(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks," a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and I wanna start this episode by saying happy new year and how grateful I am for all of you and all your support and how excited I am for everything that we're gonna get done in 2024.

But instead of talking about all those new things today, I want to share some of my takeaways from last year. I actually went back and listened to dozens of episodes from 2023, and I wanted to share my top 10 takeaways from last year. I'm gonna reference a bunch of past episodes today, so just know that if you want to find that episode, you can always go to allthehacks.com/ whatever the episode number is.

So if it's episode 99, allthehacks.com/99. And as always, I'll include links to all the episodes I cover and anything else in the show notes to make things easier for you. So let's jump into my top 10 takeaways from 2023 right after this. Taking care of your health isn't always easy, but it should at least be simple.

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That's allthehacks.com/AG1. Check it out. (upbeat music) Takeaway number one, and don't read into the order of these 10, is that everyone can build more confidence. Now, I wouldn't say I'm the most confident person I know, but it's certainly not a skill that I ever thought I was necessarily lacking.

But after my conversation with Aziz Ghazipoura in episode 130, I realized that confidence is a skill that anyone and really everyone can improve. And one of those reasons is that just believing in something and being confident about it isn't always the same as asking for it. And that asking for things often leads to a lot more than you thought.

So one of my takeaways from that episode is just practice getting rejected to help boost your confidence and your ability to ask for things. And it might surprise you over the course of your life. And it's literally as easy as going up to random people and asking questions even that you know they'll say no to.

So find a stranger and ask for $100, not in a way that you're begging or giving a reason, just say, "Hey, do you think I could have $100?" The goal is not to get the $100. It's to help you get better and better at understanding and feeling that discomfort so that you can ask things and be more confident in the future.

If this seems hard, you can work through uncomfortable situations in advance. Ask yourself, if this happens, what would be the outcome? And almost every time you'll realize that it's not really gonna be as bad as you might've initially thought. And part of the reason that I think being confident and walking into certain situations is hard is because there's so much uncertainty.

But I had another conversation this year with Matt Abrahams, which was episode 139, where I learned that you can prepare for a lot of spontaneous conversation as well. And one of the biggest tactics I learned there was he gave four ways that you can relieve the pressure to respond if you're in a situation where you're not sure what to say.

One of them that might be the most uncomfortable is to just pause. I've seen a handful of speakers do this really well at conferences and as uncomfortable as it is, the responses that come after are almost always so good that you forget about that pause. So that's one thing.

The other is if you need to buy yourself some time, you can just ask someone to clarify. Another option is to just paraphrase what someone said. So you could just repeat what they said, allowing you some time to think and process. And then the last, which is something that I think it's hard for all of us to do and takes a little bit of confidence is to just say you don't know.

Matt also suggested pairing that with I don't know, but I'll look into it and follow up with you. But my hunch or my inkling is this. So people understand that you have the expertise, but you couch that you don't actually know if it's correct versus so often we know people that say things that they're thinking and state them as facts.

The other big way to get better at being confident in situations with other people, especially when communicating is to really just focus on other people's needs. So often we think about conversation, negotiation being about ourselves, but it's often about others. And so one line that Matt learned from his mother was just constantly saying, tell me more.

Let people do the talking, listen to their needs and respond to their needs appropriately. That said, there are a few tactics that I'll share before I move on to number two that were really interesting. And they were all about having some structures to how you will have a conversation.

And so Matt shared a few, I'll just share them. One was what, so what, now what? And he's like, if you just think about this and you practice it in advance, it just makes it really easy anytime you're asked a question or put on the spot to put your answer into a framework that'll help you be concise and deliver your point.

So what happened, why is it important, and what are we doing next? Similarly, there's problem, solution, benefit, which is a common thing in sales tactics. You can frame your response or your question as, well, here's the problem, here's what we're gonna do, and here's why it matters. And then he gave one that was great that I haven't had a chance to practice yet, but it was for toasts or tributes.

Anytime you're put on the spot to speak at an event, maybe a dinner, he called it what? It stands for why, why you're here. H is how are we connected? A is an anecdote or two, and T is the thank you or toast. So if you get tapped on at a dinner, hopefully that will help.

And one of the ways he said you can practice these is just look at anything going on in life. Maybe it's an ad on TV and just think, what was the structure they were using? And just thinking about it and practicing it makes it second nature and makes it much easier for you to think on the fly.

So takeaway one is that everyone can build more confidence, especially when it comes to spontaneous conversations. Takeaway two is that kindness is so important. So often we hear messages like nice guys finish last, but after my conversation with Gary Vaynerchuk in episode 118, I think we can all understand how flawed that statement might be.

I know I've been jealous of other people in the past, and honestly, I'm not sure why, but there is an overwhelming abundance of resources and opportunity in this world. And other people's success doesn't usually limit or take away from your opportunities or accomplishments. Maybe if you're in a race with someone, obviously if they win, you will not win.

But in general, in life, in business, in a lot of our endeavors, that's not true. And with so much more perspective, anytime I've been jealous in the past seems crazy. And now I've kind of become this person that always wants to be the first to congratulate other people on their successes, and it's a sincere happiness for them.

Now, I don't know why this is so hard for so many people. I think a lot of it probably comes down to fear. People are scared they're gonna fail, they're gonna be taken advantage of, and so instead of being kind, they throw up their defenses. But I think if you start being kind and accountable to yourself and to others, I think you'll see your personal life, your career, and really everything start to flourish, including the success of others around you, which is a really amazing feeling.

And one step that might help is just trying to understand who you're trying to accomplish things for. Are you working to make yourself happy, your parents or your friend group? And as you push and push, I think ultimately it'll hopefully come back to what's truly gonna make you happy.

However, I just wanna flag that all of this talk about kindness reminds me of a quick conversation I had with Nisair Yassin in episode 123, where we discussed the distinction between being nice and being kind and how different they can be. Sometimes I think we think we're being kind, but we might actually just be being nice because we're limited by the fear of offending someone else.

So I wanna encourage you to realize that if you are delivering bad news, it does mean doing it from a place of sincerity. Some of the best feedback I've gotten from entrepreneurs I've spoken with who are raising money for their businesses is after I gave them very negative feedback about why I didn't want to invest, but I didn't say it to put them down.

I didn't say it unkindly. I shared the things that made me concerned because honestly, I wanted to see if they thought they were valid. And if they did, maybe they could course correct because ultimately I want them to succeed. And the feedback from those meetings where I decided not to invest, I've heard later was so, so helpful.

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Takeaway number three is that we need to value our time better and really get better at outsourcing, delegating, or even dropping things that we don't wanna do. So why is this important? Well, I think we all know that time is such a precious and limited resource that we can't get more of.

And I had a great conversation with Dan Martell in episode 98, who's really the master at this. And one thing we talked about was calculating our buyback rate to figure out what your time is worth. And there's a lot of ways to do that math, but that's not actually the hard part.

I think the hard part is once you get that number, actually applying it. Because when we're sitting at home trying to decide if we wanna order groceries online, we're not actually going to make our buyback rate in the one hour we'd save. And so putting this in practice is especially hard.

I know that many of the people listening, myself included, are frugal, we hate paying premiums, but you never know what you're gonna miss out on until you make space for it. Take this podcast as an example. Once I went full time on it, I was able to do so much more from consistency with the newsletter, the membership, more research for solo episodes, which might evolve to be an even bigger part of the show next year, but I didn't know that at the time.

It was having the space to think, to write out ideas, to brainstorm and get creative that allowed so many cool things to unlock. And I wouldn't have had that space if I wasn't willing to protect my time. So what are some ways you can buy back your time? I love doing a time audit, look at your calendar, I'll talk about that in another takeaway later.

You can look at all the tasks that you might be able to outsource and just try to figure out are there things that you don't want to spend your time on, that you don't enjoy, that don't give you energy, that you could outsource somewhere else. Whether that's work or home, could be grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, gardening, fixing a toilet, all those things are possible.

Yes, it'll cost more, but how much? I used to hate paying all these markups and delivery fees and service fees to get groceries delivered. And I wanted to know the true cost so I could feel good about it. I added everything to the card in the app and then I actually went to the grocery store and I compared the total and the difference was about $15.

Except the grocery store trip took an hour. And by the way, I think I ended up buying about $15 of things I didn't need because I was a little bit more impulsive at the store. But even if I avoided that impulsive behavior, $15 an hour seems like a great deal.

Every day, I don't just hop in the car and drive for Uber or Lyft to make $15 an hour. So clearly I value my time at more than that. And if you look at what I've charged in the past for consulting, my rate is way more than that. So why is it so hard?

