Writing

My 2022 Reflection

Welcome back to another annual review. At the end of every year, I like to reflect on what happened in the last year. Then afterwards, I make a readable, public version so that others can benefit from my experiences and lessons.

The format has changed a little this year. For each area of my life worthy of mentioning, I categorize them based on their net score rating with either:

W’s (formerly named what worked)
L’s (formerly named what didn’t work)

And then afterwards, I share the most important lessons I learned.

A lot happened in the last year, so this ended up becoming quite lengthy and in all honesty, I don’t care to simplify it any further. So let’s get right into it.

L’s

Let’s start off with the more challenging topics, the L’s.

Being unfocused

As I was doing my year-end reflections, I realized that I’m in a vicious cycle right now.

There are 2 things I want to do more than anything else:

Working with clients 1 on 1 with energy work
Creating content around self-improvement & my journey

But my challenge is because I haven’t leaned into either of these businesses enough to the point where I can make enough money to support my lifestyle, I’ve needed to focus on alternative financing through freelance marketing. But because my time and energy are reduced by creating for others, I struggle to give either of the 2 the necessary resource that they need to thrive, thus continuing the cycle.

Not only that, but this cycle stops me from doing more of what I want to do. I experience unnecessary guilt and pressure when I’m doing anything but those 2 and don’t feel like I have enough time to do what I really want to do.

Though I’m grateful for the amazing opportunity that freelance has provided me in the past year, I’m tired of making for others and I want to zero in on taking the consulting + energy work business seriously, so that I may create a financial situation in where I can do just this and content creation all the time.

I used to love taking on multiple projects, but I’ve come to realize that I’m spreading myself too thin right now and I want to focus on 2 max. I only have so much time and energy in a day, and I want to lean into my magic zones and focus on the highest leverage work that brings me closer to my goals, build businesses that I love working on and fundamentally change my life from a financial and business perspective. I made some serious progress in the last year on my ability to focus on a day-to-day level, now I crave focus within the businesses I’m taking on.

Perfomance consulting¹

I finished last year’s reflection with, “by the time my 2022 reflection comes, I plan to finally put Moxey Energetics under what worked.” Unfortunately, this prediction was wrong. While I began the year thinking that it would be my main focus, I couldn’t figure things out fast enough so in order to create money, I tabled this business for almost the whole year to focus on building up my freelance marketing business. But as the year came to a close, I became very tired of creating for others and I could feel this insanely strong pull to do this business even though I was terrified of doing so.

Ever since, I’ve been using the same tools and strategies that I’ll be offering to get myself to a point where I’m not crippled by my fears so that I can take action on launching this and building the business. I’ve been working through all the essential blocks recently and really healing a lot. I’m pleased to say that it’s working and I’m working.

I’m not fucking around when I say this is the year I finally build up this business to the point where I can fully exist with this type of work as my main source of income. There’s nothing I want to do more than this, so it’s been elevated to top priority and I’m actively working away at this goal, finally. First things first, I need to replace my freelance income with consulting, then I’ll be able to break the cycle and lean into this work and content creation 100% again.

Also of note, I’ve gotta give myself credit for getting certified in one of the techniques I use and gaining some experience with the “consulting/coaching” side of things during that event. Additionally, I really lived and breathed the techniques, always defaulting into using the techniques on myself that I offer in my services and healed an amazing amount of things in the last year. I also began laying the foundations of how the business will win in the next year.

All that said, in the coming year, here’s what I’ll need to improve on:

A full-blown sales system for generating leads, onboarding clients, etc. as I’ve had nothing, which breeds no customers
Confidence that this type of work can work as effectively on other people as it has on me. This will come with experience and case studies.
Continuing to work through the fact that I’m not just some life coach, but rather providing a valuable service and some consulting on the side
My ability to sell the concept of energy work and explain it effectively from all different angles — especially without sounding crazy
My self-image. Reverse the current self-image where I see myself as the type of person who doesn’t follow through on a business like this and work through my lack of self-trust I have around my ability to stick with it and make this happen
Getting in the game and staying in the game. Consistency.
Developing a more affordable group program, where I can work with people who want to do this kind of work but can’t necessarily afford the price of my 1 on 1 work.

Sales

While I grew in sales and negotiations this year through selling myself, negotiating in freelance jobs and communicating through various relationships across the areas of my life, I still have so much to grow in this regard. Right now, I see myself as more of a creative than a salesman, but in order to achieve my goals, I need to dedicate myself to sales. I need to strongly level up my ability to take ideas, effectively communicate them to others and inspire them to take the action that I want them to. This is fundamental to all areas of my life — client acquisition, negotiations, communication with content creation, relationships, women and even politics. Above all, my future is very dependent on how great I can become at selling my consulting/energy work services. And I really need get good with not only receiving no’s, but also persevering in the face of rejection.

