7 Questions to Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet
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Right now is the perfect time to pause, reflect, and set the tone for the year ahead. So today I want to break down the art of conducting a personal annual review and give you seven questions you can use to ensure you get the most out of your year.

So as I went through this exercise myself, I actually went back and listened to episode 99 with my friend Sahil Bloom on this exact topic as we were going into 2023. And honestly, it was so helpful to hear him walk through his process of a personal annual review that I thought about just replaying that episode today on its own. But a lot has changed in my life, and I thought I'd do a little bit of a hybrid episode experiment.

So I'm going to replay parts of that previous episode, but as we step through each part of the annual review, I'm going to jump in from the future, from now, and talk about how I'm thinking about each of these questions today and how things have evolved over the past two years. So whether you're looking to just level up your personal growth, relationships, family, or career, I really think this episode will leave you inspired and excited.

equipped to do so. I'm Chris Hutchins, and if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave a comment or review. And if you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Now let's get into it right after this.

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Zahil, 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 is an American philosopher and

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. Like you get to the end of the year and everyone's instinct is, okay, I'm going to look forward. Let me make my goals. Let me do all that. And that's just like 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 into 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 produce 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 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 because 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, 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. 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.

We need to adapt. We need to have those 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, 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. I was trying to figure out, it's not that I didn't change my mind. It's how do I find the things I changed on without too much recency bias on 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

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 have morphed or changed.

For a lot of people, it can be journaling notes that you've left yourself during the course of the year or

Some people send themselves emails. I like doing that a lot from time to time, note documents. Sometimes it's just conversations with friends. 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 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 as 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 had been a pain in my life for a long time. And finally, I was just like, I'm going to 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 going to go build an igloo, like get a chainsaw, cut blocks of ice and build an igloo. 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 that. Like it was so focused on that. So I got to get it back going, but something I encourage everyone to consider if you're wanting to make sure each month has something exciting. 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 going to 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,

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 like 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 like $1, $2, $3, $4, $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 with it. 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 going to try it. And it was awesome. And I'm like- 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 is a little dry. And I was like, oh, I wonder if I'm a really heavy mouth breather. 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. We've been going back and forth. And then I tried it. I was like, I woke up and it just felt like my mouth was fresh. You should have him on and do an episode on breathing because 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 any time 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 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 grand ambition prior to him being born of all the things I was going to teach him. I had this long list that I had written out of all the stuff I was going to teach my son and how I was going to mold his personality in all these different ways. And I think somewhere around 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. Like 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 ourselves.

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 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 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 sure, that didn't seem possible. Rubik's Cube probably solving it. But I was thinking, I bet if I went to her and was like, hey, let me teach you how to juggle. She'd be like, no, I want to 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 going to 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. So 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 going to do that one day.

Okay, so let's quickly recap what I said almost two years ago. Outsourcing was one that I changed my mind on. So happy I did that. POS has been an amazing addition to our team. And we're looking to bring on another person next year, probably a part-time producer for the podcast to help take some of the work forward.

and help us do even more. So that's one. I said spending money. This still feels like something that I am trying to change my mind on. I'm trying to get better at it. Sometimes it just feels like I'm rewiring my DNA. So I continue to change my mind that I want to spend more and be more intentional about spending and not kind of get lost in all the little tiny things and the little tiny costs, but it's hard sometimes.

And the mouth tape was a funny one. I actually ended up not doing this that much more and not doing it currently. But Sahil said I should have James Nestor on who did come on on episode 178. And it was an awesome episode. Definitely go back and listen. It's actually changed a lot of the things I'm doing and I'm way more conscious about my breathing.

As for what I've changed my mind on this year, I'm going to start with one on cashback. And if you go back and listen to episode 170, I went way deeper on this. But I think some combination of finding out that points are on sale a lot of the time, cards with a lot of cashback are just getting better and better. This U.S. bank card with 4% on everything, Robinhood with 3%. It's really compelling. And I'm going to start with one on cashback.

