(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. Now, just a few weeks ago, I read a few posts that really had me thinking more about how I wanna optimize 2023. One was about conducting a personal annual review, and the other was about 23 ways to make 2023 an amazing year.

They were both fantastic, and they were both written by my friend Sahil Bloom, who is one of my favorite creators. But he actually started his career in private equity and then spent a decade investing professionally before he turned to writing about finance and sharing his frameworks to have a more fulfilling life and career.

And to prepare for this conversation, I actually ended up coming up with so many topics I wanted to cover, but we're gonna have to get to them another time because we're gonna focus today on conducting a personal annual review, which is nothing like the arduous process of a performance review at work.

It's actually just seven questions you can ask yourself that give you the perfect opportunity to reflect on the past year and plan for what's ahead. Then we're gonna walk through some of Sahil and my top recommendations for how to make 2023 an amazing year across your work, health, life, and money.

I'm so excited for this conversation, so let's get started right after this. Sahil, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, man. As an avid listener, I'm excited to make my debut appearance here. Yeah, and we'll probably get to this at the end, but there might be some future appearances coming, but it's January.

There are a lot of people out there trying to make their resolutions, make their intentions for the year. What do you think people get wrong when they go through that process? The biggest thing I think people get wrong is focus on the planning side and not enough on the reflecting side.

There's this quote that I love, John Dewey, an American philosopher, and basically what he said was, "We don't learn from experience. "We learn from reflecting on experience." And I always thought that was a really powerful way of thinking about your year. You get to the end of the year and everyone's instinct is, "Okay, I'm gonna look forward.

"Let me make my goals. "Let me do all that." And that's just the way everyone operates. It's the standard. And not enough time is spent reflecting on the year that just passed. And what did you learn from it? And how can you actually take those learnings and drive yourself forward and do a better year going forward?

It's funny, I was hoping you'd say that because I wanted to talk about your personal annual review because I've seen you tweet about it, and then you actually produced this document that people could download. I kind of want to walk through it. So do you think we could just give people an overview of how you structure an annual review?

And then if anyone listening wants a copy, we'll definitely link to it in the show notes. Yeah, it's a pretty simple structure, as you know there. I've been doing this for the last five plus years, I would say, in this format. And you've had or had discussions with a few of these people, but I've taken inspiration over the years from a lot of the giants that I really look up to and admire like Tim Ferriss or James Clear, who have written about in the past their annual review structures.

And so I've sort of adapted that, but basically the whole thing is framed around seven questions. So maybe we can just go through the questions. You and I can chat about them a little bit. I'm curious for what your perspectives are on your own year on these. Maybe we can go from there.

I'm so glad you put this together and that we're having this conversation 'cause I went through and I started going through all of this myself. And I don't think I would have done that without your prompt. It's like you jump in and you're like, "Oh, I got all this stuff to do this year." So I think this was a great process for me.

I hope other people take that away from it. But let's just jump in, number one. So the first one that I always start with is what did I change my mind on this year? It's the first question I always ask. And the genesis of this is really just this idea that if you're not changing in any way, you're dying.

Like we need to adapt. We need to have those like software updates as I like to think of them to our mind to rewrite the old code and refresh it with new things. And so at the end of the year, I always like to ask, like what are the big things that I really changed my mind on?

And if there's nothing, I start to get really worried. That's when the tension starts to build. So that's always the first question that I ask. I'm curious for you specifically, what are some of the things that you feel like you changed your mind on this year? And I'm happy to give you mine.

So I'll run through it, but I have one quick question, which is for each of these things, is there anything you do that helps jog your memory? For me, I was like looking through my photo albums, like where was I this year to try to just anchor some points on things?

Or I was looking at my work calendar, like I was trying to figure out, it's not that I didn't change my mind. It's like, how do I find the things I changed on without too much recency bias? I'm like, what did I change my mind on in December? Part of the value of this whole process is that it requires you to pause and actually look back at your work, writing, projects, things that you did during the course of the year, because that actually gives you the zoomed out perspective.

The whole value of doing an annual review like this is really that you're constantly living in a first person view. You're zoomed in as far as you can possibly be, and this forces you to zoom out. You're like a bird flying to 10,000 feet and now observing your full year and being able to do it.

So for me, I'm a writer. That's kind of my primary thing. So I can actually go back and look at all of my writing during the course of the year and see, find those trends, look at things that I was talking about, thinking about, and how those might've morphed or changed.

For a lot of people, it can be journaling, notes that you've left yourself during the course of the year. Some people send themselves emails. I like doing that a lot from time to time. Note documents. Sometimes it's just conversations with friends. It's also a reason, by the way, why these annual reviews are often really productive to do in a group setting or in a one-on-one setting with another individual that you trust, because it tends to lead to a slightly more active discussion and pushbacks that actually make you think a little bit more deeply and avoid that recency bias that you mentioned.

For me, for some reason, and maybe it's that I live in the Bay Area and there's no seasons, so I don't have this like, what was happening when it was snowing? What was happening during summer? I like to use the calendar and go back and look at calendars and photos to just jog my memory of like, what happened in spring?

Oh, I went on this trip to New York or Boston or something. Oh, what was going on at work around the time I did that? So that was my version. I've done that recently, by the way, with my wife. So we just had our sixth anniversary and we were on a walk and we started thinking about, okay, what did we do each year since we got married?

Like, what were the big milestones, trips, things we did? And it was such a fun and interesting exercise to think about like, what our mindset was at each of these points in life. We got married and then we kind of had, you have the honeymoon period and you're going on all these trips and what were you thinking about and doing?

It's actually a really fun relationship exercise for people that have been in longer term relationships. - I'll share one thing and then I'll promise I'll answer your question, which is starting in, I don't know why, March of 2014, I started logging this doc, it's just a Google sheet called Monthly Experiences.

And my goal was that every month for the rest of my life, I needed to have an experience that made that month memorable. I first was like, was it monthly memorables, was monthly experiences? And it didn't necessarily have to be some crazy skydiving kind of thing. One of them was like, I had surgery on my foot because I had this thing called a Morton's neuroma and it'd been a pain in my life for a long time.

And finally, I was just like, I'm gonna do this. One was, we were in Colorado where my wife grew up and it was like so much snow, it was so cold. And I was like, I'm gonna go build an igloo. Like get a chainsaw, cut blocks of ice and build an igloo.

- Oh man. - Things like that. June, 2015, we got a dog. This was one way, it has nothing to do with an annual review but it was, I wanted to make sure that every month of my life, there was something memorable. And I was like, gosh, it really dropped off a cliff when I had kids and the pandemic hit and I need to resume it.

But it was like, oh, when the pandemic was here and you have kids, yeah, there was something memorable with childhood development each month, but it felt weird to be like, kid smiled, kid said dad. Like it was so focused on that. So I gotta get it back going, but something to encourage everyone to consider if you're wanting to make sure each month has something exciting about it.

- I love that idea, it's great. - So a few of the things for me was that one was around outsourcing. I think I have always been someone in multiple jobs, I've had the opportunity to have an admin and I just always said no, I always said no. I was kind of taking everything into my own hands.

I loved optimizing. And finally, last year in 2022, I really started saying, okay, maybe I could hire someone to help do some research. Maybe I could hire someone to help with parts of the newsletter, with parts of the editing, with parts of the production. So last year was a year that I changed my mind on hiring people to help do things, to give you more surface area you can cover with your own time.

