My 2022 Annual Review
Key lessons in physical and mental health, productivity, people, and more
Hey friends,
Happy New Year!
Colorado is incredible. We caught fish on December 28th, then we received a foot of snow just one day later.
I’ve spent a lot of time this month conducting an annual review. Using Anthony Gustin’s template, this was a great way to reflect on 2022, clear my head, set new goals, and really kickstart 2023.
Below I’ll share some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned this year, by category.
As Gustin alludes to, “reflecting on the past is a very important part of knowing what you do more or less of in the future.”
This really echoes one of my favorite quotes from the Stoic philosopher Seneca:
“What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.”
Reflection is probably the most underutilized but single most important part of the learning process.
This is long and I don’t expect you to read it all. I kind of view it as a letter to my future self about some of the learnings from the year. I’ve bolded the most important pieces, if you want to skim.
Obviously, I’m not offering any medical or nutrition advice. Rather, I’m just presenting tips I’ve learned and have used in my own life. I hope you find these as valuable and interesting as I do.
Physical Health
Even if you think your abs look good, do not stop training them. As I found out the hard way, the lower back is intimately linked to your core. If you have weak abs, your back can overcompensate. You can get piercing back pain, even when lifting lightweight.
The hardest, most rewarding habit was showing up to the gym on my worst days. Most times, I actually felt great and only a few occasions I had to quit the workout. I probably got 330 workouts in this year. Once I got out of the all-or-none mindset and said to myself, “let’s just get something in at least,” most times I was able to push myself and be reminded that there’s no better gift than having my physical health.
“Cheat day” is a recipe for disaster. Having a designated “cheat day” and being completely strict for the other six does not work. It’s the closest I’ve been to an eating disorder. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it was grossly compulsive. I don’t recommend it. Instead, devise some rules you can adhere to daily. For me, those are striving to consume 1.6 - 2 grams of protein per kg of bodyweight and eating at least one fruit or vegetable with every meal. For any habit, an all or none mindset will ruin you. If you ate McDonald’s for lunch, don’t throw in the towel and eat like garbage for dinner. Take each meal as its own, have dessert a few times per week, and keep in mind that there’s something about highly processed foods that make us likely over-consume them.
If you’re not building muscle, you probably aren’t getting enough hard sets in. Thanks to the videos of Ryan Humiston, a hilarious and ripped gym Youtuber, I realized that many of us suck at estimating true failure. While full muscle failure isn’t necessary, it helps you calibrate to coming within a few reps of failure. His videos are also great for optimizing form for muscle growth (ie for biceps curls, don’t do full range of motion, so you basically maximize the time under tension for that muscle). Here’s a quick way to start: do all of your workouts with 30-rep sets this week. It’ll suck (especially legs), but you’ll come to realize that your limits are only the ones you set for yourself. Also, eat enough protein (see above).
If you do shoulder day after chest day, don’t do shoulder front raises. This puts unnecessary strain on your anterior deltoid and is what I hypothesize led to my shoulder impingement / biceps tendonitis problem. After realizing this, I switched my workout program to where there’s more days between my chest/tris and shoulders workout.
I’ve been exercising for longevity (and looks) this year, implementing many tactics from Peter Attia, M.D. A common misconception is that you have to choose between living longer (lifespan) and living better (healthspan). But as I’ve seen, everything in life is amplified by better health. Taking care of sleep, exercise, and nutrition (do these for most of the time, don’t be a bot either) has improved my cognition, productivity, energy, immune system (only one cold this year!), and probably everything else.
I tried consuming under 10g of added sugar. One life-changing experiment I did was consuming minimal added sugars, which seem to be in almost every food. It’s amazing how our taste buds can change (they regenerate every two weeks it seems). I arbitrarily decided on consuming under 10g of added sugars daily (barring the occasional dessert). My taste adapted rapidly: I was raised gagging on carrots but now enjoy their slight sweetness. I think one reason many people don’t enjoy vegetables is that on a relative sugar basis (i.e. compared with ultrasweet soda), a carrot tastes like the most disgusting thing in the world. I lost my taste in November of 2021, and it actually took most of 2022 to fully regain it. I’m super grateful for that but also just experiencing certain flavors I never would’ve liked in my sweet-adapted past: bell peppers, coffee, and plain Greek yogurt (with fruit of course), to name a few. I’m not saying that added sugars are good or bad, just that they might make us more likely to overeat and gain weight.
Mental Health
Learning mindfulness meditation has been life-changing. I learned it through Sam Harris’s amazing app, Waking Up. While commonly stereotyped as a spiritual practice or for angry, Type A people, meditation is a way for us to observe our own thoughts and realize that all emotions, anger, anxiety, and suffering comes from within our own perceptions. I have no affiliation to Sam, but if you’d like a free 30-day trial, let me know. Dr. Peter Attia is most interested in meditation as part of the longevity toolkit, not because of the neuroscience data, but because of its potent effect as an antidote to psychological suffering.