YouTube

It’s a shame this is an L because as I mentioned, it’s one of the things I care about most. But the challenge is, I was very resistant to sitting down and editing complex videos, I barely pressed upload (especially on my main channel) and overall, I just really lacked consistency. In total, I only posted 1 video and 1 short on my main channel, and 15 videos on the second channel.

The truth is, I didn’t manage my resources correctly. I struggled to make videos for myself when I was investing much of my time and energy into creating for others on a freelance basis. I was also dealing with a sneaky case of perfectionism where I was attached to making videos above my current skill level — something I’ve thankfully since let go of — and I placed the first “moving out” video on such a pedestal because it was such a special experience for me that would only ever happen once. Lastly, I became way too attached to releasing videos in the order that they happened in and told myself I wouldn’t let myself post anything else until the moving video was done.

Beyond these main culprits, there were many additional causes that contributed to my lack of consistency this year — being absolutely consumed by algorithms and retention, the terrible cycle of being “behind” in content, too much pressure put on just one video that blocked the rest, having too many projects open at once, experiencing a great deal of chaos in my mind, overthinking, perfectionism, resistance to editing complicated videos, a rigid style of creating and a lack of efficient system. I even had a goal to get monetized and totally could’ve done it thanks to the success of the drone video, but I couldn’t manage to do the most important thing within content creation — post.

Unfortunately, all of these things combined cost me a full year of potential progress on my main channel and sadly, this year will ultimately be remembered as one where I barely posted any content. Thankfully, most of the aforementioned has been either healed or corrected. And as a result, I believe the next year will look way different because, despite the L’s, I advanced my craft, processes and knowledge.

The drone video that I posted days before 2022 became my first video to “hit the algorithm” and ended up doing 30K views by the end of the year and taught me a lot about how the YouTube algorithm works. And on my second channel, I had multiple videos do quite well too — especially political ones — to the point where my second channel hit 500 subscribers and passed my main channel (lol). And while I had a huge hiatus, I still managed to film, storyboard and partially edited a handful of unreleased videos, including 2 of the moving videos and a video about shaving my head — all of which will hopefully be released very soon.

My filmmaking, storytelling and editing were highly improved from the unreleased videos and from freelance work, which I’ll cover more in the other sections. I learned a lot through observing others’ content — whether it was studying their filming, editing, titles, or thumbnails. I levelled up my thumbnail design skills and I’m ready to take thumbnails just as seriously as I take making videos, with some potential serious edits in favour of an even greater click-through rate.². And I also found a much better minimalistic process for filming key moments in my journey, with my default becoming to film reusable b-roll rather than chaotic a-roll. I developed a new process for making selects and gave myself permission to lean hardcore into pancake editing, my preferred editing style of choice³. My camera work levelled up, which I’ll talk more about within filmmaking and photography.

My creative process is way different now thanks to spiritual evolution and levelling up my systems. It’s more peaceful, calm and orderly rather than chaotic and all over the place. I’m taking on less, focusing more, and seeing things to completion — behaviour that was very challenging to change, but I’m so happy I did. The internal peace has changed the game because of how needed it is to counteract the chaos and matrix that is editing videos. I’m letting my creation be less rigid and more flow based, giving myself permission to jump back and forth between the various stages of making videos, being willing to redo the same work in a different way, taking breaks, forcing things less, and letting things naturally happen.⁴ I’m also caring a lot less about silly things like making sure the project can make sense in the future, everything’s perfectly organized in the timeline, or that its creation was documented well — with rare exception, it doesn’t fucking matter. I’m still taking things seriously as I want to make the best videos possible, but it’s equally off of a pedestal and I’m ready to just post.

I got a taste of what it was like to post in real-time with a handful of videos this year ⁵, and while editing after filming used to be something I subconsciously feared, I’m now addicted to how much smoother and more enjoyable the process is from start to finish. I also had major detachments occur around releasing almost all the videos in my “vault”, so I don’t have much to catch up on before I’m creating in real time again and can recreate this. I did a lot of healing on this pattern this year, now I just need to get caught up and heal anything in the way of me staying caught up.

The strategy is clear for the next year. While the bar is still pretty high for main channel videos, I’ve lowered my expectations of quality to the point where I can post whatever my best work is at the time, then just keep improving. As of current, I want almost all the main channel videos to be either my best work or high-value concepts that can take off on the algorithm. I’m leaning towards truth-seeking and self-improvement, specifically targeting young male entrepreneurs and creators. Going forward, while I might seem like the main character at times, the ultimate person I’ll be making for is my audience. I’ll be a guinea pig for experiments, the character in the story and sharing my perspectives on things, but ultimately, it’s so that you can improve, grow, expand and evolve.

