Annual Review: Part I
Reflecting on 2020, what I celebrated, where I fell short, and three lessons learned
Welcome to the latest Monday Seven—fresh ideas and frameworks for a life well-lived.
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Hi Friends, 👋🏽
This is a special edition of our regular newsletter.
It’s the first time I’m sharing an annual review publicly.
While it’s daunting to share my life with the internet, I’ve come to learn that living publicly is an asymmetric risk. The upside is unlimited and the downside is capped.
In the interest of living more publicly, as well as becoming a better writer, I want to share my experiences from 2020 and my goals for the new year.
This is a two-part Annual Review.
In this post, I reflect on the biggest moments and milestones from 2020, what I’m celebrating, where I fell short, lessons learned, and a list of my top books and products.
I’ll share my goals for 2021 in a second post. That’s coming up next week.
Enjoy!
Reflecting on 2020
Life is fun when it’s a game. The game’s storyline is divided into chapters. Each chapter ends up being a few years long. The chapters are broken up into sections and a section ends up being roughly a year.
For me, having a theme for the year helps guide the direction, intentions, and decisions. The theme is how I decide to play life's game.
In 2020, the theme was Offense. After a year spent fighting fires I was completely burnt out. In sports, they call this a scoring slump. Your skills and talents don’t suddenly evaporate. It’s all about psychology and confidence, and the best way to get out of a slump is to start taking more shots on goal. With that in mind, I began the new year committed to going on the offense and regaining confidence.
Get serious about finances
After years of building two companies, I had completely neglected personal finances and did not have the most basic structures in place. I started by creating a personal balance sheet to understand my net worth. I tried a few software tools like Mint but ultimately found this Google Sheets template the most useful. Once I got a handle on my personal net worth and monthly finances, I created a financial plan and set dream goals like owning a farm.
Once I got a handle on my finances, I began investing seriously in public markets. This year I moved 10% of my net worth into public markets. I also made my first two angel investments in Apt (real-estate) and Composer (fintech).
Finally, my partner Christine and I began building our joint finances and creating a balance sheet for our life together. This helped us spend guilt-free with monthly and annual budgets, made chats about money easier, and prepare for big life events.
Get fit like a soccer player
My goal in 2020 was to get bigger then lean out. 185lbs and 12% body fat. I started weightlifting and increasing my caloric intake in a meaningful way. By the end of February, I had grown from 165lbs to 185lbs. The only supplements I took were protein, creatine, and citrulline malate. I followed Julian's guide to building muscle to get started. I built my own routines with research from here, here, and here, and tracked progress using the Strong app. At my peak, I managed to do a 4-minute plank, one set of 50 push-ups, and 15 chin-ups. I kept up with bodyweight exercises while traveling across India. When India went into lockdown and I was in a beach hut for 11-days, I exercised every day. It was in many ways my favorite time of the year. Here’s my routine from that time:
Morning: 5km run
Lunch: 150 push-ups and 4 sets of chin-ups on the bathroom door frame before
Evening: 20-minute sunset swim in the ocean
Unfortunately, once I got back with gyms closed weightlifting completely fell off. I’m ending the year lighter than I’ve ever been clocking in at 157lbs as of this morning.
Travel
This was a great year for travel and I don’t mean that sarcastically. I had trips planned to Guatemala, Prince Edward Island, and Havasupai and the Grand Canyon. None of them happened. But I’m very fortunate to have been able to take two trips of a lifetime.
At the beginning of March, I went to India for a solo trip. I left my cell phone and laptop behind and followed my instincts without any set plans. The trip was part experiment and part adventure. I knew that I needed an extended period of time away. I removed myself from day-to-day company operations, created playbooks for the team, and trusted them with the rest. I am incredibly grateful to Bhavik Vyas and Taavi Weinberger who steered the ship while I was gone and managed the business through a global pandemic - more than I could ever ask of anyone. While in India I had the time to reflect on life’s biggest questions. I wrote an essay on why we are here, a letter to my future kids, and another letter to my 40-year old self. The trip could have easily gone the other way. I am extremely lucky to have had an adventure of a lifetime.
This summer my life-partner Christine and I took two weeks to drive across Canada for another trip of a lifetime. We visited national parks, cycled across the Rockies, and committed to building a life together.
Propose to Christine
This was supposed to happen in a treehouse on an avocado ranch overlooking a volcano in Guatemala. Instead, it happened atop Mount Bourgeau in Banff. We spent the next two weeks in Vancouver sharing the news with family and friends. In hindsight, it was much better than how I had planned it at the start of the year, and without a pandemic, there is no way this would’ve happened. Committing to life with Christine is the one decision I made this year that made all other decisions clearer. It’s as if a portal opened up and we stepped through a secret level within the game of life. It is one of the most significant milestones of my life to have a partner along for the ride.