The more I think about it, the more I'm able to do it, but it's the doing it that makes it easier because once I do it, I start to actually see the things that have happened in my life with extra time to be creative and to think. And that's when it's gotten more and more comfortable.

On the work side, 2023 was actually the year I finally hired an assistant and I haven't looked back. Her name is Possany. She's amazing and I'm so grateful for her. I worried for months before going through that process that I wouldn't be able to fill her week with work.

And now we're already talking about when to hire another person to join the team because she's already taken on so much work. So if you're even remotely interested, there are lots of companies you can use to find or recruit an assistant, but we used Oceans. The website's oceansxyz.com, highly recommended.

If you're interested, reach out to them and let them know I sent you and ask them if they can hook you up with a deal. Also, we have an amazing episode coming out in a week or two with Sam Korkos about all the different ways you can leverage delegation through assistance, automation, and more.

So that's gonna be really awesome. Finally, part of this takeaway was also say no. And I included that because just looking at an email this morning and I got a pitch to use someone's service, and I still felt this small instinct that I needed to reply, but I'm not sure why.

Just because they or probably some automated system sent me an email to my inbox doesn't mean I owe them a reply. A previous version of me probably would have, but I think it's really important to protect our own time and realize that just because someone is trying to impede on our time doesn't mean we have to let that happen.

So when you get a phone call, you can say no. When you get an email, you can just archive it. Don't forget that you need to be more protective of your own time as well. So that's takeaway three, value your time and really get better at outsourcing, delegating, and just dropping the things you don't want to do.

Takeaway number four for me was learning the skill of spending. This one is so important and it has two steps. First, getting clarity on your spending, which I really went deep on this year in episode 133. I have never had more clarity on our spending in my entire 39 years of life.

I've tried all the tools. We ended up using Copilot to track everything. I think it's fun and easy and way better at categorizing expenses than the five to 10 other apps I tried. They are now a partner of the show. So if you want to try it out for two months for free, you can do that at allthehacks.com/copilot or with the code HACKS2.

And good news for both XMint users and Android web users, they're building a Mint data importer as we speak, which should be done soon. And they'll be launching Copilot for Android and web this year. I'm really excited for more of you to be able to check it out. But once you understand where you're spending money, you need to also be intentional about where you want to spend and the changes you want to make, which involves going through all those categories and really thinking about what you care about, what you don't, what's important to you and what's not.

And the hard part for me wasn't actually cutting back on things I don't care about. It was learning the skill of spending to dial up the things I did care about. I'll go back to how hard it is for me and probably many of you to steer away from our like frugal and optimizing way of life.

And honestly, it's still hard, but I've gotten better and better at doing it. In fact, I once heard someone describe a budget as being more freeing than restricting, because when you allocate a certain amount of money to a category, it actually gives you the freedom to spend it without worry.

And I have to agree. So this year, we've decided to increase our money dial for travel. And we wanted to do that because we love traveling, but we also wanted it to be comfortable with two kids, which is something we really value. And by the way, you might not, which is totally fine.

But for us, that means renting a bigger house or getting two connecting hotel rooms, or in some cases, renting a suite, all of which costs two to three times what we used to spend and usually can't be booked with points. But because we know we've cut back in other areas of our life, and because we've allocated a specific amount of extra money to this category, and it's important to us, we've gotten a lot more comfortable spending that money.

If you wanna go back to episode 141, I talked with three-time All The Hacks guest, Brad Barrett, from the Choose Five podcast, all about learning the skill of spending. And it also brought me back to a very early episode, episode number nine with Ramit Sethi, who really believes vehemently that you should spend on the things you care about, turn up those money dials, and then cut back mercilessly on the things you don't care about.

So that's takeaway number four. I really needed to get better at learning the skill of spending, and I think it's a journey that I am on and making progress. Number five is that there are many paths to happiness and success. Now, this one seems so obvious, but Amy and I worked in tech in Silicon Valley for the last decade, and it almost seemed in our minds that success was being the founder of a unicorn startup or being a venture capitalist, which in hindsight seems so obviously narrow and wrong, but that career and effectively the way you invest your money, because if you're being a founder, you're taking a lower salary or investing in your company, and if you're an investor, you're actually investing in those funds that you manage.

It just seemed like what you were supposed to do with your time and energy and money to be successful. And even though I'm doing the podcast full-time, it still felt a little bit to me like a side hustle or a less exciting path because it wasn't success in the way the last decade has trained me to think about it.