Write in a paper journal on a weekly basis. Whether that’s writing three good things down, doing a brain dump, asking why until I got to the bottom of a psychological reflection, this is a powerful tool that is incredibly effective for everyone, but especially overthinkers, like yours truly.
Consume basically no news. Early this year, constantly checking the news for pandemic updates was draining and horrible for my mental health. Check the news once a day for relevant business and general news, but steer clear of the news as much as possible. What you pay attention to defines your life, and if you’re always watching the news, you’re likely always in disproportionate fear of something. The level of conversation is also just so shallow too.
Don’t go on your phone for the first and last hour of the day. Whatever you’re doing that day can wait. Many of the days I felt “off,” I realized it came from reading emails or scrolling social media first thing in the morning. This is not a good way to live. Wake up starting your own life, go outside, read a book at night. As lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss mentioned in The Four Hour Workweek,
“‘I’m not the president of the U.S. No one should need me at 8 P.M. at night. OK, you didn’t get a hold of me. But what bad happened?’ The answer? Nothing.”
Spend more time completely bored. Going on walks without headphones and entertaining yourself with a wandering mind. It’s a surprisingly pleasant experience and is truly the only way to slow down life (other than mediation and journaling).
People and Psychology
Be curious, not judgemental. We’re naturally selfish, so if we assume we’re wrong and that people aren’t always out to get us, it’s a much more peaceful life. It takes no time to make someone’s day, so always slow down for a second. We’re all humans, it’s not all about hustle.
Smile.
Deep, intellectual, psychological conversations are rare, and I think the world is missing out on them. With the omniscience of social media and constant distraction, chats not related to the newest TikTok trend or latest news event seem more rare than ever. I seek them out and really enjoy them (special thanks to CW and CP for those). I constantly think about the long term impact of technology and social media has on depth, both in relationships and work.
As I found out working in the food industry, there’s something powerful about being thanked by name. While I don’t find it creepy (as some of my colleagues did), I think it conveys a true appreciation and sincerity for someone.
People judge you so much less than you think. One of the best decisions this year was committing to learning Spanish and becoming fluent one day. As I reflected, I realized that I feared speaking it because I couldn’t get the accent down and felt I’d be judged by native speakers. I learned that was such a small fear, but my mind falsely amplified it. Fear really is a liar. With practice, I learned the Spanish accent and how to roll my R’s. As it turns out, native speakers really encourage you and want to help you improve.
No matter how big of an RBF someone has, most people want to talk and have a conversation. It might seem like they don’t because maybe they have headphones in (or a huge RBF), but most people are pretty friendly and do. If this sounds crazy, as I’ve observed at college, people can (and do) go a whole day with their headphones in, take them out for class, all while having few conversations with anyone. Maybe except for those “conversations” with their friends on Snapchat or Facetime. No wonder there’s so much social anxiety out there.
Productivity
You don’t learn more by listening on 2-3x. While it wasn’t hard to train my ears to listen faster, you just don’t learn as well, even though it seems like you’re getting through more podcasts or audiobooks. Even if the inputs are high quality, the output is still garbage, since you don’t spend enough time on learning reflections. As Shane Parrish puts it, “Reflection, not experience, leads to learning.” Less is more.
Turn off nearly all notifications. Live on Do Not Disturb. After returning from a week off-the-grid in Alaska this summer, as I felt the first vibration in my pocket, I was actually startled. I immediately felt a tension and anxiety in my stomach to “catch up” on email, which really just involved “clearing my inbox” of emails that were mostly irrelevant. As I’ve experimented with, always seeing those little red notification circles on apps causes a small, insidious amount of anxiety and undue stress. So does receiving a constant stream of vibrations. Check these apps on your own terms instead of letting them interrupt you from the most important tasks or people. This might sound crazy, but doing this largely increased my productivity, focus, and even just getting into an enjoyable workflow, unencumbered by notifications. Try this for a day: turn on Do Not Disturb, only allowing calls from your favorite contacts. Or go a Saturday without your phone. You’ll notice this conditioning we all have to check the lock screen (we’re not checking the time, we’re craving a distraction). This allows for more deep, fulfilling activities. It almost feels like nowadays, our actual lives are interruptions to the time we spend on our phones. I’ve really enjoyed reversing this. As mentioned above, I’m not the President, so there’s no way in hell I’ll miss anything important. I frequently think about the following quote from Essentialism: “If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.” Almost all emails don’t actually need an instant response. I like to batch checking email one or two times a day, and that’s it.
Make a dedicated wind down routine. Pick a time to shut everything down. Turning off the phone, getting a nice hot shower, and doing some reading before bed is a great way to prevent burnout. I’d even argue that it makes you more productive the next day.
Work in silent environments. Unless the assignment you’re doing is absolutely mindless and you need music to crank it out (ie making but not studying flashcards), it takes a lot of mental energy to block out background noise. Seriously, though. Your mind is constantly buffering between the task at hand and blocking out the background, such that your mental capacities are seriously reduced. I’ve observed this as I experimented with different places to study. Silent, distraction free environments give you the best use of your limited mental energy. Studying with other people is fun, but know that you need to study alone to actually understand the material yourself.
