2021 will be the greatest year of my life (so far)
Six months into writing this newsletter and I've achieved more than I could ever imagine.
It’s the end of June, which means it has officially been six months since I started writing this newsletter to make a change in my life and start tracking and achieving my goals. This is the story of what I’ve been able to accomplish so far this year, and what I’ll hopefully continue to accomplish through the end of 2021.
First, let’s rewind six months.
The first step was to set myself some goals. As a refresher, the five goals I’ve been working on since the beginning of the year are:
Publish one newsletter a week.
Read 30 minutes a day. (182 hours total)
Work out once a week.
Post 52 videos on TikTok.
Consume less, create more.
For those who have been following for a while, you know I’ve been quite successful with achieving these. So far, I’ve written 20 newsletters and read 14 books. I’ve worked out 42 times and posted many TikToks. I’ve even reduced my daily phone screen time from eight to under three hours.
An unexpected consequence of these goals was how the rigor needed to achieve them permeated to other parts of my life. I’ve been able to achieve some small but significant wins that I never sought out in the first place. For instance, I’ve stopped biting my nails almost entirely. It wasn’t something that I necessarily wanted to do, but I definitely didn’t like the idea of being a nailbiter (also not the most sanitary thing to do in the middle of a pandemic). The simple knowledge that I was able to crush the above goals made me realize that I could easily achieve something as basic as not biting my nails. So I just went cold turkey and never went back. I had literally been biting my nails for as long as I can remember, and it somehow took reading 30 minutes a day to give me the strength to stop. Funny how that works.
If you’ve been following this journey from the very beginning of the year, you know that I actually started the year with 10 goals. In February, when I realize it was too much and I wasn’t achieving anything due to the lack of focus, I decided to prioritize the five goals above. I think the six-month mark is as good a time as ever to reintroduce the other five.
The other five goals were:
Pass 1000 followers on TikTok.
Be more like Harry Styles.
Prioritize my mental health.
Explore more arts.
Code for fun.
In February, when I put these goals on pause, the main reason was that they were either output goals (I discuss this idea in this newsletter) or weren’t measurable and therefore not achievable goals (if you can’t measure your progress, how can you know if you’re progressing?). So as I do implement them into my life, I need to make sure that I make my interim goals (smaller goals that will allow me to achieve the bigger ones) measurable input goals. For example: “Prioritize my mental health” becomes “medidate every day.”
Let’s do this exercise for these five goals:
Pass 1000 followers on TikTok. This is clearly an output goal. The only way to achieve this goal is if I keep posting on TikTok. So for now I’ll just keep at my other goal above, and maybe I’ll reach this milestone by the end of the year. If I do, great! If I don’t, that’s fine, I can’t beat myself up over something I can’t control. What I can control is how much I post. So I just gotta keep at it.
Be more like Harry Styles. This one is obviously hard to measure, and therefore hard to achieve. So let’s break it down. What is Harry Styles like? He makes music, he has cool style, he has a sexy bod and cool tattoos. Easy enough! I’ve been buying some cool clothes recently (see proof below), have been working on my sexy bod through the working out goal, and who knows, maybe I can get a tattoo at some point soon? For the music, I don’t want to add that to my plate right now, but I definitely want to explore making music in the near future (maybe next month?). For now, I’ll break down this goal into four subgoals: 1. Work out once a week (which I’m already doing), 2. Buy cool clothes, 3. Get a tattoo (sorry mom), and 4. Make music.
Prioritize my mental health. Funny enough, even though I haven’t actively prioritized it, my mental health has been the best it’s been in a while these past few months (maybe because I feel like I’m actually achieving goals?). One thing I’ve discussed already in the past is meditation, but it never really took. This Yes Theory video about meditation was really interesting, and it’s made me want to try meditating regularly once again. I don’t consider myself a very anxious person, but even if I don’t feel the “need” to meditate, I can’t imagine a regular check-in with your brain could be anything but positive. So I want to try meditating regularly. Like daily. Should be fun.
Explore more arts. I’ve already said above that I want to play around with music. Another aspect of my past I’d like to reconnect with is visual arts. Painting used to be a huge part of my life growing up (I took Higher Level Visual Arts in high school) but I’ve kind of left that in the dust as I went to college and then graduated. I want to do more painting again. For now, I think a goal of making two paintings before the end of the year would be positive and achievable. I think this topic calls for its own newsletter topic though, so I’ll talk more about it in a later newsletter. Subscribe to hear about that!
Code for fun. Finally, my tenth and final goal for the year was to code for fun. I had lost the fun aspect of coding while studying CS in college and then doing it for work, and I wanted to reconnect with what makes me happy when I code. You may have heard by now that I sold my company earlier this year, which involved an app I had built with three friends. This was a lot of fun to work on, and I’m now working on the app and other technologies full-time, and am having more fun in the process. I do think it would be healthy to code outside of work as well because I don’t want to get burnt out and feel like coding is a burden more than a hobby. For the time being, doing some Leetcode coding problems seems to scratch my itch for “fun coding”, but I want to explore other ways throughout the second half of the year.