As for the other aspects, now that shorts are on their own tab, I’ll also be posting independent, standalone short-form vertical content, teasers for long-form videos and maybe even some clips, all designed to assist with channel growth and graduate people into my library of long-form content. I’ll also be utilizing the community tab as a place to connect with my existing audience, but also to growth hack my way into an untapped audience.

On the second channel, I think I’m going to capitalize on the rise of reaction videos, and then post casual vlogs and use it as a catch-all for anything else that isn’t much about personal development but I still want to post. I’m still not 100% what I’m doing with the podcast, but you can check that out here. And last but not least, I’m starting a locals so that only an exclusive set of people can see the rawest, most behind-the-scenes content that I have, rather than having it on the second channel — out in the public for anyone to see and subject to an algorithm to decide its fate.

The new place, the gear, the clarity, the mindset, the energy, the skills, the algorithm knowledge, the storytelling, the minimalistic systems and processes — the foundation has been laid. It’s clear what I want to make, I just need to execute. In order to take content seriously in the next year however, my next step is to create a financial situation where I have the time and energy to create consistently, and this will be accomplished by replacing my freelance income with performance consulting.

I really, really, really hope that by summer, I’ve leaned fully into both performance consulting and content creation, I’m continuing to level up all aspects of this craft, staying consistent, growing my audience, posting everywhere I want to, and above all? Being so organized and up to date with content that I can spontaneously write, film and edit something, and even put it out the same day if I want to. This is the dream for me.

Social media

I’ve been off of social media for almost a whole year and it was fucking amazing.⁶ I’ve been heads down, insular and focused, only reachable through messaging apps like text, email and discord. As a consumer, I see this as an absolute win⁷. But because I’m a creator, this is an L.

As with years prior, I didn’t feel the need to create short-form content as it wasn’t a priority for me in the least. The only posts I made were political and shared out of sheer obligation. But I got to the point where I loathed social media. I grew tired of watching people go back to normal as if we weren’t living in a very fucked up world at the moment, I hit new levels of not caring about looking at people’s content, I completely lost interest in posting and then stopped going on altogether. After a few months of inactivity, I deactivated my accounts⁸, and just occasionally put out hot takes on Twitter, post and ghost style.⁹

The biggest challenge for me is that I’ve blended personal and professional on these accounts, but I don’t want that to be the case anymore. I’ve been fantasizing about unfollowing everyone across all accounts because I’m not built for looking at feeds and letting algorithms tell me what I should look at, but I do like using social media to seek out things and use it as a tool for distribution. I also absolutely despise the games of following people back — especially people from my past I don’t care to follow on social anymore but either still care about or don’t want to burn bridges with, as well as the unnecessary pressure to follow new people that I meet, even though it’s clearly a non-personal account. This nonsense dramatically reduced the quality of my life when my accounts were active and its absence has strongly increased the quality of my life. So, there’s a very strong chance that I unfollow everyone when I’m ready to return.

And as a creator, I do want these accounts back at this point. They’re incredible tools for distribution, but that’s where it stops for me. I don’t want to be following people or consuming much content if any on these apps. I just want to post and ghost. And with the massive success of the Andrew Tate/Sneako model in 2022, it became apparent how useful these accounts can be and gave me a much clearer idea of how I want to use my socials. The biggest difference though is that instead of leaning so hard into politics as I have in years past, it’s time to focus on self-improvement content again, with politics and truth-seeking sprinkled in on the side. Personal excellence is the ultimate rebellion and if we are to change things in the world, we’re going to need a full-on cultural reset. I’ll talk about this more in the politics section.

I’ll also need to level up my systems for creating content for socials and just lean fully into repurposing and clipping. I’ll also need to get back into the swing of creating and sharing in real-time again with each of the platforms that I want to. But before I do all that, I need to get business in check, get my YouTube dialled and then I can return to socials, hopefully using it exclusively for distribution this time around.

Podcast

I planned on re-launching the podcast this year, but that timeline kept getting pushed back farther and farther as I wanted to get up to speed on my main channel first, which obviously didn’t happen. So, unfortunately, the podcast remained inactive too.

