How can I can best learn from the past year and improve my next year? Here’s my three-part approach, combining thoughts and strategies from Ben Franklin, Bill Gates, Tim Ferriss, Chris Guillebeau, Marshall Haas, Sahil Bloom, Ali Abdaal, Paul Graham, and 5 years of past Zach.
TRP → Think, Review, Plan
- Part 1, Think – relax and reflect unspecifically (1-2 days) – day 0-1
- Part 2, Review – catalogue and create specifically (3-4 hours) – day 2
- Part 3, Plan – specify and schedule everything (2-3 hours) – day 3
Part 1: Think
Time: 1 day
Nearly all of us are “go, go, go!” right until that last day of work or school and it makes it so easy for us to keep going, when what we really need is a pause.
There is this amazing part of our brain, called the default mode network (DMN), that simply cannot function while we are actively thinking about things. This is why so many brilliant thoughts appear in the shower, while staring at a tree, or on a phone-less walk.
There are two magic things that happen when we sign off and let the DMN run free (and this is scientific evidence, not just me yapping away):
“Put your thoughts to sleep, do not let them cast a shadow over the moon of your heart. Let go of thinking.”
– Rumi
I need a full day of low stimulation to let my DMN run free and my subconscious get to work, because I’ll be answering some big questions for the upcoming year. Like, what’s my life mission? What’s important to me? How do you retain a pair of socks for more than one month? So, this part 1 usually lasts one day and includes:
- A scheduled and calendar-slotted full day off
- All computers and phones put away the night before, and I tell myself I want to start to think about, unspecifically, “What’s important to me? Who do I want to become? And what does my gut say?” as I fall asleep
- Then, the next morning, a long walk
- A long lunch
- A long massage
- A long sauna session
- Time with family and friends
- A fun fantasy book
- A bath and an early bed
This is the ultimate priming of my mind and body for the work that’s going to happen tomorrow. Which is when I review absolutely everything that happened the past year. Day 2, and part 2, will be for three to five hours the next morning to figure out what went well and what didn’t go so well the year before.
Part 2: Review
Time: 3 – 5 hours
This is where my systems in the past have failed. I would vaguely think about my life instead of strategically taking note of everything that happened.
Nowadays, most of us have all of our lives in our calendars, on our email, in our YouTube and Netflix watch history (don’t worry, I’m not checking yours), and in our photos. Let’s use them instead them using us.
We are going to scroll through everything (which is fun in itself) and put things into the category of “Energy Gainers” or “Energy Losers.”
“I have found “past year reviews” (PYR) more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions.”
– Tim Ferriss, who inspired 90% of Part 2
- Paper and Pen: I have my massive notebook open to two pages, the left side is all energy gainers, and the right side is all energy losers. I’ll go through all my data sources and see if something was an energy gainer or energy loser. For example, I might look at a trip to Hawaii to surf on my photos and say, “That was awesome, into the energy gainer side!” versus looking at a day full of meetings and phone calls and say, “Those phone calls and coffee chats drained me, to the energy loser side!” Think about:
- Which people did I spend time with that made me feel great! / not so great
- Which activites made me feel energized during or afterwards / feeling drained and tired
- Which projects felt like “flow” / “forcing”
- When did I go to bed easily / difficulty sleeping
- Fill it in: iPhone photo library for the past year, calendar of the past year, all my journal entries, YouTube watch history, text message history, books I read, and money I spent.
Turn the page, and on the left side label “What went well” and “What went poorly.”
Now that you have all the data, think generally about the past year split into Professional (career, money, job) and Personal (fitness, relationships, happiness)
- What went well: I will generally for 30 minutes about things that went well in my professional (YouTube, Career, Money) and personal (fitness, relationships, nature, happiness) life.
- What did I do this year that I’m genuinely proud of?
- What surprised me about what worked?
- What content/work resonated with me and others?
- When did I feel most like myself?
- What relationships deepened in ways that matter?
- What brought me unexpected joy?
- Where did my body and health improve?
- What went poorly: Same questions as above, but what went poorly on the right side
- Where did I waste time on projects that went nowhere?
- What opportunities did I miss because I was afraid?
- Where did I compromise on my values for external validation?
- Where did I neglect my health?
- What relationships did I let atrophy?
- Where did I choose comfort over growth?
Next week, I’ll share with you all my answers (as long as they aren’t too personal) but here’s an example of something that went poorly and drained my energy, my scrolling has gotten worse in NYC.
My phone usage has spiked from 30 minutes a day to 3 hours a day: refershing my email, checking LinkedIn. Why was I doing this? Well, probably because I felt lonely and wasn’t making progress in my personal and professional life as I wanted, so I felt discomfort which led to me scrolling to distract/pacify myself, and then I’d feel worse… and so on and so on.
The key insight is this is really avoidance behavior; because I wasn’t aligned with my big and deeper goals, because I am often adhering to dogma (great Steve Jobs speech here if you haven’t watched it), I needed to fill the discomfort with the numbing behavior of scrolling.
