Blog | Christopher Ming Blog

Last updated on February 1st, 2024 at 06:01 pm

Intro

This is a review of my 2023 and a public sharing of 2024 goals.

Why document it? Two reasons

First, the Bill Gates quote sums it up:

“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

We’re capable of great things. They just take time.

Second, doing this each year is joyful. The act of reminiscing fills my cup.

Chris Bailey wrote

“To gain greater enjoyment from your experiences, try practicing anticipation and reminiscence. Both are forms of savoring—ways to convert positive experiences into positive emotions.

“We can also savor an experience after it happens—a savoring style called reminiscence. We reminisce by reliving an experience in our mind, looking back through photos of an experience, or talking about it with a friend or a loved one.

My process:

1/ Review and retrospective the last year

I review:

Photos
Roam notes
Google photos
Swarm check-ins
Instagram stories
Google Calendar

2/ I organize life into six buckets:

Long-term projects
Career
Relationships
Health
Money
Leisure

For each bucket, I think about: (1) What went well (2) What could be improved.

3/ Plan next year

I review notes about (1) my long-term goals and (2) my Perfect Tuesday. These are my North Star metrics. (Other long-term goals, like how much I plan to earn, I documented here (it needs an update).

Finally, I keep the following in mind, from Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Plans are worthless. Planning is everything.”

We measure success by inputs and intention, not blindly following a set path.

Here are my reviews of 2022,2021,2018,2017.

2023 Retrospective

The 2023 theme: Less impressed, more involved.

My 2023 goals in a nutshell: Build products, make carbon accounting easy, Philadelphia in 2023, purple belt, and travel.

Let’s dig deeper:

Long-term projects

I spent 2023 writing and building an audience around remote work, with the goal of:

Building an audience
Launching 1-3 products

On LinkedIn, I increased my followers by 285% (10,083 total followers). I did this by posting every day for the first 3 quarters of 2023 and going viral 4-5 times. Those virality spikes drove most of the followers; posting every day allowed me to go viral.

On the newsletter, I switched services (Mailchimp to Beehiiv) and cleaned out a quarter of my list. Net net, I increased subscribers by 85% (1853 total subs). Most came from LinkedIn. I experimented with three different lead magnets and settled on The Remote Job Hub: 50+ remote job boards & 700+ remote companies.

In products, I launched a free product, the Go Remote database, free resources on moving abroad and working remotely.

I also gave my first talk, on making an international move with family (for NomadEire) and was on my first podcast (WFH Forever).

Around Q3, my friend Scott asked me:

“What are you doing this for?”

It was a good question.

I did not have a good answer.

I wrote and built an audience because, at some indeterminate point in the future, I want this work to generate an income. The “when” and the “how” are details I keep kicking down the road.

But it’s hard to move forward because I didn’t know where it’s going. Do I keep writing because I’m good at it? Or do I get off the pot and actually make a business out of this?

Because businesses make money.

I dedicated Q4 to creating a paid product. What I landed on: group coaching to help people land a remote job. It was $500 for a 4-week cohort, and I opened it to 6 clients. It was fun and hard and rewarding. Building the content and then running the group coaching sessions felt like a culmination of everything I learned during my time at I Will Teach, Reforge, and Noom.

Most importantly, my clients are seeing results.

What about the misses from 2023? There were many:

I needed to pause all content work in Q4 to work on the product, which means my processes weren’t sustainable to begin with
Besides the group coaching, I didn’t crack any other monetization
Dozens of social posts I thought were bangers went nowhere
Still haven’t found a newsletter format I can be consistent with
Any SEO traffic has dwindled over time

Relationships

I bought Amy a sweater. It was too small, and I missed the refund window. She insisted I didn’t bother to buy the size up. She had enough sweaters, she said.

Oliver interrupted.

“Are you arguing?” he asked.

After 10 years of marriage, whether or not to buy a sweater is about as heated of an argument as we get into.

