Intro

2020 was a crazy year, but I found it to be an underrated year of transformation, growth and clarity.

In this annual reflection, I’ll be giving you an overview of some key areas of my life and covering the following questions:

What went well?

What didn’t go so well?

What lessons did I learn?

Let’s begin.

What went well?

Spirituality

The most important thing I did this year was to make spirituality my top priority.

Surrounded by a world of chaos, I focused on raising my consciousness.

Because of this, I was able to remain more calm and peaceful, which allowed me to analyze situations with more objectivity and be more effective in my day to day.

I studied Dr. Sue Morter’s work and became better at breath work through “central channel breathing”, learning to breathe into all emotions that arise, strengthening my grounded-ness and connection with the universe, and realizing that everything was happening “for me” and “for my awakening”.

I drilled Eckhart Tolle’s teachings and worked on presence, awareness, acceptance, surrender.

I also used energy work to improve my detachment, overcome inner challenges where I was triggered, and become that much closer to the strong spiritual state I so seek.

Throughout the year, my humility increased as I identified less and less with the physical body and instead viewed myself more and more as a vessel for source to flow through and do its work — and invited Source energy into every project I worked on for greater ease, enjoyment and results.

Now, was I always in a perfectly zen state? Not a chance. I was tested — from doubts, to fears, to attachments — but each time I experienced one of these unexpected responses, I was gifted with another opportunity to heal and get closer to peace.

Embracing this year

I found 2020 to be an underrated year.

It was filled with transformation, growth and clarity.

I get it — it had its fair of challenges between extreme political divide, a pandemic, economic sabotage from unjust lockdowns, and more.

But here’s the thing — this year, like any, was still a neutral year.

With every challenge comes equal or greater opportunity, for those who are looking for it.

When the weak minded among us faced setbacks early on in the year, they crumbled like a cheap chair, and opted to cancel a collection of 365 days (which makes no logical sense).

The strong minded had those same setbacks, but used the bricks thrown at them as building blocks.

I opted to use the year to my advantage and in the process, put myself a full year ahead of those who wrote it off.

I used lockdown to tackle projects that I had put off for a long time. I trained myself to type with all 10 fingers (just hit a new record of 100 WPM as I’m typing this in early 2021), I began learning the basics of DJ’ing (I might be the most underrated non DJ at finding doubles), and I deep cleaned and organized my physical and digital spaces (felt incredible).

I spent more time outside than I ever have this summer and fell in love with working in the fresh air, I became closer with my immediate family, and I got a free audit to see how people approached challenges and how they responded to me, which gave me clarity of who’s ideal to keep and my reality, and who’s got to go.

Throughout the full year, I also quadrupled down on improving my mindset, systems, skills and energy — foundational work that helped prepare me for future success in business, creativity, spirituality.

I took what life threw at me this year, and turned it to my benefit.

Everyone has challenges, but it’s how you respond to them that matters.

Thank you 2020, for your blessings in disguise.

Critical thinking

What a weird world we’re living in right now.

The entire year, I felt people missed the point on every single event that occurred. It’s blatantly obvious if you dig deep enough that there are agendas at play and the major events were just supporting it.

You may call that conspiracy theory, I’d call it doing research and thinking critically about our world.

From the beginning of COVID, I had my doubts because the media pushed it so heavily. When the media is so aggressive about something, rest assured, it’s probably a good idea to question why they’re actually pushing it and consider that there’s someone probably benefiting from this narrative.

I thought I did a good job throughout this whole year of questioning everything around me, and being very strategic with who I used as sources, while also doing my best to not fall prey to confirmation bias like I watched so many others succumb to.

I didn’t stay silent either, and I’m proud of how I voiced my opinions. Instead of shaming like the far left, social justice warriors did to me, I publicly put my truth on wax, clearing my conscience by giving people an alternative perspective, insight or data point and let people do with it what they wanted.

I did struggle at times with doubts as I felt very alone and sometimes crazy for thinking differently, because I felt like I was in such a minority and the majority was so loud.

But even despite the left’s pathetic shame tactics, the laughable “fact checking” and the widespread “internet scientists”, I continued to challenge the mainstream, group thinking narratives, while doing the best job I could to stay objective, challenge my beliefs, observe data and opinions, and come to my own conclusions.

It also forced me to be more compassionate as we’re all doing what we think is right.