Before I re-launch the podcast in 2023, there are some key things I need to get clear on:

The niche I want to serve and who I want the audience to be. It’s likely to be young men — both creators and entrepreneurs — who are red-pilled and are in a mindset of self-improvement, but I need more clarity on this.
The value proposition that I want to offer the audience and the format that this might take. And then getting crystal clear on why listeners should bother investing their time and energy into this instead of another show. And then learning to sell this effectively.
The differences between this format and other formats like the main channel and second channel (and really sitting down, getting honest with myself and questioning if it’s even worth doing a podcast right now, or if it’s better to focus in on these 2 instead)
Who I’ll have on the show and who I won’t. Then if they aren’t a match, I need to get better at saying no and setting boundaries, while also being potentially more open to the types of guests I’ll have on my show if I’m just being too closed-minded on the matter just because I disagree with them on certain things.¹⁰
The value proposition that I as the podcast host have to offer guests, so that I can work towards landing bigger and bigger guests
Where I’ll put the long-form video, whether that’s behind a paywall, on Spotify, on a separate YouTube channel or all in one.

And when I return? Clips, clips and more clips. This is the obvious move, as we live in a clip-centric world now.

Style

I continued my minimalistic style, wearing black Lululemon pants with 9 black H&M t-shirts and really liked it. So much so, that the all-black-everything vibe has leaked into my other material possessions.¹¹

But the rest of my style needs an upgrade. For sweaters, I want a couple of black H&M hoodies to replace the big-ass grey sweater I currently rock.¹² For summer wear, invest in some black shorts from lululemon so I’m not rocking sweat shorts from like 5 years ago. For gym wear, I need to find black t-shirts that better fit my long torso and pants that are better for the gym because my shirt raises too high on certain exercises, exposing my stomach if I don’t tuck it in tight enough. And, I’ve been rocking the decade-old slightly baggy Adidas track pants that were once my Dad’s lol, so those need a comfortable and tighter upgrade too.

The biggest change that’s required, however? My hair. I’m over it. Long hair was fun for a minute, but near the end of the year, I really grew to dislike it — especially after being red-pilled in the summer and realizing how low in priority your looks are as a man. Not only is hair like this a pain in the ass to maintain, but I look like a feminine, soy-boy, liberal — the complete opposite of what I’m working towards. Expect a hairstyle change in early 2023.

Moving out

Moving out was amazing. Living without parents under the same roof was critical to my development as a man. It allowed me to step up, practice adulting, lead in my own way and become the much-needed “adult” of the apartment. But who I did it and how it was received came back to bite me.

While it was cool to share the apartment with Tay at first, the excitement faded within a couple of months. Tay and I clashed so much for the rest of the year that it totally ruined the experience for me as a whole. While she remembers it fondly, I remember it for what it was — a few good moments with a whole lot of bullshit and shitty moments that clouded the good. Worst of all? I was gracious enough to let her boyfriend live there from April on — something they totally took for granted — and it ended up being my worst L of the whole damn year for a host of reasons. Things were cool at first, but as the facade faded, this later became a massive pain in my ass and absolutely killed my quality of life.

If I ever do roommates again, I need to be way more selective of the type of people I’ll live with, as the wrong people can completely steal your time, energy and productivity. And in cases like this, if you’re living with someone you can’t trust, it can really mess with your sleep, your health and your consciousness levels too. It pains me to think about how much more I could’ve accomplished this year if I was living with higher-quality people (or better yet, none!)

Finances

As for my current situation, I’ve relied too much on credit in recent years and I have way more debt than I’d prefer. If I do things right in the next year, I might be able to clear all this and it would be so nice. I also want to form better habits around money, especially saving for my future and saving for taxes — something I failed to do last year because I was living very much on the wire and re-investing so much back into my gear.

Freelance was a good step in the right direction as I was working fewer hours with higher pay because I was working on high-leverage, valuable tasks. But as I mentioned many times in this reflection, I want to go all in with consulting and energy work as my main source of income, continuing to raise my rates to whole new stratospheres, helping people in incredibly profound and impactful ways¹³, and getting paid handsomely for the transformations that I’ll help facilitate.

There are so many reasons why it’s essential for me to continue levelling up my rates and income and I’m glad that I’m finally taking this seriously, as it’s the best chance I have at experiencing real freedom. It’s time to get out of this trap that I’ve put myself in of not having enough money to do exactly what I want to do within reason. I want to save up for a proper runway, be able to lean into exactly what interests me the most and absolutely dominate at whatever I’m doing, without the stress of making enough to survive each money. I want to reduce the tension that I have to pay bills and survive, have way more time and energy to work on content, re-invest in my health, make strategic investments and create an infrastructure where I can eventually provide for my family. Enough is enough, it’s time to transform this area of my life.

Reflections

As always, at the end of every week, I reflected. But this year, I tried some experiments. At the end of every month, I did a monthly reflection by answering similar questions, but taking a higher level approach and then reread weekly reflections and wrote the highlights. I repeated this same formula for quarterly reflections too, but instead of revisiting the monthly reflections in that time period. And then for the annual reflections, I revisited the 4 quarterly reflections.

