So those are two things to just set up some organization

01:07:59.260 | for where's your money, what's your net worth,

01:08:01.420 | what are all your accounts, all that.

01:08:03.300 | And then the other is for 2023,

01:08:06.100 | this is mostly for people with kids,

01:08:08.300 | but knock off the two big tasks

01:08:09.660 | that every single parent I know punts on,

01:08:11.860 | which is setting up a will or a trust or something like that

01:08:15.540 | and setting up life insurance.

01:08:16.980 | Those two things are things that have been bogging you down.

01:08:19.900 | Like go get them done in 2023

01:08:21.980 | because they're just like so, so, so important.

01:08:25.140 | That's my recommendation for two things on the money side

01:08:27.540 | to bring into the year.

01:08:29.340 | I need to check out Kubera.

01:08:30.500 | This sounds really interesting.

01:08:31.580 | I've always looked for something like this.

01:08:32.940 | I'm gonna go check it out.

01:08:33.780 | Awesome.

01:08:34.620 | Is it an Indian company?

01:08:35.540 | 'Cause I think it's derived from the God of wealth.

01:08:38.300 | The founder, I believe has family is from India

01:08:41.460 | or is from India.

01:08:42.300 | I don't remember.

01:08:43.140 | Okay, cool.

01:08:43.960 | Yeah, it's a great name 'cause it's the God of wealth.

01:08:45.260 | So Kubera is awesome.

01:08:46.380 | By the time this episode comes out,

01:08:47.860 | they will be a partner of the show

01:08:48.980 | and we'll have a discount for you.

01:08:50.340 | If not, go to allthehacks.com/deals

01:08:52.540 | and it should be there.

01:08:53.900 | That's it.

01:08:54.740 | We covered a lot.

01:08:55.580 | You say that's it.

01:08:56.420 | Oh, man.

01:08:57.420 | I think that's it for now, actually,

01:08:58.780 | because you've written all these amazing posts,

01:09:01.020 | one on razors, paradoxes.

01:09:02.500 | And I was like, we should go through all this.

01:09:03.740 | And I was trying to plan for this episode.

01:09:05.380 | And I'm really glad we didn't try to fit all that in here.

01:09:07.580 | Oh, man.

01:09:08.420 | 'Cause it would have just been one of those

01:09:09.340 | like run through everything, no depth, no value.

01:09:12.260 | So I think we got to have you back on

01:09:14.300 | and we can run through a few of the other things

01:09:16.100 | you've written about that I think would be really valuable

01:09:17.900 | to talk through.

01:09:19.020 | I would love to do it, man.

01:09:20.180 | This was a blast.

01:09:21.020 | It was really fun getting to actually talk

01:09:22.300 | through this live.

01:09:23.140 | I haven't gotten to do this.

01:09:23.960 | I'm excited to get everyone's feedback

01:09:25.540 | and hopefully people come away with a few things

01:09:27.540 | that changed their life this year.

01:09:28.780 | I love it.

01:09:29.620 | One thing that I like to ask everyone,

01:09:31.020 | which I paused in the last interview,

01:09:32.380 | I don't know why I forgot,

01:09:33.740 | was is there a place, whether it's where you're from,

01:09:36.940 | where you travel a lot, that you know a lot about,

01:09:39.440 | that if someone were going to for a day,

01:09:41.420 | you'd tell them here's a place to eat,

01:09:43.140 | here's a place to have a drink,

01:09:44.120 | or here's something unique to do?

01:09:45.720 | Yes.

01:09:46.560 | So in Bangalore, India, which is where my mother's from,

01:09:49.420 | that I've spent a ton of time in over the years,

01:09:51.460 | there is an amazing restaurant at this pretty old hotel,

01:09:54.960 | which is now called ITC Windsor.

01:09:57.060 | The restaurant is called the Royal Afghan

01:09:59.060 | and it is my favorite meal in the entire world.

01:10:02.220 | The best naan that I've ever had.

01:10:04.620 | And they have a dish called dal bukhara that is unbelievable.

01:10:08.380 | So that would be mine, the Royal Afghan in Bangalore, India.

01:10:11.060 | Anything else you'd say?

01:10:12.060 | If someone's going all the way to India,

01:10:13.380 | they're going to the Royal Afghan,

01:10:14.820 | how should they spend the rest of their day?

01:10:16.540 | Oh man, just take in the culture.

01:10:18.500 | If you've never been to India,

01:10:19.660 | it is an unbelievable and very different experience.

01:10:22.560 | The smell will last with you forever.

01:10:24.620 | It is a very distinct smell

01:10:26.060 | when you get off the plane in India.

01:10:27.700 | Well, I'll add one extra Bangalore recommendation,

01:10:30.400 | which is not actually in Bangalore,

01:10:31.700 | but if you like to rock climb, hop on the train,

01:10:34.220 | which is a whole other experience and head to Hampi,

01:10:37.140 | which is a really cool place

01:10:39.500 | for a ridiculous amount of outdoor bouldering.

01:10:41.700 | We had a lot of fun there.

01:10:42.540 | I haven't done that yet.

01:10:43.380 | I'm going at the end of this month though.

01:10:44.980 | So maybe I'll have to go do that.

01:10:46.100 | Do you rock climb?

01:10:47.420 | No.

01:10:48.260 | It's like a backpackery rock climbing town.

01:10:52.220 | That is what the town is known for,

01:10:53.880 | at least for tourism purposes.

01:10:55.780 | Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on this.

01:10:57.020 | I'm just going to stick to doing the commercial stuff.

01:10:59.540 | No, you can have a lot of fun in Bangalore.

01:11:00.800 | We had a great time, but awesome.

01:11:02.420 | All right, thank you so much.

01:11:04.020 | Where can people sign up for the newsletter,

01:11:06.340 | follow you and stay on top of everything

01:11:08.140 | you're writing online?

01:11:09.260 | You can find me obviously on Twitter,

01:11:10.860 | Sawhill Bloom, it's all under my name.

01:11:12.860 | And then my website is sawhillbloom.com

01:11:14.700 | and you can find my newsletter there

01:11:15.900 | or anything else that I'm up to.

01:11:17.000 | The newsletter is awesome.

01:11:18.020 | Definitely worth a follow and a subscribe.

01:11:19.860 | Thank you so much for being here

01:11:21.220 | and we'll have you back soon.

01:11:23.060 | Excited to do it.

01:11:23.980 | Thanks so much, man.

01:11:25.020 | I really hope you enjoyed this episode.

01:11:28.500 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:11:30.260 | If you haven't already left a rating

01:11:31.760 | and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify,

01:11:35.140 | I would really appreciate it.

01:11:36.860 | And if you have any feedback on the show,

01:11:38.300 | questions for me, or just want to say hi,

01:11:40.700 | I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

01:11:44.940 | That's it for this week.

01:11:46.020 | I'll see you next week.

01:11:47.180 | (upbeat music)

01:11:50.120 | (bubbles popping)

01:11:52.960 | (bubbles popping)

01:11:55.800 | (bubbles popping)

01:11:58.640 | you