Time will tell, but I’m pretty damn sure I’ll be on the right side of history.

Vlogging

The weekly vlog was one of the most time and energy consuming projects this year, but it also brought me incredible joy and grew me tremendously as a creator.

I filmed 38 vlogs since beginning in late January 2020, edited 23 of those, and published 5 — the rest of which are scheduled to be published in January 2021.

I went from filming only talking head shots for podcasts, to capturing my day to day life in real time — learning to become comfortable with filming in situations I wasn’t used to, capturing myself and the world around me in key moments, and allowing myself to shoot in more creative and engaging ways (all of which was shot on my iPhone X!) — and it all helped make me a better videographer in the process.

Through trial and error over the next 11 months, I developed my own unique style of vlogging as I documented my evolution in life, spirituality and business — and was deeply inspired by Casey Neistat’s vlogs and Gary Vaynerchuk’s WeeklyVee, which was the main reason I began weekly vlogging.

Gaining more experience, I developed a greater understanding for which stories should be told and which shouldn’t, I figured out a way to vlog when I was tight for time called “highlight vlogging”, and became an infinitely better story teller in the process.

Where my filming was consistent, my video editing was not. I let the task of video editing slip too low in priority for a whole host of reasons (excuses) and accidentally created 2 huge backlogs for myself, and thankfully got out of the second one and into present time. You can see me tackling it in “The Content Catchup Chronicles”.

Despite the editing inconsistency earlier on, my skill improved significantly. My editing speed increased as did my standards. I became much more ruthless with cutting out the inessential which didn’t add much value, the pacing improved, the duration lowered and the overall quality grew as a byproduct by eliminating the low hanging fruits, and detached from long term re-usability to level up the quality now through mood enhancing music, effects and memes.

After becoming hooked on essentialism, it helped me become a better story teller. I discovered that not every thought or moment matters as much my ego thought it did, and it allowed me to be more willing to cut that which didn’t serve the main story line, and focus on the 20% of moments that yield 80% of the value.

I also developed some kick ass systems for speed, quality, accountability and gamification — a 2 pass editing system that helps me effectively edit vlogs, a Notion content management system for managing each step of the creation process, and hacks to reverse engineer intro’s, titles, thumbnails and descriptions even easier.

I still have a long ways to go until I achieve “must watch TV” status, but I’m grateful for how much this vlog has helped me grow as a creative in video editing, filming, story telling and communication, as well as how this vlog has helped me document my journey to an even higher degree.

Notion development

I had so much fun with Notion in the past year. Every system I use in my day to day has been upgraded. I recreated my systems from the ground up, focusing on simplification, essentialism, sustainability and reverse engineer real life results above all.

I moved to a dashboard first focus for ease of access, use and input, I merged related databases, simplified their properties, and I built a life management system for reverse engineering my biggest life goals down to today’s actions (heavily inspired by August Bradley, my main mentor for Notion system design).

Though my ego questioned if I was wasting my time with how much I spent creating on this app, my green light made sense in retrospect and it turned out to be an incredible use of time. Through continued reps, my system design skill went through the roof — from lightweight CRM’s, to Life OS’s to an entire content creation system — and I even began consulting for a few Notion users, working for free to start.

To date, this is the greatest app that’s ever touched my reality and it’s exciting to see its popularity grow — even though it’s been challenging to watch its growth while feeling like I’m missing the wave as I haven’t made any content for it yet. But you can expect to see Notion content in 2021 from me as I have a lot to share.

All in all, I’m feeling very excited for my future with this app as I built systems this year that will make execution and alignment so much easier for the future.

Interviews

I launched an interview series this year for my podcast and began by having 3 friends on — Zack Platt, Daniel (uSAYbFLOW), and Giuseppe Cuna (Azel) — people who have a long term trajectory in which I believe in, and currently have good perspectives from early days in their journeys to share with others.

I’m still experimenting with the ideal format, but I’m confident in saying that I believe I have what it takes to be a world class interviewer and/or podcast host by the end of the decade.

With a unique combination of curiosity, critical thinking, truth seeking, psychology and spirituality, I can bring something special out of people out that they’re not used to showing or sharing. My podcast won’t be for everyone, though. I require a level of depth that goes beyond most people’s interests or attention spans, but for those who this is fascinating to, it will be a gold mine.