So now that we’ve explored that, let’s update my “input goals” for the second half of 2021:
Publish one newsletter a week.
Read 30 minutes a day. (182 hours total)
Work out once a week.
Post 52 videos on TikTok.
Consume less, create more.
Meditate daily.
Paint two paintings.
Do a Leetcode coding problem each week.
Get a tattoo.
Make music.
Now, you may be thinking, “Max, you stupid idiot, you failed to do ten goals in the past. What makes you think this time will be any different?” Aha, you must have forgotten one crucial thing! I’ve been reading this year, and endowed with the power of KNOWLEDGE, I now know how any goal can be achieved! It’s a simple idea that starts with the letter H.
HABIT!!!
Okay, you’re probably sick of me talking about habits at this point, but the reason I am bringing it up once again (in yet another newsletter) is that I just finished a book called “Atomic Habits” (you may gather from the book’s title that it is, in fact, a book about habits). In this book, James Clear goes in-depth into the idea of how habits can be formed (and for bad ones, broken), and one thing I realized while reading this book is how, in fact, I hadn’t really turned any of my goals into real habits, with the possible exception of one of them. Not to be repetitive, but a habit is made up of a cue (the habit trigger), a routine (the habit itself), and a reward. Clear adds another layer, the “craving”, which happens between the cue and the routine. The cue triggers the craving which causes you to want to do the routine in order to get the reward. The only goal I confidently turned into a habit, which is also coincidentally the goal that has been the easiest the uphold, is reading. Every morning, when I wake up (cue), I’m excited to read (craving), so I sit down and read for thirty minutes (routine) and I’m rewarded with a great experience and the fulfilling feeling of having done something first thing in the morning.
I have to achieve this with my other goals.
Therefore, I need to implement way stricter daily habits. Now, this seems like it is going to be an uphill battle, but the “strictness”, in theory, is in fact what makes it easier. Ideally, I would get to a point where these goals are entirely automatic. The less you have the think about the routine, the less of a chance you have to say, “Nah, I’m not going to do this one today.”
This brings up another topic from James Clear’s book, the concept of habit stacking. This idea basically hacks the “looping” effect of habits by setting the reward of one habit as the trigger of the next, effectively making multiple habits happen in sequence, one after the other. This idea will only really work with clear planning, however, so here’s the idea for my daily routine.
Wake up at 5:30 am on weekdays (note: I currently wake up at 6 am and start work with a 7 am call every morning, so an extra half hour to fit in the rest of. the goals should be easy enough.)
Make coffee.
As the coffee is brewing, weigh myself (will discuss this in a future newsletter, subscribe to read about it when it comes out).
Pour a cup of coffee then read 30 minutes.
Finish my cup of coffee as I update my “Am I Healthy?” chart (subscribe to read about this in a future newsletter).
Workout, then shower.
Start work (7 am - 4 pm).
Lunch break (12 pm - 1 pm) + meditation.
After work, do one Leetcode exercise.
Work on newsletter for 30 minutes.
Chill.
Bedtime between 9:30 pm and 10:30 pm.
Then on weekends, I work on TikToks on Saturday and finish up my newsletter on Sunday, and I’ll be golden.
Easy enough. I made a calendar to stay on top of it, and I can update it as I see fit, if I think I should rearrange timings or want to fit a new routine in somewhere (you can access the calendar here).
Anyway, I think that’s a good spot to stop. I have a new daily routine to test out, and an updated set of goals to make sure I continue crushing 2021.
Let’s make the rest of 2021 awesome together!
💪 Goals
Year progress: 48%
Oops, I know the goal for the past week was posting on TikTok, but I didn’t get around to doing that. Need to focus on that this week, by maybe working on a few during my “chill” time in the evening. Other than that, goals are going well.
📥 Input
Newsletters posted: 20 📈 +1
Hours read this year: 89 📈 +3.5 (on schedule)
Workouts this year: 42 📈 +1 (18 ahead of target)
TikToks posted in 2021: 9 (@maxzechef) + 4 (@maxlascombe) = 13 +0 (11 behind target)
Screen time this week: 20h
Number of times meditated: 0 (on schedule)
📤 Output
Newsletter subscribers: 43 (thank you ❤️)
Books read this year: 14
Number of abs: 1
TikTok followers: 125 (@maxzechef) + 22 (@maxlascombe)
📚 Reading
Finished this week:
“Atomic Habits”, James Clear.
Currently reading:
“The Hobbit”, J. R. R. Tolkien.
“The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”, Taylor Jenkins Reid.
Please leave any book recommendations in the comments and add me on Goodreads.
Thanks to all my subscribers and readers new and old. Really means a lot that you read this week after week. If you’re not reading from your email inbox, please consider subscribing below:
See you next Sunday ❤️
In the meantime, you can read last week’s newsletter: