Make This Year Amazing with Seven Simple Questions for Your Annual Review

00:00:00.000 | Part of the value of this whole process is that it requires you to pause and actually

00:00:05.800 | look back at your work, writing, projects, you know, things that you did during the course

00:00:12.680 | of the year.

00:00:13.680 | Because that actually gives you the zoomed out perspective.

00:00:15.860 | Like the whole value of doing an annual review like this is really that you're constantly

00:00:20.880 | living in a first person view.

00:00:23.480 | You're zoomed in as far as you can possibly be.

00:00:26.200 | And this forces you to zoom out.

00:00:27.840 | You're like, you know, a bird flying to 10,000 feet and now observing your full year and

00:00:31.960 | being able to do it.

00:00:32.960 | So for me, I'm a writer.

00:00:35.000 | That's kind of my primary thing.

00:00:36.360 | So I can actually go back and look at all of my writing during the course of the year

00:00:39.480 | and see, find those trends, look at things that I was talking about, thinking about,

00:00:43.520 | and how those might have morphed or changed.

00:00:45.480 | For a lot of people, it can be journaling, you know, notes that you've left yourself

00:00:49.320 | during the course of the year.

00:00:51.000 | Some people send themselves emails.

00:00:52.320 | I like doing that a lot from time to time.

00:00:54.360 | Note documents.

00:00:55.360 | Sometimes it's just conversations with friends.

00:00:58.120 | Hello and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life,

00:01:02.320 | money and travel.

00:01:03.400 | Now, just last month, I read a few posts that really had me thinking more about how I want

00:01:08.000 | to optimize 2023.

00:01:10.240 | One was about conducting a personal annual review and the other was about 23 ways to

00:01:14.840 | make 2023 an amazing year.

00:01:17.440 | They were both fantastic and they were both written by my friend Sahil Bloom, who is one

00:01:21.660 | of my favorite creators.

00:01:22.880 | But he actually started his career in private equity and spent a decade investing professionally

00:01:27.960 | before turning to write about finance and sharing his frameworks for having a more fulfilling

00:01:32.440 | life and career.

00:01:34.200 | In preparation for this conversation, I came up with so many topics I wanted to cover,

00:01:38.400 | but we're just going to have to get to them another time because we're going to focus

00:01:41.100 | on conducting a personal annual review, which is nothing like the arduous process of a performance

00:01:46.160 | review at work.

00:01:47.240 | It's actually just seven questions you can ask yourself that give you the perfect opportunity

00:01:51.420 | to reflect on the past year and plan for what's ahead.

00:01:55.280 | Then we'll walk through some of Sahil and my top recommendations for how to make 2023

00:01:59.600 | an amazing year across your work, your health, your life and your money.

00:02:04.200 | I'm really excited for this conversation, so let's get started right after this.

00:02:10.680 | Sahil, welcome to the show.

00:02:15.440 | Thank you for having me, man.

00:02:16.520 | As an avid listener, I'm excited to make my debut appearance here.

00:02:20.160 | Yeah, and we'll probably get to this at the end, but there might be some future appearances

00:02:23.400 | coming.

00:02:24.400 | But it's January.

00:02:25.400 | There are a lot of people out there trying to make their resolutions, make their intentions

00:02:29.280 | for the year.

00:02:30.680 | What do you think people get wrong when they go through that process?

00:02:33.160 | Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing I think people get wrong is focus on the planning side and

00:02:38.200 | not enough on the reflecting side.

00:02:39.960 | There's this quote that I love, John Dewey is an American philosopher.

00:02:45.480 | And basically what he said was, "We don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting

00:02:50.280 | on experience."

00:02:51.640 | And I always thought that was a really powerful way of thinking about your year, like you

00:02:54.640 | get to the end of the year and everyone's instinct is, "Okay, I'm going to look forward.

00:02:59.000 | Let me make my goals.

00:03:00.000 | Let me do all that."

00:03:01.040 | And that's just like the way everyone operates.

00:03:02.920 | It's the standard.

00:03:04.240 | And not enough time is spent reflecting on the year that just passed.

00:03:07.240 | And what did you learn from it and how can you actually take those learnings and drive

00:03:11.440 | yourself forward and do a better year going forward?

00:03:13.400 | Yeah, it's funny.

00:03:14.400 | I was hoping you'd say that because I wanted to talk about your personal annual review

00:03:17.880 | because I've seen you tweet about it and then you actually produced this document that people

00:03:22.120 | could download.

00:03:23.120 | I kind of want to walk through it.

00:03:24.560 | So you think we could just kind of give people an overview of how you structure an annual

00:03:28.240 | review and then if anyone listening wants a copy, we'll definitely link to it in the

00:03:31.720 | show notes.

00:03:32.720 | Yeah, absolutely.

00:03:33.720 | I mean, it's a pretty simple structure as you know there.

00:03:36.080 | I've been doing this for the last five plus years, I would say in this format.

00:03:42.760 | And you've had or had discussions with a few of these people, but I've taken inspiration

00:03:46.640 | over the years from a lot of the giants that I really look up to and admire like Tim Ferriss

00:03:51.340 | or James Clear, who have written about in the past their annual review structures.

00:03:55.880 | And so, I've sort of adapted that.

00:03:57.480 | But basically, the whole thing is framed around seven questions.

00:04:00.120 | So maybe we can just go through the questions.

00:04:02.200 | You and I can chat about them a little bit.

00:04:03.880 | I'm curious for what your perspectives are on your own year on these and we can go from

00:04:08.960 | there.

00:04:09.960 | I'm so glad you put this together and that we're having this conversation because I went

00:04:13.200 | through and I started going through all of this myself.

00:04:15.920 | And yeah, I don't think I would have done that without your prompt.

00:04:20.280 | It's like you jump in and you're like, "I got all this stuff to do this year."

00:04:23.480 | So I think this was a great process for me.

00:04:25.360 | I hope other people take that away from it.

00:04:27.440 | Let's just jump in.

00:04:28.440 | Number one.

00:04:29.480 | So the first one that I always start with is, "What did I change my mind on this year?"

00:04:34.440 | It's the first question I always ask.

00:04:36.920 | And the genesis of this is really just this idea that if you're not changing in any way,

00:04:42.520 | you're dying.

00:04:43.640 | We need to adapt.

00:04:44.640 | We need to have those software updates as I like to think of them to our mind, to rewrite

00:04:49.000 | the old code and refresh it with new things.

00:04:51.800 | And so, at the end of the year, I always like to ask, "What are the big things that I really

00:04:54.840 | changed my mind on?"

00:04:56.560 | And if there's nothing, I start to get really worried.

00:04:59.320 | That's when the tension starts to build.

00:05:01.480 | So that's always the first question that I ask.

00:05:03.440 | And I'm curious, for you specifically, actually, what are some of the things that you feel

00:05:07.560 | like you changed your mind on this year?

00:05:09.000 | And I'm happy to give you mine.

00:05:10.000 | Yeah.

00:05:11.000 | So I'll run through it.

00:05:12.000 | But I have one quick question, which is, for each of these things, is there anything you

00:05:15.400 | do that helps jog your memory?

00:05:19.600 | For me, I was looking through my photo albums.

00:05:22.500 | Where was I this year?

00:05:23.500 | To try to just anchor some points on things, or I was looking at my work calendar.

00:05:27.960 | I was trying to figure out...

00:05:29.740 | It's not that I didn't change my mind.

00:05:31.240 | How do I find the things I changed on without too much recency bias on what did I change

00:05:35.920 | my mind on in December?

00:05:37.280 | Yeah.

00:05:38.280 | I mean, part of the value of this whole process is that it requires you to pause and actually

00:05:44.080 | look back at your work, writing, projects, things that you did during the course of the

00:05:51.440 | year.

00:05:52.440 | Because that actually gives you the zoomed out perspective.

00:05:54.400 | The whole value of doing an annual review like this is really that you're constantly

00:05:59.160 | living in a first-person view.

00:06:01.720 | You're zoomed in as far as you can possibly be, and this forces you to zoom out.

00:06:06.120 | You're like a bird flying to 10,000 feet and now observing your full year and being able

00:06:10.500 | to do it.

00:06:11.500 | So for me, I'm a writer.

00:06:13.240 | That's my primary thing.

00:06:14.600 | So I can actually go back and look at all of my writing during the course of the year

00:06:17.720 | and see, find those trends, look at things that I was talking about, thinking about,

00:06:21.760 | and how those might have morphed or changed.

00:06:23.720 | For a lot of people, it can be journaling, notes that you've left yourself during the

00:06:27.880 | course of the year.

00:06:29.280 | Some people send themselves emails.

00:06:30.600 | I like doing that a lot from time to time.

00:06:32.600 | Note documents.

00:06:33.600 | Sometimes it's just conversations with friends.

00:06:36.680 | It's also a reason, by the way, why these annual reviews are often really productive

00:06:42.000 | to do in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting with another individual that you trust,

00:06:47.360 | because it tends to lead to a slightly more active discussion and pushbacks that actually

00:06:51.560 | make you think a little bit more deeply and avoid that recency bias that you mentioned.

00:06:55.920 | Yeah.

00:06:56.920 | For me, for some reason, and maybe it's that I live in the Bay Area and there's no seasons,

00:07:01.080 | so I don't have this like, "What was happening when it was snowing?

00:07:03.400 | What was happening during summer?"

00:07:05.160 | I like to use the calendar and go back and look at calendars and photos to just jog my

00:07:10.260 | memory of like, "What happened in spring?

00:07:11.960 | Oh, I went on this trip to New York or Boston or something.

00:07:15.320 | Oh, what was going on at work around the time I did that?"

00:07:17.520 | So that was my version.

00:07:18.640 | But I've done that recently, by the way, with my wife.

00:07:22.220 | So we just had our sixth anniversary and we were on a walk and we started thinking about,

00:07:26.440 | "Okay, what did we do each year since we got married?

00:07:29.400 | What were the big milestones, trips, things we did?"

00:07:31.720 | And it was such a fun and interesting exercise to think about what our mindset was at each

00:07:36.640 | of these points in life.

00:07:37.800 | We got married and then you have the honeymoon period and you're going on all these trips

00:07:41.220 | and what were you thinking about and doing?

00:07:43.480 | It's actually a really fun relationship exercise for people that have been in longer-term relationships.

00:07:48.220 | I'll share one thing and then I'll promise I'll answer your question, which is starting

00:07:51.760 | in...

00:07:52.760 | I don't know why, March of 2014, I started logging this doc --it's just a Google Sheet--

00:07:58.320 | called "Monthly Experiences".

00:07:59.480 | And my goal was that every month, for the rest of my life, I needed to have an experience

00:08:04.940 | that made that month memorable.

00:08:06.920 | I first was like, "Was it monthly memorables, was it monthly experiences?"

00:08:10.140 | And it didn't necessarily have to be some crazy skydiving kind of thing.

00:08:13.520 | One of them was like, I had surgery on my foot because I had this thing called a Morton's

00:08:17.520 | Neuroma and it had been a pain in my life for a long time.

00:08:20.120 | And finally, I was just like, "I'm going to do this."

00:08:22.080 | One was, we were in Colorado where my wife grew up and it was like so much snow, it was

00:08:26.600 | so cold.

00:08:27.600 | And I was like, "I'm going to go build an igloo."

00:08:28.600 | Like, get a chainsaw, cut blocks of ice and build an igloo.

00:08:32.140 | So things like that, June 2015, we got a dog.

00:08:37.040 | So I don't know.

00:08:38.040 | This was one way.

00:08:39.040 | It has nothing to do with an annual review, but it was...

00:08:41.160 | I wanted to make sure that every month of my life, there was something memorable.

00:08:45.680 | And it went, it went, it went.

00:08:47.320 | And I was like, "Gosh, it really dropped off a cliff."

00:08:49.400 | It dropped off a cliff when I had kids and the pandemic hit.

00:08:53.640 | And I need to resume it.

00:08:54.760 | But it was like, "Oh, when the pandemic was here and you have kids, yeah, there was something

00:08:57.240 | memorable with childhood development each month, but it felt weird to be like, 'Kids

00:09:01.040 | smiled.

00:09:02.040 | Kids said, 'Dad.'"

