“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~George Santayana
2022 was a year when for a long time nothing seemed to happen and then suddenly a lot did. Started the year at a low point physically (triple slip disc, COVID, complete bed rest) and a lighter workload than I would have liked. It ended with me working on multiple exciting projects and being much fitter and stronger than I have been in the last couple of years. This left me not only with a lot of momentum heading into 2023 but also a boatload of reflections that should serve me well in the coming year!
- Strong routines are what anchor your habits and therefore your progress. And the best ones don’t get swayed by circumstances (in most cases). When failing to build a habit, stop blaming circumstances or mindlessness of willpower. Instead, check what processes and systems you have put in place to enable the habit. So instead of blaming laziness for not hitting the gym every morning, hire a fitness instructor who keeps you accountable. Remove all junk food from home and suddenly even if you have hunger pangs, you end up eating better food. Most of my goal-setting around 2023 has been about setting up systems rather than just targets. Winners and losers have the same goals. Setting up audacious goals in and of itself means nothing if you are not setting up systems to make them happen.
- Some decisions can have a large and continued impact on your goals, positively or negatively. For example, hiring a fitness instructor, watching the first episode of a really long series or buying a bottle of Rooh Afza (did all of these at one point or the other this year). Once you have taken that first decision, inertia takes over and it becomes very hard to step back and stop the action. It is essential to take such decisions very carefully and mindfully. And understand that it can also work in a positive direction. Hiring a fitness trainer was the most high-leverage thing I did this year. Beyond fitness, it helped me set up a daily routine of eating mindfully and sleeping on time.
- Mindfulness is harder to enforce the later it is in the day. If you find yourself losing focus or drifting, find a way to break the circuit and refresh your tired self – get in a walk, meditate for 10 mins or find some playtime. This will allow you to be fresher late in the day too. Moving my meditation block to the evening right after reaching home helped me spend better quality time with my family most evenings.
- Our body is a connected ecosystem and sometimes things that you thought were unrelated turn out to be quite related. As you work on your health, build muscle and lose weight a lot of problems that you thought were unrelated (breathlessness, disturbed sleep, lack of focus) tend to go away as well. At the same time, if you are working out hard, there will hardly be any day when you are not sore in some part of your body. Learn to differentiate between stagnating pain and growing pain.
- Your ability to focus on work is often directly proportional to the quality of work you are doing. Hitting a wall in your work? Maybe you need to work on another approach or maybe even another project! The biggest challenge is not to work harder but to find projects you genuinely care harder about. Knowing which game to play and then sticking to it is way more important than playing a game well when it doesn’t have a corresponding payoff. Spend time where the payoff is worth the time you spend.
- Knowing when to switch off the screen in front of you is a much-needed skill for the new age. Just being completely present with the people you are with at any point in time is such a big game-changer in the modern world. I have a lot of respect for people who don’t look at their phone screens during the course of a meeting.
- You don’t get value-add from anything if you go in believing you won’t get any value-add. Sounds cliché but is true for almost every experience or relationship in life. Believe in the goodness of people unless they give you a reason to believe otherwise. And even then recheck. Believe what you are doing will pay results, or stop doing it.
- Don’t substitute a metric for a goal. If you are doing something you thought was going to get you closer to your goals but it is not, then change your approach. For a large part of the year, I carefully tracked the number of steps I took in a day. I was walking a lot but in terms of health going nowhere. Decided to shift my approach to a more comprehensive workout and diet program and soon I was seeing results. All data is not information.
- Investing is about patience. Sometimes you just have to wait for the right opportunity to come along. Whether it is investing in a start-up or in real estate or even public market equity. And hard to be patient when you have fear/FOMO.
- If there was one piece of advice I would give to 18-year-old me it is this: stop trying to save for your 40s or retirement or whatever. That shit ultimately works itself out. Instead, try to start making friends for life. College is about the last time in life you make friends for life…which is scary to think about given the long years ahead. I am glad for the ones I did. It’s very hard to make that shit happen later!
- And always Kinder > Smarter. If you ever have to choose between being smart or being kind (at work, in your personal life, on the internet), I hope you will consider choosing the latter always. There’s more than enough intelligence to fill the world. Kindness is another matter entirely.
What were your big learnings from 2022? What are you planning to change in 2023? Share your thoughts…would love to learn and imbibe!