So that was one. - That's a powerful one. That's gonna pay dividends for a long time, changing your mind on that. - Yeah, the other one, which I think was the hardest, was learning to spend money. And I know this sounds crazy, but I feel like myself and maybe a lot of people listening, we almost get to the point of optimizing and frugality, that it's very hard to spend money on anything.

Like, I remember we're at a Japanese restaurant and I was like, "All I want is a miso soup." Like, that just felt like what I wanted today. And I was like, "God, they're charging $7 for a miso soup. "I feel like a miso soup should be $3 or $4." And I was like, "You know what?

"I just need to stop worrying." Like, I'm so used to telling people, "Stop worrying about the latte. "It's not about the latte. "This is a Ramit Sethi thing." He's like, "The lattes aren't what's killing you. "It's these big decisions." And here I am, to use the Japanese restaurant example, not ordering a seaweed salad because I like it, because it's extra $5, or not getting miso soup because it's overpriced by $2.

I found that when you can just let the small decisions go, happiness goes up, stress goes down, anxiety goes down. When it comes to optimizing my finances, where I am in my life, those one, two, three, four, $5 differences weren't having a big impact. And so I've changed my mind on that a lot.

When I'm shopping online for groceries, I would pull up Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods and price compare strawberries and stuff like that. I've kind of gotten over the small costs of things and gotten comfortable. So those are two things. And the one small funny thing that I'll share, which I put in my end of the year learnings was mouth tape.

When I interviewed Liz Moody, who has this Healthier Together podcast, she was like, "You should consider trying this out, "taping your mouth at night." And I was like, "That is the craziest thing." For six months, I was like, "That's the craziest thing." And then I was like, "You know what?

"I'm just gonna try it." And it was awesome. - Changed your life? Were you a big mouth breather before? - It wasn't a thing that I processed in my mind, but there were just times where I woke up and my mouth was a little dry. And I was like, "Oh, I wonder "if I'm a really heavy mouth breather now." And then I tried it and I was like, "I woke up "and it just felt like my mouth was fresh." I know it sounds like a weird thing to say.

- Well, it's deeply impactful for your health. Breathing through your nose. You should have James Nestor on at some point. He wrote the Bible on this. - Breathe. We've been going back and forth. - You should have him on and do an episode on breathing 'cause it's hugely impactful for your health.

- So that was one where you write it off as like, "That's so silly. "Why would you do that? "That seems ridiculous." And last year I was like, "You know what? "Let's just try it." And now I have like a stack of hostage tape, which is like the most ridiculous name for a mouth tape company on my bedside.

- There is a general rule of thumb there, by the way. And maybe it's like a David Foster Wallace, "This is water" takeaway as well of, anytime your bias is, "That's totally ridiculous. "That sounds silly. "That's wild." Just try it. Because half the time, those things that you're automatically highly certain of, you end up being completely wrong on.

And maybe we would all learn a whole lot more about ourselves and grow in a different way if we just took on those things that we write off immediately. - Anything from your list this past year that's worth sharing? - The biggest one for me was a kid thing.

I think you know this, but we had our first son in May. He was born and I had these like grand ambition prior to him being born of all the things I was gonna teach him. Like I had this long list that I had written out of all the stuff I was gonna teach my son and how I was gonna mold his personality in all these different ways.

And I think somewhere around like the six month mark, which was later in the year, I just realized that I don't think it's possible. I basically think that kids come out with a sort of a kit and their personality and who they are and aspects of their character. It's sort of fixed.

It's like genetic. They come out with it. And our job is actually not to try to teach them things around all of these specific values that we want. It's to be able to embody our values as a person and hopefully guide them in the general direction of what we believe is a strong set of values.

But the idea of like being able to mold and shape my child, I've given up on as something that's possible. - It's funny 'cause just this morning, I had a moment that further re-emphasized this for me, which was there were these three little felt balls and my daughter was playing with them.

And she's like, "Daddy, here you go." And she just hands them to me and I start juggling them. And she's like mesmerized. She's two and a half. She's obviously too young to learn to juggle right now. I'm sure there's some savant kid in the world who can juggle a two and a half, but that didn't seem impossible today.

- A Rubik's cube probably solving it. - But I was thinking, gosh, I bet if I went to her and was like, "Hey, let me teach you how to juggle." She'd be like, "No, I wanna do things on my own." But just doing it. Like if you want your child to maybe do something that you do or learn something, letting them emulate you and watch you and maybe admire and look up to it is probably gonna be a 10 times more effective way to do it than trying to force them to learn this thing that you want them to learn.

- Completely agree. That's why I bring my son with me in my garage gym so that he can watch me work out. - He's like seven months old. He's like, "I'm gonna do that one day." - Awesome, okay. Question two. - Let's do it. - All right, so the second question and the third are all around energy.

And the second question is basically what created energy for you during the course of the year? This whole idea is to go back and look at your calendars. You said you were already doing this for the first one, but go back and look at your calendars from the year and try to identify the trends in what actually created energy in your life.

What were the activities? What were the work projects? What were the meetings? Who were the people? What were these trends that actually brought you energy? - So this was a fun one. I guess people listening to this are probably not gonna pause and go do one before finishing the episode, so they won't have this problem.

But I would definitely encourage people to listen or read all of the topics of the personal review and then go back and look at your calendar. Otherwise, you'd go back, learn a bunch of things you changed your mind on and then have to repeat the process. So this was really interesting because I think this past year was the first year that the world opened up and I was a creator.

And I met a bunch of other people, creating podcasts, YouTube, all kinds of stuff. That's just never been a part of my career. I met a lot of founders and investors and people in finance and financial advisors and planners, but I'd never really met a lot of creators. And that was one thing that gave me a lot of energy because this is my new job but I just have never been in this industry.

So that was a big one for me. And then going on adventures with my daughter, just me and her, and we have two now, but we would ride our bike. I'd put her on the back. We'd ride the bike. We'd hop on Caltrain. We'd ride like two stops on Caltrain.

We'd get off. We'd go to the donut shop. We'd like buy a donut. And then we'd like bike back home. - That's so awesome. - It's like those adventures were so much fun. I have a bunch of other ones, but those are two I'll share. - And then the question to ask yourself, by the way, after you identify those activities, those people, the projects, is really, did I spend enough time on those?

Go look at it. Was that like 2% of my time spent? And I was actually just spending the rest of my time on other stuff? Because that's a question that you then need to answer as you think about what your next year looks like. So for me, I probably have a somewhat similar one to you in that I get a ton of energy out of creative activities.

And that's writing for me is a huge one. Conversations with smart, interesting people is another one. Extremely broadly, by the way, this isn't like talking to successful people is what I get excited about. I have fascinating conversations with Uber drivers, with people that are helping me with things around the house.

I find that you can learn from almost anybody when you open up to it. And I get a ton of energy from hearing different people's stories, different people's struggles. It ends up inspiring a lot of the things that I end up writing about as well. So that's a huge energy creator for me.

And then the last one is sort of productive leisure as a category. And I think about it, walking is a huge one for me. I probably averaged close to 20,000 steps a day in 2022, which was a huge number for me relative to anything I had done in the past, largely because my son would only sleep when he was taking on walks outside.

And so it forced me to be outside a lot. And I just found that I was getting so much creative energy from walking and being out in nature. So that was another big learning for me. - To compliment that with what drained energy is the next one, right? - Yeah, and it goes in tandem.

As we said, when you look at your calendar, you're figuring out what were the things that created energy. And then you're looking at the same time at what was the stuff that just drained me. For a lot of people, this tends to be stuff like back-to-back meetings, phone calls, the meetings to talk about future meetings, processing email, doing things that are sort of monotonous activities that happen to hijack your day a lot of the time.