00:09:03.040 | It was so focused on that.

00:09:04.520 | So I got to get it back going.

00:09:06.400 | But something to encourage everyone to consider if you're wanting to make sure each month

00:09:10.880 | has something exciting.

00:09:11.880 | I love that idea.

00:09:12.880 | It's great.

00:09:13.880 | All right.

00:09:14.880 | So a few of the things for me was that one was around outsourcing.

00:09:20.040 | I think I have always been someone...

00:09:23.360 | In multiple jobs, I've had the opportunity to have an admin and I just always said no.

00:09:27.000 | I always said no.

00:09:28.000 | I was taking everything into my own hands.

00:09:30.000 | I loved optimizing.

00:09:31.000 | And finally, this year, when I started the podcast, out of necessity, well, I started

00:09:36.700 | last year, but...

00:09:37.700 | Two years.

00:09:38.700 | Sorry.

00:09:39.700 | Two years.

00:09:40.700 | But last year in 2022, I really started saying, "Okay, maybe I could hire someone to help

00:09:43.160 | do some research.

00:09:44.160 | Maybe I could hire someone to help with parts of the newsletter, with parts of the editing,

00:09:48.320 | with parts of the production."

00:09:49.320 | So last year was a year that I changed my mind on hiring people to help do things to

00:09:54.200 | give you more surface area you can cover with your own time.

00:09:59.040 | That was one.

00:10:00.280 | That's a powerful one.

00:10:01.280 | I mean, that's going to pay dividends for a long time, changing your mind on that.

00:10:04.760 | Yeah.

00:10:05.760 | The other one, which I think was the hardest, was learning to spend money.

00:10:10.720 | And I know this sounds crazy, but I feel like myself and maybe a lot of people listening,

00:10:15.960 | we almost get to the point of optimizing and frugality that it's very hard to spend money

00:10:19.620 | on anything.

00:10:21.520 | We're going out to dinner and I remember we're at a Japanese restaurant and I was like, "All

00:10:26.200 | I want is a miso soup."

00:10:27.600 | That just felt like what I wanted today.

00:10:29.040 | And I was like, "God, they're charging $7 for a miso soup.

00:10:32.620 | I feel like a miso soup should be $3 or $4."

00:10:36.040 | And I was like, "You know what?

00:10:37.040 | I just need to stop worrying about..."

00:10:39.800 | I'm so used to telling people, "Stop worrying about the latte."

00:10:42.120 | It's not about the latte.

00:10:43.120 | It's a Ramit Sethi thing.

00:10:44.120 | He's like, "The lattes aren't what's killing you.

00:10:45.840 | It's these big decisions."

00:10:46.840 | And here I am, not ordering the...

00:10:49.840 | To use the Japanese restaurant example, not ordering a seaweed salad because I like it

00:10:53.600 | because it's extra $5 or not getting miso soup because it's overpriced by $2.

00:10:58.560 | And so I found that when you can just let the small decisions go, happiness goes up,

00:11:05.320 | stress goes down, anxiety goes down.

00:11:08.320 | When it comes to optimizing my finances, where I am in my life, those $1, $2, $3, $4, $5

00:11:13.760 | differences weren't having a big impact.

00:11:15.360 | And so I've changed my mind on that a lot.

00:11:18.200 | When I'm shopping online for groceries, I would pull up Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods

00:11:22.560 | and price compare strawberries and stuff like that.

00:11:26.120 | I've gotten over the small costs of things and gotten comfortable.

00:11:30.400 | Those are 2 things.

00:11:31.680 | And the one small funny thing that I'll share, which I put in my end of the year learnings

00:11:36.800 | was mouth tape, which I thought was that when I interviewed Liz Moody, who has this Healthier

00:11:42.600 | Together podcast, she was like, "You should consider trying this out, taping your mouth

00:11:45.360 | at night."

00:11:46.360 | And I was like, "That is the craziest thing."

00:11:47.920 | And for all of 6 months, I was like, "That's the craziest thing."

00:11:51.240 | And then I was like, "You know what?

00:11:52.240 | I'm just going to try it."

00:11:54.000 | And it was awesome.

00:11:55.000 | And I'm like...

00:11:56.000 | Changed your life?

00:11:57.000 | Were you a big mouth breather before?

00:11:59.220 | I don't even know if I ever thought...

00:12:01.200 | It wasn't a thing that I processed in my mind.

00:12:03.920 | But there were just times where I woke up and my mouth was a little dry.

00:12:07.000 | And I was like, "Oh, I wonder if I'm a really heavy mouth breather or not.

00:12:09.760 | I don't know."

00:12:10.760 | And then I tried it.

00:12:11.760 | And I was like, "I woke up and it just felt like my mouth was fresh."

00:12:14.240 | I know it sounds like a weird thing to say.

00:12:16.120 | Well, it's deeply impactful for your health.

00:12:18.760 | Breathing through your nose.

00:12:19.760 | You should have James Nester on at some point.

00:12:21.560 | He wrote the Bible on this recently.

00:12:23.600 | Yeah.

00:12:24.600 | We've been going back and forth.

00:12:25.600 | Yeah.

00:12:26.600 | You should have him on and do an episode on breathing because it's hugely, hugely impactful

00:12:29.040 | for your health.

00:12:30.040 | Yeah.

00:12:31.040 | I just...

00:12:32.040 | You write it off.

00:12:33.040 | It's like, "That's so silly.

00:12:34.040 | Why would you do that?

00:12:35.040 | That seems ridiculous."

00:12:36.040 | And last year, I was like, "You know what?

00:12:37.040 | Let's just try it."

00:12:38.040 | And now, I have like a stack of hostage tape, which is like the most ridiculous name for

00:12:42.360 | a mouth tape company on my bedside.

00:12:44.620 | There is a general rule of thumb there, by the way.

00:12:47.000 | And maybe it's like a David Foster Wallace, "This is water" takeaway as well of any time

00:12:53.120 | your bias is, "That's totally ridiculous.

00:12:56.520 | That sounds silly.

00:12:57.640 | That's wild."

00:12:58.720 | Just try it.

00:12:59.920 | Because half the time, those things that you're automatically highly, highly certain of, you

00:13:04.480 | end up being completely wrong on.

00:13:07.040 | And maybe we would all learn a whole lot more about ourselves and grow in a different way

00:13:11.000 | if we just took on those things that we write off immediately.

00:13:15.920 | Anything from your list this past year that's worth sharing?

00:13:18.000 | Yeah.

00:13:19.000 | The biggest one for me was a kid thing.

00:13:20.840 | I think you know this, but we had our first son in May.

00:13:25.300 | He was born.

00:13:26.560 | And I had these like grand ambitions prior to him being born of all the things I was

00:13:32.360 | going to teach him.

00:13:33.360 | I had this long list that I had written out of all the stuff I was going to teach my son

00:13:37.520 | and how I was going to mold his personality in all these different ways.

00:13:41.080 | And I think somewhere around like the six-month mark, which was later in the year, I just

00:13:45.080 | realized that I don't think it's possible.

00:13:47.960 | I basically think that kids come out with a sort of a kit and their personality and

00:13:53.880 | who they are and some aspects of their character.

00:13:57.480 | It's sort of fixed.

00:13:58.480 | It's like genetic.

00:13:59.480 | They come out with it.

00:14:00.480 | And our job is actually not to try to teach them things around all of these specific values

00:14:05.280 | that we want.

00:14:06.280 | It's to be able to embody our values as a person and hopefully guide them in the general

00:14:10.880 | direction of what we believe is a strong set of values.

00:14:13.700 | But the idea of like being able to mold and shape my child, I've given up on as something

00:14:19.200 | that's possible.

00:14:20.440 | It's funny because just this morning, I had a moment that further emphasized this for

00:14:25.160 | me, which was there were these three little felt balls and my daughter was playing with

00:14:30.480 | them and she's like, "Daddy, here you go."

00:14:31.880 | And she hands them to me and I start juggling them.

00:14:34.480 | And she's like mesmerized.

00:14:36.720 | And she's two and a half.

00:14:38.200 | And I was just thinking, I guarantee and she's obviously too young to learn to juggle right

00:14:42.840 | now.

00:14:43.840 | I'm sure there's some savant kid in the world who could juggle a two and a half, but that

00:14:46.440 | didn't seem possible.

00:14:47.440 | She's got an X cube probably solving it.

00:14:50.320 | But I was thinking, gosh, I bet if I went to her and was like, "Hey, let me teach you

00:14:54.240 | how to juggle."

00:14:55.240 | She'd be like, "No, I don't want to teach you.

00:14:56.240 | I want to do things on my own."

00:14:57.960 | But just doing it.

00:14:58.960 | Like if you want your child to maybe do something that you do or learn something, letting them

00:15:04.360 | emulate you and watch you and maybe admire and look up to it is probably going to be

00:15:08.040 | a 10 times more effective habit or way to do it than trying to force them to learn this

00:15:12.400 | thing that you want them to learn.

00:15:13.640 | I completely agree.

00:15:14.640 | That's why I bring my son with me in my garage gym so that he can watch me work out.

00:15:18.440 | He's like seven months old.

00:15:19.960 | He's like, "I'm going to do that one day."

00:15:23.280 | Awesome.

00:15:24.280 | Okay.

00:15:25.280 | Question two.

00:15:26.280 | Let's do it.

00:15:27.280 | All right.

00:15:28.280 | So the second question and the third, it's kind of a two way to be, but two and three

00:15:32.880 | are all around energy.

00:15:35.400 | And the second question is basically what created energy for you during the course of

00:15:40.040 | the year.

00:15:41.160 | And this whole idea is to go back and look at your calendars.

00:15:43.960 | You said you were already doing this for the first one, but go back and look at your calendars

00:15:47.420 | from the year and try to identify the trends in what actually created energy in your life.

00:15:54.160 | What were the activities?

00:15:55.520 | What were the work projects?

00:15:57.160 | What were the meetings?

00:15:58.160 | Who were the people?

00:15:59.500 | What were these trends that actually brought you energy?

00:16:03.360 | So this was a fun one.

00:16:04.360 | And actually, I guess people listening to this are probably not going to pause and go

00:16:07.320 | do one before finishing the episode, so they won't have this problem.

00:16:10.240 | But I would definitely encourage people to listen to all of the...

00:16:13.520 | Listen or read all of the topics in the personal review and then go back and look at your calendar.

00:16:18.240 | Otherwise, you'd go back, learn a bunch of things you changed your mind on and then have

00:16:22.280 | to repeat the process.

00:16:23.280 | So this was really interesting because I think this past year was the first year that the

00:16:29.240 | kind of world opened up and I was a creator.

00:16:31.880 | And I met a bunch of other people creating podcasts, YouTube, like all kinds of stuff.

00:16:37.020 | And that's just never been a part of my career, right?

00:16:40.000 | I met a lot of founders and investors and people in finance and financial advisors and

00:16:44.200 | planners, but I'd never really met a lot of creators.

00:16:48.580 | And that was one thing that gave me a lot of energy because it's just I'm...

00:16:52.460 | As much as I...

00:16:53.460 | This is my new job, but I just have never been in this industry.

00:16:55.860 | So that was a big one for me.

00:16:57.860 | And then going on adventures with my daughter, just me and her.

00:17:02.620 | We have two now, but we would ride our bike, I'd put her in the back, we'd ride the bike,

00:17:10.420 | we'd hop on Caltrain, we'd ride two stops on Caltrain, we'd get off, we'd go to the

00:17:15.540 | donut shop, we'd buy a donut and then we'd bike back home.

00:17:19.140 | It's like those adventures were so much fun.

00:17:22.880 | I have a bunch of other ones, but those are two I'll share.

00:17:25.460 | And then the question to ask yourself, by the way, after you identify those activities,

00:17:29.760 | those people, the projects is really, did I spend enough time on those?

00:17:34.720 | Go look at it.

00:17:35.720 | Was that like 2% of my time spent and I was actually just spending the rest of my time

00:17:40.080 | on other stuff?

00:17:41.160 | Because that's a question that you then need to answer as you think about what your next

00:17:44.300 | year looks like.

00:17:45.300 | So for me, I probably have a somewhat similar one to you in that I get a ton of energy out

00:17:51.040 | of creative activities.