As I take my next steps forward, I want to make guests on the podcast more consistent and begin to go beyond my circle of friends to eventually only interview world class performers, and dissect exactly why they are the way they are, and how they get the results they achieve — and in the process put together a masterclass for thoughtful people to learn from.

Finances

I struggled at times this year financially, but I’m pleased to say that I used my CERB money very effectively — as I paid off my credit card balance to 0 for the first time in around half a decade, stayed very frugal throughout the whole year, and even began to budget and track transactions (but this habit fell off, I need to get used to it again)

That being said, I didn’t do a good enough job with making money this year and it’s not acceptable in my books. In 2021, it’s going to be one of my top priorities as I can see its importance in my upcoming evolution.

Website

After much procrastination and over-complication, I focused on essentialism, introduced a timeline and a worthwhile incentive, made a list, executed that list, and finally launched my personal website (documented in The Process 033).

There’s still a lot I need to do, including properly setting up services, but this website serves as a place to hold all of my content in one location, host the services I’m offering, and showcase the work I’m involved in, (and of course, position me to my target market and make me look cool, but we’re not going to talk about that)

Social

As per usual, my social life was a low priority because even though I love people — I love the process even more.

It was a good year for purging my social circle. By just speaking my truth authentically from a grounded place, I pushed away the kind of people who are pessimistic, unaccountable, asleep, and/or sensitive snowflakes that couldn’t handle a different opinion — people I don’t care for associating with much anyways.

In the process of this all, I brought people closer who are optimistic, accountable, awake, respectful, opportunistic — people who gave me tremendous hope for the future of the world. You know who you are, and I’m grateful for you.

I also bonded with my immediate family, became closer with my Mom and my sister to the point where I learned to enjoy living with them, and bonded with my Dad (who lives elsewhere) and I saw him more than I have since I left his house 4 years ago.

Last but not least, I met Giuseppe Cuna (Azel) — one of the sweetest souls I’ve ever met — and he later became one of my best friends.

What didn’t go so well?

Moxey Energetics

TLDR; I didn’t do much.

Moxey Energetics is a business that I’ve been talking about for 2 years, but have made very little progress on.

I’m tired of the lack of results — and being in this annoying state where I have to call myself an aspiring entrepreneur because I haven’t put in the work required to succeed in this area yet.

I’m over the idea of “playing business” to check the box. I want to win in business, for real.

In 2020, I let Moxey Energetics slip the wayside far too often and opted to prioritize creative work and content creation instead.

Underlying this behaviour is a lot of fear — fear of rejection, fear of disapproval, fear of not being ready, fear of looking like an idiot, fear of ruining my reputation, fear of not being good enough — as well as others that I haven’t gained conscious awareness of yet.

I did however have some foundation clarity this year on how I want to approach business, including utilizing a model that allows people without money to get great results and those committed to investing the money to get those results better and faster, a product offering that could change my plan completely, and how my funnel aligns with mindset, systems and energy.

In the upcoming year, I expect my results to change as I put business higher in priority than content creation, I spend more on preparation and I overcome my fears through consistent exposure to micro failures.

I will eventually figure out this entrepreneurship thing. I’d rather die than not succeed.

Freelance

Early on this year, I got started on creative freelance work — from video editing, to visual design to Notion system development. I created product demo videos, designed logos and built productivity management systems for people.

Though the work began as pro-bono, getting my first paid freelance job after a friend hit me up for a product demo video helped grow my confidence a lot, knowing that all the past work I’ve put into developing these skills could help me sustain myself financially. At that point, I knew I didn’t need to go back to the job world and I could find a way to sustain myself by doing work for people independently, keeping my freedom to a degree simultaneously.

I also laid a good foundation for what I’m capable of within my portfolio through the use of charged and pro bono projects and can use much of what I worked on for the following year.

However, I didn’t do a great job with consistently show up to find new jobs beyond my warm market and in 2021 I need to do a better job with that if I want to sustain myself 100% without any assistance.

I understand it may be challenging navigating the upcoming economy, but with all challenges lie an equal opportunity for greater success.

Solo Podcasts

I recorded 18 solo podcasts in 2020 but despite this number, I had an uphill battle with it.

At the end of May 2020, I closed out “Reflections” — a series that was crucial to my early years of documenting, and to replace it I created “The Journal” — a new series with a change in format that resulted in less editing, more flow and more freedom.

