2024 year in review
It’s the end of the year! And what a year it was!
Time for a recap! I'll review every New Year's resolution from 2024 and evaluate my performance. Then I’ll identify lessons for 2025. Let's hop right in!
1) Publish 42 creations (including newsletter)
Including the post you are reading right now, I published 24 creations this year. Out of these, 7 were posts for my newsletter. The rest were various small projects I helped my girlfriend with for her new fashion business, Sinaya.
The numbers don't look great: I completed just under 60% of the goal. But I'm not disappointed. I'm proud of the stuff I did put out, and besides, I didn't miss the mark because I was sitting on my ass. On the contrary, I missed it because I was too busy traveling and living a great life (see goal 7). So, overall, I'm happy with this goal.
Some lessons for next year:
I need to consider travel and vacation time when deciding how much output I want. I expect to travel a decent amount in the first half of the year, so that's something to keep in mind.
I would like to do more writing next year. I might split this goal into two — one for writing and one for other creative outlets.
2) Read 25 books
I read 23 books this year. Not bad.
I’ve been going through a fiction/classic literature phase this year. When I started really reading a few years ago, I gravitated more toward nonfiction. It’s easier to see the positive effect of these kinds of books. I could point to specific knowledge I had acquired from each new book I read. And some of them had pretty profound effects on me. Some of these are “Atomic Habits,” “Why We Sleep,” and “How to Change Your Mind”. These are books that made me rethink how I live my life daily.
At other times, I've been really into biographies, where I felt I could learn so much from how amazing people have lived their lives. Some examples of my favorites are: “Kitchen Confidential,” “Into the Wild,” “Walk Through Walls,” “Greenlights,” and “I'm Glad My Mom Died.” These are all amazing books from which I've drawn lots of inspiration.
But as I've said, I focused more on classics/fiction this year. I thought at first I was getting less out of books of fiction, which felt especially true when I used to write book-report-type posts for my newsletter. When writing about a nonfiction book, it was hard to pick only one thing to write down that I had learned since there was so much. In contrast, with fiction, there was rarely one clear lesson one could draw from a book. "Why We Sleep" taught me the importance of a good night’s sleep, but did I learn anything from “The Great Gatsby?”
What I've come to value, with time, is how much each book stays with me. You might be thinking, “duh,” but I didn't consider the value of this until I started reading more regularly. As much as I learned from all the nonfiction, I can only point to a handful that have stayed with me over the years. And the truth is, unless you make a conscious and concerted effort to apply the knowledge you learn from them to your daily life, most of the knowledge will fade and become useless. In contrast, an amazing book of fiction is unforgettable. And despite the lessons being less clear-cut, they stay with you and shape you in ways hard to observe. I find myself thinking about “The Remains of the Day,” “Breakfast of Champions,” or “Bel Ami” on quite a regular basis. And these are just the few that came to mind as I write this. Each of these brings a profound emotional reaction out of me just thinking of them. They haven’t necessarily added to my practical knowledge, but they’ve added to what makes me click. They’ve become a part of who I am.
As far as this goal goes, I still think 25 is the perfect number to strive for. I can easily achieve this with a steady habit of reading 30 minutes a day, as long as other stuff doesn’t get in the way of this habit.
3) Meditate 250 times
I missed the mark by ten for this goal, but I can confidently say this is ingrained in my daily routine. As long as I’m not traveling (which I did a lot of this year), it’s pretty easy for me to do this regularly, and I still feel the benefits every day.
Nothing to change here. This goal will be coming with me into the new year.
4) Do 36,500 pushups
Here's one thing I learned this year: pushups suck! It's just pain the whole time. And it's not rewarding pain in the same way that long-distance running is. In running, sure, your legs hurt, and your feet ache, and your thighs chafe, but at least you get to be alone with your thoughts and breathe in some fresh air. Push-ups aren't like that. Your brain just counts down the ups and downs until the pain is over.
Ok, enough complaining. How'd I do?
I did over 17,000 — 17,314 to be exact. It's not 36,500. It’s not even half of 36,500. But at least it’s approximately 17,314 more push-ups than I did last year.
There are a lot of reasons I missed the mark by so much. As the year started, I thought I’d get a jump on the goal by doing more than 100 pushups at the start in case I missed some days later on. I settled on 25% more pushups than I was supposed to do. So on day one, I did 125. The problem was that two weeks in, I had already missed a few days. Two months in, and I was already having to do over 150 pushups a day to be on target, which made it even easier to miss the mark. By the time summer rolled around, with five trips under my belt, I was already having to do 200 pushups a day to keep up. To reduce strain, I would split them into sets of 25 spread out throughout the day. But that meant I had to find time for eight sets of pushups. If I got busy, or was traveling, or had to go out for whatever reason, boom there went more missed pushups.