I just have a lot of points right now. And if I'm having points that are probably devaluing over time, I probably don't need more of them as much as I could actually put money to use, especially with the business and Amy joining full-time on the podcast.

One thing I changed my mind on is how important things like guest interviews are. And so if I looked at the numbers back in 2022, when I did this last episode, 64% of the episodes were interviews. Now that's down to 48. But what's gone up is we've almost doubled the number of episodes that are deep dives

where I'm doing primary research. We've almost doubled the number of collaboration episodes where instead of having a guest come on as an interview, I bring someone on and we collaborate on a topic. We have a discussion. I really enjoy doing those episodes. And then finally, AMA episodes, they actually went way up from 2022 to 2023. And then recently I realized that somehow we just kind of let

them drop off in 2024, and I picked them up recently, so that's another thing. So I think you'll see a lot more intent-driven content where I've spent a lot of time doing either research or really getting excited about something, and maybe less people who are just guests that maybe pitched me on a book that I thought was interesting but doesn't really fit into the narrative of what I want to focus on.

I also think that in some world where AI is much more important in the world of podcasting, doing things that are primary research that you can't find anywhere else, I think is going to be even more compelling. I also changed my mind this year on how much I wanted to invest in my health, both with time and money. So I'm actually going to do a big episode on this. You've probably noticed a few recent episodes on health stuff. I want to dive into all the diagnostics that I've considered, my experience with concierge doctors, which I've

started to experiment with. We switched for next year from a standard plan on our health insurance to a high deductible health plan. So it's going to allow us to save each month on our premiums and then use that money to be more intentional about what we want to spend money on. One of those things is a concierge direct primary care that we're going to replace our kind of primary doctor with.

Also, trying really hard to cut out ultra-processed foods, which is a big decision. And it's not like I thought ultra-processed foods were good prior to this year, but I think I just changed my perspective on how important it is to really try to take control over what is going in my body and what we're feeding our children and our family and all that. And so that's something Amy and I are really focused on as well. Then last, when it comes to running a business, one thing I changed my mind on is education.

how big we want this to get and how much we want to turn it into a company. There was a window of time in the last couple of years where I was talking to friends or investors about fundraising and building out a company and hiring a team and doing all this stuff. And the more time I think about what I want to be doing with our

daughters, both being really young and wanting to spend time with us. I think we made the decision and I changed my mind that I want to have more time with them. I want to focus on content I love. And even if that means we have to turn down business opportunities, that's okay right now. Those business opportunities will be there in a few years or there will be other ones that are different and I'm okay with the sacrifice of not taking them and whatever lost income comes from it.

because right now I don't wanna grow the podcast and all the hacks into something huge because I wanna have time to spend with the family and I know what kind of time building a business takes. It's just not a priority right now. That said, to the extent we find really amazing people we can partner with, I think that gives us some of the leverage to build things

without having to necessarily take on all the work. So if you look at the trip we took to Iceland and we partnered with Brandon Presser and he helped lead the trip, and now we're gonna do more of them next year, and he's gonna lead all those trips and we're working together to make that awesome without having to take on all the work myself.

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Okay. Question two. Let's do it. All right. So the second question and the third are all around energy and this

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 going to 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 change 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 kind of world opened up and I was a creator. And I met a bunch of other people creating podcasts, YouTube, like all kinds of stuff. That's just never been a part of my career, right? 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 and 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, we have two now, but we would ride our 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. It's like those adventures were so much fun. I have a bunch of other ones. 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. 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.