So figuring out what those activities are, what the trends are in them, and then figuring out if you allowed those to take over your entire day, or if you were able to sort of manage the balance that has to naturally exist across the energy creators and the energy drainers.

- Funny enough, I think I took this in a slightly different perspective, which was it wasn't the back-to-back meetings, all that stuff. There were two things that I put here that I'll share. One was fitting our children into our old life. So my wife and I probably clocked in four, five, six, seven trips a year when we were kidless pre-pandemic.

Whether they were weekend trips or drives or international trip. And I think we had a great time in December going to London and Paris with two kids. But I think trying to fit two small kids into the type of trip we would normally take actually drained a lot of energy.

And I think we probably would have been better off trying to think about the trip, not from a how do we get the best of both worlds, but how do we maybe have one trip a year where we can get away on our own, and one trip where we're taking it in a way that doesn't require as much effort and burden.

Especially when kids are napping one, two, three times a day. It's just you're not gonna have that same experience. So that was one. And the other one was social media, just feeling the need to put pressure to, oh, I gotta post this much, this many places. I was like, I found the content area that I love right now, which is recording a podcast, writing a newsletter.

I really love those two things. But it drained me every time I was thinking, oh, how do I clip it to a short form video and post it here and here? We'll get to this later 'cause I have some other thoughts, but that was one where I think it just drained, it drained.

Just trying to think about those things. - Yeah, that one drains a lot of people in the creator ecosystem. You can spread yourself way too thin across all of these different platforms and get a lot of FOMO about like, oh, it's growing their podcast a lot by doing this and this.

On that platform, it's just, oh, I need to be doing that. And it just like pulls you in that direction mentally, and the cognitive load ends up being, it destroys you. Anything that drained you? - The biggest one for me is always calls and meetings. Calls and Zoom meetings, I should say.

I love in-person meetings. And so my big takeaway was calls, like the get-to-know-you calls, I'm just not doing anymore. We're just not gonna do those. My way to make sure that I still have those get-to-know-you things is doing them in person. And basically, I'm an open book of meeting people in person in New York.

And New York, fortunately, tends to be one of the places that basically everyone comes through at some point or another. And so if someone reaches out to me and they live in Vancouver and they wanna get together, and I'm not doing calls 'cause I'm not gonna do a get-to-know-you call, they tend to be coming to New York at some point within the next six months, and we will get together in person and meet that way.

And it's been awesome so far since I started implementing the change. Just the energy of meeting someone in person, the friendships that get formed, it's just on a different level from the Zoom call that you end up leaving and saying, hey, we should get drinks sometime, and you end up never connecting with the person in the future.

That, for me, is definitely number one going into this year. - Going into this year, the other thing I'm gonna do on that point is, if someone says, can we do a meeting? I'm just like, can we just do the phone call? Not every video call has to be a video call.

If this wasn't a video call, I feel like maybe we wouldn't connect as well. But when we had a quick conversation before this, we did it on the phone and it was fun. - And you can do phone calls while walking, by the way. Huge unlock for me is just, I'll do phone calls while walking now when I need to.

And it's a big unlock. You actually think more clearly when you're walking that way. Unless you need to be in front of your computer for a specific reason, walking meetings are awesome. - And if someone pushes back, if you wanna prevent the pushback, they're like, hey, let's do a video call.

I say, hey, you know what? I find that when I'm doing a call on my computer, I'm a bit more distracted 'cause there's email popping up. So maybe we do a phone call and I'll just go on a walk and I'll be completely focused on you. How's someone gonna push back there?

You're like, do you want my attention or do you want part of it? - And it's 100% accurate, by the way. Think about how many windows you typically have up during a typical Zoom call and how often you're checking the notifications that pop up in the screen or looking at the internet or your email or whatever it is.

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Okay, question four. This is one of my favorites. What or who were the boat anchors in my life? And boat anchors is a term that I created, so I need to explain it. As you would expect, it is the thing that is creating drag on your life. When I think about boat anchors, I typically think about them as people, and these are the people that are trying to hold you back.

It's the people that sort of snicker or laugh when you tell them what your ambitions are. It's the people who put down your accomplishments or try to say that they're not as impressive as they otherwise were. It's also the people who are saying that about others when you're talking to them, and they're putting down others just in the general context of conversation.

These are boat anchors. These are people that are literally placing a drag on your progress and holding you back from achieving at the next level that you're trying to get to. So identifying who they are, sitting down and reflecting on the relationships and the things in your life that might be holding you back in that way is a huge part of this reflection process because developing a plan to start minimizing the impact that those people have in your life is really key.

For the sake of not being boat anchors ourselves, I would say let's just skip through trying to talk about who these are in our lives, not be negative, but I do think this is a productive step. We all have these people. And so it's just being really clear. We don't need to talk about who ours are, but we all have these people in our lives and thinking about it clearly and sitting down and really reflecting on it.

And it doesn't have to be that you tell the person, "Hey, you're cut out of my life, by the way." This is an important point. You can identify these people and just slowly minimize their role within your ecosystem. You don't need to hang out with them all the time.

Maybe you don't need to touch base with them quite as much as you did, or tell them about the things that you're working on or thinking about. It's just figuring out a way to minimize the impact of their drag in your life. All right, question five. What did I not do because of fear?

So this goes back to Tim Ferriss, who developed, I think it was in 4-Hour Workweek, the first time he talked about it, but then there's a very famous TED talk where he talks about it, fear-setting, which is generally the idea that we allow our fears to distort our reality and we build them up in our minds as much worse than they really are.

And so the concept of fear-setting is to get much closer to your fears, to really deconstruct them and figure out, were they as bad as I thought? And what's the worst case that could happen? What's the upside if I actually go and do this and then proceed accordingly? So the whole idea is to go back and look at your year and figure out, what did you actually shy away from doing?

And then think about, okay, well, let me break that fear down. How real was it? Because at the time, you just passed on the opportunity due to that fear. For me, this was just going full-time on all the hacks. And it was so funny because a friend of mine, shout out to Ben who worked with me at Wealthfront, who was like, why aren't you doing this?

Like, why aren't you going full-time on this project? And I was like, well, if I were giving my friend advice, I would tell them that they need to go full-time on it. Like, it was so obvious. I could use all the mindset tactics that I've learned from interviewing smart people where it's like, oh, what would your friend say?

If your friend says you should do it, then maybe you should take the advice. And I was like, well, I would give everyone advice. Like, you're at this point where this is the time to capitalize. And I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Part of it was like, oh, maybe I'll wait till the end of the year.

Maybe I'll wait here and I'm on parental leave and all this stuff. And I'm happy that I did it, but I spent a decent amount of time trying to figure out why it took me so long. That was one that I just needed to break down and spend more time reflecting on.

- The waiting for the perfect moment is the bias here that almost everyone has. We tell ourselves we're gonna do X at the perfect moment, and it's not the perfect moment now. And the reality is it's never the perfect moment to make those big leaps and to do those big jumps.

I've written about this. Sometimes you literally just need to open the door and jump out and hope the parachute was packed tight and just make that leap. And so deconstructing your fears and going through this exercise is really helpful. I had the same one, by the way, when I was thinking about making the leap to full-time into these personal pursuits a year earlier.

So in 2021, that was my thing that I held off on doing because of fear that ultimately sort of got forced upon me. But that was definitely mine in 2021. - The other one is, and I still have this fear, all of the businesses I've run have been venture capital-backed businesses where all the money you have as a company, it's not like you get to keep it.

