The habits that changed my life in 2021
My year in review ⚡️ how I became a better version of myself through a handful of easy-to-implement habits (lifetothemax #29)
That’s it! 2021 is almost over.
It’s time to recap my year, and see what I’ve achieved and learned.
I kicked off the year by starting a newsletter that was originally titled, “Max’s Accountability Newsletter” (what a mouthful!) As its name indicates, the purpose of the newsletter was keeping myself accountable for my goals. But the bigger picture was that I wanted to live a fun, fulfilling life. So I eventually changed the name to lifetothemax, which encapsulates that, and it also includes my name, so double-win.
Still, I wanted to make meaningful progress each week towards each of my ten goals. As a refresher, or if you’re new here, my new year’s resolutions were:
Publish one newsletter a week.
Post 52 videos on TikTok.
Pass 1000 followers on TikTok.
Read 30 minutes a day.
Work out once a week.
Be more like Harry Styles.
Prioritize my mental health.
Explore more arts.
Consume less, create more.
Code for fun.
So let’s take them one by one and see how I did, what worked and what didn’t, and how I see each goal evolving into the new year. I’ll also discuss some unanticipated side effects that popped up along the way. Let’s start with my second goal, because I want to end with the newsletter one.
2 & 3. Post 52 videos on TikTok + Pass 1000 followers on TikTok
Ok, so I ended up doing neither of these. I started strong right out of the gate, posting 9 TikTok’s on my cooking account (@maxzechef), with my second one even garnering enough attention (in my opinion) to be considered viral, with 6000 likes and over 44 thousand views (I wrote about it back in my third newsletter, see below).
But after a while, I stopped posting. The videos were taking a little too long to make, and it was starting to turn something I loved doing (cooking) into a bit of a chore, with the added hassle of setting up a camera every time I needed to stir a pot or cut up some vegetables.
After a few months, I decided to give TikTok another go with a new account (@maxlascombe), where I planned on releasing shorter, easier-to-make videos that I could film and edit directly within the TikTok app. I decided to make videos that lined up nicely with this newsletter, where I would take a short idea from a recent posting and expand upon it in video form. I ended up posting another 17 videos on this account between June and July, and then I also stopped posting there. The videos were easy to make, but took away the fun. They also felt like they were approaching Gary Vee / Tai Lopez style content, which I didn’t love.
But that’s the key about what failed. In both cases, trying to churn out videos to reach an arbitrary goal of X videos in a year or Y followers by December meant I was taking away the fun of making videos. I didn’t love what I was doing, which meant I was destined to fail. There’s three key takeaways from these two goals:
Although this goes directly against what I have previously said, I no longer want to put “measurable” goals on creative endeavors. This takes away the fun of the task, and once the fun is stripped away and I end up not fulfilling the goal, it sticks out as a failure rather than a win (rather than saying I created 9+17 = 27 TikTok’s this year, I only created 27 out of the 52 I had intended).
If I change my mind about what I want to create throughout the year, I don’t want to have the goal to look back on as a failure. Creative goals should promote creativity, not hinder it in any way, even if the creativity does not come in the same form as the goal initially intended.
I should never set a goal that I have no control over. I have control over how many videos I make, but not how many followers I get. No more setting output goals (I discuss the difference between input and output goals in the “Goals” section of this newsletter).
4. Read 30 minutes a day
This, without a doubt, is the goal that made the most fundamental difference to my year. Even though I’m two weeks behind on the goal, I still read about 175 hours this year, and have finished 23 books.
Waking up every morning and reading either a great work of literature or some extremely inspiring piece of nonfiction put me in an awesome mindset at the start of every day, and imparted me with more knowledge and confidence in my endeavors than ever before.
The only thing that I’d want to change about this goal is to do it even more. So how much more should I strive for?
50 books in a year.
That seems right, so I just need to double my time.
Anyway, this newsletter is not about setting goals for next year, I’m leaving that for next week, but reading an hour a day seems like it would be both achievable and incredibly impactful on my life. Let’s do it.
5. Work out once a week
This was the first goal I completed this year, and I’m happy to say I continued to blow it out of the park. Of course, the bar was set very low, coming off of a year where I had worked out a total of 12 times in 2020, but still… I lost count since August but adding up the 25-ish runs I’ve done since then to the 82 workouts I had already completed, I would say I more than doubled the goal… which means I did about 8 times as well as 2020! Not bad.