So recapping, two years ago, I said that meeting creators created a lot of energy, and it still does, and I love meeting people in person, but I also want to make sure that I get back to the primary research that I love, which really created energy for me this year. So that includes finding more deals, which if you notice this year, we transitioned the newsletter from being more about content to being about deals, news, or

offers, things I've found on the internet. And I'm really excited about that. If you're not subscribed, I'm really proud of the newsletter we put out each week, allthehacks.com slash email, but also the other primary research. It might sound crazy to so many of you that I get so much energy opening new bank accounts, trying every award search tool, trying to figure out how to get different elite statuses through different programs,

going to Costco and buying gold or buying gift cards online and learning how to resell them. I get a ton of value out of doing that research. And I think that it's valuable for you guys for me to synthesize what I learned because I know not everyone loves that. So I want to do more of that next year. I also said last year that spending time going on adventures with my daughter was something that gave me a lot of energy. This year, extend that to both kids

Amy, having more family time was so much fun. Getting to take adventures, whether they were local, whether they were building a fort in our house, whether they were a trip. Our kids are so much fun. And I think, yes, they're trying at times, but at this age, they want to hang out with us.

I want to make sure that we have time to do that. And so one of the changes I think we want to make is instead of trying to fit in one trip, maybe we can try and take a longer extended trip and live abroad for a few weeks or a month at a time during the summer when there's no school. That seems like something that we might try to do so that we can have those adventures, but in a way that works really well for kids at this age.

And to make that happen, I might even be willing to skip a week or two of the podcast. We'll see. It's something I really want to do next year.

To complement 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 energy drainers. Funny enough, I think I took this in a slightly different perspective, which was...

It wasn't the back-to-back meetings and all that stuff. There were two things that I put here that I'll share. One was fitting our children into our old life. 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 kind of burden, especially when kids are napping one, two, three times a day. It's just, you're not going to 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 got to 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 because I have some other thoughts. But that was one where I think...

It just 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. Oh, I need to be doing that. And it just like pulls you in that direction mentally and the cognitive load, it destroys you.

Anything that drained you? 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 going to 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 want to get together and I'm not doing calls because I'm not going to 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 going to 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 like when we had a quick conversation before this, we did it on the phone and it was fine. And you can do phone calls while walking, by the way. A 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 want to 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 because 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 going to 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. It's totally true.

Update on what drained energy. Last time I said trying to fit kids into our old life. That's true, but we did a good job, I think, changing that. So instead of trying to take kids on all these vacations, we had one family-focused trip. My parents came, the kids came, our au pair came, and we went to Hawaii, and that was awesome. And then Amy and I took a trip to Europe, and we did our Iceland trip, and we did that separately, and we weren't trying to cram everything.

the kids into the kind of trip that we wanted. We did those separately. But interesting, one of the things I learned when I was talking to someone about the way people in France parent is they pointed out that, you know, kids fit into the parents' lives on the weekends. So the weekends aren't all about just do everything for kids activities. It's also about the kids having to come along for things for the parents because the parents were working all week.

And when we came back, we started realizing that we'd fallen into this system where we'd scheduled so much on the weekends. We had soccer and swim class and this, and then we had to do naps and we had to get lunch and dinner that it felt like the weekend was so structured that not only did we not have time to do things like

Go grocery shopping. We also didn't have time for spontaneous adventures. And so one of the changes we made was we realized that weekends were a bit draining because they were so prescribed. So we actually moved swim class to a weekday afternoon and started rearranging the schedule. So we had time on the weekends, whether it was to get things done that we needed to do and the kids could come along or whether it was just going to a park for the morning and not feeling like there were so many things and it was go, go, go. So that was one change we made because we

I think we found that it was pretty draining to get to the weekend and feel like there was not a single second of free time. Last year, I also said social media was

As you'll see, that was draining and I have done barely any of it. The amount of times I've posted on social media this year, I could probably count on my hand. I'll even extend YouTube to that because I think that's something I realized this year was pretty draining was the more I learned about how to make YouTube successful, the more I realized I didn't want to do all of those things. And the way to hit YouTube well is to make content for YouTube and to talk about things that are controversial and be a little bit out there.

I didn't want to do that. I felt like I like creating the content I want, and if it doesn't knock it out of the park on YouTube, well, sure, we'll still put it there. If you want to consume it there, that's fine, but I'm not willing to go and do all the things you need to do to make YouTube a wild success because I realized some of those things were contradictory to the way I wanted to make content and what I thought the show should be, and that's

That's okay. I can live with that because it was really draining for me to think about how do I run this podcast and I guess YouTube channel in a way that's best for the platform instead of best for the audience and best for me and what I thought made sense. So those are a couple of the things that drained for this year.