Basically, it's always in the company. So you're really motivated to spend it all to try to grow and build a really big company because the benefits to you only come if that company really succeeds. When you run a small business, which I'll call a podcast a small business, it's like if that podcast makes money, you get the money.

That's how businesses that you own yourselves and you don't have investors work. And so one thing that I'm struggling with is to take that money and go reinvest it into the business, if you will. Hiring someone to help research or book guests or edit and produce. And I feel like I've been able to chip away at smaller pieces, but making a big investment is something that I haven't been able to do yet.

And I see all these stories of successful business owners, not the venture capital startup founder kind of people, but the overwhelming theme is that they all reinvested in their business to grow it. And so it's like, I know I need to do it. I know I should do it.

I would give my friends advice to do it, but it's so hard when it's basically like reinvesting your own money. And I think the mindset shift that I had that was so productive for personal savings was that every dollar I earned, I just immediately shelved in my brain as if it was my savings.

So I know a lot of people, the way they budget or the way they spend money, they spend their money, but everything that's leftover, they save or they save 500 bucks a month and everything else they can spend. For me, 100% of the money was savings. And I treated every single purchase as if I was saying, do I want to dip into my savings to buy this coffee?

Do I want to dip into my savings to have dinner out? That was my process, which made me incredibly frugal, probably not spend enough money and do enough things. Now, I have that same thing applied to business where it's like, do I want to dip into my savings to hire someone to do this thing?

And it just makes it harder to spend money. That's interesting. I kind of did a structural thing from a business standpoint that might be useful for people that has been sort of a behavioral hack for me, which is I have an S-corp that's set up that has all of my kind of personal holding company entities running through it.

And all I do is with an S-corp, you have to pay yourself a salary, a reasonable salary out of it. And so that reasonable salary is what covers all of our home expenses and our whole life and everything there. And so because of that, because it's two separate businesses, it runs from my S-corp that pays a salary out to our personal joint bank account as a family.

I then just think of that S-corp bank account as it's the business, it's the working capital. And so everything there, in my mind, is segmented as totally separate. I need to think about reinvesting. What does it look like? What's the margin profile? What's the return on this investment, et cetera?

And that's been a hugely helpful behavioral hack for me overall. So I just did my S-corp election at the end of the year. Smart man. So this is something that maybe will make it easier next year. Yeah, it definitely will. It definitely will. The salary thing definitely makes a big difference versus the LLC.

Six, ready? Yep. Greatest hits and worst misses from the year. The reason for doing this one is because we are all swayed by our natural bias. So a optimist will see all the hits from the year. They'll look at their year and pat themselves on the back and say, wow, I had a great year.

Look, this and this. And the pessimist stares at their year and says, oh my god, this was the worst. I had all these things go wrong. It was awful. Doing a actual explicit list of your hits and your misses forces you to be balanced and actually take a real look at the two sides of your life and success from a scoreboard standpoint.

So writing them all down, I find, is hugely helpful. Which side do you skew on? I would say I skew towards being self-critical. I am-- it probably comes from my athletic background. Negative self-talk was always how I motivated myself athletically, which is a funny thing to say these days because everyone is very big on positive self-talk.

I always motivated myself by telling myself it wasn't good enough or the things I was doing wasn't good enough. And as a result, if I sit down and think about my year, I tend to just glaze over the awesome things that happened and think about, oh, well, this didn't work out or I failed at this, quit this too early, whatever.

And so it helps for me to zoom out and actually think about the wins to balance all of that out. What about you? When it comes to the future, I'm definitely in the optimist camp. I'm like, it's always going to work out. Kids are going to not even have jet lag when we travel.

I'm always the one like, what's the brightest side of things? But when it comes to myself, I am always the person that's trying to find how to improve, at least crave the criticism. So if I'm cooking dinner for family and everyone's like, this is great, I'm like, sure. It's great.

What wasn't great? Yeah, like, what could have-- did it need a little more salt? Could I have cooked it a little longer? I know that I'm not Thomas Kell-- I'm not a three Michelin star chef. So telling me that this is fantastic, I want to know how to make it better.

It's weird. Forward looking, I'm much better at thinking optimistically. On myself and reflection, I'm more like, oh, god, I could have done this better. I definitely don't want honest feedback on my cooking from my family. Like, if I make steaks on the grill, I just want everyone to say, these are amazing.

That's so funny. When everyone says these are amazing around our table, I get so frustrated. I'm like, no. There's no way that this is a perfect steak. What could have been better? Well, you're going to end up accelerating as a chef, and I'm going to kind of stay at my low baseline.

That's OK. I probably shouldn't focus on my cooking as much. I'm clearly not going to have a profession in the culinary arts. That's a good one, though. OK, final question. What did I learn this year? This is just the best place to wrap these up for me, because it sort of captures everything.

You just did all of these questions. You sort of boil it all down and sit down and write down a list of the things that you learned. And how did you grow? And how did you learn? And how did you develop during the course of the year? So I always find this to be a great way to kind of summarize the whole exercise and really have a set of key takeaways.

So I did this one wrong. So I'm going to share my failed experience. What did you do wrong? I took it way too literally. And I was like, what did I learn? And I was like, oh, well, Nick Gray taught me how to throw a good cocktail party. That totally counts.

I think that's great. Sure. OK, so maybe I didn't take it wrong. But what I didn't do was, what did I learn from going through questions one through six? I didn't do the tie it all up in a bow summary version of number seven. I did the, here are all the things I learned.

And I was like, wow, I could just go to every podcast. I learned a bunch of stuff each episode. I just had this massive list of all these things I learned. What would have been maybe more effective, which I will probably do this afternoon or this evening, is let's take the previous six questions in this entire process and try to put a bow on the whole thing and what I learned and what that means for life ahead.

Yeah, I think both are productive, to be honest. I love the fact that you went and learned how to throw a good cocktail party from Nick Gray, who's awesome and best in class at throwing cocktail parties. He threw an in-person event for Sam Parr and I that we hosted in New York this summer.

And I've never seen something so well-coordinated and organized. It was amazing. That guy is world class. So that's a great one. I love that one. Obviously, we're talking about reflection. But I want to talk a little bit about the year ahead. But I do want to ask, you mentioned very briefly at the beginning things that made it easy for you to go back, like journaling or sending yourself emails.

Are there things that people should be thinking about in the year ahead that will make this process easier in the future, whether it's a monthly review or journaling, things like that? Yeah, I do a monthly review that I think is super important. And I do this for a number of reasons.

The biggest one for me is when you have a plan for the year, which if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably a planner. You probably like to set your course for the year at the beginning and figure out where you're heading, your North Star, if you will. But the biggest challenge with that is a year is just such a long time.

And changing, you get the whole one in 60 rule that I think was in Atomic Habits is if you're off by one degree, you're going to miss your target by a mile for every 60 miles flown. And it's super, super impactful. And I think about it a lot. So I sit down at the end of every month.

And I try to ask myself a set of questions and just reflect on the month from the past. What were the really important things in my life? Was I focusing on those? Did I actually spend time on the really important things? Or was my attention grabbed elsewhere? Are my daily systems, the things that I'm doing on a daily basis, actually in line and aligned with what my long-term goals are, my mid-term goals are?

So I do sit down at the end of every month and try to either-- for me personally, I like to write down by hand. Some people like using Notion or some digital tool or sending themselves an email. But for me, being able to have that then as a record that I can go back and look at, in addition to anything else I've collected from the year, like calendars, et cetera, tends to be a really helpful exercise.