00:17:52.600 | And that's writing for me is a huge one, conversations with smart, interesting people is another

00:17:59.040 | one.

00:18:00.040 | And I had to find smart, interesting, extremely broadly, by the way, this isn't like talking

00:18:03.560 | to successful people is what I get excited about.

00:18:06.080 | I have fascinating conversations with Uber drivers, with people that are helping me with

00:18:10.540 | things around the house.

00:18:11.540 | Like I find that you can learn from almost anybody when you open up to it.

00:18:17.100 | And I get a ton of energy from hearing different people's stories, different people's struggles.

00:18:21.120 | It ends up inspiring a lot of the things that I end up writing about as well.

00:18:24.760 | So that's a huge, huge energy creator for me.

00:18:27.080 | And then the last one is sort of productive leisure as a category.

00:18:31.880 | I think about it, walking is a huge one for me.

00:18:34.720 | I probably averaged close to 20,000 steps a day in 2022, which was a huge number for

00:18:40.640 | me relative to anything I'd done in the past, largely because my son would only sleep when

00:18:45.320 | he was taking on walks outside.

00:18:46.920 | And so it forced me to be outside a lot.

00:18:48.760 | And I just found that I was getting so much creative energy from walking and being out

00:18:52.800 | in nature.

00:18:54.080 | So that was another big learning for me.

00:18:55.880 | Yeah.

00:18:56.880 | And to compliment that with what drained energy, I guess, is the next one, right?

00:19:01.120 | Yeah.

00:19:02.120 | And it kind of goes in tandem.

00:19:03.240 | As we said, when you look at your calendar, you're figuring out what were the things that

00:19:06.160 | created energy.

00:19:07.160 | And then you're looking at the same time at what was the stuff that just drained me.

00:19:11.180 | And for a lot of people, this tends to be stuff like back-to-back meetings, phone calls,

00:19:16.360 | the meetings to talk about future meetings, processing email, doing things that are sort

00:19:22.960 | of monotonous activities that happen to hijack your day a lot of the time.

00:19:27.460 | So figuring out what those activities are, what the trends are in them, and then figuring

00:19:31.420 | out if you allowed those to take over your entire day, or if you were able to sort of

00:19:37.080 | manage the balance that has to naturally exist across the energy creators and energy drainers.

00:19:41.960 | Funny enough, I think I took this in a slightly different perspective, which was it wasn't

00:19:46.800 | the back-to-back meetings, all that stuff.

00:19:49.120 | There were two things that I put here that I'll share.

00:19:51.080 | One was fitting our children into our old life.

00:19:55.600 | So my wife and I probably clocked in four, five, six, seven trips a year when we were

00:20:04.000 | kidless pre-pandemic, whether they were weekend trips, or drives, or international trip.

00:20:09.680 | And I think we had a great time in December going to London and Paris with two kids.

00:20:14.880 | But I think trying to fit two small kids into the type of trip we would normally take actually

00:20:21.240 | drained a lot of energy.

00:20:22.800 | And I think we probably would have been better off trying to think about the trip not from

00:20:26.640 | a how do we get the best of both worlds, but how do we maybe have one trip a year where

00:20:32.020 | we can get away on our own, and one trip where we're taking it in a way that doesn't require

00:20:38.480 | as much effort and kind of burden, especially when kids are napping one, two, three times

00:20:43.960 | a day.

00:20:44.960 | It's just you're not going to have that same experience.

00:20:46.240 | So that was one.

00:20:47.920 | And the other one was social media, just feeling the need to put pressure to "Oh, I gotta post

00:20:55.380 | this much, this many places."

00:20:56.960 | I was like, I found the content area that I love right now, just recording a podcast,

00:21:01.680 | writing a newsletter.

00:21:02.680 | I really love those two things.

00:21:04.240 | But it drained me every time I was thinking, "Oh, how do I clip it to a short form video

00:21:07.920 | and post it here and here?"

00:21:09.160 | And I think, we'll get to this later, because I have some other thoughts, but that was one

00:21:14.480 | where I think it just drained.

00:21:18.480 | Just trying to think about those things.

00:21:20.120 | Yeah.

00:21:21.120 | That one drains a lot of people, I think, in the creator ecosystem.

00:21:24.100 | You can spread yourself way too thin across all of these different platforms and get a

00:21:28.600 | lot of FOMO about like, "Oh, so-and-so is growing their podcast a lot by doing this,

00:21:32.880 | this and this on that platform.

00:21:35.840 | to be doing that."

00:21:36.840 | And it just pulls you in that direction mentally, and the cognitive load ends up being just...

00:21:42.800 | It destroys you.

00:21:44.580 | Anything that drained you?

00:21:45.580 | I mean, the biggest one for me is always calls and meetings.

00:21:49.120 | Calls and Zoom meetings, I should say.

00:21:51.400 | I love in-person meetings.

00:21:52.920 | And so my big takeaway was calls, like the get-to-know-you calls.

00:21:58.320 | I'm just not doing anymore.

00:21:59.640 | I'm just not going to do those.

00:22:01.320 | And my way to make sure that I still have those get-to-know-you things is doing them

00:22:07.240 | in person.

00:22:08.520 | And basically, I'm an open book of meeting people in person in New York.

00:22:13.320 | And New York, fortunately, tends to be one of the places that basically everyone comes

00:22:17.400 | through at some point or another.

00:22:19.120 | And so if someone reaches out to me and they live in Vancouver and they want to get together,

00:22:24.120 | and I'm not doing calls because I'm not going to do a get-to-know-you call, they tend to

00:22:28.040 | be coming to New York at some point within the next six months, and we will get together

00:22:31.240 | in person and meet that way.

00:22:33.080 | And it's been awesome so far since I started implementing the change.

00:22:36.800 | Just the energy of meeting someone in person, the friendships that get formed, it's just

00:22:40.160 | on a different level from the Zoom call that you end up leaving and saying, "Hey, we should

00:22:44.080 | get drinks sometime," and you end up never connecting with the person in the future.

00:22:47.880 | That for me is definitely number one going into this year.

00:22:50.880 | Yeah.

00:22:51.880 | Going into this year, the other thing I'm going to do on that point is just if someone

00:22:55.040 | says, "Can we do a meeting?"

00:22:56.040 | I'm just like, "Can we just do the phone call?"

00:22:58.760 | It doesn't...

00:22:59.760 | Not every video call has to be a video call.

00:23:01.600 | I think that if this wasn't a video call, I feel like maybe we wouldn't connect as well.

00:23:06.120 | But I'm not sure every call that everyone does...

00:23:09.360 | When we had a quick conversation before this, we did it on the phone, and it was fine.

00:23:13.760 | And you can do phone calls while walking, by the way.

00:23:15.880 | A huge, huge unlock for me is just like, "I'll do phone calls while walking now when I need

00:23:20.240 | to."

00:23:21.240 | And it's a big unlock.

00:23:22.240 | It's really clear when you're walking that way.

00:23:23.600 | And so unless you need to be in front of your computer for a specific reason, walking meetings

00:23:27.640 | are awesome.

00:23:28.800 | And if someone pushes back, if you want to prevent the pushback, they're like, "Hey,

00:23:32.320 | let's do a video call."

00:23:33.320 | I say, "Hey, you know what?

00:23:34.320 | I find that when I'm doing a call on my computer, I'm a bit more distracted because there's

00:23:37.680 | email popping up.

00:23:38.680 | So maybe we do a phone call, and I'll just go on a walk, and I'll be completely focused

00:23:42.240 | on you."

00:23:43.240 | How's someone going to push back there?

00:23:44.240 | You're like, "Do you want my attention or do you want part of it?"

00:23:46.900 | And it's 100% accurate, by the way.

00:23:48.880 | Think about how many windows you typically have up during a typical Zoom call and how

00:23:52.280 | often you're checking the notifications that pop up in the screen or looking at the internet

00:23:55.920 | or your email or whatever it is.

00:23:57.320 | It's totally true.

00:23:59.080 | Question four, this is one of my favorites.

00:24:01.360 | What or who were the boat anchors in my life?

00:24:06.840 | And boat anchors is a term that I created, so I need to explain it.

00:24:11.840 | As you would expect, it is the thing that is creating drag on your life.

00:24:15.760 | So when I think about boat anchors, I typically think about them as people.

00:24:19.620 | And these are the people that are trying to hold you back.

00:24:22.880 | It's the people that sort of snicker or laugh when you tell them what your ambitions are.

00:24:27.960 | It's the people who put down your accomplishments or try to say that they're not as impressive

00:24:32.800 | as they otherwise were.

00:24:33.800 | It's also the people who are saying that about others when you're talking to them, and they're

00:24:37.800 | putting down others just in the general context of conversation.

00:24:41.400 | These are boat anchors.

00:24:42.400 | These are people that are literally placing a drag on your progress and holding you back

00:24:46.040 | from achieving at the next level that you're trying to get to.

00:24:49.600 | So identifying who they are, sitting down and reflecting on the relationships and the

00:24:53.980 | things in your life that might be holding you back in that way is a huge, huge part

00:24:59.160 | of this reflection process because developing a plan to start minimizing the impact that

00:25:04.000 | those people have in your life is really key.

00:25:06.760 | For the sake of not being boat anchors ourselves, I would say let's just skip through trying

00:25:11.720 | to talk about who these are in our lives and not be negative.

00:25:15.000 | But I do think this is a productive step.

00:25:18.060 | We all have these people.

00:25:19.320 | And so it's just being really clear.

00:25:21.200 | We don't need to talk about who ours are, but we all have these people in our lives

00:25:24.020 | and thinking about it clearly and sitting down and really reflecting on it.

00:25:28.040 | And it doesn't have to be that you tell the person, "Hey, you're cut out of my life,"

00:25:31.200 | by the way.

00:25:32.200 | This is an important point.

00:25:33.560 | You can identify these people and just slowly kind of minimize their role within your ecosystem.

00:25:39.620 | You don't need to hang out with them all the time, maybe.

00:25:41.840 | You don't need to touch base with them quite as much as you did or tell them about the

00:25:44.760 | things that you're working on or thinking about.

00:25:46.940 | It's just figuring out a way to minimize the impact of their drag in your life.

00:25:51.900 | Question five, what did I not do because of fear?

00:25:57.320 | This goes back to Tim Ferriss who developed, I think it was in 4-Hour Workweek, the first

00:26:03.360 | time he talked about it.

00:26:04.360 | But then there's a very famous TED Talk where he talks about it, fear setting, which is

00:26:08.520 | generally the idea that we allow our fears to distort our reality.

00:26:15.680 | And we build them up in our minds as much worse than they really are.

00:26:18.520 | And so, the concept of fear setting is to get much closer to your fears, to really deconstruct

00:26:23.200 | them and figure out, "Were they as bad as I thought?

00:26:26.960 | And what's the worst case that could happen?

00:26:28.560 | What's the upside if I actually go and do this?"

00:26:31.280 | And then proceed accordingly.

00:26:32.800 | So, the whole idea is to go back and look at your year and figure out what did you actually

00:26:37.040 | shy away from doing and then think about, "Okay, well, let me break that fear down.

00:26:41.880 | How real was it?"

00:26:43.340 | Because at the time, you just passed on the opportunity due to that fear.

00:26:46.800 | Yeah.

00:26:47.800 | For me, this was just going full-time on all the hacks.

00:26:53.440 | And it was so funny because a friend of mine, shout out to Ben who worked with me at Wealthfront,

00:26:59.440 | who was like, "Why aren't you doing this?

00:27:01.400 | Why aren't you going full-time on this project?"

00:27:04.480 | And I was like, "Well, if I were giving my friend advice, I would tell them that they

00:27:07.960 | need to go full-time on it."

00:27:09.200 | It was so obvious.

00:27:10.200 | I could use all the mindset tactics that I've learned from interviewing smart people where

00:27:15.880 | it's like, "Oh, what would your friend say?

00:27:17.280 | Your friend says you should do it, then maybe you should take the advice."

00:27:20.640 | And I was like, "Well, I would give everyone advice.

00:27:22.440 | You're at this point where this is the time to capitalize."

00:27:24.320 | And I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

00:27:26.640 | Part of it was like, "Oh, maybe I'll wait till the end of the year.