I truly feel like my relationship with working out has completely changed. I am no longer someone who should work out more but hates it, I do work out, and actually enjoy it. As I mentioned last week, I’m currently injured, but I can’t wait until I can run again.
So how could this goal evolve next year? First off, I definitely want to keep working out more than once a week. However, I also don’t want to fall into the same trap as with TikTok where if I can’t work out (like when I’m injured), I feel like I’m falling behind on a goal. Hence, I might replace this goal with a more interesting and unique goal, one that I had mentioned in the past: running a marathon. That way, if I don’t get out to work out each week or get injured, I’m not failing a goal. This new goal encapsulates some pretty important training, which should push me to workout more than ever before, despite not having a measurable goal.
6. Be more like Harry Styles
Originally, this goal was meant as a half-joke. It doesn’t mean anything concrete which meant that I couldn’t truly “achieve” or “fail” this goal. But still, I think it instinctually meant something to me, so let’s break it down and try and see how I did.
When I wrote this, here’s what I had in mind: Harry’s tattoos, Harry’s clothing, and Harry’s creativity (making music, etc.). So let’s see:
First off, I got my first tattoo this year (read about it below). To be clear, I did not get a tattoo for the sole purpose of being more like Harry Styles. I genuinely wanted to get a tattoo. But if it made me even 1% more like him, then that’s a win with regards to this goal.
With clothing, I wouldn’t say that I’ve achieved Harry’s look exactly—not that I necessarily wanted to either—but I have started buying more “cool” clothes by going to vintage stores and trying to leave my comfort zone a little more when it comes to how I dress. Hoping to bring this energy into the new year and explore this a little further.
For his creativity, once again, I didn’t match him exactly, as I didn’t explore music, but through various other media (writing this newsletter, making videos) I do think I was more creative than in past years.
Although this wasn’t part of the goal, I also did this recently (somewhat on a whim):
Yes, that’s a real earring.
Overall, I would say that I am “more like Harry Styles” now than I was a year ago, even though this was more of a jokey goal.
7. Prioritize my mental health
I can’t point to anything in particular I did this year related to this other than meditation. That was going great for the first month of me doing it every day (read below), but I have to admit I haven’t been doing much meditating recently (like at all, for the past 4 months).
I want to get back to meditating again, but maybe daily was a little too much. I’ll have to play with some different frequencies next year.
Prioritizing my mental health has also taken on a new meaning this year for me. In a way, this goal is about providing balance for all the other goals. As I kept adding more and more goals to my list last year, I wasn’t leaving a lot of time for myself (and my mind) to breathe. Looking back a few newsletters, when I had my daily routine planned out each day starting at 5:30am and having non-stop work/productivity practically until the evening, it is clear I wasn’t giving myself any time to check in with myself about my mental health. Meditating helped with that, but 10 minutes in the middle of a 100mph day is not enough. I often haven’t been getting a full 8 hours of sleep (new goal for next year?) because I would miss my bed time and still force myself to wake up early.
Meditating is one aspect of this, but it cannot be the end all be all. Prioritizing my mental health is a goal that I will have to rethink deeply about bringing into 2022.
8. Explore more arts
The two main things I mentioned I wanted to do with this goal were: 1. try making music, and 2. paint more. I didn’t do either, but that’s fine.
In both cases, I kept putting them off for later because it was never the right time. But I think this points to a big learning experience I had this year: you can’t force creativity. The key with this goal is that I wasn’t setting myself up for success. Being creative and being productive are quite opposite. When trying to maximize productivity during every minute of every day, it is impossible to get in the mindset of being truly creative in an artistic way.
My goal, above all, should have been to make time for art. If I had forced myself to set time aside for making art, which would sometimes come at the expense of productivity in other areas, then the creativity would have come. I liked the idea of making music or painting, but I never took the time to think about inserting either of these into my schedule.
I want to continue to explore more art forms in the new year (maybe music and painting, or maybe something entirely different…), but the goal will be framed around making the time for creativity.
(Throughout the last few months, as I was failing to make music and paint, I often had feelings of inadequacy. I wrote about these feelings in the following newsletter, which seemed to be one of my most popular this year.)
9. Consume less, create more
This goal came from a place of feeling like I wasn’t being creative enough, and that I was consuming too much content (mostly TikTok). Essentially, I wasn’t making the best use of my time. So the key here for me was to reduce the amount of time I wasted by reducing my screen time (specifically on my phone).