You've published, I think, somewhere that monthly review process. Is that right? Can we link-- we can link to that. Yeah, I released an annual planning guide after the annual review guide, which has my whole process for setting out the long-term goals. I think about checkpoint goals that are in between the daily systems that come there, the anti-goals, what we want to avoid, the Pyrrhic victory, like avoid winning the battle but losing the war with these goals.

And then finally, how to think about tracking and adjusting, which is really that monthly review process. So I did have that out somewhere and people can find that. We can put it in the show notes. Perfect. And journaling is something that I haven't adopted as a habit, but it seems like the data out there is like it's a really good habit.

It seems like everybody should be doing this. It's the best habit. I finally figured out how to do this. I spent five years-- to be honest, like five years-- telling myself at the beginning of every year that I was going to become a journaler because of the impact that it has on your mental health and your ability to change course and reflect.

And literally, I would come into the year-- every year, I'd say I was going to do it. I would set up this complex journaling process with these fancy notebooks and these pens and all this stuff because that's just how I'm wired-- and set aside 30 minutes a night to sit down and reflect and do all this stuff.

And without fail, five days in, I would miss a day, and then the whole thing would get derailed, and I wouldn't journal for the rest of the year. And so I finally made progress and figured out a system that works by just simplifying it to a two-minute process where I just do-- I call it my 1-1-1 method.

And it's one win from the day, so one thing that went well that you did well, one point of tension, anxiety, stress, like one thing that's just on your chest that you need to get off and get down on paper, and then one point of gratitude. It can be as tiny as a smell that you really enjoy during the day, or it can be huge-- the health of your family, whatever it might be.

But writing those three points down every single night, it has just been this enormous unlock for my life. And it's so simple that literally anyone can do it, and you don't have an excuse not to, because it can take one minute to go and sit down and write it.

And if you are struggling on one of those three things, do you sit there and think it out, or do you just skip it? Or what advice would you give to someone who's like, God, I just can't think of something? I try to do it from complete word-dump mindset.

I don't want to overthink it too much. I want to just do the first thing that comes to my mind, the first win that I can think of from the day. It can be as simple as, I got up at the time I said I was going to get up.

Because it just gives you a nice pat on the back, where if you feel like you lost the day, you feel like you had a tough day, that first win that comes to your mind, and you can write it down, it's so impactful. And everyone has tension or stress.

No one is ever going to be without one of those from a given day. You always had something. So it tends to be either the win or the point of gratitude is tougher. The win is usually the hardest for people. Open up the aperture of what qualifies as a win in your life, if you will.

Everyone thinks it has to be some amazing big thing, but it can be as tiny as, I got up out of bed when I thought. I took a shower in the way that I wanted to. The smallest little thing can count as a win in your life. Last night, I had an apple instead of dessert.

And for anyone who-- Help, God. Yeah, I know. That's how I felt. It's that meme where you're like, oh, I felt like a hero. And I recorded an episode yesterday with Jordan Schlane, who's a doctor, and he's awesome. And we talked a lot about this. So I think that episode will have already come out by the time people hear this.

So you'll know why I was so excited about eating an apple. But that would have been my win if I had written that down. It's a great one. Do you write it digitally or do you write it with a pen? I write with pen and paper. I just find the process of actually writing on paper to be pretty therapeutic.

I have terrible penmanship. I need to get much better about that. Actually, when I tweeted this whole method out, I tweeted a picture of my journal and got dunked on by a bunch of people for how bad my handwriting is. But such is life. So that's one thing to take into 2023.

But I know you wrote a post that I really liked, or a newsletter. You've been very good at, here's my content. If you want to consume it on Twitter, you can consume it here. You want to consume it on Instagram, you can consume it here. Or you can subscribe to the newsletter, which I do.

And one was about 23 things to take into 2023. So I thought we would wrap this up and go through highlights. We'll put a link in the show notes. Subscribe to the newsletter for sure. But just a few of these things, since you broke them down into categories, what do you think?

OK. Yeah, let's do it. All right, so your first category was work. I'll let you hit on a few, your favorites. If unprompted, great. And if not, I'll prompt you with a couple that I think are worth bringing up. OK. Well, the first one connects directly to the annual review.

So I think it's a great one to start on, because it'll help people as they think about this coming year. I call this my energy calendar technique. It sounds like something from like Sedona, Arizona with crystals in the room. Yeah, you got the vortex, the Sedona vortex. I love that.

Sedona is amazing, by the way. Everyone should go there at some point in their life. The energy calendar technique is basically a simple color coding strategy to figure out over the course of a week or two what it is in your life that's creating energy and what's draining energy.

So the way I do it is take a week when you're going to do this, go through a workday. At the end of the day, look at your calendar and make changes to the color of the things on your calendar based on what created energy, what was sort of neutral, and what drained energy from you.

And literally go change the color of those things on the day that just passed. So if something created energy, you mark it as green. If it was neutral, you mark it as yellow. And if it drained energy, you mark it as red. Do that every single day for a week, maybe two weeks, and then go back and look at it.

And you'll immediately be able to viscerally, very clearly identify trends in what created energy in your life, which you need to amplify and try to spend more time on, what was neutral, which you can kind of continue to leave or potentially try to delegate, and then what was draining energy from your life.

And with those, the whole idea is to start slowly working your way towards being able to delegate or delete those from your life. The one thing that I'm going to try with this is there are times, especially when you're working on your own schedule like I am, where I'll be doing something, but I didn't put it in my calendar.

I'm not as good as others at time blocking the whole perfect day. But at the end of the day, it'd be really easy for me to be like, oh, for this hour, I researched this topic. So if you do it at the end of the day, it could be really quick.

So I'm going to go in back and also add other things. I'm also bad, by the way, at time boxing. I think time boxing is near a all who is amazing. And I think it's a great technique for a lot of people. I really struggle with having like every minute of my calendar filled.

Just optically, it intimidates me about the day. Even if a block literally says, go on a walk with your son, it's intimidating to me to see at the beginning of a day every minute filled. So I have huge open blocks. So I actually do exactly what you just said.

I'll go back and say, oh, I did this piece of research here. I did this here, et cetera. I love helping you answer all the toughest questions about life, money, and so much more. But sometimes it's helpful to talk to other people in your situation, which actually gets harder as you build your wealth.

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Well, speaking of walks, let's talk about taking breaks, 'cause I know that was in there, number four. This is all about attention residue, which is a concept that I think one of your prior guests, Cal Newport, has written about in the past that I've become somewhat obsessed with. Generally, just this idea that we're always context switching because of the world that we live in with constant notifications.

So, you'll be working on something and then you decide to check your email. And when you check your email, there's this tiny cognitive load that is now stuck in that email when you come back to the work. And you're just getting spread thin. You're literally just like leaving your kind of mental capacity in all of these different places, in your messages, in your emails, et cetera.

And so then, when you're going back and working on the really important thing, you're operating at like 60% of what your optimal mental capacity is. And obviously, as a result, your work is gonna suffer. So, this whole idea is we need to minimize the impact of attention residue. Attention residue is that actual scientific side of that when that happens and your attention is grabbed in different places.

And taking breaks is really a key way to get around this. And so, the biggest way that I think most people can put this into their schedule and into their lives is schedule 25-minute meetings instead of 30-minute meetings. And immediately, you'll see a difference. Rather than having the context switch that comes from having back-to-back meetings that are just pushing you from one thing to the next when your mind is still in the prior meeting while you're in the new one or your mind's on the next meeting while you're in this one, you create an actual separation window.