On one hand, the self-reflection and documentation of my journey were good. The practice forced me to slow down, get present and read past writing. I had no choice but to simplify the process as time went on, improving my ability to let go of inessential points, say no and edit them out of the higher-level reflections. But the pendulum swung too far and it became a practice that took way too much of my time and energy. These reflections were so vigorous and cumbersome that at times, they’d get completely in the way of what I wanted to do be doing — moving forward. I’m not sure exactly what I want to do next year, but If I choose to continue monthly and quarterly reflections, I’ll need to find a much more simplified format so that it’s a much higher ROI. But overall, weekly reflections are still a W.

W’s

Spirituality & personal growth

This was a tremendous year for my personal growth and spirituality — and they’re so interconnected these days that I’m combining them here. I invested an average of an hour a day (usually first thing) into utilizing healing & transformation techniques (sounds woo woo but are the best tools for deep change that I’ve ever come across), and a full year of practicing with new processes resulted in so much change in my being, actions and life.

My mind and energy became much calmer and grounded, and it’s had an incredible effect on my work and productivity. The way I perceive time is different; time passes by much slower now. I’m here, now, in the present and seeing the matrix for what it is. My mind is moving slower, but in a way that is faster in the net score (challenging to explain this unless you’re living it). Rarely do I try to rush things, but rather do them in their proper time. My ego is still present, but it continues to have less and less power over me.

I’ve continued to consistently work towards healing my fears and confronting that which scares me through exposure to the feelings and taking the necessary action. I’m committing to fewer inessential things that I don’t want to do and doing more of both what I actually want to do and making sure I’m doing the essential, but less-than-fun tasks. I’m leaning into minimalism more than ever. I find myself letting go of more and more. It’s become easier to edit in all aspects of life — making the necessary cuts, excluding things that don’t need to be there, letting go of the inessential — and it’s been huge for my creativity too. I’ve been able to discard footage easier and easier and realized that it’s unreasonable to think that I can make at the scale that I want to and keep all the raw footage, at least right now.

I’m continuing to say less and imply more within writing and video. I’m less rigid with my processes for creation, letting things flow more and happen without absolute structure/order. I’m letting myself lean into more of who and what I want to be rather than what the world thinks I should be. I’ve learned to be okay with not being “good” or “bad” but just showing up as I am, while still doing my best to stay moral and ethical. I’ve finally let myself use the dark side for creativity to refocus myself, then return to the light so I don’t burn myself or others and it’s been critical to my progress over the last month or so. I’m getting better at handling more and more pressure and responsibility. I’ve gotten more comfortable with negotiations, debates and sales. I’m people-pleasing less and less. I’ve made mental masterminds a go-to ritual again and it’s unlocked so much clarity for me¹⁴. I’m letting my intuition guide me more and more and getting more and more clear at deciphering the readings. I’ve worked on getting better at communicating with people, holding certain standards, and giving challenging truths.

I also cut caffeine from my daily habits¹⁵, and I now only indulge in it around once a week or so. It’s forced me to rely on my naturally produced energy, which resulted in an increase in physical energy and a more regulated mood due to a lack of highs and crashes. And instead of having cracked-out mornings where I go all out, I’m able to execute for much longer throughout the day and tackle essential work no matter what time of day or state that I’m in because I don’t need that “high” to get my best work done.

A lot of the aforementioned is hard to quantify and measure at the moment, but all in all, you’ll see in the coming year based on my forthcoming results in many ways that it’s been another great year for my evolution.

Productivity & execution

Productivity is just different now. The biggest changes came from spirituality — the newfound calm in my mind and energy has directly affected my execution. I’m leaking less energy from unnecessary stress. I’m making things so much simpler and easier on myself. The chaos of editing videos, creating content and project management has become so much simpler because I feel like I’m able to see through the matrix of things.

My systems have simplified, and I don’t care about keeping everything perfectly organized, just good enough. Instead of committing to a big list of things every day, I set a main focus for each day that I can go all in on¹⁶, then once it’s complete, I can focus on secondary tasks. Focusing my day on 1 “theme” rather than splitting up my day into a whole host of projects has not only been way more enjoyable, but it’s also helped me get a lot more done.

I worked on healing my resistance to going faster and my attachment to being slow, and since, my speeds have changed big time. I used to subconsciously make things take longer than they should, but that’s a thing of the past now. I worked on seeing myself as the type of person who does things in their proper time and I’m incredibly grateful that this has been embodied now. I’m doing the same things in a fraction of the time without rushing things and being much more present. Raising my freelance rate to $50/h CAD also really helped with this because it became a game of justifying what my time was worth, mostly to myself.

