Annual Review 2020

Hiya,

First off, happy New Year, folks! I had a great 3-4 months off from the blog/newsletter and I’m excited to get back into writing.

This year, my newsletters will look different:

1. I’ll send you a newsletter whenever I publish a post. No commitments on when or how many times they’ll go out each week. My intention is to give myself space to write faster or slower, depending on what my goals are. If it gets annoying for you because I’m so prolific… Well, we’ll figure it out then.

2. I’ll be writing essays and articles, no more Tim Ferriss-like roundups. Those were fun to write and kept me consistent, but they didn’t allow me to give certain ideas the full treatment they deserved.

If this is the first newsletter you’re getting from me, welcome!! Crazy to think that there’s folks on this list that I haven’t met in person. You can check out my blog’s About page to learn more about who I am and what I do.

Finally, if you’ve unsubscribed in the past and are annoyed to receive this newsletter from me, please unsubscribe again (scroll down to the link at the bottom of this email). I took down a sign up form on my site and resurfaced some emails sign ups from it. So I just re-added everybody because I wasn’t sure who had unsubbed and who hadn’t.

Anyways, have fun reading my Annual Review 2020. I’ll talk to you soon. 👋

One of my favourite days of the year: chasing waterfalls in Hamilton, Ontario with my best friend

I’ve done an annual review every year for the past 3 years. (Here’s last year’s review.)

Like the previous ones, I initially wanted this to be a “what went well”, “what didn’t go well”, and “what I want to work on next year” format. But I’m learning to take external events without judgment, without trying to force change.

So instead of that, I’ll review the lessons I learned this year in chronological order. I’ll also pull from my most impactful books and quotes from 2020.

I won’t dwell on how the pandemic affected my life. But briefly:

Was it tough? Yes.

Do I miss life before the pandemic? Of course.

But to me, this is the most important question:

Did this experience provide more “grist for the mill”? Most definitely.

I’m lucky to report that lockdown and quarantine has done me more good than harm. I wouldn’t wish it on any generation—I for one, am beyond ecstatic for the vaccine—but despite the difficulties, I’m thankful for the difference it’s made in my life.

And it’s these 10 lessons that made 2020 worthwhile.

1. A meaningful life requires high quality leisure

Leisure and rest are not meant to support work. Work is supposed to support a life of leisure.

I’m not just talking about a binge-watching-Netflix kind of leisure. I’m talking about serious hobbies — creative, challenging ways to spend time and energy that grows and challenges a person.

I didn’t realize how important serious hobbies were until the pandemic took ultimate frisbee away from me.

Playing ultimate gives me hours of weekly social interaction that fill up my tank and my time. It used up mental energy that I would otherwise spend anxiously overthinking the rest of my life—which I struggled with in the first half of 2020 (more on this in the next point).

In the first 2.5 months of 2020, all the training I’d been putting into growing as an ultimate frisbee player were finally showing. I had my first layout goals —first on beach, then on turf. I was supposed to try out for a professional womxn’s team in Toronto the weekend we went into lockdown.

I’ve since replaced ultimate with writing and reading, Spikeball in the summer, making time for friends, going on walks, and pursuing creative and artistic projects.

It’s not the same. And I’m still looking forward to the day I’ll jog on to the grass/turf/sand again (and semi-dreading how horribly out of shape I’ll feel). But I’m glad I developed other activities on which to spend my time.

2. Actively manage the chaos of life

Unless one learns to control the chaos in their external and internal lives, entropy, anxiety, and fear will always be their unwelcome bedfellows.

I managed the internal chaos by doubling down on my journaling. I started my journaling practice 5 years ago on the advice of a productivity coach, in order to control my monkey mind.

My journaling practice—more than any other activity I did this year—helped me ease my anxiety, untangle my convoluted emotions, and just friggin’ get on with my day. As I write this, I’m on my 10th morning pages journal and my 6th bullet journal.

To control the external chaos, I underwent Tiago Forte’s Getting Things Done Like a Boss course in March to learn David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) productivity system. In April, I took Tiago’s Building a Second Brain (BASB) course and implemented that as my note-taking system.

Committing to these 3 simple activities–journaling, implementing GTD, and mastering BASB—were instrumental in dealing with the flaming projectiles of garbage that 2020 kept lobbing in my direction.