You can go for a quick walk. You can sit and just breathe. It has a massive impact immediately. And by the way, if anyone doesn't know this, it's a setting in Google Calendar to turn on speedy meetings, which takes 30-minute meetings, makes them 25, takes hour meetings, it makes them 50 minutes.

So, you don't even have to work hard to do it. You could just enable the feature. And then, when you drag an hour-long meeting, it auto readjusts to 50 minutes. - That's a great hack, I love that. I think this pairs well with your number seven about batching email into Windows to process.

- Yeah, this one has been a huge push for me personally, which is I just found myself constantly checking emails and texts throughout the entire day. And so, when I started really focusing on minimizing attention residue, I thought about what's the best way for me to minimize the impact that has.

And what I did was I just set a one-hour block late in the day, which was when I was going to actually check email. And initially, I definitely wasn't perfect about it. I'm still not 100% compliant. I will still pop it open because I have the finance gene in me where I feel like I need to be on email 24/7.

But having a window of discrete time when you're actually gonna process those emails allows you to minimize how it impacts the other parts of your day. And then also, you really focus on the emails and you think clearly about the things and the questions people are asking when you're working on them because that becomes the core thing that you're doing during that time, rather than it being just a little distraction and you're trying to process it as quickly as you can between meetings.

So that one's really impactful. It depends on what your career track is and what you're working on to think about how many of those windows there need to be, how long they have to be. If you work in professional services, if you're a lawyer, if you're an investment banker, if you're a consultant, it's rich for you to think that you can have a one-hour window when you're doing email.

It's ridiculous. I worked in finance. You can't do that. But can you have three of those windows during the day and get away with it? Probably. You could probably have one early in the day, one around lunchtime and one in the evening and be in a good spot where you're still getting those periods of deep work when you can really think about things, but then you also have those fixed times where you're processing and moving through stuff.

So I think there's a happy medium for everyone to find that'll really optimize this. - I don't know the science behind this, but my gut would say that part of the reason we love checking our emails, 'cause every time something comes in, it's like someone's wanting to talk to you.

There's this dopamine hit of seeing this thing. I can say that when you start batching your emails, you just increase the likelihood that some interesting thing is gonna be there every single time you check your email. So at the end of this recording, I'm gonna go check my email and I'm gonna be excited because I know that there's actually something interesting.

Whereas when you're in the habit of checking your email all the time, 90% of those times, it's just some stupid spam thing. It's something unimportant. But now when I batch my emails, every time I check my email, if it's only two or three times a day, there's usually something valuable and interesting in there.

So I actually get a lot of satisfaction when I've gone without email for a little while, is I get that dopamine hit of like, oh, there's one great thing every time. - You're a really positive guy. I like this about you. That's great. I'm a dread email guy. I'm trying to avoid the stressful thing that's coming into my inbox.

- Oh, no, I'm excited. I'm like, what exciting thing could be here? - And by the way, doing the same thing with text messages has been a great change for me 'cause it's the same exact impact when you're checking texts throughout the day. My goal for 2023 is to try to do this with social media because popping open Twitter once an hour and looking at things and doom scrolling and seeing what notifications or who's yelling at you or sending you mean DMs, just like super, super counterproductive for deep work.

- For Twitter, one thing I've done is just relentlessly unfollow. You don't even have to unfollow. You can mute a person so you can still DM them, but you don't have to see their tweets to the point that there's just not that many people in your feed. So your feed is something you can manage and actually maybe complete in the day.

- Did you turn to the latest tweet setting or are you still on? 'Cause now that they've changed the algorithm, the home feed is tons of stuff of people you don't follow. - Yeah, so I still use TweetBot because I don't like that in the Twitter app and I don't like seeing sponsored tweets.

So I still use TweetBot as my main Twitter app and there are reasons it sucks. It's delayed on getting notifications from DMs, but throughout this conversation, I'm wondering if maybe that's a good thing. I would love to see the Twitter app be something that I could use more regularly, but I don't use it much right now.

- The hack here is you go to the little star icon in the top right of your Twitter thing and just change it to latest tweets rather than doing the home. And it means that it just does it in chronological order and it's basically only people you follow. And so that cleans up your feed immediately.

You don't have all the stuff that Twitter is serving up to you. - Does it sync between platforms? - No, it doesn't. I literally just checked this 'cause I had my Mac OS Twitter app was on latest, but my phone is somehow not. I'm now gonna go fix that.

- TweetBot for me, since I only follow a handful of people and they're like news sources and people, I could just go on my computer and it's like there are 12 unread tweets. I scroll up and then when I go to my phone, it jumps right to that same spot in the feed.

But- - I love it. - Hopefully Twitter can get their act together. The one thing I'll add to this, so I guess by the end of this, it might be 26 things or 27 things to take into 2023, is from my reflections, which is just learn to outsource tasks to increase the ROI of your time.

I will say, depending on what industry you work in, this may or may not be allowed. So check with your company. If you work for yourself, you have a lot more flexibility, but there are certainly tasks during the day that I'm sure someone else could do and give you more time to spend on the things that are the most high ROI for your time, especially if your company would support you, maybe hiring a virtual assistant to help do some of these things.

I've seen a handful of examples of people, especially in sales, where they were able to hire people, their company wasn't gonna give them the budget. So they just personally freelance hired people and convinced the company that they should have the budget to bring this person on so that they could spend their time closing the deals and drive up the actual output they got, their salary went up, even net of what they had to pay out.

So I think there are a lot of opportunities to outsource, to optimize where you spend your time. Yeah. All right, health? Health, all right. Well, there's a couple in here that are my go-tos. So the first one is something that I started doing in college, which I guess I will loosely call the 55530 method.

And the reason I will loosely call it that is because someone else called it that. I put it in this like life hacks document that I did maybe six months ago, and then someone wrote a Twitter thread on it without citing me actually, because they thought that it was like a well-known method.

And it was literally just something that I created and started doing in college that no one knows about. So it's pretty funny to me that it now has a name. But basically this is, as soon as you wake up and get out of bed, you do five squats, five lunges per leg, five pushups, and a 30 second plank.

And all this does is just immediately sparks your energy and metabolism to start the day. It's like a simple thing, right? Five pushups. It's not like you're saying, "Oh, I'm gonna do 100 pushups as soon as I get out of bed." It's a low enough amount that it's not intimidating and you can force yourself to just quickly do it to start the day.

You can do it while your coffee's getting made or literally as soon as you get out of bed. But it gives you this huge energy boost to start the day. And I think it's hugely impactful. I started doing it because we had these early morning baseball practices in college.

And it's just a habit that's now stuck with me throughout my life. What else do you do in the morning? I'm curious. I think there are a few things in your health list that are morning routine. Yeah. I get out of bed. I drink a whole bunch. I keep a cold water on my bedside table.

So as soon as I wake up, I drink a whole ton of water. I do the five, five, five, 30 really quickly, just like on the floor on the side, trying to stay quiet 'cause I wake up earlier than my wife. And then I go get in a cold plunge.

So this is a new ad. I got the cold plunge in July of 2022 and have done every single day since, three to seven minutes in it every morning at 39 degrees. And that's been probably the biggest impact in my life of a single thing that I've added to my routine in the last like five or 10 years.

I've experienced just a massive set of benefits in terms of energy and in terms of the dopamine rush that I get from it. The surge that just lasts for hours that just makes me feel superhuman during the early part of my day. That's been the big ad for me.