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

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 state. 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.

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So update on the boat anchors. I'm not really going to go into people's names and that kind of stuff. I really love how Sahil pointed out that one of the worst things you can do is just complain because complaining doesn't really achieve anything. If you can fix it, fix it. If you can't fix it, it's not worth talking about.

But I really liked how he talked about self-limiting beliefs because I had a conversation with Amy recently and I realized that I do have this self-limiting bone anchor in my life that I need to work on. And it seems crazy to a lot of people given the career I've had, but I feel this fear that I can't make money. And it's,

even though you could look at my career and say, well, you've always had jobs, you've always done things that allow you to make money, I've had this kind of irrational fear that, well, what if next year is different? What if I don't have a job? What if no one's listening to the podcast? What if I can't find a way to make money? And what that leads to, and this is a bit subconscious, but I've done some reflecting to try to figure it out recently, is this

need to take advantage of every deal. And so I can remember a few points in the last few weeks even where some deal was happening and I was like, oh, I gotta go take advantage of this. This is awesome. You know, left breakfast or was distracted during dinner. And then the actual benefit of the deal might have been $100 or less.

And just realizing that, yes, I might not necessarily be comparison shopping for my groceries online with two shopping carts anymore. Maybe I've gotten past that. But...

Turning down an opportunity to make money is something that I think is different than saving money, but the same kind of core issue. So I feel like I've gotten good at turning down some little opportunities to save money, but I also need to get good at turning down little opportunities to make money because they can be a distraction from bigger things, whether those things are bigger opportunities that could make more money or just getting your time back and spending it with your family or friends or whatever you're excited about.

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. Like, it was so obvious.

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. 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. Waiting for the perfect moment is the bias here that almost everyone has. We tell ourselves we're going to 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. 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 left over, 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 assets.

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. Yeah. So I just did my S-corp election at the end of the year. So this is something that maybe will make it easier next year. Yeah, it definitely will. The salary thing definitely makes a big difference versus the LLC. Okay. What did I not do because of fear?

Two things that I said last time, one was spending money on the business. And that was funny because I hadn't gone back and necessarily listened to the episode from two years ago before I thought about what for me was something that I didn't do because of fear this year. And the first one that came to mind was again, spending money on the business.

And there have been a few opportunities where I feel like I found awesome growth opportunities that cost money to spend. And I was willing to spend $1,000 here or there, but it kind of capped out and I wasn't really willing to make bigger investments. Even if I had evidence from past experiments that the return was worth it, I just couldn't do it. And so that's something that I think I really, really need to tackle head on. It's something that Amy and I discuss all the time because I'm

I think that there are some investments that don't require turning the company into a thing with lots of employees that are still worth doing. And that is something that I want to solve. The other thing I said last time was going full time on the podcast was something I didn't do because of fear. And so this year, obviously, I didn't have to make that decision again. But since the last episode, we had to make that decision for Amy. She was thinking about joining me full time on this business. And I

kind of proud that we didn't take the same approach, which was think about it for years and years, even though we felt like it was the right thing. And we just did it. And I think we're both so excited we made that decision. We're enjoying working together. You've heard her on the podcast more recently. Hopefully there's more of that to come next year. And so that one felt really good. Now, one more thing from the last year, which is clearly becoming a theme, is that there were some business decisions that we had to make. And we made the decision out of fear that they would end up sucking up too much time. And

And so similar to my point about not doing things that would make money because of the time implication, we were afraid that they would take too much time and we could have been wrong. But the downside of doing something that would really eat into our time and become this giant distraction for Amy and me and ultimately the whole family.

was something that we still have some minimal amount of regret, right? It's income that we could have had. Maybe it wouldn't have been as time intensive as we thought, but I still feel really good about doing it, even though we kind of did it out of fear. So I know this is usually about looking at what you were afraid of and overcoming it. In this case, I think that fear was really healthy.