And then I had a conversation with Cody Sanchez in episode 119, and it really changed things. First off, she's built her entire empire buying boring businesses, which was something I'd never considered, and honestly didn't sound exciting to me, but she's built a wildly successful company around it. And it just kind of kicked me out of that mode of thinking because she's put her time and money into something that's not that sexy, but that she really enjoys and has done so well.

And it got the wheels turning for me about all the possible things I could do, but not just me, anyone. I've shared that episode to so many friends and family members in different industries, from medicine to oil and gas to teaching. And even though many of them aren't rushing out to buy a laundromat or another small business, they've all shared how they're now thinking a little bit differently about the paths they could take to their own happiness and success, which is awesome.

And I can't wait to see where the next year or two take all those people, and especially take me and Amy and everything we're doing. Don't worry, the podcast isn't going anywhere. I'm just excited for everything that can come. So takeaway number five, there are so many more paths to happiness and success that you might not be considering.

Takeaway number six is that we are all responsible for our own health. And this really came to light this year and started with my cholesterol situation, which for most of my life had been high. But for years, the advice I'd gotten from doctors was just exercise, eat healthy, check back.

And even though my cholesterol numbers didn't get better, the advice never changed. I'd been on that regimen for a while. And then I started listening to Peter Attia's podcast and eventually went down the rabbit hole of heart disease, which by the way, is the leading cause of death, and realized that the advice I've been getting is so bad.

And the reasons why are so crazy. One of the primary ones is that the way we evaluate risk of heart disease is that we look at the likelihood of a cardiac event and set a threshold where if it's higher than that point, we take action. And if it's not, we don't.

And most of those tests that are used don't even work until you're 40. So if you're not 40, or if you are 40, but you're not a high enough likelihood of something happening, then we don't take any practice. It's as if we said, until you're a specific percentage likely to get lung cancer in the next 10 years, smoking is fine, which seems crazy.

And so I started taking this into my own hands. I went and paid for a calcium score test, which at some places is quite affordable, and found out that I have a small, but non-zero amount of calcium in my arteries, which meant this is serious. I sought out a doctor that would actually listen to some of these results and talk.

They were part of one medical, so it's not like I went and spent a ton of money to do this. And the course of action was to get on statins, and I've brought my cholesterol down, and I feel much, much better about the future. In the middle of this entire process, I also did an episode with Dr.

Jordan Shlain, which was episode 97, and we discussed how important it is for all of us to be in charge of our own health. And that's because even the best doctors in the world don't have the time or ability to care about your health as much as you do.

They also can't be experts in everything. And unfortunately, many have to tailor their advice to what patients can do, i.e. what's covered by insurance, and often what's been given to them in outdated guidance that they're still operating on. So in addition to that calcium score test, I've done a bunch of research on other tests I could be doing just to get a baseline of where I can affect change.

And fortunately, a lot of those diagnostics are getting cheaper and more accessible. Things like DEXA scans, VO2max, getting all of your biomarkers done, whole-body MRIs. I'm actually gonna do a whole episode on what I learned in that process next year, but please don't get caught up on everything you could possibly do.

Yes, you can use those tests to figure out where to make progress, but honestly, anywhere you make progress is better than nowhere. And I love this one point where I think it was Dr. Schlain said, you know, there are a million ways you can improve your health, but if you're not just exercising and eating healthy, a lot of them don't matter.

So yes, you can go deeper and deeper, but also don't forget about the fundamentals and keep in mind that you're ultimately in charge. If you wanna go deeper on this, Peter Attia's book "Outlive" came out this past year and I really enjoyed it. So takeaway number six, we're all responsible for our own health.

We have to take it into our own hands. And fortunately, that's become a lot easier. I've talked to a lot of amazing people on this podcast, but if you're like me, you wanna go deeper. So where can you go to learn from the most remarkable people? That's Masterclass, who I'm excited to partner with for this episode.

This year, don't just talk about improving. Masterclass helps you actually do it by giving you unlimited access to intimate one-on-one classes with the world's best. In fact, Masterclass offers over 180 world-class instructors. So whether you wanna master negotiation with Chris Voss, think like a boss with Martha Stewart, or go deeper on mental strength with All The Hacks guest Robin Arzon, Masterclass has you covered.