- Yeah, we've just created a space in our home where a cold plunge will one day go. - I don't know enough of the science to say like the brown fat and the metabolism and the immunity. And there's all this research. Dr. Huberman has talked about it, I think on an episode that shows all of these great health benefits.

But if nothing else other than the dopamine rush and the feeling of doing something hard that makes the rest of the day feel easier, it would be worth it too. I've absolutely loved it. I think it's phenomenal. - Awesome. Anything else you do in the morning? Well, number nine was about a tech free walk.

- Oh yeah, this is with my son now, which is even better on all of this. But waking up in the morning, doing those things and then just going out and getting sunlight. Again, this is like goes back to a thing that Dr. Huberman has talked about a lot, the impact of getting sun first thing in the morning.

And that can be on a cloudy day, you just have to stay out longer, there still is sun. But having that kind of just being able to breathe, not having your phone on you so that you're not looking and checking messages, checking email, checking social media, et cetera. Is a great way to start your day, set your body in the right direction.

It improves your mood, it improves your sleep, the next night, a whole host of health benefits. But for me personally, just from a cognitive standpoint, to start my day with a feeling of breathing and creativity, it has been a great habit. - I'm gonna add a couple, I'll do them quick 'cause they're actually four.

And most of them came from this conversation I had about health a couple weeks ago. Technically I had a day ago, but by the time you're listening to this, it'll be a couple weeks ago. So one, we talked about how one of the most valuable things you could do is just time-restricted eating.

So you call it intermittent fasting, you can call it whatever you want, but just keeping your eating window to a smaller time. That's something that I had done for a while, took a pause in the holidays and hopefully will bring back this year. Another is we talked about Jordan, who I spoke with, was like one of his diagnostic things is going through who are you and just collecting the basic data and diagnostics about your health.

So I'm gonna encourage a lot of people who haven't done this to consider it, which is just like get your basic metabolic panel. Like your blood work done. I know a lot of us, when we're young, we're like, ah, everything seems fine, but trying to figure out, is there an area you need to work on?

For me, it was cholesterol. That's my area right now, but for everyone else, it could be different. So just doing that. There are some great companies that can support that, by the way. You can look up the different ones. I'm not affiliated with any, but I've used InsideTracker in the past.

It's relatively pricey, but it's an incredible experience. And they have a great kind of dashboard that allows you to track it over time as well. They are a partner of the show, so everybody gets 20% off. So bring that price down a little. Another one he pointed out was stop using alarms.

And this'll be interesting one to hear your reaction to, 'cause I know you wake up early. And he said, switch from a wake-up alarm to a bedtime alarm. Once you learn how much sleep your body needs to naturally wake up, then instead of setting your alarm for 5 a.m., which I think is something you do, figure out how much sleep you need and set your go-to-bed alarm, because there's just so much magic that happens while you're asleep that interrupting that process can have an impact on your health.

And if you could force that to be different, that's better. So I actually don't use an alarm in the morning because I've gotten pretty good at waking up naturally around the same time, as long as I go to bed at the right time. That's an interesting one. I've always just loved alarms.

So I'm not trying to take it away, just switch. I originally needed them because I just wasn't sleeping enough. And so I just needed to get up early. When I was working in finance in my early days, I was getting up at like 3.45, going to bed probably by 10.30.

I just wasn't sleeping enough for like a period of six years. I've recently, over the last year and a half, started taking sleep very seriously. And now I just have a grandpa schedule, man. I'm asleep by 8.30 and I'm up by between four and five, depending on the day.

And I get my seven to eight hours and I feel great. And I wake up and I don't have an issue with it, but maybe I should experiment with it. And then the last was along the lines of that apple. I had this like negative impression of fruit my whole like last few years.

I was like, well, fruit has sugar. If fruit is sugar, can't be good for you. And if I'm going to have sugar, why not eat a cookie? My wife has told me that was crazy forever. And we finally dug into the science behind it. And it's like, fruit is actually pretty good.

There are some fruits that are not as good as others. Like I think a mango, especially when it's dried or in juice form, is maybe more like a soft drink than something. But I'm going to try as part of this cholesterol plan to replace dessert with like fruit and dark chocolate.

It's a great approach, by the way, for limiting calories. Like you get the sweetness hit, but you don't have the negative impact. So I love that one. That's a great ad. And the amount of fiber in an apple, like you just can't have five apples. Like I can tell everyone listening from experience, you can have five cookies.

Like it is a physically possible thing. I don't think I could eat five apples. No, you definitely couldn't. And by the way, this all goes to one of my health hacks, which is to just do all of your shopping on the outer perimeter of the grocery store. If you just do that, you will immediately get healthier, lose weight, be in better shape, et cetera, because all of the good stuff is on the outer aisles and all the bad stuff is on the inner aisles.

One fun financial kind of psychological money hack that I learned in an episode a long time ago was that if you walk the grocery store in the reverse order, on average, people save, I can't remember the percent, but they spend less. Because like the grocery stores, you think it's like, oh, they managed to put this thing on this aisle.

It's like, no, they very meticulously engineered every aspect of your grocery store for you to spend the most amount of money possible. And just by going to the back and working your way around the other way, you will avoid certain marketing things, certain various elements that are trying to get you to spend.

- It's like Ikea, man. Ikea has that maze that you have to go through at the end that is so perfectly engineered to make you buy shit you don't need. - I remember one time we were like, we just need to find an accent chair. And I was like, it is so hard to get to anywhere in Ikea without following the map.

Like, there's like a couple like hidden doors. You're like, can I go through this? I just need a chair. - Oh, so good. - So that's health. Jordan and I actually talked about doing some follow-up episodes. So I wanna get more serious on that this year. I'm excited for Peter Attia's book, "Outlive" coming out later this year.

All right, let's talk about personal before we wrap and money. - I just wanna thank you, Quik, for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals.

So please consider supporting those who support us. - Okay. Personal, again, going back to one of your prior guests, Cal Newport, I think this is back in college. I first read this from him. He had a blog piece about like a shutdown ritual or something like that. I call it a power-down ritual, but basically creating a very fixed separation between your professional life and your personal life is something that you can do that immediately improves your mental health and has definitely had an impact on my life.

This is like establishing a sequence of events that you do at the end of your day that mentally and literally marks the end of your workday. So it might be like checking messages for the last time and firing off any last emails that you need to set. Might be doing the little bit of prep for your next morning's work to kind of set yourself up to hit the ground running.

Might be checking Slack. Whatever it is, you kind of do this one set sequence of a couple of events. And then in Cal's original blog piece, he actually advocated saying something out loud, like having kind of like a nerdy, actual like shutdown sequence initiated thing that triggers in your mind that the day is over.

And the whole goal is that once you do this shutdown sequence, you're off. You're not checking email. You're not going and looking at things. That's it for the day. And it's just a really helpful practice, especially in this hybrid and remote work world that we're living in where it's so easy to let professional and personal blur.

I don't have a ritual yet. And I think people learn this when you have kids. It's like, you wanna have your quality family time 'cause you're working during the day. You kind of have to do this, but I don't have a ritual. And I feel like I'm gonna bring that one into this year.

So it's a good one. I like that. Two more for you really quick on the personal side. If you're in a relationship, tell your partner one thing you appreciate about them every single night. And this can be the tiniest thing. It can be like, I appreciate how you picked up that one thing or how you let me know about X, Y, or Z.