00:27:29.240 | Maybe I'll wait here.

00:27:30.240 | And I'm on parental leave and all this stuff."

00:27:32.560 | And I'm happy that I did it, but I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out

00:27:38.080 | why it took me so long.

00:27:40.360 | And I think that was one that I just needed to break down and spend more time reflecting

00:27:46.240 | on.

00:27:47.240 | Yeah.

00:27:48.240 | The waiting for the perfect moment is the bias here that almost everyone has.

00:27:52.160 | We tell ourselves we're going to do X at the perfect moment, and it's not the perfect moment

00:27:56.720 | now.

00:27:57.720 | And the reality is it's never the perfect moment to make those big leaps and to do those

00:28:01.360 | big jumps.

00:28:02.360 | And so, sometimes -- I've written about this -- sometimes you literally just need to open

00:28:06.200 | the door and jump out and hope the parachute was packed tight and just make that leap.

00:28:12.000 | And so, deconstructing your fears and going through this exercise is really helpful.

00:28:15.600 | I had the same one, by the way, when I was thinking about making the leap to full-time

00:28:19.880 | into these personal pursuits a year earlier.

00:28:22.240 | So, in 2021, that was my thing that I held off on doing because of fear that ultimately

00:28:27.840 | sort of got forced upon me.

00:28:30.640 | But that was definitely mine in 2021.

00:28:33.320 | The other one is -- and I still have this fear -- so, when you have -- all of the businesses

00:28:39.920 | I've run have been venture capital-backed businesses, where all the money you have as

00:28:44.800 | a company, it's not like you get to keep it.

00:28:46.880 | Right?

00:28:47.880 | Basically, it's always in the company.

00:28:49.360 | So you're really, really motivated to spend it all to try to grow and build a really big

00:28:52.880 | company because the benefits to you only come if that company really succeeds.

00:28:58.880 | When you run a small business, which I'll call a podcast a small business, it's like

00:29:02.480 | if that podcast makes money, you get the money.

00:29:06.280 | That's how businesses that you own yourselves and you don't have investors work.

00:29:09.620 | And so, one thing that I'm struggling with is to take that money and go reinvest it into

00:29:16.240 | the business, if you will, hiring someone to help research or book guests or edit and

00:29:23.120 | produce.

00:29:24.120 | I've been able to chip away at smaller pieces.

00:29:27.040 | But making a big investment is something that I haven't been able to do yet.

00:29:32.920 | And I see all these stories of successful business owners, not the venture capital startup

00:29:39.240 | founder kind of people, but regular people.

00:29:40.960 | And the overwhelming theme is that they all reinvested in their business to grow it.

00:29:45.900 | And so it's like, "I know I need to do it.

00:29:47.240 | I know I should do it.

00:29:48.240 | I would give my friends advice to do it."

00:29:50.360 | But it's so hard when it's basically like reinvesting your own money.

00:29:55.080 | And I think the mindset shift that I had that was so productive for savings, personal savings,

00:30:00.640 | was that every dollar I earned, I just immediately shelved in my brain as if it was my savings.

00:30:06.800 | So I know a lot of people, the way they budget is...

00:30:09.040 | Or the way they spend money.

00:30:10.160 | They spend their money, but maybe everything that's left over, they save.

00:30:13.640 | Or they save $500 a month and everything else they can spend.

00:30:17.840 | For me, 100% of the money was savings.

00:30:20.600 | And I treated every single purchase as if I was saying, "Do I want to dip into my savings

00:30:25.280 | to buy this coffee?

00:30:26.720 | Do I want to dip into my savings to have dinner out?"

00:30:29.540 | That was my process, which made me incredibly frugal, probably not spend enough money and

00:30:33.840 | do enough things.

00:30:35.000 | Now I have that same thing applied to business where it's like, "Do I want to dip into my

00:30:38.840 | savings to hire someone to do this thing?"

00:30:42.720 | And it just makes it harder to spend money.

00:30:44.640 | That's interesting.

00:30:45.640 | So I did a structural thing from a business standpoint that might be useful for people

00:30:50.680 | that has been a behavioral hack for me, which is I have an S-corp that's set up that has

00:30:56.120 | all of my personal holding company entities running through it.

00:31:00.680 | And all I do is with an S-corp, you have to pay yourself a salary, a reasonable salary

00:31:04.880 | out of it.

00:31:05.880 | And so that reasonable salary is what covers all of our home expenses and our whole life

00:31:09.240 | and everything there.

00:31:10.340 | And so because of that, because it's two separate businesses, it runs from my S-corp that pays

00:31:15.620 | a salary out to our personal joint bank account as a family.

00:31:19.060 | I then just think of that S-corp bank account as it's the working cabinet, it's the business,

00:31:23.800 | it's the working capital.

00:31:24.800 | And so everything there in my mind is segmented as totally separate.

00:31:29.160 | I need to think about reinvesting.

00:31:30.860 | What does it look like?

00:31:31.860 | What's the margin profile?

00:31:32.860 | What's the return on this investment, etc.

00:31:35.040 | And that's been a hugely, hugely helpful behavioral hack for me overall.

00:31:38.280 | Yeah.

00:31:39.280 | So I just reclassified her.

00:31:41.280 | I did my S-corp election at the end of the year.

00:31:44.960 | So this is something that maybe will make it easier next year.

00:31:48.320 | Yeah, it definitely will.

00:31:49.720 | It definitely will.

00:31:51.160 | The salary thing definitely makes a big difference versus the LLC.

00:31:54.520 | Question six, ready?

00:31:56.840 | Greatest hits and worst misses from the year.

00:32:00.760 | The reason for doing this one is because we are all swayed by our natural bias.

00:32:05.640 | So an optimist will see all the hits from the year.

00:32:08.480 | They'll look at their year and pat themselves on the back and say, "Wow, I had a great year.

00:32:11.960 | Look, this, this, this, and this."

00:32:13.560 | And the pessimist stares at their year and says, "Oh my God, this was the worst.

00:32:18.040 | I had all these things go wrong.

00:32:19.320 | It was awful."

00:32:20.880 | Doing a actual explicit list of your hits and your misses forces you to sort of be balanced

00:32:26.140 | and actually take a real look at the two sides of your life and success from a scoreboard

00:32:31.560 | standpoint.

00:32:32.560 | So writing them all down, I find, is hugely, hugely helpful.

00:32:37.500 | Which side do you skew on?

00:32:39.480 | I would say I skew towards being self-critical.

00:32:42.680 | It probably comes from my athletic background.

00:32:46.740 | Negative self-talk was always how I motivated myself athletically, which is a funny thing

00:32:50.980 | to say these days because everyone is very big on positive self-talk.

00:32:54.160 | I always motivated myself by telling myself it wasn't good enough or the things I was

00:32:57.960 | doing wasn't good enough.

00:32:59.800 | As a result, if I sit down and think about my year, I tend to just glaze over the awesome

00:33:03.760 | things that happened and think about, "Oh, well, this didn't work out," or "I failed

00:33:08.660 | at this.

00:33:09.660 | Quit this too early."

00:33:10.660 | Whatever.

00:33:11.660 | And so it helps for me to zoom out and actually think about the wins to balance all of that

00:33:15.220 | out.

00:33:16.220 | What about you?

00:33:17.220 | When it comes to the future, I'm definitely in the optimist camp.

00:33:22.000 | I'm like, "It's always going to work out.

00:33:24.840 | Kids are going to not even have jet lag when we travel."

00:33:27.380 | I'm always the one like, "What's the brightest side of things?"

00:33:29.620 | But when it comes to myself, I am always the person that's trying to find how to improve.

00:33:36.900 | And so I dig on the...

00:33:37.900 | I at least crave the criticism.

00:33:40.780 | So if I'm cooking dinner for family and everyone's like, "This is great."

00:33:45.100 | I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:33:46.100 | Sure.

00:33:47.100 | It's great."

00:33:48.100 | Yeah.

00:33:49.100 | What could have...

00:33:50.100 | Did it need a little more salt?

00:33:51.100 | Could I have cooked it a little longer?

00:33:53.500 | I know that I'm not a three Michelin star chef.

00:33:57.580 | So telling me that this is fantastic, I want to know how to make it better.

00:34:01.640 | So it's weird.

00:34:03.340 | Forward-looking, I'm much better at thinking optimistically.

00:34:07.260 | On myself and reflection, I'm more like, "God, I could have done this better.

00:34:10.780 | I could have done this better."

00:34:11.780 | I definitely don't want honest feedback on my cooking from my family.

00:34:13.940 | If I make steaks on the grill, I just want everyone to say, "These are amazing.

00:34:17.260 | These are restaurant quality steaks."

00:34:18.260 | That's so funny.

00:34:19.260 | When everyone says, "These are amazing," around our table, I get so frustrated.

00:34:22.100 | I'm like, "No.

00:34:23.180 | There's no way that this is a perfect steak.

00:34:25.220 | What could have been better?"

00:34:26.220 | Well, you're going to end up accelerating as a chef and I'm going to stay at my low

00:34:29.060 | baseline.

00:34:30.060 | That's okay.

00:34:31.060 | I probably shouldn't focus on my cooking as much.

00:34:33.980 | I'm clearly not going to have a profession in the culinary.

00:34:37.380 | That's a good one though.

00:34:38.380 | Okay.

00:34:39.380 | Final question.

00:34:40.380 | What did I learn this year?

00:34:42.820 | This is just the best place to wrap these up for me because it captures everything.

00:34:47.780 | You just did all of these questions, you boil it all down and sit down and write down a

00:34:52.260 | list of the things that you learned, how did you grow, how did you learn, and how did you

00:34:56.300 | develop during the course of the year.

00:34:58.980 | I always find this to be a great way to summarize the whole exercise and really have a set of

00:35:03.860 | key takeaways.

00:35:05.220 | So I did this one wrong.

00:35:07.620 | So I'm going to share my failed experience.

00:35:09.300 | What did you do wrong?

00:35:10.620 | So I took it way too literally and I was like, "What did I learn?"

00:35:13.460 | And I was like, "Oh, well, Nick Gray taught me how to throw a good cocktail party."

00:35:16.700 | That totally counts.

00:35:17.940 | I think that's great.

00:35:18.940 | Sure.

00:35:19.940 | Okay.

00:35:20.940 | So maybe I didn't take it wrong.

00:35:21.940 | But what I didn't do was, what did I learn from going through questions one through six.

00:35:27.660 | I didn't do the tie it all up in a bow summary version of number seven.

00:35:31.740 | I did the, "Here are all the things I learned."

00:35:34.100 | And I was like, "Wow, I could just go to every podcast because I learned a bunch of stuff

00:35:37.260 | each episode."

00:35:38.260 | I just had this massive list of all these things I learned.

00:35:40.780 | What would have been maybe more effective, which I will probably do this afternoon or

00:35:44.380 | this evening, is like, "Let's take the previous six questions in this entire process and try

00:35:49.940 | to put a bow on the whole thing and what I learned and what that means for life ahead."

00:35:55.500 | I think both are productive, to be honest.

00:35:57.380 | I love the fact that you went and learned how to throw a good cocktail party from Nick

00:36:01.220 | Gray who's awesome and best in class at throwing cocktail parties.

00:36:04.220 | He threw an in-person event for Sam Parr and I that we hosted in New York this summer.

00:36:09.820 | And I've never seen something so well-coordinated and organized.

00:36:13.300 | It was amazing.

00:36:14.380 | That guy is world class.

00:36:16.780 | So that's a great one.

00:36:18.340 | I love that one.

00:36:19.620 | So obviously, we're talking about reflection.

00:36:21.700 | But I want to talk a little bit about the year ahead.

00:36:24.220 | But I do want to ask, you mentioned very briefly at the beginning, things that made it easy

00:36:28.380 | for you to go back, like journaling or sending yourself emails.

00:36:32.580 | Are there things that people should be thinking about in the year ahead that will make this

00:36:37.180 | process easier in the future, whether it's a monthly review or journaling, things like

00:36:42.060 | that?

00:36:43.060 | I do a monthly review that I think is super important.

00:36:47.140 | And I do this for a number of reasons.