Even after the change in format, I still kept my solocasts too much on a pedestal and it invited doubt, self judgement and internal resistance — but I kept recording anyways, reflecting on how I can improve it.

By the end of August 2020, as I recorded my 5th episode of The Journal, my communication improved to the point that I didn’t need to make a single cut and went for an hour straight. For the next 3 episodes, I would have only one cut to make. This was a major step in the right direction for my desired outcome — raw footage that’s communicated so well that it doesn’t need to be edited.

Still, even then, my standards for my podcast remain far above where I’m at because my verbal communication and story telling are not up to par yet. Going forward, I’ll be focusing on improving my succinctness, telling more engaging stories, adding multiple camera angles and raising the value per minute, in my mission to make my podcast “must listen radio.”

Communication

After spending so much time listening to myself during the content catchup, I was blessed with the painful realization that I have a long ways to go in my communication still.

From the unnecessary amount of swearing, to the cut worthy transition words, to the extensive rambling, I now know that I need to evolve it going forward.

I did however, make some solid progress.

I reduced mumbling and improved my enunciation by over-enunciating words for months on end.

To much surprise of those used to my extensive f bombs, I’m now swearing less and less after realizing that there are a lot more elegant words than “fuck” that can paint a much more enticing picture. Plus, you just sound a whole lot more intelligent when you use more advanced words instead of defaulting into cursing.

My rambling is decreasing too as I force myself to say less to say more by focusing on the essentials, and as I realize that much of what I want to say, doesn’t actually matter. (How am I doing here?)

Every day is filled with practice. From writing stories in my journal entries, to vlogging and podcasting, I’m consistently aiming to level up my writing, speaking, communication, vocabulary, story telling, structure and flow.

With each repetition, I advance my skills and become closer to where I want to be — world class at communication.

Audience size

I’m 3 years into making content from a personal brand standpoint, and on YouTube for example, I’m still under 100 subscribers — exactly 89 subscribers, up from 14 in the past 365 days.

Anyone thinking rationally would likely conclude, “Josh, you might want to put your time into something else,” but they can’t see my vision and they don’t have my level of intuition.

In one way, it’s exciting to me. This long awaited growth is creating a story that will inspire many for decades to come. It’s a hero’s journey in which the world continuously told him “no, you’re not good enough,” but he refused to give up. While no one cared and he was forgotten in the dark, he laughed at the minimal metrics and opted to keep going because he sensed where this was all headed — and invested time into learning and improving his craft, consistently putting in the reps, experimenting and adapting as he went, and then eventually, turned his work from worthless to world class and the audience flooded in.

In another way, in order to get the impact and business results I desire, I need more eye balls so it’s time to finally optimize my channel for growth.

My results so far have made a ton of sense. Audience growth comes from creating high quality content and properly optimizing and marketing that content to attract attention and keep it.

Before, my videos weren’t up to a high enough standard as I was early in the process.

Thankfully, in the last 12 months the standards for my content quality have significantly upgraded, and it’s finally at a point where I feel a lot more comfortable sharing it and optimizing it.

Additionally, after experimenting with making some properly optimized dubstep videos in the last year that even helped me get my first 1000 view video, it helped show me the importance of SEO and growth hacking. I began studying what it takes to grow on YouTube and I’ll be leveraging what I learned in the past year to apply it to my self growth content, as this is all I care about making going forward.

Here’s to more audience growth going forward — and thank you so, so much to those who were here early on supporting me. You have no idea how much that means to me. I’ll remember you.

P.S. As for the rest of my “social media” platforms, minimal growth there too. On those platforms, I didn’t create much due to being focused on long form content so I completely get it.

Fitness

My physique and strength stayed about the same over the last 12 months — I lifted weights at an average of twice a week, estimating around 100+ strength workouts. (Cardio? Good one, maybe next year.)

The beginning of the year was great — I joined a gym after 3 years of working out in a home gym. It was scary at first but shortly thereafter became way more fun than training in the dungeon as I was fueled by seeing others around me train hard, met some cool members and trainers, and I loved the feeling of the environment.