Your visual environment is essential. Clear your desk and put your phone out of sight. There’s something about those background distractions in your peripheral vision. I’ve noticed once I clear those, I work so much better.
Other tips to optimize your workspace. I posted in-depth notes here from Dr. Huberman’s podcast on this topic, but here are the best ones I’ve used to optimize focus, alertness, and cognition:
Take advantage of the Cathedral Effect: you can do analytic, detailed thinking better in low ceiling environments and more creative and abstract reasoning better in high ceiling environments. Wear a hat and hoodie if you’re doing precise coding or Excel work, but if writing or doing something more creative, go outside or to a high ceiling building.
Find new places to work or study: novel visual environments can lead to more alertness
Avoid reclining or doing homework on a couch, and try to stand for at least half of your work day (this also helps with posture but also alertness)
Procrastination sometimes works. I’ve always approached things with the mindset of doing small chunks and preparation, but some school assignments are so unamusing to the point where I need time to be one of my prime motivators. As Tim Ferriss mentions in The Four Hour Workweek, we should utilize Parkison’s Law:
“Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion ... The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher quality due to greater focus”
Other Learnings
The Drive Podcast with Ric Elias: time is our only currency, the only nonrenewable resource. Any old, rich person would trade all their money for more time. So don’t waste it on toxic people or trivial arguments that you won’t even remember in a few years. You’re already rich if you have your health.
“College and schools, the way we think about them, they come from a time period when books were rare, knowledge was rare. Baby sitting was rare, crime was common, violence was prevalent. There was no such thing as self-guided learning. So I think schools are just byproducts that these kinds of institutions and now we have the Internet, which is the greatest web of knowledge ever created, completely interconnected. So it's very, very easy to learn. If you actually have a desire to learn, everything is on the Internet ... the ability to learn, the means of learning, the tools of learning, are abundant and infinite, but it’s the desire to learn that’s incredibly scarce” - Naval Ravikant
I Will Teach You to Be Rich: “When you embrace the idea that you can earn more, one of the biggest surprises you’ll discover is that you already possess skills others would pay for—and you’ve never even realized it.” Busy people want help with their lives, just open your eyes. There’s simple opportunities for you to help others, based on your current skill set. Money is an exchange of the value you provide to others.
Ali Abdaal and Kevin Jubbal: being a doctor is not as glamorous as it may seem (ie in the great TV show House). While there is prestige and good pay, there is also seemingly lots of bureaucracy, administrative burden, burnout, overworking, and a huge opportunity cost, to name a few. Considering this, the problem with passion and work-life balance, I figured that since I’m no longer 100% sure about becoming a doctor, I needed to adjust my four year plan. I dropped organic chemistry immediately, which I think was a great decision, as I detested being in chemistry labs anyways.
Ali Abdaal: thank you for introducing me to Notion, this incredible, beautiful note-taking app. I’ve always had various quotes, ideas, and scraps in placed in different journals, books, and apps. This is the one place I store it all. Ali was a big reason I started my blog, with the mission of providing useful and thoughtful information to others while having fun and learning how to write. I’ve really enjoyed making my website and blog posts, and am excited to put more of my thoughts out into the world next year.
The Four Hour Workweek: ask for forgiveness, not permission. Define your fears not your goals. What if I did the opposite of everyone around me? Being busy is a form of laziness:
“Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness— lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.” - Tim Ferriss
Letters from a Stoic: anyone, no matter how old, can die today. Always keep in mind that anything can happen. Teach more since you enjoy learning so much. Practice low expectations and don’t get your hopes too high about anything.
Lying: White lies are shallow—don’t tell them. I think I’ve always intuited this feeling in myself, but I guess I needed a nudge to tell me. I think white lies and some other social conventions are shallow and repulsive. In almost all cases, it seems like lying isn’t the way to go. Short term discomfort, long term gain. Important note: this is distinct from saying whatever’s on your mind.
The Defining Decade: “‘Although social media’s allowing people to reach out to everyone is a good thing, it can also divert energy that someone would have spent on close relationships to outside relationships that don’t really matter. I believe this has made people shallower because they are trying to impress everyone in the world rather than focusing on the people that matter.’”
Four Thousand Weeks: Pay yourself and make time to do what YOU want to do. Most stuff can be moved back on your to-do list. Focus on a few important, urgent tasks for tomorrow, and that’s it. Dedicate time for yourself. “If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.”
Having your own room, in a quiet place, is a luxury. Never forget that. Also, ear plugs are a lifesaver sometimes, so always carry them around.
“You have to take a path that’s dangerous. And most people want to take the safe path. The safe path leaves you stuck in quiet desperation, almost every time. It’s hell.” - Joe Rogan
Read fiction. Not only does it increase empathy and let your imagination run wild, but it’s a pretty good indicator of how bad our attention spans are and how we have this programmed desire to constantly check our phones. Concentration is a skill, and many of us may have lost it.
If you read this whole thing, thanks so much.
If you’d like to read this on my website, click here.
Have a great year,
Baxter
Foto de Moritz Knöringer en Unsplash