“We crave distraction—a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded in the shortest possible time. To keep up this ‘standard’ most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure.”
– Alan Watts
Finally, and this is the hardest part, but one of the most important parts, based on what gave you energy, and what you think is truly important to you, try and figure out your life mission in a couple of points.
Importantly, before we get started:
- Work backwards from energy. What activities make time disappear?
- Separate “goals” from “directions.” Goals are “make $X,” while directions are, “move towards freedom.”
- Accept that everything changes. Your thoughts and dreams and goals at 15, were likely different from what they are at 30, which will be different than your goals at 45. This isn’t failure, it’s growth.
I STRONGLY recommend turning on voice to text or using something like MacWhisper and talking out all your answers on a walk or something like that and then pasting it into Claude to help it categorize and summarize and bring everything together.
What is your life mission? Use these questions to guide you:
- What problems genuinely bother you? What could you rant about forever? What do you often find yourself thinking about or doing in the off time?
- When have you felt the most alive and engaged in the past 5 years? (luckily the exercises above should have helped!)
- What would you work on if money and status were irrelevant and couldn’t change?
- What do people come to you for? Where do people trust you? What are things you’re unusually good at?
- What are you willing to suffer for? As Buddha says, “life is suffering,” so if it’s suffering, what are you willing to suffer for?
- If you died at 80, what would need to be true if you felt like your life was well-lived? Not what would impress others, what would really make you feel satisfied?
- Is there an overlap between what you’re good at, what you enjoy, what the world needs, and what you can sustain financially (the ikigai frame)?
For example, I did the above exercise, and my mission is something like:
Build things that help people live better, with people who give me energy, while living freely. This breaks down into specific goals of things like:
- Earn a certain amount of money
- Live abroad for 1-3 years
- Start a company or 20
- Find people to work with and cofounders who can excite me, and I respect
- Stay close to my family, friends, and nature while maintaining my health
This makes life so much easier and better. Because now I can align my actual specific actions with these life goals.
If you did this, well done, this was the hard part, now I’m going to try and plan my year with specific steps and actions to get closer to this life mission, adding energy givers, removing energy drainers, and trying to have many more things that “went well,” next year.
Part 3: Plan
Ok, now we are ready to actually plan the next year. This will be much more straightforward.
Designing systems to make our life mission much more likely. By setting specific and actionable things to do.
- Look at the life mission, energy gainers, energy losers, and big life goals we just worked on
- Work backwards to 10-year goals
- Where do you want to live?
- What do you want your life to be in 10 years?
- What does your day-to-day look like?
- What have you buillt of created? Who are you surrounded by?
- From the 10-year list, create your 3-year goals of 3-5 specific outcomes. From your 10-year goals, where would it be great to be at in 3 years?
- What is your job/work? → I’ve created 2 startups that I’m excited about, and don’t work full-time anymore in the corporate world
- Where are you living? → I’m living in Portugal, the coast, surfing every other day.
- What is your family/personal life like? → I have a long-term girlfriend I’m thinking about settling down with, I am the healthiest I’ve ever been, and have many events a month with friends and family.
- What are you excited about? → Moving back to the USA to start a family and create a lasting and changing business that helps people live better lives.
- From those 3-5 specific goals, create another set of 3-5 very specific input-driven goals
- Ideate and select 10 startups with a step-by-step plan created for confirming I’m solving a real-world problem, building the MVP, getting my first customers, and delivering the product to customers and receiving payments. Figure out how to transition smoothly and financially smartly from the corporate world.
- Select my first 3 places in the world where I will try living: how much I’ll budget to live in these places, where I will live, what I will do, and who I will be with or meet
- Aim for building real relationships with real people and schedule time with friends and family
- Bonus: apply 80/20 to the energy gainers and schedule in the 20% of activities that created 80% of my joy and happiness for the new year
- Scheduling a trip with my friends to surf now
- Organizing dinners with friends now
- Booking time with a personal trainer, massage therapist, and mentors
- Set aside time every day to read books
- Decide on my list of books to read for the next year (this can change)
- (This list gets much more specific, but I’ll leave it out, like: journaling and meditating in the morning, doing hot yoga on Saturdays, running with my friend on Mondays…
- Bonus +1: apply 80/20 to the energy losers to do everything I can to remove 20% of the activites that create 80% of my stress
- Setting strict rules and strategies to prevent me from scrolling on my phone
- Having a “break glass” list of things to do when I feel alone and bored in my apartment
- Don’t hang out with certain people in real life
- Don’t allow the corporate world to mandate certain things in my life
- Bonus +2: What daily action can you do, and how granular can you get?
- “Meditate” usually doesn’t work, “Meditate for 15 minutes using Sam Harris’s Waking Up App directly after my morning shower” works much better
These annual reviews don’t mean anything if you don’t actually take action.
Take action! Change your life! Join me on the quest for Camelot.
Wow! Did you read all of that?
If you did, I think it means you are ready for a change and to take action. Let me know what your plan is for the new year. I’d love to hear it!