I’ve done a much better job of doing things in their proper time, and following through on timelines for both work and personal projects — even if it’s uncomfortable to do. Procrastination is much rarer. This is easily measured by looking at the quarterly creator reflections from earlier in the year taking around 50 days, while recent ones take around 10 days (and this is only going to get even better in 2023). Instead of fearing timelines, I’ve become friends with them. Timelines have become fun to set because I don’t see them as a mini-death, but rather a game of how good I can make something within the time allotted. And worst comes to worst, I can always reschedule or renegotiate if it’s genuinely necessary.

I fell in love with focus, doing things to completion and being in “real-time”. I used to spread myself super thin, create way too many open loops for myself by starting new things without finishing the prior projects/tasks, and as a result, I was constantly “behind”. But I’ve been actively doing everything I can to reverse all three patterns at an energetic and behavioural level to leave this cycle in the past. Despite the change being very uncomfortable at first, I forced myself to focus on one thing at a time and bring it to completion before beginning something else — no matter how much I didn’t want to do it — and did this with content creation, freelance, food and anywhere the pattern was manifesting. This new approach to execution became a habit shortly afterwards and helped me reduce the amount of unnecessary stress I had and the backlog of open loops I’d need to tackle after shrunk significantly. This helped me get a lot more done and made work that much more enjoyable. And in the next year, it’s going to get even better. I can’t wait.

In short, the process of work has become a whole lot more fun, simple and easy now — even for challenging tasks.

Getting my own apartment

As an introvert, it’s been a dream of mine for over a decade to live on my own, and in December 2022, I finally got my own apartment! A big thank you to everyone who helped me with accomplishing this. It’s stretching me a lot and forcing me to evolve as it’s a significant investment each month, but the added time, energy, productivity and peace I’ve received so far from being here has been worth every penny so far. It’s just me, my cat and a whole lot of work, as it doubles as my office and studio as well. While it has different stresses than the last place, I’m sleeping so much better now, can put my guard down and I’m able to flow so much easier in whatever I’m focused on learning, creating and building. This has been one of the best investments I’ve ever made.

Freelance

While I’m over the idea of creating for others and I want nothing more than to replace my freelance income with consulting and energy work in 2023, freelance grew me a lot this year.

When I wasn’t taking the necessary actions to build my own business at the beginning of the year, my friend offered me a position as a content creator for a service business he and his partner were launching, and after sitting with it, I accepted that it wasn’t time to focus on building the energy work business yet, so I humbled myself, accept their offer and prioritized building their business instead.¹⁷

It started as just content creation, but as time progressed and situations arose, I proved my usefulness by becoming their all-in-one marketing guy. It gave me a tremendous opportunity to get paid to develop my skills in filming, editing, storytelling, photography, SEO, design and most notably — advertising. Not only was it cheat codes to get paid to improve my skills doing things I liked, but it was also for a real business with real stakes and it felt incredible to do what I could on the marketing front to help them build their business and brand. Even though I knew how much I had to grow, for the first time ever, I felt like a professional marketer.

While we originally planned for this to be a “job”, we ended up setting things up on a freelance basis, and boy am I ever glad we did. This slight shift allowed me to work with them, rather than for them. This allowed me to finally feel like a real entrepreneur, gave me the independence I required and forced me to handle my side of the freelance business.

This whole experience grew me so much. I was finally making money creating for a living, which was a dream come true and allowed me to further my craft for my own projects in the future. Because I was expected to output creative on a consistent basis, I was forced to drop my perfectionism and ship creative to reach timelines and client expectations. I became so much more comfortable with client management, both through my main client Hero and other clients I had the privilege of working with as well. For businesses where I was being paid hourly like with Hero, I learned how to effectively track my time and bill it, and healed the various insecurities and resistant points that came with this. I also became more comfortable charging higher and higher rates, and by Q4 I raised my rate from $35 CAD/h to $50 CAD/h — achieving a goal that I’ve had for a few years.

Having a consistent income with ever-improving rates also gave me the opportunity to re-invest in my business, be less stressed financially, counter inflation, and have an answer that I’m confident in when people ask what I do¹⁸

Filmmaking, storytelling

While I considered my YouTube endeavours a failure this year, my progression with filmmaking and storytelling was quite the opposite.