3. Differentiate then integrate

“What does it really mean to be ‘in the world but not of the world’?”

This question is based on Jesus’ prayer to the Father for His disciples in John 17:15. This was one of the 12 favourite questions I identified during my BASB coursework.

Shifting gears from chaos to creativity, here’s my answer to that question: becoming “in the world but not of the world” requires differentiating oneself from any other human being in the world and to integrate back to contribute to society as whole.

I learned this firsthand when I participated in the 5th cohort of David Perell’s Write of Passage in July. Finding success in online writing requires one to publish compelling articles on a consistent basis.

I achieved differentiation by drawing heavily from my personal experiences around being an immigrant and going back to working for someone else. I achieved integration by asking for feedback from my peers (shoutout to Robbie, Michael, Ari, and Brandon!) as I wrote the articles.

On a personal level, this meant acknowledging and understanding my unique experiences. In order to detach myself from self-consciousness, shame, and narcissism, I needed to share my story with others. Thus my Tuesday newsletter, and the tagline of my blog: “open sourced self-reinvention”.

4. Build valuable career capital to make career moves that pay well

Writing online built my career capital. This year, it finally paid off.

In the tail end of July, as I was taking Write of Passage and trying not to feel sad about the world, I achieved the sweet spot of being able to do for work what I would do even if no one paid me to do it.

In July, I landed a job doing work I love with people I respect.

Publishing online opened the door for my friend to know what I was interested in, career-wise. It also gave the hiring team to an extended cover letter to assess how well I fit the company and the role.

Most importantly, it showcased that I could communicate complicated topics well—particularly valuable for especially for companies doing business-to-business work.

5. Become autotelic and actively direct my attention, thoughts, & emotions

While my journaling and self-therapy self-care routines helped, I was getting really emotionally tired of having to work through my issues myself with no seeming end in sight. So I did two things:

1. I started seeing a therapist in September

2. I actively worked on being autotelic—finding challenges and setting goals on every little thing I did

While seeing a therapist for someone from my background isn't normal, I’ve come to view it the way Morning Brew co-founder and CEO, Alex Liebermann, does: as mental sparring practice, done to improve long term fitness as much as address short term issues.

(Shoutout to my fellow Fil-Chi Cherry for helping me find my therapist through Inkblot Therapy.)

The other half is about becoming autotelic, which translated loosely, means “self goal”. After finishing the book Flow in November, I learned that:

One of my goals moving into 2021 is to turn the bouts of anxiety into flow and treat them as a way to grow, instead of as a dreaded adversary.

6. Depth over breadth in life and in friendship

In October, I saw Netflix’s The Social Dilemma and afterwards, tore through Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.

The lessons from both cemented one key idea in my mind: Replacing my relationships with social media vastly diminishes the social boost I could potentially receive from my IRL relationships.

Because of this, I deleted Instagram from my phone. I also reached out to friends and my friend groups, with an emphasis on rich interactions and face-to-face conversations.

This led to a number of creative, socially-distanced activities, like learning to play Among Us with childhood friends from the Philippines, a Zoom Secret Santa with my university frisbee friends, and a bi-weekly book club with my capstone project team from university.

As Cal says in his book, “The problem, then, is not that using social media directly makes us unhappy. The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that’s massively more valuable. The small boosts you receive from posting on a friend’s wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can’t come close to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spending real-world time with that same friend.”

7. Pursue enjoyment over pleasure

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi writes, “Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment. We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention.”

In other words, quality of leisure trumps the amount of hours spent. Here are 3 criteria I now use to vet whether or not a leisure activity is of a high quality:

1. Requires active mental or physical participation over passive consumption

2. Uses skills to produce valuable things in the physical world

3. Requires real-world, structured social interactions

The more of the criteria an activity fulfills, the more enjoyable it is.

For example, leisure in solitude is still enjoyable as long as there is a goal to fulfill and a way to challenge myself. I experienced it this year when I took Write of Passage. I felt this a similar surge of accomplishment when I finished reading Ron Chernow’s 800-page Alexander Hamilton –the longest book I’d finished in a while. In the same way, a passive activity like watching a show can go beyond pleasure and become enjoyable, if it’s done with others.