This, I’m happy to say, has been achieved. Much like the working out goal, I was truly starting at zero, by which I mean that my screen time was approximately 8 hours a day on average, if not much more on days off (you might be wondering how this is even possible, and I truly would not know how to answer). So all I had to do was not spend all of my available time on my phone.
After implementing the techniques I discussed in the following newsletter, I was able to solve this problem outright. Even now after having re-downloaded TikTok and Instagram to my phone, my screen time is just under 3 hours a day (I know that this may still seem incredibly high for lots of you, but I’m very proud of this fact.)
Reducing my screen time means I’m able to do more of the stuff that makes me excited about life: reading, writing, exercising, and spending actual quality time with friends, family and my girlfriend (and now my dog, too). Although I might not keep this as a goal for next year, since I am pretty satisfied with how much progress I’ve made, I’ll continue to keep the techniques from that newsletter in mind if I ever do feel my screen time creeping back up.
10. Code for fun
I added this goal to my list back when my job was working for an employer where I didn’t have a lot of say in what the day-to-day coding was really like. Some days were super exciting, and then some weeks felt filled with interminable boring projects. So I wanted to make sure I continued to code outside of work in a way that I actually enjoyed doing it.
I’m happy to say I also did well on this goal. As I wrote about back in May (see below), I built an app with some friends and we ended up selling it after a few months. I also worked on some other side/personal projects along the way (I’m not ready to discuss all of these just yet), but overall, I did code for fun.
Seeing the way my life is currently set up, I feel like I get to code exciting stuff almost every day for my job, so I don’t think I’ll need to keep this goal next year. Still, I want to continue to be creative which includes coming up with fun coding projects and executing on them.
1. Publish one newsletter a week
Last but not least, this newsletter. It truly changed my life.
Even though I did not write a full 52 newsletters (this is “only” my 29th), I still feel like the practice of setting goals, writing about my progress semi-weekly and seeing what I should change and update has had an astounding impact on what I was able to do with a year of my life. Simply put, I feel like I am getting more out of life.
I also think I’ve learnt some pretty important things about myself and how I function through this exercise. I am kinder to myself, more understanding of my struggles and appreciative of my wins. I have a better idea of who I am and what I want to become. And I can say without a doubt that this has not always been the case.
Just a year ago, feeling like I was getting so little out of life, I would beat myself up over it constantly. I could not understand how I could want to do something so bad (like making youtube videos) yet have so little motivation to consistently do it. This newsletter has allowed me to reflect regularly on these struggles and understand how and why they happen.
I want to continue writing this newsletter next year. What I will change, though, is that I won’t beat myself up over missing a week here and there, whether for vacation, not having enough time, or simply not feeling up to it or inspired to write one week. Let’s call it a somewhat-weekly newsletter.
Finally…
That’s it. 2021 is over. This is officially my last newsletter of the year. Next week’s newsletter (out on Sunday January 2nd, 2022) will be the first of the year and will outline my new and improved goals for 2022. Can’t wait.
As a summary, here are a few things I want to hit home with my new goals (some general rules of thumb):
Measurable goals are great, but they also lead to a feeling of failure if you miss any of them. Set goals where you can measure progress, and focus only on the progress, not on what you intended to achieve.
Don’t measure creative goals. Instead, make goals around giving yourself the time and space to be creative. Also don’t force certain creative outlets (e.g. music) — your wants can change and having an arbitrary goal you set in January to look back on is a bad idea.
Be kind to yourself. Know what you are capable of and how you work under certain conditions. Then set goals that you know you can reach by creating an easy-to-follow habit. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be ambitious about goals, just that you should be able to break them down into easy habits. (e.g. read 50 books → read an hour a day).
That should set me up for success for when I set my new goals next week. Make sure to subscribe if you haven’t already to get that newsletter in your inbox next Sunday.
Lastly, I want to thank you, the reader, once again for reading my newsletters every week. This self-reflection is key to my continued success, and I also really enjoy writing this newsletter, and talking to you. The responses I get from these newsletters, online but especially in person, have always been awesome, and made me feel like I’m doing something right. I love that I can make a connection with you and in turn make a difference in my life. I hope that you’ll come along for the ride in 2022. I can’t wait.
Happy new year! ❤️
— Max
Swag