00:36:48.940 | The biggest one for me is when you have a plan for the year, which all of us, if you're

00:36:53.380 | listening to this podcast, you're probably a planner, you probably like to set your course

00:36:58.060 | for the year at the beginning and figure out where you're heading, your North Star, if

00:37:01.300 | you will.

00:37:02.300 | But the biggest challenge with that is a year is just such a long time and changing.

00:37:07.140 | You get the whole one in 60 rule that I think was in Atomic Habits is if you're off by one

00:37:13.460 | degree you're heading, you're going to miss your target by a mile for every 60 miles flown.

00:37:18.100 | And it's super, super impactful.

00:37:21.100 | And I think about it a lot.

00:37:22.460 | So I sit down at the end of every month, and I try to ask myself a set of questions and

00:37:26.940 | just reflect on the month from the past.

00:37:29.700 | What were the really important things in my life?

00:37:31.940 | Was I focusing on those?

00:37:33.300 | Did I actually spend time on the really important things or was my attention grabbed elsewhere?

00:37:37.900 | Are my daily systems, the things that I'm doing on a daily basis, actually in line and

00:37:42.020 | aligned with what my long-term goals are, my midterm goals are?

00:37:45.820 | So I do sit down at the end of every month and try to either, for me personally, I like

00:37:49.500 | to write down by hand.

00:37:50.860 | Some people like using Notion or some digital tool or sending themselves an email.

00:37:54.940 | But for me, being able to have that then as a record that I can go back and look at, in

00:37:59.700 | addition to anything else I've collected from the year, like calendars, et cetera, tends

00:38:03.500 | to be a really helpful exercise.

00:38:06.180 | You've published, I think, somewhere that monthly review process.

00:38:09.100 | Is that right?

00:38:10.100 | Yeah.

00:38:11.100 | I released an annual planning guide after the annual review guide, which has my whole

00:38:16.380 | kind of process for setting out the long-term goals.

00:38:19.580 | I think about checkpoint goals that are in between the daily systems that come there,

00:38:24.420 | the anti-goals.

00:38:25.420 | You know what?

00:38:26.420 | We want to avoid the Pyrrhic victory, avoid winning the battle, but losing the war with

00:38:29.980 | these goals.

00:38:30.980 | And then finally, how to think about tracking and adjusting, which is really that monthly

00:38:34.340 | review process.

00:38:35.500 | So I did have that out somewhere and people can find out.

00:38:38.500 | We can put it in the show notes.

00:38:39.740 | Perfect.

00:38:40.740 | Yeah.

00:38:41.740 | And journaling is something that I haven't adopted as a habit, but it seems like the

00:38:44.460 | data out there is like, it's a really good habit.

00:38:46.540 | Like it seems like everybody should be doing it.

00:38:48.300 | I finally figured out how to do this.

00:38:50.580 | I mean, I spent five years, to be honest, like five years telling myself at the beginning

00:38:56.740 | of every year that I was going to become a journaler because of the impact that it has

00:38:59.980 | on your mental health and your ability to change course and reflect.

00:39:03.660 | And literally, I would come into the year, every year I'd say I was going to do it.

00:39:07.660 | I would set up this like complex journaling process with get these fancy notebooks and

00:39:12.540 | these pens and all this stuff, because that's just how I'm wired.

00:39:15.900 | And you know, set aside 30 minutes a night to sit down and reflect and do all this stuff.

00:39:20.500 | And without fail, five days in, I would miss a day and then the whole thing would get derailed

00:39:25.780 | and I wouldn't journal for the rest of the year.

00:39:27.620 | And so I finally made progress and figured out a system that works by just simplifying

00:39:32.160 | it to like a two minute process where I just do, I call it my one, one, one method.

00:39:36.800 | And it's one win from the day.

00:39:38.780 | So one thing that went well, that you did well, one point of tension, anxiety, stress,

00:39:44.180 | like one thing that's just on your chest that you need to get off and get down on paper.

00:39:48.860 | And then one point of gratitude.

00:39:50.500 | So one thing that you just, it can be as tiny as like a smell that you really enjoy during

00:39:54.940 | the day, or it can be huge, you know, health of your family, whatever it might be.

00:39:59.140 | But writing those three points down every single night, it has just been this enormous

00:40:03.420 | unlock for my life.

00:40:04.820 | And it's so simple that literally anyone can do it and you don't have an excuse not to,

00:40:08.980 | because it can take one minute to go and sit down and write it.

00:40:12.020 | And if you are struggling on one of those three things, do you sit there and think it

00:40:17.100 | out or do you just skip it?

00:40:18.700 | Or what advice would you give to someone who's like, "God, I just can't think of something."

00:40:22.500 | I try to do it from like complete word dump mindset.

00:40:28.220 | Like I don't want to overthink it too much.

00:40:30.100 | I want to just do the first thing that comes to my mind, the first win that I can think

00:40:33.500 | of from the day.

00:40:34.500 | It can be as simple as like, "I got up at the time I said I was going to get up."

00:40:37.740 | Because it just gives you like a nice pat on the back where if you feel like you lost

00:40:40.700 | the day, like you feel like you had a tough day, that first win that comes to your mind

00:40:44.340 | and you can write it down, it's so impactful.

00:40:47.060 | And everyone has the tension or stress.

00:40:50.780 | No one is ever going to be without one of those from a given day.

00:40:53.580 | You always had something.

00:40:54.820 | So it tends to be like either the win or the point of gratitude is tougher.

00:41:00.220 | The win is usually the hardest for people.

00:41:02.020 | And so it's just like minimize what you think, like open up the aperture of what qualifies

00:41:06.700 | as a win in your life, if you will.

00:41:08.980 | Everyone thinks it has to be some amazing big thing, but it can be as tiny as, "I just

00:41:12.620 | I got up out of bed when I thought I took a shower, you know, in the way that I wanted

00:41:17.060 | to."

00:41:18.060 | Like the smallest little thing can count as a win in your life.

00:41:20.660 | Last night, I had an apple instead of dessert.

00:41:25.100 | And for anyone listening...

00:41:26.100 | Hell, it's God.

00:41:27.100 | Yeah, I know.

00:41:28.100 | That's how I felt.

00:41:29.100 | It's that meme where you're like, "Ah, I felt like a hero."

00:41:31.820 | And I recorded an episode yesterday with Jordan Schlane, who's a doctor and he's awesome.

00:41:36.700 | And we talked a lot about this.

00:41:37.700 | So I think that episode will have already come out by the time people hear this.

00:41:40.340 | So you'll know why I was so excited about eating an apple.

00:41:43.420 | But that would have been my win if I had written that down.

00:41:46.860 | It's a great one.

00:41:47.860 | Do you write it digitally or do you write it with a pen?

00:41:49.860 | I write with pen and paper.

00:41:51.140 | I just find the process of actually writing on paper to be pretty therapeutic.

00:41:54.900 | I have terrible penmanship.

00:41:56.220 | I need to get much better about that.

00:41:58.260 | When I tweeted this whole method out, I tweeted a picture of my journal and got dunked on

00:42:01.760 | by a bunch of people for how bad my handwriting is.

00:42:05.020 | But such is life.

00:42:06.340 | That's one thing to take into 2023.

00:42:08.220 | But I know you wrote a post that I really liked or a newsletter, right?

00:42:12.780 | You've been very good at "Here's my content.

00:42:14.620 | If you want to consume it on Twitter, you can consume it here.

00:42:16.680 | You want to consume it on Instagram, you can consume it here.

00:42:18.700 | Or you can subscribe to the newsletter, which I do."

00:42:21.260 | And one was about 23 things to take into 2023.

00:42:24.380 | So I thought we would wrap this up and go through highlights.

00:42:29.180 | We'll put a link in the show notes.

00:42:30.800 | Subscribe to the newsletter for sure.

00:42:32.540 | But just a few of these things since you broke them down into categories, what do you think?

00:42:36.220 | Yeah, let's do it.

00:42:37.220 | All right.

00:42:38.220 | So your first category was work.

00:42:39.220 | Well, the first one connects directly to the annual review.

00:42:41.620 | So I think it's a great one to start on because it'll help people as they think about this

00:42:44.800 | coming year.

00:42:45.800 | I call this my energy calendar technique.

00:42:48.740 | And as it sounds like something from like Sedona, Arizona with crystals in the room,

00:42:52.780 | you got the vortex, the Sedona vortex.

00:42:54.740 | I love that.

00:42:55.740 | Sedona is amazing, by the way.

00:42:57.660 | Everyone should go there at some point in their life.

00:42:59.580 | The energy calendar technique is basically a simple color coding strategy to figure out

00:43:04.740 | over the course of a week or two, what it is in your life that's creating energy and

00:43:08.540 | what's draining energy.

00:43:09.780 | So the way I do it is take a week when you're going to do this, go through a workday at

00:43:14.780 | the end of the day, look at your calendar and make changes to the color of the things

00:43:19.780 | on your calendar based on what created energy, what was sort of neutral and what drained

00:43:23.920 | energy from you and literally go change the color of those things on the day that just

00:43:27.660 | passed.

00:43:28.660 | So if something created energy, you mark it as green.

00:43:30.320 | If it was neutral, you mark it as yellow.

00:43:32.300 | And if it drained energy, you mark it as red.

00:43:34.560 | Do that every single day for a week, maybe two weeks, and then go back and look at it.

00:43:39.580 | And you'll immediately be able to viscerally very clearly identify trends in what created

00:43:45.820 | energy in your life, which you need to amplify and try to spend more time on what was neutral,

00:43:51.100 | which you can kind of continue to leave or potentially try to delegate.

00:43:55.160 | And then what was draining energy from your life.

00:43:57.840 | And with those, the whole idea is to start slowly working your way towards being able

00:44:01.940 | to delegate or delete those from your life.

00:44:04.420 | Yeah, the one thing that I'm going to try with this is there's times, especially when

00:44:09.580 | you're working on your own schedule like I am where I'll be doing something, but I didn't

00:44:12.900 | put it in my calendar.

00:44:14.060 | I'm not as good as others at time blocking the whole perfect day.

00:44:17.780 | But at the end of the day, it'd be really easy for me to be like, "Oh, for this hour,

00:44:20.900 | I researched this topic."

00:44:22.540 | So if you do it at the end of the day, it could be really quick.

00:44:25.740 | So I'm going to go in back and also add other things because...

00:44:28.980 | I'm also bad, by the way, at time boxing.

00:44:31.020 | I think time boxing is near a all who is amazing and I think it's a great technique for a lot

00:44:36.580 | of people.

00:44:37.580 | I really struggle with having every minute of my calendar filled just optically.

00:44:41.380 | It intimidates me about the day.

00:44:42.820 | Even if a block literally says, "Go on a walk with your son," it's intimidating to me to

00:44:47.820 | see at the beginning of the day every minute filled.

00:44:50.260 | So I have huge open blocks.

00:44:52.100 | So I actually do exactly what you just said.

00:44:53.860 | I'll go back and say like, "Oh, I did this piece of research here.

00:44:56.940 | I did this here," etc.

00:44:58.300 | Well, speaking of walks, let's talk about taking breaks because I know that was in there

00:45:01.860 | number four.

00:45:02.860 | I mean, this is all about attention residue, which is a concept that I think one of your

00:45:06.740 | prior guests, Cal Newport, has written about in the past that I've become somewhat obsessed

00:45:11.340 | with.

00:45:12.340 | Generally, just this idea that we're always context switching because of the world that

00:45:17.260 | we live in with constant notifications.

00:45:19.460 | So you'll be working on something and then you decide to check your email.

00:45:22.660 | And when you check your email, there's this tiny cognitive load that is now stuck in that

00:45:28.500 | email when you come back to the work.

00:45:30.900 | And you're just getting spread thin.

00:45:32.340 | You're literally just like leaving your kind of mental capacity in all of these different

00:45:36.820 | places in your messages, in your emails, etc.

00:45:39.020 | And so then when you're going back and working on the really important thing, you're operating

00:45:42.580 | at like 60% of what your optimal mental capacity is.

00:45:46.020 | And obviously, as a result, your work is going to suffer.

00:45:48.560 | So this whole idea is we need to minimize the impact of attention residue.

00:45:53.620 | Attention residue is that actual scientific side of that when that happens and your attention

00:45:58.500 | is grabbed in different places.

00:46:00.780 | And taking breaks is really a key way to get around this.

00:46:04.580 | And so the biggest way that I think most people can put this into their schedule and into

00:46:09.640 | their lives is schedule 25-minute meetings instead of 30-minute meetings.

00:46:14.140 | And immediately, you'll see a difference.

00:46:16.360 | Rather than having the context switch that comes from having back-to-back meetings that

00:46:20.760 | are just pushing you from one thing to the next, when your mind is still in the prior

00:46:24.160 | meeting while you're in the new one, or your mind's on the next meeting while you're in

00:46:27.000 | this one, you create an actual separation window.

00:46:30.800 | You can go for a quick walk.

00:46:32.120 | You can sit and just breathe.

00:46:34.120 | It has a massive impact immediately.

00:46:36.720 | And by the way, if anyone doesn't know this, it's a setting in Google Calendar to turn

00:46:40.720 | on speedy meetings, which takes 30-minute meetings, makes them 25, takes hour meetings,

00:46:44.840 | and makes them 50 minutes.

00:46:45.920 | So you don't even have to work hard to do it.

00:46:48.920 | You could just enable the feature.

00:46:50.380 | And then when you drag an hour-long meeting, it auto readjusts to 50 minutes.

00:46:54.880 | That's a great hack.

00:46:55.880 | I love that.

00:46:56.880 | Yeah.

00:46:57.880 | And then I think this pairs well with your number seven about batching email into Windows

00:47:03.640 | to process.

00:47:04.720 | Yeah, this one has been a huge, huge push for me personally, which is I just found myself

00:47:11.480 | constantly checking emails and texts throughout the entire day.

00:47:15.200 | And so when I started really focusing on minimizing attention residue, I thought about what's

00:47:19.040 | the best way for me to minimize the impact that that has.

00:47:22.680 | And what I did was I just set a one-hour block late in the day, which was when I was going

00:47:26.920 | to actually check email.

00:47:28.600 | And initially, I definitely wasn't perfect about it.

00:47:30.600 | I'm still not 100% compliant.

00:47:32.320 | I will still pop it open because I have the finance gene in me where I feel like I need

00:47:36.920 | to be on email 24/7.

00:47:39.020 | But having a window of discrete time when you're actually going to process those emails

00:47:42.880 | allows you to minimize how it impacts the other parts of your day.

00:47:46.880 | And then also, you really focus on the emails and you think clearly about the things and

00:47:50.720 | the questions people are asking when you're working on them because that becomes the core

00:47:54.400 | thing that you're doing during that time, rather than it being just a little distraction

00:47:58.920 | and you're trying to process it as quickly as you can between meetings.

00:48:03.240 | So that one's really impactful.

00:48:04.680 | It just depends on what your career track is and what you're working on to think about

00:48:09.800 | how many of those windows there need to be, how long they have to be.

00:48:12.880 | If you work in professional services, if you're a lawyer, if you're an investment banker,

00:48:16.040 | if you're a consultant, it's rich for you to think that you can have a one-hour window

00:48:20.600 | when you're doing email.

00:48:21.600 | It's ridiculous.

00:48:22.600 | I worked in finance.

00:48:23.600 | You can't do that.

00:48:24.600 | Now, can you have three of those windows during the day and get away with it?

00:48:28.800 | Probably.

00:48:29.800 | You could probably have one early in the day, one around lunchtime, and one in the evening

00:48:32.920 | and be in a good spot where you're still getting those periods of deep work when you can really

00:48:37.160 | think about things.

00:48:38.340 | But then you also have those fixed times where you're processing and moving through stuff.

00:48:42.000 | So I think there's a happy medium for everyone to find that'll really optimize this.

00:48:46.600 | Yeah.

00:48:47.600 | And I don't know the science behind this, but my gut would say that part of the reason

00:48:51.500 | we love checking our emails is because every time something comes in, it's like someone's

00:48:54.760 | wanting to talk to you.

00:48:55.840 | There's this dopamine hit of seeing this thing.

00:48:58.160 | I can say that when you start batching your emails, you just increase the likelihood that

00:49:02.640 | some interesting thing is going to be there every single time you check your email.

00:49:07.200 | So at the end of this recording, I'm going to go check my email and I'm going to be excited

00:49:11.760 | because I know that there's actually something interesting.

00:49:14.360 | Whereas, when you're in the habit of checking your email all the time, 90% of those times,

00:49:19.440 | it's just some stupid spam thing.

00:49:22.300 | It's something unimportant.

00:49:24.120 | But now, when I batch my emails, every time I check my email, if it's only two or three

00:49:27.800 | times a day, there's usually something valuable and interesting in there.

00:49:31.400 | So I don't know.

00:49:32.400 | I actually get a lot of satisfaction when I've gone without email for a little while.

00:49:35.680 | I get that dopamine hit of like, "Oh, there's one great thing every time."

00:49:39.640 | You're a really positive guy.

00:49:40.640 | I like this about you.

00:49:41.640 | That's great.

00:49:42.640 | I'm a dread email guy.

00:49:43.880 | I'm trying to avoid the stressful thing that's coming into my inbox.

00:49:47.320 | Oh, no.

00:49:48.320 | I'm excited.

00:49:49.320 | The most exciting thing could be here.

00:49:50.320 | And by the way, doing the same thing with messages has been a great change for me with

00:49:54.880 | text messages because it's the same exact impact and you're checking text throughout

00:49:59.060 | the day.

00:50:00.060 | My goal for 2023 is to try to do this with social media because popping open Twitter

00:50:04.860 | once an hour and looking at things and doom scrolling and seeing what notifications or

00:50:09.920 | who's yelling at you or sending you mean DMs, just like super, super counterproductive for

00:50:14.380 | deep work.

00:50:15.380 | Yeah, for Twitter, one thing I've done is just relentlessly unfollow.

00:50:20.740 | Or even...

00:50:21.740 | You don't even have to unfollow, but I think you can mute a person.

00:50:24.420 | So you can still DM them, but you don't have to see their tweets.

00:50:26.660 | To the point that there's just not that many people in your feed.

00:50:29.900 | So your feed is something you can manage and actually maybe complete in the day.

00:50:34.460 | Did you turn to the latest tweet setting or are you still on?

00:50:38.220 | Because now that they've changed the algorithm, the home feed is pretty...

00:50:42.060 | It's tons of stuff of people you don't follow.

00:50:43.820 | Yeah.

00:50:44.820 | I still use Tweetbot because I don't like that in the Twitter app and I don't like seeing

00:50:50.420 | sponsored tweets.

00:50:51.420 | I could just...

00:50:52.420 | So I still use Tweetbot as my main Twitter app.

00:50:55.620 | And there are reasons it sucks.

00:50:57.100 | It's delayed on getting notifications from DMs.

00:50:59.820 | But throughout this conversation, I'm wondering if maybe that's a good thing.

00:51:03.380 | Yeah.

00:51:04.380 | So I would love to see the Twitter app be something that I could use more regularly,

00:51:09.140 | but I don't use it much right now.

00:51:11.620 | The hack here is just to turn...

00:51:14.340 | You go to the little star icon in the top right of your Twitter thing and just change

00:51:17.820 | it to latest tweets rather than doing the home.

00:51:21.500 | And it means that it just does it in chronological order and it's basically only people you follow.

00:51:26.380 | And so that cleans up your feed immediately.

00:51:28.660 | You don't have all the stuff that Twitter is serving up to you.

00:51:31.020 | I don't think it's...

00:51:32.020 | Does it sync between platforms?

00:51:33.500 | No, it doesn't.

00:51:34.900 | Because I had that...

00:51:35.900 | I literally just checked this because I had my Mac OS Twitter app was on latest, but my

00:51:41.540 | phone is somehow not.

00:51:43.020 | So I'm now going to go fix that.

00:51:45.660 | So yeah.

00:51:46.660 | Tweetbot for me, it's like...

00:51:48.060 | Since I only follow a handful of people and they're like news sources and people...

00:51:51.700 | I can just like...

00:51:52.700 | I go on my computer and it's like there are 12 unread tweets.

00:51:55.220 | I just roll up.

00:51:56.220 | And then when I go to my phone, it jumps right to that same spot in the feed.

00:51:59.480 | But hopefully, Twitter can get their act together.

00:52:01.940 | The one thing I'll add to this...

00:52:04.300 | So I guess by the end of this, it might be 26 things or 27 things to take into 2023,

00:52:09.500 | is from my reflections, which is just learn to outsource tasks to increase the ROI of

00:52:14.100 | your time.

00:52:15.100 | And I will say, depending on what industry you work in, this may or may not be allowed.

00:52:19.740 | So check with your company.

00:52:21.020 | If you work for yourself, you have a lot more flexibility.

00:52:23.660 | But there are certainly tasks during the day that I'm sure someone else could do and give

00:52:27.740 | you more time to spend on the things that are the most high ROI for your time.

00:52:33.140 | And especially if your company would support you, maybe hiring a virtual assistant to help

00:52:36.900 | do some of these things.

00:52:38.180 | I've seen a handful of examples of people, especially in sales, where they were able

00:52:42.900 | to hire people.

00:52:44.260 | Their company wasn't going to give them the budget.

00:52:45.940 | So they just personally freelance hired people and convinced the company that they should

00:52:50.340 | have the budget to bring this person on so that they could spend their time closing the

00:52:54.100 | deals and drive up the actual output they got.

00:52:57.500 | Their salary went up, even net of what they had to pay out.

00:53:01.020 | So I think there are a lot of opportunities to outsource, to optimize where you spend

00:53:07.760 | your time.

00:53:08.760 | Yeah.

00:53:09.760 | Alright.

00:53:10.760 | Health?

00:53:11.760 | Health.

00:53:12.760 | Alright.

00:53:13.760 | Well, there's a couple in here that are my go-to.

00:53:16.420 | So the first one is something that I started doing in college, which I guess I will loosely

00:53:21.100 | call the 55530 method.

00:53:23.940 | And the reason I will loosely call it that is because someone else called it that.

00:53:27.500 | I put it in this like life hacks document that I did maybe six months ago.

00:53:31.340 | And then someone wrote a Twitter thread on it without citing me actually, because they

00:53:36.220 | thought that it was like a well-known method.

00:53:39.180 | And it was literally just something that I created and started doing in college that

00:53:42.940 | no one knows about.

00:53:43.940 | So it's pretty funny to me that it now has a name.

00:53:46.780 | But basically this is as soon as you wake up and get out of bed, you do five squats,

00:53:52.540 | five lunges per leg, five pushups, and a 30 second plank.

00:53:57.180 | And all this does is just immediately sparks your energy and metabolism to start the day.

00:54:02.420 | It's like a simple thing, right?

00:54:04.140 | Five pushups.

00:54:05.140 | It's not like you're saying, "Oh, I'm going to do a hundred pushups as soon as I get out

00:54:07.140 | of bed."

00:54:08.420 | It's a low enough amount that it's not intimidating and you can force yourself to just quickly

00:54:12.220 | do it to start the day.

00:54:13.340 | You can do it while your coffee is getting made or literally right as soon as you get

00:54:16.300 | out of bed.

00:54:17.520 | But it gives you this huge energy boost to start the day.

00:54:20.500 | And I think it's hugely impactful.

00:54:21.820 | I started doing it because we had these early morning baseball practices in college.

00:54:26.260 | And it's just a habit that's now stuck with me throughout my life.

00:54:29.120 | What else do you do in the morning?

00:54:30.500 | I'm curious.

00:54:31.500 | I think there are a few things in your health list that are morning routine.

00:54:34.980 | I get out of bed.

00:54:36.980 | I drink a whole bunch.

00:54:38.700 | I keep a cold water on my bedside table.

00:54:40.820 | So as soon as I wake up, I drink a whole ton of water.

00:54:43.380 | I do the 5-5-5-30 really quickly, just like on the floor on the side, trying to stay quiet

00:54:48.380 | because I wake up earlier than my wife.

00:54:51.340 | And then I go get in a cold plunge.

00:54:54.380 | So this has been...

00:54:55.380 | This is a new ad.

00:54:56.380 | I got the cold plunge in July of 2022 and have done every single day since, three to

00:55:01.980 | seven minutes in it every morning at 39 degrees.

