2020... what a year.
I just put the finishing touches on my Annual Review.
Here are 30 lessons I learned about myself and the world across five areas:
• Health
• Wealth
• Relationships
• Online creativity
• Personal operations
🧵👇🏼
1. Health starts with removal, not addition.
This year I officially hit 100 lbs lost. And looking back, it wasn't what I started doing, but what I stopped doing that got me there.
Fewer carbs, fewer beers, fewer hours sitting, these things add up.
The most "disciplined" people actually are the most undisciplined.
But they recognize and accept this.
So they set up constraints that prevent them from having to rely on self-control and willpower.
If you can't sit comfortably alone with the voice in your head, no amount of "success" will change that.
12 weeks alone in NYC during peak-COVID forced me to learn this lesson.
The times I felt best: eating healthily and reading philosophy.
The times I felt worst: eating horribly and doom scrolling.
This is the closest thing you can get to primal living in the modern world.
Start the day with a walk and watch your energy, mood, and creativity soar.
These will be different for everyone.
But start looking for the fundamentals of what makes you feel good.
Then find a way to do them every day.
7. Everything changes when you stop trying to save and start trying to earn.
My goals to start 2020 all started with "save X every month."
But you can only take expenses so low.
Which has higher ROI? An hour spent budgeting or an hour spent learning copywriting?
If you view money, opportunity, or success as scarce, it will avoid you.
The world, especially the internet-enabled world, is full of opportunity.
Set aside X amount of money that you will invest in these three areas every month.
Your health, time, and energy are assets with high ROI.
Your cash flow will dominate your net worth gains in your early years.
This one deserves a longer post, but the last place to be with your money when you're young is in cash.
The S&P 500 bottomed the day there was a five-block line outside of Trader Joes in NYC.
And people have been calling for a top ever since, but it can and will keep going.
12. Thoughtfully invest in communities to form strong relationships.
Online communities are like a curated resource for like-minded people.
The price of entry is peanuts to the long-term benefits of the relationships you will form.
You can meet anyone in the world online.
But you have to put yourself out there and start sharing your ideas and worldview.
As I shared more online, I begin to meet incredible people. I set a simple goal to meet one new person every week, but most weeks I ended up with more.
Now, these people are some of my best friends.
I can't wait to enjoy dinners with my closest friends again.
Especially with how many smart people I've met this year, those conversations are going to be epic.
@david_perell introduced me to this idea and now I think about it every day.
Find the 10 people that push you forward, make you more creative, work in different domains, and see the world with a unique lens.
Then, double down on them.
17. Writing online is the highest leverage habit in human history.
I can trace everything good that happened to me this year back to writing.
But writing and *publishing online* brought the most amount of good.
I spent months inconsistently sharing into the void.
It was only when I committed to tweeting every day, writing four threads every week, and producing consistently that things accelerated.
I got the chance to meet and interact with many people who were ~a year or two ahead of me.
The most valuable question I asked: what do you wish you knew a year ago?
In the beginning, you need to share way more ideas than you feel comfortable sharing.
Make noise, and listen for signal from both yourself and others.
In the age of capturing attention, the ability to create media assets is more valuable than coding.
My prediction is we will see "content creator" boot camps similar to coding bootcamps in the next few years.
Humans cannot comprehend exponential growth in real-time.
Going from 150 to 300 followers is not +150, it's +100%.
Focus on your doubling time. If it's constant, you're growing exponentially.
If it's accelerating: look out.
The closest thing you get is the turn of a New Year.
That's when I started writing my newsletter, one year ago.
But I wish I started six months before that, before I felt "ready."
24. Become obsessed with finding leverage and efficiency.
The first principles of my productivity are leverage and efficiency.
I want to store my time finite time and energy into infinite assets.
With everything else, I want to be ruthlessly efficient.
Looking back at my goals for 2020 made me laugh.
It's impossible to see one year into the future.
So this year, I'm focusing on 12-week goals and systems.
Much is made about mental models and cognitive biases.
But applying them isn't easy. In looking back at my decisions, the most-common bias is sunk costs bias.
So now I look for it everywhere.
Ask "why" more often with any of your systems, goals, or habits.
Throughout the year I found myself doing things week after week that were inefficient, but never stopped to ask why.
This was the best framework I learned in 2021 (h/t @shaanpuri)
• Know where you are (brutal honesty.)
• Know where you want to be (long-term visioning.)
• Know the next step you need to take (immediate clarity.)
Action, not planning, creates clarity.
I took on a lot this year.
I produced most consistently when I invested in creating systems and designing my environment to reduce friction.
The smoother my systems, the faster I could ship.
This is a reminder to myself.
So I'm reflecting on one question to end 2020: what if I took every goal I'm about to set and 10x'd it? Would that change how I spend my time, energy, and attention?
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2020... what a year.
— Dickie Bush \U0001f4ca (@dickiebush) December 30, 2020
I just put the finishing touches on my Annual Review.
Here are 30 lessons I learned about myself and the world across five areas:
\u2022\xa0Health
\u2022\xa0Wealth
\u2022 Relationships
\u2022\xa0Online creativity
\u2022\xa0Personal operations
\U0001f9f5\U0001f447\U0001f3fc