Question 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 an actual explicit list of your hits and your misses forces you to sort of 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. It probably comes from my athletic background. I just like 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. Like, I'm always the one like, what's the brightest side of things? But when it comes to myself, I am always the person trying to find how to improve. I at least crave the criticism. So like, 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 like, didn't need a little more salt? Could I have cooked it a little longer? Like,

I know that 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. 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 okay. 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.

For greatest hits and takeaways, I noticed we didn't really go deep on them last time. And I probably need to spend some more time here, but I'll just share a few. One that's really tiny, but I just notice it almost every morning is watching our oldest daughter go to school with her backpack on. And there's just this awesome moment that I would absolutely classify as a greatest hit. Just seeing her grow up and go off to school and...

There's something about the backpack that just makes it so different because our younger daughter goes to school also, but doesn't wear a backpack and seeing her walk on out to school in a backpack just makes her feel so old. And that was a huge hit. We didn't miss a week of the podcast this year. I'm really proud of that. We got the newsletter to a weekly cadence. Really proud of that as a big hit. And then we did the Iceland trip. We took people to Iceland and it was absolutely incredible. I'm so excited. We're going to do it again next year. That was really an awesome experience on the missus.

I think the biggest thing, and Amy would reiterate this a thousand times over, is that everything feels last minute. And this spans business and personal. It feels like we're planning vacations to last minute. It feels like we're planning the title of an episode the night before it comes out. It feels like even what we're doing for the weekend is just a little bit last minute. And I think that's something that we need to do next year is just be more intentional with our time and plan in advance so that we're not doing all of these things last minute and we're better using our time.

Okay, 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. Okay. 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,

well, I could just go to every podcast. I'd learned a bunch of stuff each episode. And 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 like, 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.

So this time I have the benefit of knowing how the question was supposed to be answered, not how I thought it was two years ago. And for what I've learned, just the kind of what did I actually learn? What are my takeaways? There's an episode on that coming out in one or two weeks. And so I'll leave you to that as what I learned in the last year, because I don't need to recap that. We have a whole episode about it. As for tying all this up in a bow and really processing what did I learn from this exercise?

I think the biggest thing, which I mentioned in the misses, is intentionality. And that's being intentional about where we're spending money, being intentional about where we're making money, being intentional about our time, how we spend it, who we spend it with, even where we go. And business decisions, being intentional about what we want to do. If I had a theme that I want to wrap up

2025 in, it's being more intentional about all the things we do and really thinking about them in advance and trying to make the right decision, not just for money or family, but for everything all in one in one cohesive unit. What's the best thing overall for what we're trying to do? And so I think that's something we're going to focus on a lot. We're going to do an annual planning conversation, both about the business and our family. And I think that's going to be a really big theme for 2025.

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.

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. 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

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 midterm 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? Yeah, I released an annual planning guide after the annual review guide, which has my whole kind of 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. 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 like a two minute process where I just do, I call it my one, one, one 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

It can be as tiny as like a smell that you really enjoy during the day, or it can be huge 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 like 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. 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 like 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. Like 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 listens... Yeah, I know. That's how I felt. It's that meme where you're like, I felt like a hero. And I recorded an episode yesterday with Jordan Schlain, 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. Okay.

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? Yeah, let's do it.

Okay, so I'm going to wrap this episode up here. If you want to listen to the rest of this conversation, go back and look for episode 99 or go to allthehacks.com slash 99. Sahil's 23 things to take into 2023 was an amazing list. By the time this episode comes out, maybe there's a 25 things to take into 2025 list. And if so, I will put that in the show notes.

Thank you so much for listening. I really hope this process of doing an annual review and running through it is something that will add a tremendous value to the way you reflect on 2024 and the way you think about going into 2025. I want to be really intentional with my year. I hope you do as well. And I really hope you all have an amazing 2025. Happy New Year. Thank you so much for all the support over the last year and all the years you've been listening. I really appreciate it. I will see you next week.