There are over 200 classes to pick from with new classes added every month, like modern Japanese cooking, which helped me be more confident in the kitchen and introduce some new flavors to our weekly meals. Plus, every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there's no risk for you.

And right now, our listeners will get an additional 15% off an annual membership at allthehacks.com/masterclass. Get 15% off right now at allthehacks.com/masterclass allthehacks.com/masterclass. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy, and even if you've already filed, being proactive right now to lower your future liability is so important.

And now that I'm working with GELT, I feel like I finally have a partner I can trust to handle everything for my personal and business taxes, and I'm excited to be partnering with them today. Think of GELT as the ultimate modern CPA. They not only offer an amazing tech platform that gives you personalized guidance to maximize deductions, tax credits, and savings, but also it's so easy to communicate with them.

There's an in-house team of expert CPAs who can recommend the most effective tax strategies to minimize risk and grow your wealth. And my favorite story is that when we first onboarded with GELT, they reviewed our past returns and found a huge mistake our prior CPA had made, so they refiled and got us back all that money.

So, if you're ready for a more premium, proactive tax strategy to optimize and file your taxes, you have to check out GELT. And as an "All The Hacks" listener, you can skip the wait list. Just head to allthehacks.com/GELT, that's G-E-L-T. Again, that's allthehacks.com/G-E-L-T to stop overpaying on taxes. I just wanna thank you quick 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. All right, my takeaway number seven is that eating well can be so much easier than you think.

So, just talked about health. One of the biggest things there is food and diet, and I feel like it's always seemed so hard to eat healthy. But this year, we've realized that we've been making it more work than it needs to be. So, I wanna share some of the tips we've learned and been using to make the process better.

First off, meal planning helps so much. This could be as simple as just planning out what you wanna cook each week. We organize all our meals in an app called Paprika, which I love. But if you wanna make it even easier, there are plenty of sites that sell or give away full meal plans.

And this is one where AI can actually be really helpful. If you haven't done this, definitely try it out. Go to ChatGPT, or whatever your AI of choice is, and ask them to create a meal plan, and then continually try to tailor it to exactly what you want, whether that's flavors, or diets, or types of protein.

And the results are amazing. You can do this for regular cooking, or you could even layer on kind of a meal prep aspect where you're gonna make food in bulk and freeze it, which will make cooking meals even easier in the weeks that follow. Okay, another one. You've probably heard me talk about this multiple times, but one of the ways we make eating well easy is that three of our meals every single week come from Green Chef, which is a meal kit focused on eating well.

There are a lot of options here, and we've tried others in the past, but when we tried Green Chef early last year, it was amazing, both the food taste and the health aspect. And we've honestly been ordering it every week we're in town since. And even though I got them to become a partner of the show, though they don't even know I'm doing this, we still have to pay for it every single week, but we're happy to.

And if you go to allthehacks.com/greenchef, you can get 60% off your first kit. Another thing we've done to simplify meal planning is just repeat meals. Comes in two forms for us, which is just repeating recipes we love, which has the added benefit of making the cooking so easy because the recipes become second nature, or we just do tacos on Tuesday and pizza on Friday.

There's no overhead on what we're doing those nights. It's always the same. And when you combine that with Green Chef for three nights a week, we really only have to plan for two nights a week. I mentioned outsourcing above, but ordering groceries online has made everything easy. And for this, we're mostly using Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods because every time we keep trying Instacart, they do such a bad job of replacements.

And by the way, if you end up getting an assistant, you could actually ask them to help plan your meals and order the groceries and save you time. In the past, we've also had someone help with meal prep. So I put an ad out on Craigslist just to find someone local who could cook meals and prep for the week, and it was way less than the cost of delivery.

And we were able to share recipes we wanted to someone who would shop and cook for two to three days at a time and drop everything off on Tupperware. It seemed like such a luxury, but it was so much cheaper than you'd think. And all we had to do for dinner was reheat things.

Then finally, after talking to Chef David Chang in episode 122, I took away a bunch of hacks to make cooking at home easy, like buying more frozen fish, using spices more, not always needing to peel ginger, so many more things in that episode. But a big one that has saved us time is just using the microwave more.

Which no joke, we've probably made his salmon veggie rice dish a dozen times in the microwave, which you can make with just one pot and do the whole meal in your microwave. It's delicious, but the microwave also helps keep food nutrients dense, and you don't have to use as many oils or fats.

Honestly, we enjoyed the microwave cooking that we learned so much that we ended up partnering with AnyDay, the microwave cooking company Dave Chang is behind, to get all listeners 15% off at allthehacks.com/anyday if you wanna check it out. So takeaway number seven is that eating well can be a lot easier than you think.

Number eight is that you are in control of your own life. This one seemed so cliche to include because it wasn't really a new message from 2023, I'm sure we've all heard it. But talking about it with Robin Arzon in episode 145 really made it come to life for me, because I realized it's not always about just the big changes as much as it is some of the small ones.

So often we hear that we're in charge, we get to decide what we wanna do, where we wanna go in our life, but those all seem like they lead to big, hard changes. But it's so important to not let great be the enemy of good, and realize you don't need the best outcome to make change.

Sometimes you can actually split those two things out and get started as one step, and then optimize your way to the ideal outcome as a second step that you might end up not wanting to do. For example, meditating was always set aside 30 minutes a day, and it would take the right location, room, sounds, type of practice.

Then I did an episode with Light Watkins in episode 126, and he reminded me that you can meditate from anywhere for any amount of time. You may get more benefit doing it in the most optimal way, but there's so much benefit you can get just meditating while sitting on your couch for a few minutes.

Then with Robin, she pushed me to prove that I could do something hard in the hardest time of year instead of an easier time of year with her 3 for 31 challenge, which as of recording this, I've managed to run three miles or move for 22 days straight in December, and I am confident I will manage to continue for the last nine days, which will leave me thinking, wow, if I can do this in December when we had both sets of parents visiting, two kids, all the holidays, everything we were trying to get done for end of year work, taxes and everything, I could probably do this any month of the year.

Part of that was reframing commitment to be part of my identity. So when I think about exercise, I think about the fact that I'm someone who said to others, including you all, that I'm gonna make my health important. So if I say I wanna exercise three times a week and I don't do that, I'm not being someone who follows through on my own word, which is actually way more motivating for me than being someone who just didn't exercise in a given week.

Finally, I wanna share a really cool thing Amy and I did, which we called our billionaire life exercise. Basically, we went through a bunch of categories and spent time brainstorming what our life would look like in each of them if time or money weren't a concern. Those categories were the relationship you have with your spouse, your friends and family, health and fitness, travel and transportation, hobbies and personal expression, work and career, self-improvement, giving back, and celebrations and holidays.

So we came up with all kinds of ideas on what we would change and what we would do. But at the end, the crazy realization was that the difference between our really rich life wasn't a billion dollars. It was many, many orders of magnitude less and actually pretty close to where we were today with some subtle changes that we feel like we could easily make now that we've gone through this process of cutting where we don't care and focusing on where we are.

And so the goal for 2024 is to fit a lot of those into our annual spending and actually live the life that we want. And it's just so crazy when you go through this exercise, which I'll encourage you all to try because some of the things that make us feel like we're living our billionaire life as we called it was replacing our garage door opener.

We have one of those old garage door openers that's so loud every time you open it. And anytime we're at my parents' house or anyone's house that has a newer garage door, it's so quiet. So for us, we haven't done that because we have a functioning garage door. But if we had a billion dollars, of course we'd replace it.

Well, it turns out the cost to replace a garage door isn't that high. So if we can make ourselves feel so much happier and feel like we're living the life that we really wanna live for a few hundred dollars, that's amazing. And so there's a bunch of those things in all of these categories, especially around how we spend our time with friends and family and during the holidays.

So I don't know, I really love that exercise. I hope that other people get to do it. So takeaway eight is that you're in control of your life. I encourage you all, even the small things, to be more intentional about it. Takeaway number nine is that you've gotta ditch plan B.

And while this might be similar to the last takeaway, it was really different for me and much more specific. And it all came from talking to Matt Higgins in episode 105 about his book, "Burn the Boats." The big takeaway was all of this research that shows that merely having a plan B can hold you back.

There's this experiment that happened with undergraduates in college where they brought them into a room and gave them a task of unscrambling words to form sentences and promise them energy bars as a reward for high performance. They randomly assigned them into two groups. And in one of the groups, they had them think about a backup plan that could get them free snacks on campus.

And the other group, they didn't. And sure enough, the group that had those backup plans in advance didn't perform as well as the other group. The subsequent experiments have been run with money and time and other rewards. And the results are similar every time that just having a plan B makes it less likely for plan A to be successful.

So this was a challenge because as an optimizer, I always wanna make the best decision. It often means contemplating options and having hedges. But I've really realized that when it comes to the big stuff that I wanna make sure happens, I need to go all in and not look back.

It's why I quit my job to focus on all the hacks. It's why Amy did the same thing. And sure, we probably could have and should have done it sooner, but it was awesome to see what happened when we went all in and things really felt like they were gonna work.

And one way to help make this happen even more in your life is a lesson from my conversation with Sahil Bloom about razors in episode 116. And it's what he called the optimist razor, which was when choosing who to spend time with, prioritize spending time with optimists. Pessimists see the doors that are closed, optimists see the doors that are open and probably will help you kick down those closed doors as well.

So in 2024, I'm trying to surround myself even more with others who will push me to burn my boats, focus on plan A and not give up. So that's takeaway nine. Final takeaway, number 10 is taking the time to reflect. And part of the way this episode and the one I did like this a year ago came together is that I took the time to reflect on all the lessons I learned from the podcast.

But funny enough, when I did this last year, I was so focused on doing it for the episode that I didn't actually let the exercise bleed over to reflecting on my own life. Then in episode 99, at the very beginning of 2023, Sahil Bloom shared his personal annual review exercise and it was such an eye-opener.

I loved forcing myself to do that reflection for me. And in his review, the template is simple. There's just seven questions and you can actually go back and re-listen to the episode I did with him if you want more detail. The questions were, what did I change my mind on this year?

What created energy this year? What drained energy this year? Who were the boat anchors in my life? What did I not do because of fear? What were my greatest hits and worst misses and what did I learn this year? I won't go through my answers to all of them publicly, though I am curious if you think sharing that kind of stuff with you would be interesting in a future episode, but I will share one tactic in the process when it came to what created and drained energy that I love and that's doing a calendar audit.

And I mentioned it earlier, but it just involves looking back at a few weeks of your calendar and evaluating everything you did on those criteria of what created and drained energy. And if you wanna make it even more visual, you can take the things that created energy and make them green on your calendar.

If they took away energy, make them red. If you're not sure, you can make them gray and then look at your calendar and you can visually see where you might wanna make changes going forward. But I don't think that just reflecting is enough. I think it's also really important to set goals.

Obviously those can change, but when you have your plan A, when you have your goals, you can just accomplish a lot more. And when I said in takeaway eight that you wanna be in control of your life, it's so helpful to set out where you wanna be, what you wanna do so that you can take that control.

Finally, two other quick things that I wanted to share from last year that kind of fit into this takeaway. And that's one, I looked back at episode 109 and I re-listened to my conversation with Derek Sivers, which was amazing. And he talked about getting to the point in your life where you raise the bar for everything to be a hell yeah or a no, which is something I've tried to do a lot.

Sure, earlier in your career, it might be way better to just say yes to everything. But now I'm trying to only say yes to the things I'm very excited about and let go of the FOMO I might've had about everything else. There are so many specific examples of a dinner or an event that I said no to, and I actually struggled to say no, but afterwards I felt so much better skipping and usually ended up using that time to do something I valued a lot more, whether it was work or just spending time with my family, which actually made it so much easier the next time something came up to say no.

The other thing was when I talked to Cody Sanchez in episode 119, she shared this framework called TEAM that she uses to check in and kind of take an inventory with your relationship. It only takes about 10 minutes. So it starts with T for touch, maybe you wanna hold hands, maybe you wanna sit next to each other.

E is for education, sharing something that you found interesting that day. A is for appreciation, sharing something you appreciate about the other person, but just don't keep using the same one. And then the really important one is M for metrics, where you just talk about things that you wanna change in your relationship or sometimes that your spouse wants to change, but you do it in a structured setting instead of sharing it in the heat of the moment.

Now, you don't have to use this specifically, but it was just a good idea of ways to apply kind of a regular review process to your relationship, which might sometimes get lost in your personal goals and your personal review. Okay, so my final takeaway was to take time to reflect, which I hope all of you are able to do when you think about last year.

Those are my top 10 takeaways from the podcast. I really hope this episode was helpful to you. I know it was so helpful for me to put together and think about and start to plan for 2024. However, if there was a big takeaway from the show that I didn't include, I would seriously love to hear about it.

Please share it to me, podcast@allthehacks.com. Thank you so much for listening. I will see you next week. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)