Plus, the added strain meant I would sometimes get injured. My right shoulder started hurting quite a bit, to the point I had to take a few days off, which added to how many I had to do when I started up again.
Can you tell this goal was no fun at all? Because it was no fun at all.
Eventually, when I calculated that I needed to do 250 pushups a day to finish the goal, I gave up on trying to complete it and went to its original ethos: 100 a day. Why it took me so long to do that, I don’t know. But ever since that, it’s been much more manageable. 100 a day feels like light work when you were trying to do 250 a few days before. The goal finally felt easier and somewhat rewarding — although let’s be real, it still sucked. The other thing that helped was bribing myself to do a set by reading for five minutes afterward. That way, I had something to look forward to after all the pain.
Ok, ready for the before and after?
What can we learn from this?
I’ve grown a mustache and my hair out.
My dog doesn’t like it when I stand like that.
Somehow, I have less body hair?
My arms and shoulders are bigger. So is the rest of my body though.
That’s about it.
More generally, the lesson here is that even though I was drawn to this goal’s “simplicity,” the hard part of working out is never the complexity of the workout but the actual effort required by it. If I had spent more time designing a workout that is easier to maintain as a daily habit, I wouldn’t have suffered as much and probably gotten more gains.
5) Do 100 endurance workouts (of difficulty at least equivalent to a 1-mile run)
This year was not my most active year. No races, which meant nothing to train for. This goal was an attempt to force a workout habit into my life, but like the rest of my habits, the amount of travel and not having consistent days made this hard to achieve.
Overall, I completed 66 endurance workouts. Most were running, with a few swims, surfs, and snowboards sprinkled in.
Running for the sake of running is not very fun. It’s rewarding, and some runs can feel great, but removing the motivation of training for a race makes running way less exciting. I ended up mostly going on 1-2 mile runs, which removed the fun of overcoming a challenge. This goal made running more boring than it had to be.
I’d like to go back to centering working out around the end goal of a race. I don’t think I’ll do a marathon in 2025, but doing multiple shorter races and training for them would be both rewarding and good for me.
I also got a Whoop band for Christmas. You can’t have a Whoop band and not run that much — that’s just embarrassing. I hope the band will serve as a constant reminder to stay active and a motivator as the numbers slowly increase. (Also, if anyone wants a Whoop referral, let me know! You can get a free band and one month free, and I get an extra month free if you sign up. Win-win. Whoop-whoop.)
6) Check seven items off my bucket list
I didn’t do seven, but I did do six! What a year!
The six bucket list goals I completed were:
Have omakase in Tokyo — Best sushi I’ve ever had. And I’ve had good sushi. (I’ll be writing a post soon about my last four trips of 2024 — Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Japan)
Eat a bahn mi in Hanoi — I’m tearing up at the realization this happened this year. It feels like a lifetime ago, but it was only back in April. I really do love Vietnam. What a fantastic country. I wrote about this experience here.
Travel through Asia for six months — Living in Asia and visiting so much of it has been such a great experience. What a beautiful continent, filled with lovely people, places, and cultures. Traveling this much is also quite expensive, but I am rich in life experience!
Go cliff jumping — I did this in Moalboal during a day of canyoneering. I wrote about this experience here.
Eat at a 3 Michelin star restaurant — This was the omakase place we went to in Tokyo. I want to write more about this in a separate post. As I said above, it was the best sushi I’ve ever had, but to some extent, also somehow disappointing. The 3 Michelin star label made us expect a life-altering, mind-bending, out-of-this-world experience, and it was only just the best sushi we’d ever had. Goes to show that expectations are everything.
And last but not least, the one without which none of the others could have been done:
Live for a year in a new country (not France or the US) — It hasn’t been exactly a year yet since I moved to the Philippines in January, but I feel it’s fair to add it to the 2024 tally. This experience deserves more than a small paragraph, and I intend to write a whole post about it soon. I’ll say that I’m a little overcome with emotion thinking that we actually went through with moving here. I’m visited by the ghost of Max past, a college students who felt lost and directionless and depressed at times, who had no idea what he wanted from the future. And I’m visited by the ghost of Max future, who holds pride in having lived abroad for a year. And finally the ghost of Max present, content with his current situation, excited for what the future holds. I don’t know, I haven’t watched the movie in a while — does this analogy even make sense?