Picking the right partner is the most important “happiness unlock”. This is the person who’s going to make all the big decisions with you:

To make another international move
To pack up all your life (again)
To sell all your stuff (again)
To trust you to pick a new city at random
To find your family a new home in a weekend

We got lucky. Amy and I met each other at the right place and the right time. Sometimes I wish it was less serendipitous (hear me out…). I wish we had had to be more deliberate and thoughtful in our approach. That way, I could share that approach with others.

How do you know if you found the right partner? That’s easy enough. It comes down to one question:

“Are you on the same team?”

Being on the same team means you are aligned on what matters and how you behave in those areas: family, career, money. It doesn’t mean you agree on everything. It doesn’t mean equality.

The big team decision this year was moving back to the US. We settled in Philadelphia. We found a 3-bedroom apartment, close to a public pool that saved us during the summer heat wave as we were trying to get our busted A/C unit to work. My sister joined us in the apartment, so we now have a Whatsapp Group called “Philly roomies.” It’s been a delight.

Family highlights, in no particular order:

Oliver learned to ride his bike and swim
Annabel’s language skills continue to shock & awe. She plays some mean flip cup
The kids went TikTok viral in Belfast, which was a cool and strange to navigate
We entertained guests in Dublin: mom, my brother and his wife, multiple sets of cousins
My brother got married in Madison, Wisconsin and I officiated the ceremony
We found out that baby 3 is on his way in May 2024
We restarted the Thanksgiving football game tradition with a new generation of cousins
I organized two family Karaoke nights in NYC and Edison, NJ
We hosted family in Philadelphia for a weekend trip

Career

In February 2023, I told the leadership team:

“Our free product is the wrong product.”

It was too advanced and complex for the target market (small-medium sized businesses, or SMBs). We had two paths forward: change the market, or change the product.

I was given a designer and 30 days to build a PoC (proof of concept) product.

A month later, we came back and presented the new product. Leadership swooped in:

“This is great,” they said. “We’ll own it from here. We can’t do this right if it’s a skunkworks project. We’ll resource this properly and move fast.”

Someone asked if this upset me. To have my idea “taken away.”

The answer is no. Because ideas have no owners.

The only thing that matters is the execution of an idea. Whether or not you can bring that idea to life. And bringing a product idea to life requires design, product, engineering, and marketing resources—and a guiding hand to keep those resources aligned in the same direction.

So more team members were been brought in. Original designs and concepts were iterated on, then tossed out, then brought back, only to get tossed again. The product today is a stranger to what I initially pitched.

Which is the way it has to be.

This new free product drove most of my work in 2023. The go-to-market will drive most of my work in Q1 of 2024.

Health

The pain was excruciating.

My eyes snapped open. I picked a side and started to roll. A jolt ran through my hip and down my leg. Maybe the other way?

I tried rolling left. This time, it felt like a knife dug into my left glute. Maybe not.

I squirmed to the edge of my bed, took 3 deep breaths, and forced myself over. I stifled the scream so I wouldn’t wake Amy. On the way down, I grabbed the edge of my nightstand and braced myself, so I wouldn’t eat complete shit at 5:03 am.

I was sweating and hunched over, resting all my weight against the table. My legs were locked out. The moment I shifted my weight, I started to lose balance. Standing took all my concentration.

But I was out of bed. That was a good start.

Fortunately, my bedroom doubled as my office. Which meant my office chair was next to the bed. I grasped for it, clung to it, and used it to hobble to the bathroom.

I saw myself in the mirror: blurry-eyed with bed head (but like, ugly bed head, not that tousled Orlando Bloom look). I was hunched, all my weight on the bathroom sink, because I didn’t trust my legs. I tried applying toothpaste with one hand.

And I started to laugh.

2023 was the first year I started to feel my age.

And that’s with doing a lot of things right this year:

Drinking. I cut down on the drink a lot, from 4-5 drinks per week to 0-1.

Two changes led to this: first, my “rule” is that I only drink socially. No more drinking by myself, no more drinking to “chill out.” The price (late nights, poor sleep, hangovers) is too steep, and the upside (I genuinely enjoy drinking) is not worth it.

Second, don’t keep alcohol in the house. It’s too easy to reach for out of boredom.

Fitness. Lots of great habits while we were living in Dublin: biking or walking everywhere, weight lifting 2-3x per week, BJJ 2-3x per week. There was a pause in July while moving to Philadelphia and setting up our lives. Towards the end of 2023, I was going to Planet Fitness 2-3x per week. BJJ is still on pause.

Social media. Reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport completely changed my relationship with social media apps (Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok). Slowly, I’ve removed all of the apps from my phone. By making better use of DND, airplane mode, and not checking email first thing in the morning, I’ve reduced my phone usage by ~30%.

A lot of good progress. But even with all that, every 4-6 weeks I’d wake up, legs locked up, and struggle to get out of bed.

That’s priority one to solve in 2024 (more on that below).

Other health misses from 2023:

Flirted with the idea of training MMA (but didn’t)
Flirted with the idea of doing a BJJ competition (but didn’t)
Every time a bottle finds its way into the apartment, it gets drunk. Usually by me. Usually by myself.
My sleep in Dublin was terrible. It took moving back to the US to see that. There’s power in consistency: waking up, working, family, and sleep. Living in Dublin, the edges were constantly bleeding over. I made it work. I was functional. But I was tired a lot.

Money

Tracking money abroad was hard.

I didn’t have visibility into all the accounts. I couldn’t aggregate the Irish accounts with any personal finance apps. The infrastructure I created to manage our money in the US and Ireland worked, but it was complicated.

We saved some money (I think). We invested some, too (I think).

It was all mostly a wash. We didn’t lose ground, and we didn’t gain much either. I’m excited to get this all back on track in 2024.

Leisure / Travel

What I wrote about this category in 2022:

The “leisure” bucket is always an odd one for me to write about. My hobbies are writing and training. The activities that fill my cup the most are validation from online strangers, coffee shops, and working on my submissions. Not nature, video games, or brewing beer.

This held true in 2023 (and holds true today).

Some highlights from 2023:

Belfast and Giants Causeway, Northern Ireland
Dingle, Ireland
Paris, France
Move to Philadelphia, PA
Nashville, TN

Some travel plans that didn’t work out:

Luxembourg
Amsterdam

2024 Planning

Summary

My theme for 2024:

Better is better. More is better.

This is an Alex Hormozi quote. It resonates. What it means to me:

Say no to new things. No new projets, no side quests, no new channels. Instead, focus on what’s working well. Then do more, do it more consistently, and do it better.

What that looks like across the six buckets:

Long-term Projects

Summary: One product. One offer. Two channels. Better processes.

I have the first version of a product in the can. In 2024, I’m focused on three things:

The Offer. An offer is the goods and services I provide, to whom, and at what price.

The v1 offer I used in 2023 worked. It helped me close my first six clients. But it worked because I already built up trust and goodwill with that audience.

Early experiments at the end of 2023 tell me that the same offer isn’t strong enough to build this business in 2024. In 2024, I’m reaching out to people where there’s less trust and goodwill. Yes, I need to create more. But I also need a better offer that people want to buy.

Audience and leads. How do I find more people who know and trust me and are interested in purchasing my offer?

I’m doubling down on using LinkedIn and the newsletter to find and engage with my audience. These work. I understand them. They dovetail off one another. I’ll do more and do it better.

At the start of 2023, I had a good process. I published daily on LinkedIn. I wrote a weekly newsletter. This fell off in the Q4 quarter because… life. Nothing extraordinary or extenuating. I was focused on the product. Work got busy. Family.

What this means: the “good” process at the start of 2023 was “bad” by the end of 2023. I’ve started reworking the processes.

Monetization. How much revenue will this business generate?

I reached revenue at the end of 2023. I hesitate to put out a revenue goal because I’m shooting in the dark. But earlier, I said:

Businesses make money.

So not putting out a revenue goal feels like a cop-out.

Goal: The business will make $50,000 in 2024, at 90% margin.