Just tell them one small thing because as relationships go on, it's really easy to just not think about all the good and to just have the stressful or the tension or the anxiety be the things that you hold in your mind. And doing this every night has had a really positive impact on my wife and my relationship.

And then the last one, take yourself out for more meals alone. I do this once a month without fail, either a lunch or a dinner, dinner preferably, although probably doesn't happen quite as often now with the little guy. But just go out to a restaurant by yourself. It can be your favorite place or it can be a new place.

Don't bring any technology or just keep it in your pocket, put it on airplane mode. You can bring a book, you can bring a notebook if you wanna journal and write things, but just sit by yourself and allow yourself to sort of be bored and just observe the world around you and have a nice meal by yourself.

Huge unlock that not enough people are doing. I love this one. I'll share one that's similar for people with family. And it's, if the theme of yours was, you don't always have to eat with your partner or with someone else, you can eat by yourself. Mine is you don't always have to spend all of your family time with all of your family.

You mentioned you'd take walks with your son. I think that it's important to have quality time as a family and it's also important to have quality time with people in your family together without everyone else. So that's for us, I would say, encourage people to find a way to get childcare, to go on a date, even if it's a lunch date in the middle of the day or dinner or something.

And then also with your kids alone. Like I take my daughter on an adventure. So my wife and I are talking about what we wanna do with our family in the future and taking a trip with each kid without the other kid is something we wanna do. And spending time with lots of different like one-on-one stuff is also really important.

So that's one that I wanna take into 2023. All right, last section is money. All right, money. I just had three in there. We can hit them rapid fire. First one is automate a direct deposit into an investment account that you basically never look at. One should do this.

I mean, this is just like an absolute financial no-brainer. Allow the money to just compound. Don't think about how much money's in it. Just set some low number that feels not super stressful to you that automatically goes out in a direct deposit into this investment account every single month.

Let compounding work for you. Number two, automate all the simple financial tasks in your life. I used to be a type of person that would just check all of my different bills and look at all the numbers and pay them all manually 'cause I figured someone was gonna be trying to screw me over.

It never once happened. And I was just wasting a whole bunch of mental energy by going and looking at these things every month. So automating all of your bill payment and credit cards, investing, et cetera, anything that's pulling your mind away from things that really matter is easily automatable.

And then the last one for me is this rule I have around material purchases, which is a way to save money and build wealth. Make a 48-hour rule about material purchases, which means if you put something in a shopping cart, walk away, and 48 hours later, come back. If you still want the thing, buy it, and there's no issue with that.

But most of the time, you're gonna realize that the material purchase that you had put in your shopping cart 48 hours later, you've thought about it and you don't go buy. So it's a behavioral hack for avoiding the unnecessary purchases that we don't really need. And if you can invest that money instead, even better.

I like it. I do both the first thing and the second thing. So I love all the automation. I'm not as diligent about putting in your shopping cart, but I'll add mine, which is everyone knows that's listening to this show that has in the past. When you're about to check out on something, go find all the ways you could save money for it.

Ask LiveChat for the discount. Use Rakuten or some other platform to get cash back. See if you could buy gift cards at a discount. Use the right card. Obviously, we're all doing those things. Especially on miso soup, by the way. Yeah, you could save money on that $4. I'm gonna add two others.

One is if you're not already tracking and organizing something in an automated way, do that. So I have two or three primary platforms for this. So I worked at Wealththreat for a while. People know that. They have a free way that you can link all of your accounts, see your net worth all in one place.

I also use a product called Kubera, which is, I would say, if you want the free version, Wealththreat does a great job. If you want the full bells and whistles pro version, I think Kubera is best in class. Tracks all of your accounts across all places. It works well with everything from manual assets to crypto to real estate and everything.

So I think it's a great product. And I use Trustworthy for managing all of life's stuff. So where are our old tax returns? Where are all of our COVID vaccine cards, our social security cards? I put all of our life stuff there. They've built like the family operating system.

There is a price. But when you just think about the overhead you have of trying to manage and find and store all of this stuff, it's not worth it for me. So those are two things to just set up some organization for where's your money, what's your net worth, what are all your accounts, all that.

And then the other is for 2023, this is mostly for people with kids, but knock off the two big tasks that every single parent I know punts on, which is setting up a will or a trust or something like that and setting up life insurance. Those two things are things that have been bogging you down.

Like go get them done in 2023 because they're just like so, so, so important. That's my recommendation for two things on the money side to bring into the year. I need to check out Kubera. This sounds really interesting. I've always looked for something like this. I'm gonna go check it out.

Awesome. Is it an Indian company? 'Cause I think it's derived from the God of wealth. The founder, I believe has family is from India or is from India. I don't remember. Okay, cool. Yeah, it's a great name 'cause it's the God of wealth. So Kubera is awesome. By the time this episode comes out, they will be a partner of the show and we'll have a discount for you.

If not, go to allthehacks.com/deals and it should be there. That's it. We covered a lot. You say that's it. Oh, man. I think that's it for now, actually, because you've written all these amazing posts, one on razors, paradoxes. And I was like, we should go through all this. And I was trying to plan for this episode.

And I'm really glad we didn't try to fit all that in here. Oh, man. 'Cause it would have just been one of those like run through everything, no depth, no value. So I think we got to have you back on and we can run through a few of the other things you've written about that I think would be really valuable to talk through.

I would love to do it, man. This was a blast. It was really fun getting to actually talk through this live. I haven't gotten to do this. I'm excited to get everyone's feedback and hopefully people come away with a few things that changed their life this year. I love it.

One thing that I like to ask everyone, which I paused in the last interview, I don't know why I forgot, was is there a place, whether it's where you're from, where you travel a lot, that you know a lot about, that if someone were going to for a day, you'd tell them here's a place to eat, here's a place to have a drink, or here's something unique to do?

Yes. So in Bangalore, India, which is where my mother's from, that I've spent a ton of time in over the years, there is an amazing restaurant at this pretty old hotel, which is now called ITC Windsor. The restaurant is called the Royal Afghan and it is my favorite meal in the entire world.

The best naan that I've ever had. And they have a dish called dal bukhara that is unbelievable. So that would be mine, the Royal Afghan in Bangalore, India. Anything else you'd say? If someone's going all the way to India, they're going to the Royal Afghan, how should they spend the rest of their day?

Oh man, just take in the culture. If you've never been to India, it is an unbelievable and very different experience. The smell will last with you forever. It is a very distinct smell when you get off the plane in India. Well, I'll add one extra Bangalore recommendation, which is not actually in Bangalore, but if you like to rock climb, hop on the train, which is a whole other experience and head to Hampi, which is a really cool place for a ridiculous amount of outdoor bouldering.

We had a lot of fun there. I haven't done that yet. I'm going at the end of this month though. So maybe I'll have to go do that. Do you rock climb? No. It's like a backpackery rock climbing town. That is what the town is known for, at least for tourism purposes.

Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on this. I'm just going to stick to doing the commercial stuff. No, you can have a lot of fun in Bangalore. We had a great time, but awesome. All right, thank you so much. Where can people sign up for the newsletter, follow you and stay on top of everything you're writing online?

You can find me obviously on Twitter, Sawhill Bloom, it's all under my name. And then my website is sawhillbloom.com and you can find my newsletter there or anything else that I'm up to. The newsletter is awesome. Definitely worth a follow and a subscribe. Thank you so much for being here and we'll have you back soon.

Excited to do it. Thanks so much, man. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm chris@allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. (upbeat music) (bubbles popping) (bubbles popping) (bubbles popping) you