Build the next thing
The plan at the start of the year was to recharge, work on an exit plan from companies I was leading, and start the next venture. I explored other interests and took a deep dive into K12 education. I joined On Deck Fellowship in the summer. It was one of the most surprising and rewarding experiences in terms of building a network of incredibly talented and like-minded entrepreneurs. In hindsight, it was probably not the right time for me to participate in On Deck. While both thisopenspace and Uppercase did well without me at the helm, over the past three months I made the decision to go back to my businesses. Not because they could not do well without me, but because I could not start the next thing knowing I could make a meaningful difference in both businesses. For now, I am back at my companies full time and spending the evenings and weekends exploring what’s next.
Celebrate
Gaining my confidence back
I entered the year having lost most of my confidence, questioning every decision, and filled with self-doubt. Getting my confidence back was the single biggest win. Many people who know me may be surprised to hear that I had lost confidence. I am not great at showing weakness and am pretty good at hiding it. I’ve been able to trace this trait back to childhood. Not wanting to see my mom sad as a kid I hid my own emotions and put on a smile to support her. So when I am feeling down, it’s hard for me to ask for help and for others to know that I need help.
All I can say is, I’m back baby!!!
Sprint to the finish
The last three months have been some of the best in terms of output. I contribute this to making a commitment to Christine, connecting deeply with my parents, and getting re-energized from the friendships in my life. I also attribute it to taking 9 months prior to putting systems in place that allow me to form good habits and stay focused.
Time to Think
Letters from India — I'm proud of traveling through India without a cell phone or laptop for over a month during a pandemic. It was extremely freeing and improved my ability to travel and reflexes to adapt to changing environments. It gave me the chance to reflect on life's biggest questions and gave me the clarity I needed to get back into the game of life.
60 Days of Meditation — I had planned to go on a week-long meditation retreat this year. When that was no longer possible, I decided to deepen my practice with a 60-minute sit every day which I completed over November and December. The meditations were unguided and not always easy. The mind is busy, but I found it a surprisingly easy habit to form. I’ve been meditating for at least 20 minutes daily since.
Starting this newsletter
Writing has been the skill I’ve improved the most this year and I owe it to this newsletter. At first, it was fun to write a weekly round up newsletter but without a system in place that quickly became unsustainable. I picked up books and joined writer communities to learn how to actually write. A friend asked me over the holidays what the best compliment is that I’ve gotten this year and without a doubt, it’s each and every time one of you responds to a post. I am proud of publishing 27 posts this year and excited to look back on the next year this time and think they were total shit. It means I will have grown. Thank you for following along in these early days.
Secret business milestone
Literally in the next few hours, I’m wrapping up a chapter in business. Something that I have been working towards for the past 18 months. While I can’t share the details quite yet, it is a major milestone that I am very excited to share with you when I can.
Falling short
Writing
I wish I had written more. Longer essays, deeper research, and thought pieces on what matters to me most. I wish I had built a larger following and increased the beacon of light that are my ideas to attract other like-minded people. Writing will be a major cornerstone of my life in 2021 and beyond.
Friendships
I crave more relationships with the people I would like to surround myself with. They include positive-sum thinkers, people who bias to action, original and first-principle thinkers, optimists, ambitious weirdos, boundary pushers from a diverse set of backgrounds. I want to be friends with writers, technologists, artists, young and old. I want to surround myself more with people that I admire. Making friends has never been natural for me. I’ve never been one to have many friends, but rather a few deep relationships that form over a longer time horizon.
Building what’s next
I want to be top 10% in the world at what I do, and I know I am not there yet. I made two bets: i) that I could step away from the day-to-day operations of my companies and start building the next idea or ii) that I was for certain going to build a company in the education space. Turns out it was extremely challenging to remove myself and resist the urge to jump back in and improve what I can see needs attention.
Fitness
Fitness. My goal was to be 185lbs and 12% body fat. While I got to 185lbs, going to India and coming back to a pandemic with closed gyms set me off my goal. Weightlifting at home was not the same. I stayed fit with FutureFit but ultimately lost a lot of muscle. I'm now just below 160lbs and did not hit my fitness goal
The other goals I set for myself this year and didn’t meet include:
Bench Press 1.5x bodyweight at 1 rep max (1RM)
Standing Barbell Press 1x bodyweight 1RM
Deadlift 2.5x bodyweight 1RM
Squat 2x bodyweight 1RM
10 Barbell Hip Thrusts 1.5x bodyweight
Hang Clean 1.25x bodyweight 1RM
Three Lessons Learned
Do not tolerate pain. Adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to pain. Identify the cause of your pain and confront it directly. Procrastination is a form of avoiding pain. Allowing conflict to persist in relationships is avoiding pain.
Date your ideas before marrying them. I have more ideas than I know what to do with. I am also a high-energy optimist which means I tend to get excited about ideas. Pursuing an idea means saying no to the next 10 to 100 ideas.
Prepare, observe, and know when to act. Be the student and the warrior.
Top products I bought and love
Yinch (board game)
Favorite books I read
Fiction: Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
History: Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution by Nikki R. Keddie
The Road to 5,000
In the new year, the goal is to grow Monday Seven to 5,000 people. The first step is 500 before the end of winter. It’ll take all of us to get there. If you enjoy what you’re reading, consider inviting your friends by sharing this post:
The next time you’ll hear from me is Monday, January 4 with part two of this review.
Until then,
Yashar
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