7) Travel to five different countries
Of all the goals I set this year, this is the one I truly blew out of the water. I somehow went to eleven countries this year. I wrote about the first seven already (here & here) and will write about the last four soon. Subscribe so you don’t miss that!
There’s not much to add here. I’m a happy boy living in a big, beautiful world. The world feels bigger and fuller to me than ever before, but it also feels very much in reach. I’m sad that not everyone can travel as much as I have because I’ve felt its transformational effects on me. I want that for everyone.
Look out, world, I’m coming to visit!
8) Have a conversation in Tagalog
Kumusta!
Have I learned a few hundred words? Yes. Am I able to say hello and goodbye? Yes. Can I have a conversation in Tagalog? No, definitely not.
Learning languages is hard, man. I know, shocker. Somehow, I thought living in the Philippines would make it easy. I would be exposed to the language so much that I would absorb it naturally. I could already imagine the title of my next YouTube video: “White Boy Stuns Restaurant Owner by Ordering Sinigang in Perfect Tagalog.”
The problem is, when you speak English and are a white man, people will just speak English to you. And everyone I’ve interacted with in the Philippines speaks perfect English. Which is really nice when you’re just trying to buy groceries, but completely kills the osmosis effect.
So, I didn’t naturally absorb the language and didn’t do enough to get conversational. I did flashcards regularly and read bits of a textbook, but that’s not enough to get comfortable speaking. The truth is, I could have done more, but after a while, I just got lazy. I thought the environment would force me to learn the language, that I would have to adapt to the environment, but instead it adapted to me. “Oh no, my mother tongue is so widely spoken that I can live anywhere and communicate with ease! My life is so hard.”
Anyway, this one was a failure.
But it’s mabuti. Ingat!
9) Complete all of my work milestones
Happy to report I completed this! I couldn’t have done it without my coworkers, and we’ve done some awesome stuff together this year. My job has felt rewarding and challenging (in a good way). I’ve made great connections and received good end-of-year reviews.
I don’t think there was ever a doubt in my mind that I would complete all these work milestones, but as I said back in January, I wanted to have my job represented in my goals for the year since it is a big part of my day-to-day. I tend to keep it separate and not discuss it too much here, but maybe I should. My professional life has been quite interesting and exciting over the past year. I’ve also started reading other newsletters about work culture and productivity and dealing with coworkers, and maybe I have my own two cents to add to that. We’ll see if I find some inspiration for a post in the new year.
Regarding the goal, I still have more milestones to complete over the coming months and into the summer, so I’ll maintain a similar goal in my new New Year’s resolutions.
Other notable mentions
The goals are great, but I did some other stuff aside from them. That’s what this section is about!
Mentioned this already, but it deserves to be mentioned again. I moved across the world! Crazy.
I helped Charlotte launch her fashion company Sinaya. This included setting up booths at multiple fairs, helping build her beautiful website, and even helping with social media posts.
I traveled with new and old friends. Shout out to (in order of appearance): William, Daniel, Isla, Alice, Rosh (and everyone who was at her birthday weekend, too many to list here), Francesco, Ally, Miranda (and her swimming friends). I’m probably missing a few other people. Apologies if that’s the case. I want to travel with friends more. I miss my friends always. Please reach out if you would like to travel with me!
I went to the Olympics! Not as an athlete, obviously (see goal number 4), but as a fan. It was so cool! Paris felt so alive and exciting and filled with positive energy — probably because all the Parisians went out of town…
I ate so much fantastic food. I’ve said this before, but wow. The world is beautiful, and it’s also delicious.
Lastly, and not leastly, Charlotte and I celebrated our tenth year together. I am a very lucky and very in love boy.
I think that’s it. I probably could have mentioned some other stuff, but that’s all I have right now.
When I started this newsletter in 2021, we were in the middle of the pandemic, and the only thing I could do was focus on myself and set good habits because you couldn’t go out into the world. All the travel and stuff I did this year got in the way of those habits, but I have absolutely zero regrets. It was hands-down one of the most exciting years of my life.
I’ll leave you with this: Think of all the stuff you longed to do during the pandemic that you weren’t allowed to do then. Have you done all of it since then? Have you made the best of your regained freedom?
I hope you had a fantastic 2024. The world can seem pretty grim, but so much is still under your control. Focus on that!
To 2025!
I’ve scheduled my 2025 goals to be sent out at midnight on New Year’s, so subscribe if you want to see that! And let me know what your goals are!
Happy New Year!