🎯 My New Year's Resolutions
Happy New Year! 🥳
The 1st of January. What a day. For some it's filled with optimism and excitement, for others it can feel strangely melancholic with the return to work looming and the holidays coming to an end.
But one big part of the new year is setting new year's resolutions.
As per my love of personal development, I did some annual reviewing and journalling this week, and thought about what I wanted to do in 2023.
I like doing this stuff all year round, but the New Year does provide some healthy momentum for self-assessment and interrogation.
I found a random list of questions to help me reflect on the year from Dickie Bush, a cool writer who I follow on Twitter, and tried to answer as many of them as possible.
After doing that, I planned for 2023, and did it in a way I hadn't done before.
Two weeks ago I wrote about the wheel of life and the three step process I'm using each week:
Rate my life in each area out of 10.
Think about what would make each area a 10/10.
Schedule time to work towards that into my calendar.
These were the 10 areas (I've adjusted them slightly):
Physical health
Mental health
Personal relationship
Family
Friends
Career
Fun
Spirit
Finances
Learning
I decided that since I already split my life into these areas, I should use them to set goals for the new year as well.
I set a goal/vision in each area that I would be really happy about at the end of the year, and then I can rate it each week in my Sunday night review, which I already do, and stay on top of it throughout the year.
So for each area, I wrote out a short summary about what things I'd like to achieve and what things I'd like to feel at the end of 2023.
Some were really specific like money, health and skills I want to learn, others were more general vibes like my mental health.
For example, with my family, two of my siblings have had/will have kids, so by the end of the year I'd love to look back and say that I spent loads of time with my nephews.
It's simple, but it's something I know I want to do, so I wrote it down.
Doing this in all areas of my life is incredibly powerful, it means I'm slowly generating clarity about everything that I want, and then can just go and do it.
And for the final step, which really makes it all come together, I made a blank google calendar, and created what I can expect my average week in London to look like, scheduling in time for each of these areas. This way I know that I can do everything I've set out to do. This final step was a tip from my boss a few weeks ago, and I've been loving approaching it that way in the last few weeks.
Of course some weeks will look different, but a lot will look quite similar.
Then every Sunday night and I can evaluate and see if I'm working towards the things I said I wanted and all that stuff.
There are parts of this that make me feel weird, like should my life really be that predictable that I can just plan out the whole year? Shouldn't I just go with the flow and see what life brings?
Well actually, the truth is doing it like this excites me. I like knowing I'm making time for the things that matter to me, I like making progress on things I care about, I like optimising my routine to get the most out of my life, and I know I can still find space for spontaneity and randomness throughout the week.
So, hopefully that's useful for some of you. It's not too late to do some thinking and planning for the year.
Have a great 2023 🚀
Tintin
👀 Cool Stuff I've Found 👀
Dickie Bush's list of questions to reflect on 2022.
I watched Avatar 2 and have got obsessed with the Avatar theme tune for some reason.
A 3 part series on Logan Paul and his biggest scam.
I read a book called The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch this week. Randy developed terminal cancer, so he decided to give one last lecture at the university where he taught. The book is essentially a summary of this talk that he gave with 6 months left to live.
My Reading Log 📚
In case you're interested, this is a list of all the books I started in 2022. The ones in bold are the ones I actually finished and the starred ones I'd highly recommend reading (even if I haven't read every single page of those lol).
Why Meditate - Gillian Lavendar
Think Big - Grace Lordan
Do Team - Charlie Gladstone
Midnight Library - Matt Haig
Becoming - Michelle Obama
Daring Greatly - Brene brown ⭐️
Originals - Adam Grant
The Mountains Sing - Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Love yourself like your life depends on it - Kamal Ravikant
Ride of a Lifetime - Robert Iger
Surely you’re joking Mr Feynman - Richard Feynman
The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying - Bronnie Ware
Make it stick - Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, Mark McDaniel ⭐️
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - Eric Jorgenson ⭐️
Squiggly Careers - Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis
Design Your Life - Bill Burnett and Dave Evans ⭐️
The Go Giver - Bob Burg and John David Mann
The Pathless Path - Paul Millerd ⭐️
Think Again - Adam Grant
Range - David Epstein
Defining Decade - Meg Jay
The Lean Startup - Eric Reis
Oversubscribed - Daniel Priestley
The art and business of online writing - Nicolas Cole
$100m dollar offers - Alex Hormozi ⭐️
Attached - Amir Levine + Rachel Heller ⭐️
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hayes translation)
Creativity - John Cleese
Start with Why - Simon Sinek
Fooled By Randomness - Nassim Taleb
Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
Scorecard Marketing - Daniel Priestley
Breakfast at Tiffanys - Truman Capote
A Wanted Man - Lee Child
The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel ⭐️
The Silent Guides - Steve Peters
Humankind - Rutger Bregman
Models - Mark Manson
Endurance - Alfred Langsang
Dotcom Secrets - Russel Brunson ⭐️
The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch
So I read a total of 21 books cover to cover. I don't really care these days whether I finish a book or not, it just depends on how much I'm getting from it, but it's interesting to look at.
The most important thing is I'm reading so much more than I used to, and I'm loving it. I probably spent enough time reading this year to finish around 30-35 books, which would've blown my mind a few years ago.
I used to read around 4-5 books a year, with great effort. I talk about how I approached this transformation in this newsletter here if you want to level up your reading in 2023.