Then COVID hit, gyms closed and I haven’t been to one since. I moved my training to the basement and modified my training from 3 days a week to 2 days a week to save money on food. I focused on maintenance as it’s almost impossible to build muscle if your nutrition isn’t on point and you’re only training a body part once a week. I struggled to enjoy training the same way, and felt like I was checking the box and it wasn’t very fun — and training only works when I’m enjoying the process.

At the end of December, for the first time in 4 years I took a hiatus to focus even more time and energy into content catchup. Hopefully the combination of the space away from fitness and a new goal next year will help me learn to enjoy training again.

Health

My health was very average this year and I paid the price in physical energy and emotions.

My sleep was decent at an average of 8.5, as I learned to wake up earlier and go to bed earlier, but fell off with this. Also, too often I awoke with headaches from a sensitive head and low quality pillows. I have much to improve here.

My food was incredibly average. Between trying to save money and being lazy, my diet became incredibly acidic in nature, to the point that I would wake up and feel this strange sickness in December. It sucked. Next year, I need to level out my pH scales properly and focus on alkalinity.

My posture wasn’t the A+ it usually would be as I worked in my bed too much, but has since improved from sitting at my newly acquired Herman Miller Aeron (I love you).

My water consumption was a rare positive in my health this year, moving from 4L/day to anywhere from 4-8L/day — and it felt incredible.

In 2021, my health needs to be better because it impacts my emotional quality and my level of execution.

Girls

Girls were basically a write of this year — it didn’t feel aligned at all.

I’m not willing to put the time, money or energy into anyone but myself and my business.

At some point, I want to have a queen for my eventual kingdom and it’s something I feel closer and closer to every day, but right now it’s time to focus on laying the foundation in business.

In the meantime, I still need to work on myself as I have things I need to work on from a relationship standpoint so I can be a great king when the time arrives.

With that being said, I’m a very sexually motivated person and I miss sex. A lot. But I live with my family still. So I’m being patient until I have an apartment. And then maybe I’ll get tinder. Or maybe I can just get famous so I don’t have to do a single thing because I’m not built to chase girls — I’m too focused on what I’m trying to create in my life. But I digress.

P.S. If you’re spiritual, open, have an amazing mindset and are cute, slide in my DM’s.

Social media

As a social media consumer, I strongly disliked it. By mid summer, it felt like a complete waste of time and energy. I was so over listening to people voice their limited perspectives. I even struggled to care about most people’s journeys because all my extra energy was used to keep myself and my circle from going insane. By the end of the year, I had enough and left social for 2 months — it was so nice.

As a social media creator, I didn’t do much better. Because I was so behind on long form content, I felt guilty whenever I made social media posts, so I ended up only creating around 20 posts on my instagram — my favourites were “We Are One” and “Winners Find a Way to Win”. I started a TikTok but lost interest for similar guilt based reasons. My stories on instagram stayed on point most of the year, though it was weird talking about controversial topics. I was active on twitter too, but became really bored with all the arguments with social justice warriors after I voiced my opinions about the events of the world.

Next year, I’d like to improve my consistency by adding scheduling in the mix so I can post without going on social media and upgrade my systems for micro content creation. It’s of lower importance than my long form content, but I also need to start using it to drive towards to my long form content — and visa versa.

Ego

In December 2020, after reading a page in “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle, I started to realize how much my ego had subconsciously wrapped its way around my life.

Here are many of the ways my ego likes to manifest itself:

• Doesn’t like being wrong
• Must feel in control
• Despises when others try to take credit for something that I did
• Craves recognition
• Craves positive responses
• Likes knowing more than others
• Wants to feel superior to others
• Nothing is ever good enough
• Every little thing matters and won’t let go of the past
• Sabotages when close to success, creates resistance to closing
• Hates anything less than perfection
• Rigid and inflexible
• Hates changing an opinion once it’s been publicly stated
• Hates being disliked
• Hates being “wronged”
• Obsesses over what it can’t control
• Hates feeling like it lost
• Never feels like it’s good enough
• Very hard on its self, self judgement

These are all things I feel when I subscribe to the ego’s narratives — which I try not to do. It blows me away how cunning the ego can be.

Timelines

I consistently underestimate how long things can take and struggle to hit timelines I set for myself. This has been happening for years.

It manifests in the micro as missing my projected time to go to sleep, wake up, attend meetings or appointments.

It manifests in the macro as setting a projected timeline for myself and not hitting it, which fundamentally kills my mood.

I’ve tried to counteract this by setting more realistic timelines or not setting them at all — but I’m still far from where I want to be. Overall, I have much to work on the concept of time as a whole going forward.

Lessons

Along the way, I also learned a lot too. Here are some of my favourite lessons from the year.

My purpose is to help people evolve.

I want to help people evolve.

At this point, self growth is all I care about. I’m deeply inspired by the idea of helping people to evolve. Not only does it fulfill me to evolve in my journey, but it makes me satisfies me at such a deep level to help people with their evolution in life, spirituality and business.

Focus on the essential, eliminate the inessential

After re-visiting essentialism this year and applying it to an even higher degree, I am so awake to the fact that not everything matters as much as my ego concludes it does.

If everything matters, then nothing matters.

Realistically speaking, you can’t be, do and have everything, so it’s of utmost importance that you focus on the 1% that yields 99% of results.

If we only have a certain amount of time, energy, and money — the 6’s, the 7’s and even the 8’s are taking precious resources away from your 9’s and 10’s

The more you focus on what’s truly essential, the higher your quality is in whatever you’re aiming to achieve.

This is applicable to every area of life.

Less is more.

Say no to what doesn’t matter.

Use the newfound resources to focus on what truly matters.

It’s a challenging concept to apply, but it’s worthwhile.

Focus on the essentials.

Eliminate the inessentials.

Everything that happens is for me. All that’s occurring is to further my spiritual awakening.

Whether it was the pain and betrayal I felt from being let go from Starbucks, or being triggered from SJW’s, or the chaos that’s happening in the world right now — any and all of it, is happening for my evolution, for my growth, and for my awakening at a soul level.

I signed up for everything I’m experiencing in this lifetime. The people, the events, the situations, the patterns — every little thing. It’s a higher level of responsibility and accountability, thanks to the realization that everything I experience, I asked for to help me awaken.

Find the right incentives that light your fire within, and you can turn yourself into a machine.

After experimentation this year, I now believe that everyone has an incentive that can turn them from 0 to 100, fast. If you’re struggling with motivation, keep looking for what that incentive might be for you.

For me, it’s tools that make my life and success easier. For example, a camera — which levels up the quality of my vlogs and podcasts, or a chair and desk — which helps me increase comfort and increase productivity.

When you find what those incentives are for you, tie it to the process, the results and ideally both — and watch yourself turn into a motivated machine, doing whatever it takes to get that incentive.

Those examples above were real world examples. The desk to face my fear of making a phone call, the chair for launching the first version of my personal website and a camera for catching up on content.

It’s better to achieve your goals than to have everything perfectly tracked and documented

Up until this year, I was obsessed and attached to the idea of having everything in my history perfectly documented and tracked at the smallest of levels.

Whether it was making sure that I didn’t miss a single moment on the vlog, to having all of my seemingly important thoughts captured, or stressing over the accuracy of when I completed certain tasks.

It was silly.

Now, I can see that there’s something even more important than having the journey perfectly documented — it’s execution, achievement of your goals, and creating real world results.

After missing a few moments, a few thoughts, and a few dates — time would pass and I started to realize that it didn’t matter as much as I originally thought, and that life would 100% go on.

If I’m spending all of my time and energy on trying to perfectly document my existence, it means that I’m not putting that same time and energy into creating real world results.

But without real world results, this existence ceases to be truly meaningful, and I waste my opportunity in this lifetime.

At the end of the day, it’s important to find the ideal balance between the two, because an undocumented successful journey isn’t ideal, and neither is a documented unsuccessful journey.

And right now, I’d rather execute and create real world results with less documentation than to have perfect documentation but minimal real world results.

Life is stories.

Life is just stories.

You acquired the device that you’re reading this reflection on based on a story someone told you.

This reflection is a collection of stories from my year.

The person you perceive me as is just stories you tell yourself about who I am.

If you change your mind about me, then you change the story you tell yourself about me.

Look around you — everything you perceive in your world is made up of the stories you tell yourself about it.

Storytelling is everywhere.

Sales is story telling.

Vlogging is story telling.

Product development is story telling.

Relationships are story telling.

Friendships are story telling.

Life is just stories.

Small stories, big stories. All added up into one massive story called “life.”

We’re all story tellers, whether we realize it or not.

Our life revolves around the stories we tell ourselves about what’s going on around us.