I watched myself transform into a very different person when the cameras were filming — be it in front of the camera or behind. Continuing from last year, I felt more and more like a filmmaker and videographer as time went on — checking off my shot list, leaning into variety to give myself options in the edit and doing anything to get the right shot and tell the story in a more effective manner. I continued my momentum from last year with visual storytelling and began to default into filming b-roll at all times, capturing footage that I could later use for storytelling. I also really worked on showing rather than telling, which will be evident in my style when I began posting again soon. Now, I did take filmmaking a little too seriously to the point where my standards became too high for what I wanted to post on YouTube and it stopped me from posting content because I wanted everything I put on my main channel to be genuinely perfect with Hollywood-level quality. But thankfully, later on in the year, I found a better way to think about things while also still feeling like a filmmaker, so things will be different next year.

I’m much more comfortable with my camera now. My understanding of exposure, motion blur, depth of field and white balance is so much stronger. As a result, I’m thinking less about what settings to use and I’m able to instead capture the shot when the moment arises. Due to practice, my vision and eye for composition improved a lot. I’m able to see potential shots easier, and not only do I reposition the camera but I also reposition myself to get much better shots — and it’s only going to get better from here on in. I got great practice with filming the freedom convoy passthrough, being on-site multiple times with Hero, filming all sorts of b-roll that I witnessed in the world around me and filming myself both out in the world and within the controlled environment of my apartment.

I also levelled up tons within storytelling too. I got the opportunity to study Casey Neistat’s filmmaking and storytelling course, which really helped me learn how to tell better stories in both a spontaneous and premeditated fashion, and it was an absolute privilege to see his process of making a film from start to finish. After he showed us how 3 act narratives worked, something just clicked in my mind, and I became completely fixated on storytelling and started viewing everything through that lens. From then on in, everything I was consuming became a practice to understand the 3 act narrative being told and I began implementing it into anything I was creating too — be it short-form content, long-form content, ads, writing, designs, websites — you name it. Everything is a story that’s being told, you just need to have the perspective to consciously see it.

In the upcoming year, I’d like to work on levelling up my color grading skills, continue to improve my storytelling and get comfortable filming in more places where I currently feel uncomfortable filming — especially where I don’t feel like I’m “allowed”, like the gym or droning in areas where people might not like it. I also want to work on removing obvious information so that I can better respect my audience’s intelligence and allow them to arrive at conclusions, rather than outright telling them what to think. I also want to spend more time filming just for the sake of, going back and extracting the reusable b-roll from past shoots, and be up to pace on my work so that I can be able to film whatever and have fun with it, without stress. And last but not least, I’d like to reduce my perfectionism and increase my speed (especially in regards to b-roll/visual storytelling, and finding someone to help with graphics) so I can pump out “films” consistently.

Photography

I entered the year with a very basic set of photography skills. I could still take some decent photos, but I was unsatisfied with my photo editing, portrait photography and some of my wide-angle photography, too. I could never quite seem to create the look that I was aiming for, be it in camera or in post. Worst of all, I was subconsciously scared of Lightroom and avoided it like the plague, despite it being what I’d need the most.

Early on in the year, I forced myself to get consistently uncomfortable. I made myself come back to Lightroom over and over again, learning the basic features, and then shortly after, I was able to do some basic edits and I became comfortable enough to stop avoiding the tool. I then get the opportunity to begin doing commercial shoots with Hero in the spring and said yes, figuring things out as I went and getting some great practice, and even though the shots came out pretty well, I still wasn’t fully pleased with the output.

Then in the summer, I got serious about levelling up my photography and photo editing as these were arguably the weakest skills in the stack and I needed them to improve so I could justify increasing my rates. I studied how to take better photos — especially portrait photography — and in addition to real-life shoots with freelance and capturing things in everyday life, I was consciously taking pictures in my mind all the time to help cultivate my vision. I also continued levelling up my photo editing skills and sought out how I could find my “style”, and after lots of practice, I arrived at a style that I was happy with by the end of the summer! Around this time, I realized that my mission with photography was to make people appreciate their day-to-day lives more by finding the beauty and interestingness in the seemingly mundane aspects of the world that surrounds us.¹⁸This realization came because I noticed that I was so much more interested in taking beautiful photos of my casual surroundings in my apartment rather than going out and seeking out extravagant, rare scenery. I really like finding the interestingness in what others might consider boring.

During the rest of the year, in addition to the normal shoots and practice, I did my first couples shoot, which was a lot of fun but I definitely need to work on my understanding of posing¹⁹ and I had a shoot with Hero at our local mall — both of which I shot quite well! For the edits, I found myself bored with the style from summer, so I evolved it into a new style with warmer tones, darker blacks, higher saturation and began dipping my toes into the world of colour manipulation (which is where the magic really happens). And then to close out the year, I was finally at a skill level where I could take the prior year’s Christmas photos that I could never quite edit to a satisfactory level and got them all to a point where I was confident enough in the edits and color manipulation to share them with my family in time for this year’s Christmas.

