This post is a review of my 2021 goals and a public sharing of 2022 goals.
Why bother with this exercise? 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.”
In other words, we’re capable of great things. They just take longer than we think.
The best way to stay on that 10-year road? Break it down into years. Then break those years into months, months to weeks, weeks to days…
“For parents, this is a Shackleton moment.”
This according to Tim Armstrong, CEO of the DTX Company (I’m paraphrasing).
“Your family is frozen in time. You have to spend more time with each other. During this time, I’ve gotten to know my kids 25% better.”
His interviewer, Scott Galloway added:
“You’re going to look back at this time as historic. You hope your kids and family look back on it positively.”
What Tim and Scott are saying is: play offense. Everything we do, we can frame as either offense or defense:
What a week: six-hour bottlenecks at airports, toilet paper outages, billions of dollars erased in the markets, and over 6,500 lives lost around the world.
Let’s talk about one trait that’s crucial during these times: leadership.
During times of crisis, we look for guidance. We want a steady hand to navigate choppy waters. Leadership isn’t about winning an election or job titles. Leadership is about your behavior.
Some behaviors of good leadership:
At the end of 2018, I decided there was a large “skill-gap” that I wanted to bridge. Some skills I wanted to improve were more technical:
Other skills were softer, but equally important to me:
I didn’t see a way to work on these skills without making certain sacrifices. So I made a decision: I’d give up blogging for a year.1
My every career opportunity came because of my writing habit.
I wrote my way into my first Hollywood internship, covering entire book manuscripts in a day — that’d take others a week. I wrote a cold email that landed my job with Dennis. An article on how to get health insurance opened the door to working with Ramit for 2 years.
The quality of that writing fluctuated over the last 10 years, but the work ethic never wavered.
Until now.
I debated whether to write a “year end review.” Typically, the tone of something like this is more self-congratulatory than I’m comfortable with.
But there are benefits.
This article is Part 1 in a three-part series on building a sustainable life.
In 2002, late on Christmas night, the numbers to the Powerball lottery were announced — a jackpot of $314 million up for grabs. Jewell Whitaker shook awake her husband, John Whittaker. You got 4 out of the 5 numbers! she told him.
I used to work at a horror production company called After Dark Films. We churned out memorable films like Asylum (“A mess, from the moment the film starts, you can see it and feel it” – HorrorNews) and Getaway (2% on Rotten Tomatoes, and “…a reminder of the dangers in attempting to speed past coherent editing, character development, sensible dialogue, and an interesting plot.”)
A friend of mine is a personal trainer and former bodybuilding competitor. We used to work together.
We were working on a fitness product, and on this particular day, we were on site at a gym, shooting fitness videos. Every 30 minutes or so, she’d stop and turn to her phone to take a selfie or shoot some video explaining an exercise. Then she’d spend a few seconds publishing the content to Instagram and Snap.
Kate McKean, VP and literary agent at Morhaim Literary Agency wrote:
If you’re reading this, you can very likely write. You’re probably fluent in English, or very close to, and you are able to convey ideas using words. But that doesn’t mean you can write a book.