00:55:05.220 | And that's been probably the biggest impact in my life of a single thing that I've added

00:55:11.740 | to my routine in the last five or 10 years.

00:55:15.060 | I've experienced just a massive set of benefits in terms of energy and in terms of the dopamine

00:55:20.500 | rush that I get from it, the surge that just lasts for hours, that just makes me feel super

00:55:24.860 | human during the early part of my day.

00:55:26.740 | So that's been the big, big ad for me.

00:55:28.740 | Yeah.

00:55:29.740 | We've just created a space in our home where a cold plunge will one day go.

00:55:34.380 | I don't know enough of the science to say like the brown fat and the metabolism and

00:55:39.380 | the immunity.

00:55:40.380 | And there's all this research.

00:55:41.380 | Dr. Huberman has talked about it, I think, on an episode that shows all of these great

00:55:45.820 | health benefits.

00:55:46.980 | But if nothing else other than the dopamine rush and the feeling of doing something hard

00:55:52.260 | that makes the rest of the day feel easier, it would be worth it to me.

00:55:56.380 | I've absolutely loved it.

00:55:57.980 | I think it's phenomenal.

00:55:59.580 | Anything else you do in the morning?

00:56:00.580 | Yeah.

00:56:01.580 | I mean, this is with my son now, which is even better on all of this.

00:56:05.380 | But waking up in the morning, doing those things, and then just going out and getting

00:56:09.420 | sunlight.

00:56:10.420 | Again, this goes back to a thing that Dr. Huberman has talked about a lot, the impact

00:56:13.460 | of getting sun first thing in the morning.

00:56:15.740 | And that can be on a cloudy day, you just have to stay out longer, there still is sun.

00:56:20.540 | But having that, just being able to breathe, not having your phone on you so that you're

00:56:25.500 | not looking and checking messages, checking email, checking social media, et cetera, is

00:56:30.900 | a great, great way to start your day, set your body in the right direction, it improves

00:56:34.940 | your mood, it improves your sleep the next night, a whole host of health benefits.

00:56:40.300 | But for me personally, just from a cognitive standpoint, to start my day with a feeling

00:56:44.040 | of breathing and creativity has been a great, great habit.

00:56:49.220 | I'm going to add a couple, I'll do them quick, because they're actually four.

00:56:52.900 | And most of them came from this conversation I had about health a couple weeks ago.

00:56:56.740 | Technically, I had a day ago, but by the time you're listening to this, it'll be a couple

00:56:59.860 | weeks ago.

00:57:00.940 | So one, we talked about how one of the most valuable things you could do is just time

00:57:04.840 | restricted eating.

00:57:06.100 | So you call it intermittent fasting, you can call it whatever you want, but just keeping

00:57:10.820 | your eating window to a smaller time.

00:57:13.180 | That's something that I think I had done for a while, took a pause in the holidays, and

00:57:18.540 | hopefully will bring back this year.

00:57:20.960 | Another is we talked about Jordan, who I spoke with was like one of his kind of diagnostic

00:57:26.540 | things is going through who are you and just collecting the basic data and diagnostics

00:57:30.560 | about your health.

00:57:32.300 | So I'm gonna encourage a lot of people who haven't done this to consider it, which is

00:57:36.300 | just like, go check your basic, get your basic metabolic panel, like your blood work done.

00:57:42.420 | I know a lot of us when we're young, we're like, "Oh, you know, everything seems fine."

00:57:46.740 | But try to figure out is there an area you need to work on.

00:57:49.500 | For me, it was cholesterol.

00:57:51.100 | That's my area right now.

00:57:52.540 | But for everyone else, it could be different.

00:57:53.820 | So just doing that.

00:57:54.820 | There are some great companies that can support that, by the way.

00:57:57.420 | I mean, you can look up the different ones.

00:57:58.780 | I'm not affiliated with any, but I've used InsideTracker in the past.

00:58:02.520 | It's relatively pricey, but it's an incredible experience and they have a great kind of dashboard

00:58:07.220 | that allows you to track it over time as well.

00:58:09.700 | They are a partner of the show.

00:58:11.320 | So everybody gets 20% off.

00:58:12.820 | So bring that price down a little.

00:58:15.660 | Another one he pointed out was stop using alarms.

00:58:19.280 | And this will be an interesting one to hear your reaction to, because I know you wake

00:58:21.580 | up early.

00:58:22.580 | And he said, switch from a wake up alarm to a bedtime alarm.

00:58:26.260 | Once you learn how much sleep your body needs to naturally wake up, then instead of setting

00:58:30.660 | your alarm for 5am, which I think is something you do, figure out how much sleep you need

00:58:34.980 | and set your go to bed alarm.

00:58:36.780 | Because there's just so much magic that happens while you're asleep, that interrupting that

00:58:41.180 | process can have an impact on your health.

00:58:44.740 | And if you could force that to be different, that's better.

00:58:47.420 | So I actually don't use an alarm in the morning because I've gotten pretty good at waking

00:58:52.020 | up naturally around the same time, as long as I go to bed at the right time.

00:58:55.280 | That's an interesting one.

00:58:56.280 | I've always just loved alarms.

00:58:58.620 | I'm not trying to take it away.

00:59:01.340 | Just switch.

00:59:02.340 | I originally needed them because I just wasn't sleeping enough and so I just needed to get

00:59:06.020 | up early.

00:59:07.020 | When I was working in finance in my early days, I was getting up at like 3.45, going

00:59:10.100 | to bed probably by 10.30.

00:59:11.580 | I just wasn't sleeping enough for like a period of six years.

00:59:13.940 | I've recently, over the last year and a half, started taking sleep very seriously.

00:59:17.820 | And now I just have a grandpa schedule, man.

00:59:19.540 | I'm asleep by 8.30 and I'm up by between 4 and 5, depending on the day.

00:59:25.380 | And I get my seven to eight hours and I feel great and I wake up and I don't have an issue

00:59:28.940 | with it.

00:59:29.940 | But maybe I should experiment with it.

00:59:31.780 | Yeah.

00:59:32.780 | And then the last was along the lines of that apple, which is I'm going to really try in

00:59:36.500 | 2023 to...

00:59:38.020 | I had this negative impression of fruit my whole last few years.

00:59:42.460 | I was like, "Well, fruit has sugar.

00:59:43.660 | If fruit is sugar, it can't be good for you.

00:59:47.620 | If I'm going to have sugar, why not eat a cookie?"

00:59:50.600 | My wife has told me that was crazy forever.

00:59:53.500 | And we finally dug into the science behind it.

00:59:56.420 | And it's like, fruit is actually pretty good.

00:59:57.940 | There are some fruits that are not as good as others.

01:00:00.220 | I think mango, especially when it's dried or in juice form, is maybe more like a soft

01:00:06.240 | drink than something.

01:00:07.860 | But I'm going to try as part of this cholesterol plan to replace dessert with fruit and dark

01:00:14.300 | chocolate.

01:00:15.300 | I think it's a great approach, by the way, for limiting calories.

01:00:18.620 | You get the sweetness hit, but you don't have the negative impact.

01:00:21.700 | So I love that one.

01:00:22.700 | That's a great ad.

01:00:23.700 | And the amount of fiber in an apple, you just can't have five apples.

01:00:26.700 | I can tell everyone listening from experience, you can have five cookies.

01:00:30.300 | It is a physically possible thing.

01:00:31.860 | I don't think I could eat five apples.

01:00:33.220 | No, you definitely couldn't.

01:00:34.580 | And by the way, this all goes to one of my health hacks, which is to just do all of your

01:00:38.620 | shopping on the outer perimeter of the grocery store.

01:00:41.660 | If you just do that, you will immediately get healthier, lose weight, be in better shape,

01:00:46.980 | etc.

01:00:47.980 | Because all of the good stuff is on the outer aisles and all the bad stuff is on the inner

01:00:50.940 | aisles.

01:00:51.940 | Yeah.

01:00:52.940 | Fun, fun, financial, psychological money hack that I learned in an episode a long time ago

01:00:59.260 | is that if you walk the grocery store in the reverse order, on average, people save...

01:01:04.980 | I can't remember the percent.

01:01:06.100 | Some percent of the...

01:01:07.500 | They spend less.

01:01:09.340 | Because the grocery store is just like...

01:01:11.620 | You think it's like, "Oh, they managed to put this thing on this aisle."

01:01:14.140 | It's like, "No."

01:01:15.140 | They very meticulously engineered every aspect of your grocery store for you to spend the

01:01:19.820 | most amount of money possible.

01:01:21.700 | And just by going to the back and working your way around the other way, you will avoid

01:01:26.180 | certain marketing things, certain various elements that are trying to get you to spend.

01:01:32.180 | It's like Ikea, man.

01:01:33.180 | Ikea has that maze that you have to go through at the end that is so perfectly engineered

01:01:37.700 | to make you buy shit you don't need.

01:01:40.020 | I know.

01:01:41.020 | Sometimes you're like, "I'm trying to run.

01:01:42.340 | Look at what..."

01:01:43.340 | I remember one time we were like, "We just need to find an accent chair."

01:01:44.940 | And I was like, "It is so hard to get to anywhere in Ikea without following the map."

01:01:51.500 | There's a couple of hidden doors where you're like, "Can I go through this?

01:01:53.940 | I just need a chair."

01:01:54.940 | But yeah.

01:01:56.620 | So that's health, which is something I think we're going to do a few more...

01:01:59.060 | Jordan and I actually talked about doing some follow-up episodes.

01:02:01.260 | So I want to get more serious on that this year.

01:02:03.740 | I'm excited for Peter Attia's book, Outlive, coming out later this year.

01:02:06.900 | Alright, let's talk about personal before we wrap and money.

01:02:10.540 | Again, going back to one of your prior guests, Cal Newport.

01:02:14.820 | I think this is back in college.

01:02:16.100 | I first read this from him.

01:02:17.260 | He had a blog piece about a shutdown ritual or something like that.

01:02:21.940 | I call it a power down ritual, but basically creating a very fixed separation between your

01:02:26.740 | professional life and your personal life is something that you can do that immediately

01:02:31.220 | improves your mental health and has definitely had an impact on my life.

01:02:34.880 | This is like establishing a sequence of events that you do at the end of your day that mentally

01:02:41.740 | and literally marks the end of your workday.

01:02:44.840 | So it might be like checking messages for the last time and firing off any last emails

01:02:48.900 | that you need to set, might be doing the little bit of prep for your next morning's work to

01:02:53.300 | kind of set yourself up to hit the ground running, it might be checking Slack, whatever

01:02:57.780 | it is, you kind of do this one set sequence of a couple of events.

01:03:01.740 | And then in Cal's original blog piece, he actually advocated saying something out loud,

01:03:06.980 | like having kind of like a nerdy, actual shutdown sequence initiated thing that triggers in

01:03:12.980 | your mind that the day is over.

01:03:15.060 | And the whole goal is that once you do this shutdown sequence, you're off, you're not

01:03:19.100 | checking email, you're not going and looking at things.

01:03:22.780 | That's it for the day.

01:03:23.780 | And it's just a really, really helpful practice, especially in this hybrid and remote work

01:03:28.220 | world that we're living in where it's so easy to let professional and personal blur.

01:03:32.660 | I don't have a ritual yet, but I've started to get and I think people learn this when

01:03:36.180 | you have kids.

01:03:37.180 | It's like you want to have your quality family time because you're working during the day.

01:03:40.880 | You kind of have to do this, but I don't have a ritual and I feel like I'm going to bring

01:03:44.760 | that one into this year.

01:03:46.140 | Two more for you really quick on the personal side.

01:03:48.660 | If you're in a relationship, tell your partner one thing you appreciate about them every

01:03:53.220 | single night.

01:03:54.820 | And this can be the tiniest thing.

01:03:56.220 | It can be like, I appreciate how you picked up that one thing or how you let me know about

01:04:00.460 | X, Y, or Z.

01:04:01.940 | Just tell them one small thing because as relationships go on, it's really easy to just

01:04:06.540 | not think about all the good and to just have the stressful or the tension or the anxiety

01:04:11.660 | be the things that you hold in your mind.

01:04:14.180 | And doing this every night has had a really, really positive impact on my wife and my relationship.