Everything is stories.

Everything.

Life is one big game of psychology.

After studying breakdowns from Hayden Hillier Smith (Logan Paul’s editor), it’s clear to me that video is not just art, but it’s also psychology.

It turns out that everything, including but not to the the pacing, the cuts, the music — it’s all designed to keep you engaged from a psychological perspective to keep watching the video, and reward you for doing so.

It’s bananas.

I thought maybe that art portion of content creation didn’t have anything to with influence, but I was wrong.

After more thinking, I’ve concluded that every aspect of life is impacted by psychology somehow because if a mind is involved, the game of psychology is present.

Maybe this is why is why I’m naturally drawn to influence and psychology.

Invite source into everything you’re working on. Us humans can only know so much

Every project that went well, I have invited Source into or I’ve let Source use me more so as a tool. That’s when I get the best work done, because as a human I am limited — but as Source I am limitless. It’s insane how much clarity and simplicity comes from allowing the universe, God — whatever you want to call it — to work through you.

Accomplish huge goals by making small moves, today.

When people think big goals, they likely think about big actions, too. But if your actions appear too big, you won’t get started.

As someone with big aspirations in life, I understand that it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed and disconnected from your goals — I’ve been there.

But with enough practice, it appears that small, consistent actions are what get you to where you want to go.

Here’s the system I’ve developed:

First and foremost, start the end goal.

From that end goal, map projects that if achieved, will get you closer to that goal.

Add an incentive for the completion of the project, too.

Of those projects, step out each action you’ll need to take.

Break them down into a small enough size where they feel achievable, but big enough that it’s exciting to work on.

Each action should be reduced enough that it can be completed in one day.

Then, prioritize the actions and schedule an action date for each (and if it’s scheduled for today and you need the reschedule it, that’s totally cool)

Then every day, you have your list right in front of you of what needs to get done, and whether it’s 1 thing or 10 things, you move forward that day and get closer to your goals.

Over time, you’ll be amazed how small, consistent actions turn into the achievement of big goals.

It’s been a game changing realization for me, to say the least.

(Full transparency by the way, I’m not very good at the scheduling part so what I’ve done instead is go into the chief project and find the most important tasks — but having things in the calendar is by far the best way to do it)

I don’t need to create like anyone except myself.

In the middle of summer after studying the phenomenal vlogs crafted by Logan Paul and David Dobrik and their editors, I struggled for a couple of days because I had no ounce of my that wanted to make entertainment content. I knew that my style wouldn’t ever be as fast paced, include as many fun moments, or be as highly edited.

This meant I probably wasn’t going to get those view counts either, as the majority prefers surface level, entertainment based vlogs.

And then it hit me — that was okay.

I don’t need all the views in the world.

What I needed instead, was to develop my own authentic style of vlogging.

I naturally focus on the work, the process, the journey. It has a great deal of depth, meaning and ends up being inspirational in nature.

And if that pushes the mainstream away, that’s okay with me.

Those aren’t the people I’m trying to serve anyways.

Instead of trying to create like others and get the whole world, I’d rather create in my own unique way that’s authentic to me and have it resonate with my kind of people.

This breakthrough liberated me beyond just the vlog — in the idea of niching in creativity, business and beyond.

Systems over goals

Fun fact: thought I finished this reflection in early January, I only ended up posting it publicly in October 2021 and completely forgot to write a brief about this. It’s a great lesson from James Clear’s Atomic Habits — a book I revisited multiple times near the end of 2020 and still absolutely love to this day. But I’d feel awkward if I was to write a blurb almost a year later so I’ll leave this empty for now.

Going Forward

2021 is an exciting year ahead.

Whatever happens this year, I know I’ll have a year of growth and consistency, applying as much as possible that I’ve described here.

If you’re interested in other ways to learn even more deeply about what I’m talking about, I’d recommend that you follow along on YouTube or my podcast (Spotify, Apple) — these are the 2 places I’m most active. You can also follow along here at the blog as I’ll be posting more this year, and if you like social media, you can follow along there too on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok — all @joshmoxey.

I wish you all an incredible year, and I hope this gave you at least one insight that brought value to your life. Oh, and I know it went a little long, but I’m trying to get better. Someday I’ll get there 🙂¹Thanks to James Clear for inspiring me to blog about my year, rather than just podcast about it. You rock.