This feels like I’m simultaneously stretching and sandbagging. I’ll revisit this in the H2, once I land on an offer that gets me customers.

Next, the most important part (and the hard part): focus means explicitly naming what you won’t do. What won’t I do in 2024?

No new products. I have ideas. I won’t do any of them.
No new channels. I’d love to start TikTok. I’d love to get onto podcasts. I won’t do either.
No scaling people. I want to hire a contractor to handle some of the processes. But hiring at this stage just means that my processes and tech suck.

Final note: I’ve been at this juncture before. Product in the can, on the verge of “figuring out” this business. The biggest mistake I make at this point:

I ignore the constraint. I focus too much on the routine.

I need to solve the problem in front of me, instead of sticking to a comfortable process.

Relationships

Summary: Family first. Deepen relationships. Soft networking.

Family first

It’s easy to give the best version of yourself to the outside world. The maintenance people, Uber drivers, baristas, colleagues, managers, direct reports… they absorb all your patience and forgiveness and consideration. By the time you get home, you have nothing left to give.

The best thing you can do for your family is to give them the best version of yourself.

In the vein of this year’s theme: I know what the best, most patient, most loving version of me (husband, father, brother, son) looks like. I’ve seen it in myself. Sometimes for even more than a glance. I just need more of that version.

Fortunately, there’s no secret code to “activate” that version of me. Here are the things that help:

Not drinking
Work every day
Work out every day
Be the first to wake up
Not using social media
Have an end-of-day “shutdown routine”

Deepen relationships and soft networking

In 2024, I’ll focus on deepening existing relationships. That means:

Standing lunches
More catch-up calls
Standing weekend hangouts

Keeping up with a large number of people in a meaningful way is skill I call “soft networking.”

What won’t I do? I won’t organize new meetups or build net new community groups.

Health

Summary: Fix my feet. BJJ. Consistency.

My current hypothesis: the pain in my hips and glutes is caused by my feet because it was particularly awful after a week of wearing sneakers with no support. So 2024 is the year of fixing my feet: getting a gait analysis, getting expert opinions on the right shoes to buy, wearing insoles, massage and foam rolling.

I’ll start training BJJ again. I wrestled with this for a while. There’s a cost to training BJJ when you’re a casual; all the people who take it more seriously catch up to you, then start to smash you. That leaves bruises, on the body and ego.

But the cost of not training: gaining fat, losing muscle, losing mobility, etc.—is higher.

When any choice you make is painful, pick the one where at least you’ll have a healthy body. And you’ll learn how to fight.

Finally, consistency. Again, this is just the logical extension of this year’s theme. I know what I need to do. The constraint isn’t information, but execution. I need to do more, do it better, and do it more consistently across training BJJ, weight lifting, and nutrition.

Money

Summary: Buy a car. Track finances. 25/25/50 savings, investing, and spending rate.

We’ll buy my dream car this year: a minivan.

The increased visibility of our finances since moving back to the States has already felt like an upgrade. I’ve simplified the accounts (3 different checking accounts to 1; 6 savings accounts to 3). I found a better app for that macro view (moved off Tiller and onto Kubera). For aggregating transactions, I use Mint (though it’s sunsetting in favor of Credit Karma).

With better visibility and some stability on our short-term goals (car, baby 3, Ireland in the summer, etc.) I want to get our saving, investing, and spending ratios to 25/25/50, respectively.

Leisure/travel

Summary: Ireland. Travel.

Our time in Ireland made Amy realize she wanted to raise the kids “as Irish” as possible. We’ll test spending six weeks in Ireland in the summer. We have loose plans around the dates and accommodations.

While we’re there, I’ll do some solo travel to 1-2 digital nomad hubs (e.g. Budapest, Portugal).

If I’m able to fix my feet, one activity I’m flirting with is trail running. I used to love this—about 100 times more than road running. Taking this on depends on (1) fixing my feet and (2) consistency with BJJ/weight lifting.

We’ll bookend this summer travel with my brother’s wedding in April (in Albany, NY) and my cousin’s wedding in August (in Massachusetts).