01:04:19.380 | And then the last one, take yourself out for more meals alone.

01:04:23.260 | I do this once a month without fail, either a lunch or a dinner dinner, preferably, although

01:04:29.380 | it probably doesn't happen quite as often now with the little guy.

01:04:32.400 | But just go out to a restaurant by yourself.

01:04:34.660 | It can be your favorite place or it can be a new place.

01:04:37.700 | Don't bring any technology or just keep it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode.

01:04:41.280 | You can bring a book.

01:04:42.280 | You can bring a notebook if you want to journal and write things, but just sit by yourself

01:04:46.620 | and allow yourself to be bored and just observe the world around you and have a nice meal

01:04:52.400 | by yourself.

01:04:53.400 | Huge, huge unlock that not enough people are doing.

01:04:56.980 | I'll share one that's similar for people with family.

01:05:00.380 | And if the theme of yours was you don't always have to eat with your partner or with

01:05:05.580 | someone else, you can eat by yourself.

01:05:07.140 | Mine is you don't always have to spend all of your family time with all of your family.

01:05:11.460 | And so you you mentioned you take walks with your son.

01:05:14.260 | I think that it's important to have quality time as a family.

01:05:17.820 | And it's also important to have quality time with people in your family together without

01:05:22.060 | everyone else.

01:05:23.140 | So that's for us.

01:05:24.380 | I would say encourage people to find a way to get childcare, to go on a date, even if

01:05:28.660 | it's a lunch date while you have, you know, in the middle of the day or dinner or something.

01:05:33.060 | And then also with your kids alone, like I take my daughter on an adventure.

01:05:36.780 | So my wife and I are talking about what we want to do with our family in the future and

01:05:41.060 | taking a trip with each kid, you know, without the other kid is something we want to do.

01:05:47.160 | And spending time with, you know, one on lots of different like one on one stuff is also

01:05:50.620 | really important.

01:05:51.620 | So that's one that I want to take into 2023.

01:05:53.700 | Alright, last section is money.

01:05:56.440 | I just had three in there.

01:05:57.700 | We can hit them rapid fire.

01:05:59.260 | First one is automate a direct deposit into an investment account that you basically never

01:06:04.120 | look at.

01:06:05.980 | Everyone should do this.

01:06:06.980 | This is just like an absolute financial no brainer.

01:06:09.300 | Allow the money to just compound.

01:06:10.980 | Don't think about how much money is in it.

01:06:12.380 | Just set some low number that feels not super stressful to you that automatically goes out

01:06:17.700 | in a direct deposit into this investment account every single month.

01:06:21.060 | Let compounding work for you.

01:06:23.100 | Number two, automate all the simple financial tasks in your life.

01:06:27.140 | I used to be a type of person that would just check all of my different bills and look at

01:06:32.360 | all the numbers and pay them all manually because I figured someone was going to be

01:06:35.620 | trying to screw me over.

01:06:37.220 | It never once happened, and I was just wasting a whole bunch of mental energy by going and

01:06:41.340 | looking at these things every month.

01:06:42.740 | So automating all of your bill payment, credit cards, investing, etc.

01:06:47.500 | Anything that's pulling your mind away from things that really matter is easily automatable.

01:06:53.980 | And then the last one for me is this rule I have around material purchases, which is

01:06:59.780 | a way to save money and build wealth.

01:07:02.080 | Like a 48-hour rule about material purchases, which means if you put something in a shopping

01:07:07.460 | cart, walk away, and 48 hours later, come back.

01:07:10.880 | If you still want the thing, buy it, and there's no issue with that.

01:07:14.620 | But most of the time, you're going to realize that the material purchase that you'd put

01:07:17.800 | in your shopping cart 48 hours later, you've thought about it, and you don't go buy.

01:07:21.560 | So it's a behavioral hack for avoiding the unnecessary purchases that we don't really

01:07:26.080 | need.

01:07:27.080 | And if you can invest that money instead, even better.

01:07:29.920 | I like it.

01:07:31.000 | I do both the first thing and the second thing.

01:07:33.180 | So I love all the automation.

01:07:35.800 | I'm not as diligent about putting in your shopping cart.

01:07:38.680 | But I will add mine, which is everyone knows that's listening to this show that has in

01:07:42.360 | the past.

01:07:43.360 | When you're about to check out, it's like, "Go find all the ways you can save money for

01:07:46.120 | it."

01:07:47.120 | Ask LiveChat for the discount, use Rakuten or some other platform to get cash back.

01:07:52.840 | See if you could buy gift cards at a discount.

01:07:54.640 | Use the right card.

01:07:55.640 | Obviously, we're all doing those things.

01:07:58.300 | The other 3 ones I'll give are...

01:07:59.960 | Especially on miso soup.

01:08:00.960 | Yeah, you gotta save money on that $4.

01:08:04.500 | So I'm going to add 2 others.

01:08:07.100 | One is if you're not already tracking and organizing something in an automated way,

01:08:11.260 | do that.

01:08:12.260 | So I have 2 or 3 primary platforms for this.

01:08:15.860 | So I worked at Wealththread for a while.

01:08:17.600 | People know that.

01:08:18.600 | They have a free way that you can link all of your accounts, see your net worth all in

01:08:21.540 | one place.

01:08:23.100 | I also use a product called Kubera, which is I would say like, if you want the free

01:08:27.820 | version, Wealththread does a great job.

01:08:29.400 | If you want the full bells and whistles pro version, I think Kubera is best in class.

01:08:35.380 | It tracks all of your accounts across all places.

01:08:39.300 | It works well with everything from manual assets to crypto to real estate and everything.

01:08:44.980 | And so I think it's a great product.

01:08:48.160 | And I use Trustworthy for managing all of life's stuff.

01:08:53.220 | So where are our old tax returns, where are all of our COVID vaccine cards, our social

01:08:59.060 | security cards.

01:09:00.060 | I put all of our life stuff there.

01:09:01.700 | They've built like the family operating system.

01:09:04.900 | There is a price.

01:09:06.340 | But when you just think about the overhead you have of trying to manage and find and

01:09:10.360 | store all of this stuff, it's just not worth it for me.

01:09:14.300 | So those are 2 things to just set up some organization for where's your money, what's

01:09:19.300 | your net worth, where are all your accounts, all that.

01:09:22.100 | And then the other is for 2023, I'd encourage everyone to knock off...

01:09:27.460 | This is mostly for people with kids, but knock off the 2 big tasks that every single parent

01:09:32.200 | I know punts on, which is setting up a will or a trust or something like that, and setting

01:09:38.360 | up life insurance.

01:09:39.360 | If those 2 things are things that have been bogging you down, go get them done in 2023

01:09:45.060 | because they're just so, so, so important.

01:09:50.140 | That's my recommendation for 2 things on the money side to bring into the year.

01:09:54.380 | I need to check out Kubera.

01:09:55.640 | This sounds really interesting.

01:09:56.640 | I've always looked for something like this.

01:09:57.940 | I'm going to go check it out.

01:09:59.220 | Yeah.

01:10:00.220 | I think they...

01:10:01.220 | Look, Wealthfront is...

01:10:02.220 | It's also...

01:10:03.220 | By the way, is it an Indian company?

01:10:04.220 | Because I think it's derived from the God of Wealth.

01:10:08.140 | The founder, I believe, has a background...

01:10:13.700 | Family is from India or is from India.

01:10:14.900 | I don't remember.

01:10:15.900 | Okay, cool.

01:10:16.900 | Yeah, it's a great name because it's...

01:10:17.900 | Yeah, it's the God of Wealth.

01:10:18.900 | Yeah.

01:10:19.900 | It's awesome.

01:10:20.900 | Yeah.

01:10:21.900 | And I think by the time this episode comes out, they will be a partner of the show and

01:10:24.900 | we'll have a discount for you.

01:10:26.220 | If not, go to allthehacks.com/deals and it should be there.

01:10:29.460 | That's it.

01:10:30.460 | I mean, the funny thing about...

01:10:31.460 | We covered a lot.

01:10:32.460 | You say, "That's it."

01:10:33.460 | Oh, man.

01:10:34.460 | I think that's it for now, actually, because you've written all these amazing posts.

01:10:37.900 | One on razors, paradoxes, and I was like, "We should go through all this."

01:10:40.500 | And I was trying to plan for this episode, and I'm really glad we didn't try to fit

01:10:43.540 | all that in here.

01:10:44.540 | Oh, man.

01:10:45.540 | Because it would have just been one of those run through everything, no depth, no value.

01:10:49.180 | So I think we got to have you back on and we can run through a few of the other things

01:10:52.980 | you've written about that I think would be really valuable to talk through.

01:10:55.820 | I would love to do it, man.

01:10:57.100 | This was a blast.

01:10:58.100 | It was really fun getting to actually talk through this live.

01:10:59.780 | I haven't gotten to do this.

01:11:00.780 | So I'm excited to get everyone's feedback and hopefully, people come away with a few

01:11:05.140 | things that changed their life this year.

01:11:07.580 | One thing that I like to ask everyone, which I paused in the last interview, I don't know

01:11:11.340 | why I forgot, was is there a place, whether it's where you're from, where you travel a

01:11:16.500 | lot that you know a lot about that if you were sending or if someone were going to for

01:11:20.660 | a day, you'd tell them, "Here's a place to eat, here's a place to have a drink, or here's

01:11:24.420 | some something unique to do?"

01:11:26.180 | Yes.

01:11:27.180 | So in Bangalore, India, which is where my mother's from, that I've spent a ton of time

01:11:31.220 | in over the years, there is an amazing restaurant at this pretty old hotel, which is now called

01:11:37.220 | ITC Windsor.

01:11:38.700 | The restaurant is called the Royal Afghan, and it is my favorite meal in the entire world.

01:11:45.140 | The best naan that I've ever, ever had, and they have a dish called Dal Bukhara that is

01:11:51.100 | unbelievable.

01:11:52.540 | So that would be mine, the Royal Afghan in Bangalore, India.

01:11:56.020 | Anything else you'd say?

01:11:57.020 | If someone's going all the way to India, they're going to the Royal Afghan, how should they

01:12:00.140 | spend the rest of their day?

01:12:01.780 | Just take in the culture.

01:12:02.820 | If you've never been to India, it is an unbelievable and very, very different experience.

01:12:07.540 | The smell will last with you forever.

01:12:09.900 | It is a very distinct smell when you get off the plane in India.

01:12:12.620 | Well, I'll add one extra Bangalore recommendation, which is not actually in Bangalore, but if

01:12:17.100 | you like to rock climb, hop on the train, which is a whole nother experience, and head

01:12:21.300 | to Hampi, which is a really cool place for like a ridiculous amount of outdoor bouldering.

01:12:27.980 | I haven't done that yet.

01:12:28.980 | I'm going at the end of this month, though, so maybe I'll have to go do that.

01:12:31.740 | Are you?

01:12:32.740 | Do rock climbing?

01:12:33.740 | Do rock bouldering?

01:12:34.740 | No.

01:12:35.740 | Yeah.

01:12:36.740 | So it's like a backpackery rock climbing town.

01:12:39.920 | Like that is what the town is known for, at least for tourism.

01:12:42.980 | Yeah.

01:12:43.980 | I think I'm going to pass on this.

01:12:44.980 | I'm just going to stick to doing the commercial stuff.

01:12:47.940 | You can have a lot of fun in Bangalore.

01:12:48.980 | We had a great time.

01:12:50.840 | But awesome.

01:12:51.840 | All right.

01:12:52.840 | Thank you so much.

01:12:53.840 | Where can people sign up for the newsletter, follow you and stay on top of everything you're

01:12:57.140 | writing online?

01:12:58.140 | Yeah, everything.

01:12:59.140 | I mean, you can find me obviously on Twitter, Sawhill Bloom.

01:13:01.520 | It's just all under my name.

01:13:03.020 | And then my website is sawhillbloom.com and you can find my newsletter there.

01:13:06.300 | Anything else that I'm up to.

01:13:07.300 | Yeah.

01:13:08.300 | The newsletter is awesome.

01:13:09.300 | You can follow and subscribe.

01:13:10.300 | Thank you so much for being here and we'll have you back soon.

01:13:13.660 | Excited to do it.

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