012: 2023 retrospective.

Let's reflect on 2023 together.

Happy New Year’s Eve family, how was your 2023?

This year I decided to look back on the things I accomplished, the things that went well, and the things that didn’t go so well to gain insight into how I want to plan my 2024.

I came into 2023 battle-ready. I had a game plan ready to execute and tunnel vision for the goals I wanted to achieve. I saw 2023 as a year of action and I was ready to take my first steps toward building a tech company. This year I had ambitious goals. I had a few main areas of focus: growing my knowledge, growing my brand, and identifying my startup idea.

My 2023 reflection.

For the sake of brevity, I’ve only included my business/career goals in this newsletter. But it’s important that you set goals in all areas of your life: health, wealth, relationships, and experiences.

My goals were:

1. Prototype 13 startup ideas ❌

2. Write 12 newsletters ✅

3. Develop advanced product design skills ✅

4. Develop basic product management skills ❌

5. Learn accounting & finance ❌

The most surprising thing to me this year was the way my goals evolved throughout the year. I ended up achieving only 2/5 of the original goals I set for myself. But then I achieved another 5 things that were more beneficial to my long-term plans:

1. Built a course to help aspiring designers learn the skills needed to secure a high-paying position (90% finished). ✅

2. Used the course to guide a mentee to write a high-quality case study. ✅

3. Became a certified ADPList mentor. ✅

4. Started educational accounts on Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin with a consistent posting schedule. ✅

5. Shared my knowledge with students at 4 public speaking events. ✅

If I had stuck rigidly to my original goals for the year, I wouldn’t have had as much success as I have now at the end of 2023. I realized it’s important to embrace uncertainty, adapt as you learn new things, and allow yourself to focus on what people need.

In the first 3 months of this year, I was trying to juggle too many things at once. I kept it up pretty well at first, but eventually, it became too much to maintain as a consistent habit. This all resulted in a counterproductive spiral where I wasn’t particularly effective at accomplishing any of the tasks I set out to do.

I realized I needed focus. I needed to reevaluate the activities that brought the most value to myself and others.

I discovered what was moving the needle:

1. I had people reaching out to me for mentorship. Students and new grads are all looking to secure full-time product design positions. I was already speaking on panels to share my knowledge in design. I realized that I was uniquely positioned to help people here.

2. I knew I wanted to build my brand as a designer. I realized the best way for me to do that now and still focus on mentorship is to grow my social media presence as a design educator.

And I discovered what was unnecessary at the current time:

1. While it was fun prototyping startup ideas every 4 weeks, the timing wasn’t right because I knew I wouldn’t start acting on any of these ideas until I was more confident in my skill set and better off financially. So this exercise wasn’t providing any immediate value outside of helping me refine my design process (which I could simply do through working at Meta).

2. While I do still want to learn product management skills, my current job calls for my design skills. I am still working to improve these. I would be distracting myself trying to build both skills at once.

By eliminating distractions and focusing on the highest-impact activities, I was able to make much more progress toward my long-term goals.

I allowed myself to explore my curiosities this year. I learned more about philosophy, storytelling, Christianity, spirituality, design, piano, muay thai, and finance.

Life is so much more than just career and wealth. I was surprised to also grow a ton in my relationships and experiences. It’s so important to have that balance. Don’t over-index on one area and neglect another. Balance! ⚖️

Do your own retrospective.

Now I’ll give you a quick guide on how I reviewed my year and how you can do the same for yourself. I got this template from Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole at The Yearly Review. If you follow this process, you should have a very clear understanding of your past year, and what you need to do to make your next year the best year yet.

Step 1: List out meaningful moments and milestones.

Look back through your year using photo albums, notes, journals, and any other things to jog your memory and list out any meaningful events or accomplishments month by month.

Step 2: List your wins for the year.

Use this time to celebrate everything you accomplished in 2023.

To help you generate ideas, think about habits you built, places you traveled, bad habits you broke, skills you developed, hobbies you explored, jobs you left or started, goals you accomplished, relationships you formed, and financial milestones you hit.

Step 3: Sort your wins into life areas.

1. Health

   1. physical

   2. mental

   3. spiritual

2. Wealth

   1. investing

   2. spending

   3. earning

3. Relationships

   1. friends

   2. family

   3. romantic

4. Experiences

   1. travel

   2. leisure

   3. hobbies

5. Business

   1. personal

   2. team

   3. career

Step 4: List your mistakes for the year.

Use the same categories as above and list out any moments and results you’re not so proud of this year.

Step 5: Score each life area.

Go through each life area and give yourself a score between 0 and 10.

To complete this step, go through each “sub-area” in your life buckets, give it a rating, and provide some commentary about why you’re giving it that rating. This will help give you some “raw material” you can use in the steps that follow as you analyze things you want to stop, start, and keep doing.

You should now be able to objectively see what you achieved/enjoyed this past year, and what you “missed the mark” on. So, reflect on what you want for the upcoming year and re-order these buckets based on priority.

• Which “life themes” are lacking that you want to start prioritizing? Move those up on the priority list.

• Which “life themes” are doing well, that you want to keep doing well? Keep the same on the priority list.

• Which “life themes” are too over-emphasized, that you want to deprioritize? Move those down on the priority list.

Step 6: Conduct an 80/20 analysis.

An “80/20 analysis” is a way of finding the 20% of inputs that lead to 80% of the outputs. What actions were you doing that were giving you results this year? Both good and bad.

This starts with a “brain dump” of everything you can think of that contributed to your positive & negative results in each life area.

Then, you want to closely look at them to find the 1-3 that led to 80% of the positive & negative results.

From there, you’ll brainstorm how you can double down on the few things leading to the good results & ruthlessly cut the few things leading to the negative results.

Repeated year after year, this process guarantees you are continuing to grow.

Ask yourself: “How can I double-down on the few things leading to the most good, and ruthlessly cut the few things leading to the most bad?”

Step 7: List your lessons and realizations.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself.

1. What gave you the most joy this past year?

2. What weighed on you and caused you the most stress?

3. What was the challenging moment where (afterward) you experienced the most personal growth?

4. What was the most surprising project, person, or experience of the past year?

5. Which relationships had the biggest positive impact on your happiness and growth as a person?

6. What were 3 of the hardest conversations you had? And what did you learn from them?

7. Which relationships caused you the most unhappiness or stress?

8. What’s one new thing you learned about yourself this past year?

My month in review.

• 👨🏾‍🏫 I was accepted as a mentor on ADPList and became one of the top 1% of design mentors this month.

• 🏖️ I took a trip to the Dominican Republic.

• 📱 I created a content strategy for posting educational content on social media to grow my reach.

• 🎩 Attended the Black GovTech Winter Gala and met some cool people.

Cheers to a great 2024. 🥂

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