“Stop saying, I’d like to be this. I’d like to be that. Grab your f—king nuts and be it”
I didn’t do an annual review this year.
I had plans for one, but it seemed life had other plans for me this last month (more on that in a future newsletter).
One thing that’s gotten really clear – life is short. So short.
This year especially – it seems like things go by fast.
2020 was both months and 4 years ago somehow. Wow.
Sometimes the shortness of things is all you need in order to clarify what’s important and figure your priorities out.
One of my primary priorities this year is to get back to writing more. In fact, I’ve been doing a ton of it lately – with a bit more of a bent towards research on some more health, sleep and energy topics at Impossible.co and ImpossibleFitness.
But I want to do a better job of sharing it with this list and being consistent about it.
One of those is weekly Sunday emails.
A weird psychological thing happens when you want to change something or start something new. You think you need to have a big excuse or explanation for the behavior change.
It’s like turning around in the middle of the sidewalk when you passed your destination. You feel like you need to look down at your phone or have an excuse to turnaround. But you can just do that – turn 180º with absolutely no explanation – like a maniac – and a funny thing happens.
No one cares.
But next time you see someone pass their destination, I guarantee you they fumble with their phone or mumble something to themselves before they turn around.
Annual reviews can feel like that. We make such a big production out of the next 90 day fitness plan instead of just doing 20 pushups right now.
(Seriously, try that – do just 20 pushups right now).
If the annual review helps with that – great, but I’ve found as I’ve done them more and more over the years, they turned into their own big exercise for their own sake – an exercise in elaborate procrastination – versus being genuinely helpful.
Sometimes a slap in the fast can be just as helpful as a carefully crafted 72 hour retreat with an annual review itinerary.
One of the biggest traps for smart engineers is optimizing something that shouldn’t exist.
Elon Musk
So instead of a full review, I took 10 minutes to myself to be quiet and I wrote down what I needed to do:
My main priorities this year
- Get back to writing every week
- Experimenting with video with one specific deliverable.
- Scale our impossible sleep subscriber base.
- Dialing in my fitness more than ever (building on last year).
- Selling off any other businesses & side projects that distract me from the above.
This year, more than ever, the phrase kept coming back to me:
“You already know what you need to do. You just need to do it.”
There are some additional meta goals that involve getting more things off my plate and doing less and less so I can do more and more but those are goals to serve a purpose, not a primary goal themselves.
A personal things I’m I’m hopeful to do this year is spend more time off the computer. I’ve built up so many things online over the years that I’m looking to try and spend some time learning “offline skills” (fun, remember fun?). Comedy, kitesurfing, cars (?). We’ll see.
““Work with your mind. Rest with your hands.” – Cathryn” – Nathan Barry
(I’m just going to keep quoting my friends quoting my friends. You can’t stop me).
There’s a few things on my impossible list that no longer feel nearly as impossible as they used to – I just need to sit down and do them.
Oh, and somewhere in here, we’ll handle the lawsuit as we need to.
Requirements: a strict schedule, a lot of caffeine and focus.
If you need to do a review – great. But sometimes
Life is short. Get to it.
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Speaking of energy – the best way to improve your baseline daily energy is to improve your sleep. Not just how fast you fall asleep, but how long you stay asleep.
I’ll be sharing more and more articles here soon on this, but the research is clear. It’s not about how fast you fall asleep, but the quality of the sleep that you get (and staying asleep). I’ll be sharing more on that soon.
Reason You Should Subscribe to Impossible Sleep
- → Save 10% on every order
- → Get free shipping
- → Get a free welcome sleep reset kit
- → Get a 7-step sleep reset course designed to help you build good habits
You also get random dope merch drops throughout the year because I love you and you’re awesome (p.s. current subscribers should check their mail the next few days) 👀
→ Subscribe to Impossible Sleep and wake up ready to do the impossible.
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If you’d like to do an annual review – they’re worth doing. Here’s a few good ones from some friends.
If you’re looking for a way to organize your goals this next year – you can start your own impossible list. We have tens of thousands of these out in the wild and it’s my favorite way to organize your goals so you can live a more interesting life.
Reminder: You can do sop much more than you think you can.
Keep your head up. Push your limits. Do Something Impossible.
2023 is on.