8. Simplest solutions, hardest problems, & frequent iterations

November was undoubtedly the most intense month of my year. Without going into details, I really struggled in the days that surrounded my 60-day milestone at work. (Incredibly thankful for my therapist and for my friends who helped scrape me off the floor, like a wad of unwanted gum.)

My working mandate of “simplest solutions, hardest problems, & frequent iterations” came out of that tough time. This encapsulation reminds to:

1. Work on the hardest, most impactful problems I can solve day to day, even if that means saying no or pushing off smaller tasks

2. Solve the problem as quickly as I can with the tools, knowledge, and resources I already have on hand

3. Accept that my initial product won’t be perfect and will need to be reworked and improved over a period of time (this is where further research and more refined solutions come into play)

In other words, as long as I was working on the highest-impact project I could, I could settle for a B+ grade on my initial solution, in service of speed. I could always retake the test again and again in the future.

9. Develop standards for relationships

This year I worked hard to cultivate people with whom I can go through life. I spent multiple, consecutive days with friends. I hosted my teammates for a sleepover during a tournament. I initiated a virtual Secret Santa and a book club.

I’m even more thankful for my current friendships when I recall several, less-than-healthy friendships I’d had in the past. Some were with people who didn’t respect my boundaries or who just weren’t as invested in the friendship as I was.

So to prevent future mistakes and pain, I developed two criteria for the kinds of people I want in my life:

1. They demonstrate that they value our relationship by investing attention into it

2. They inspire me to be a better person and I inspire them to be a better person

To achieve the 2 criteria, all parties must work to maintain a level of honest communication, trust, respect, and a mutual growth mindset. These two points help me identify people that I overlooked and to whom I should give more attention.

I still maintain contact with friends with whom it’s all just fun times or who fulfill one but not both. But the most rewarding friendships in my life fulfill both criteria.

Of course, I also did my fair share of crossing lines and rebuffing the overtures of kind souls in the past. So I had to learn how to be a good friend myself this year, too.

I had to learn how to be vulnerable, without using it as a crutch to force closeness. I learned how to communicate and express how I felt in healthy ways. I learned how to step back and value solitude as much as I relished being with others.

(Side note: I strongly believe in marrying your best friend, so it’s not a coincidence that these are also most of my criteria for a life partner.)

10. Let the old die to let the new thrive

People talk about what a dumpster fire 2020 was. But why wouldn’t you want to get rid of trash?

(Of course, we know it’s because dumpsters fires are harmful for the environment. But let’s not stretch the metaphor here.)

Just before Christmas, I had a lump in my throat that just wouldn’t go away. It subsided a few days before the New Year.

I’d had dozens of fearful, anxiety-laden, psychosomatic attacks like this throughout 2020. They had always threatened to come to the surface in previous years, but I’d always distracted myself with more work, more people, or more ultimate.

But I couldn’t do that this year. The Great Dumpster Fire of 2020 stripped away the rubbish of which I wouldn’t let go.

I had to face the music.

I had to face the truth that all my fear and anxiety was rooted in a lack of love and thoughtfulness for myself. And this held me from having healthy relationships and from loving others unconditionally.

Moving into 2021, I’ve have had to put a match to my old pathways of thinking. I had to dig into the dark places of my life and lovingly coax them to into the light. I’ve had to constantly remind myself, “That’s SELF 3.0 talking. SELF 4.0 wouldn’t do that.”

The heat of 2020 proved too uncomfortable for me to stick around with my old habits and creature comforts. It weaned the gold from the chaff in my life.

I needed to let go, let the Old Me die so the New Me could live.

I’ll be taking this final lesson well into 2021 and beyond.

Favourites & highlights

• Favourite song: "Good Things Fall Apart (with Jon Bellion) – Stripped" by ILLENIUM (Here’s the rest of my 2020 favourites)

• Favourite shows: It's Okay to Not Be Okay, The Queen's Gambit, Itaewon Class (all on Netflix)

• Favourite movie: The Old Guard (Netflix)

• Favourite purchases: Apple Airpods Pro & my Miele Espresso Machine 6350

• Most impactful books I read: Flow, Digital Minimalism, & Thinking in Systems

This post first appeared on RoxineKee.com.