Overall, photography was been a major point of growth for me this year. My eye and vision have evolved so much over the last 12 months and I’m finally proud of the photos I’m taking and the edits I’m making that I feel comfortable enough to share them with the world. Photography has quickly become one of my favourite things to do, creatively. Not only is it an amazing way to tell visual stories and do so in a potentially low-lift fashion, but it’s genuinely so much fun to shoot, then immediately jump into Lightroom to edit the photos and really bring them to life.

In the next year, I’d like to upgrade my gear from a point-and-shoot (lol)²⁰ to a hybrid full-frame camera that can capture images at a higher MP, in s-log format for more editing capabilities and then additionally, getting a wide-angle lens in the range of 12-16mm to go far wider than my current max of 24mm for landscape photography. I want to learn more about how to better light subjects in controlled environments, how to do so in nature, and how to work with conditions like a harsh sun or blown-out backgrounds to make magic happen. For editing, I also want to continue learning more about color manipulation and advanced editing techniques, utilizing AI in the process. To document my journey, I want to find/create a place to put all my photos from the past couple of years to show my progression. And then, I want to just be completely up to date and get to the point where everything I shoot can be immediately edited and posted somewhere.²¹

Gear

Gear is only as good as the creator behind it, but since my skills are growing so much, I made some big upgrades this year to re-invest back into the business. I finally made the switch to Mac, replacing a dying Dell XPS with an insanely powerful 16” M1 Max MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM and an 8TB SSD. It took me a minute for my mind to adjust to MacOS, but overall it’s been a dream come true to finally be integrated into the Apple ecosystem and have such a powerful tool. It’s been amazing to finally accomplish this goal. In search of greater screen real estate, I also finally got a 32-inch 4K external monitor with a magic mouse and magic keyboard, and it’s fundamentally changed the editing game²². After rocking an ancient iPhone X for 4 years, I also upgraded to the iPhone 14 Pro Max and it’s been amazing to take pictures and videos that look great on the fly. Continuing with the additions, I purchased a Manfrotto tripod, Neewer LED lights, a Joby 5K Tripod, Insta360 Go 2 and Topaz AI. I had hoped to finance a full-frame camera by year-end, but decided that the MacBook was of much greater priority²³ and that ultimately getting my own apartment would be a far greater investment than to take some better photos and videos.²⁴ So I’ll continue being patient and likely by the end of next 2023 I’ll have financed a Sony A7IV and some other badass lenses to achieve my dream setup, just like I did with my laptop/monitor setup this year.

Writing

Another year, more reps. This was a close one, but I’m putting this in the W column because I kept with it and I felt like I improved a lot. I wrote weekly newsletters for the first quarter of the year, then switched up the frequency to “here and there” afterwards because it wasn’t a priority. I wrote 4 quarterly creator reflections to document my journey of becoming a successful creator. I also wrote many outlines/scripts for videos, most of them obviously unpublished. And then on the back end, I got a lot of accidental practice with writing through reflections and journaling.

As my mind and energy become more and more calm, centered and focused, I find the act of writing and communicating my ideas becomes easier and easier. My process has evolved; beginning everything with points and a rough structure, then expanding from there. I’m trying to become less and less of a perfectionist and just write at my current level of skill, while always looking to improve my structure, punctuation and vocabulary. Whether it’s writing for my website or just simply sending a text message — any and every time I write is an opportunity to evolve my craft.

In the next year, I have a few things to improve on. First and foremost, I want to bring one-off blog posts back, revive the newsletter from the dead, make it a real newsletter that is sent out, and of course, continue upgrading my skills in all ways, while taking things lightly and imperfectly. But the main thing I need to improve is quality vs. speed. I thought I was better at this because I did so well for the past 6 months, but after writing this specific reflection, it’s clear to me how much I still have to grow. I’m still way too attached to punching above my weight class in writing, especially when I’m trying to make “document” my journey. This manifests as me spending way too much time rewriting things, just like I did here.²⁵ I’m in an awkward stage right now where I want to be a proficient writer, but my clarity of thought and writing skill isn’t quite there yet. I want to deliver the message in an accurate way, but I also want it to have amazing grammar, structure and flow, to the point where I spend ungodly amounts of time on re-writing only for me to eventually say fuck it and post it because it’s time to move on. While I recognize that writing is re-writing, I still don’t know exactly what the right move is here. Is it better for me to put out an earlier draft and move on to my next work, or is it better for me to continue re-writing until it’s worthy of sharing? Maybe even somewhere in between, where I set a timeline on when I need to release it, utilizing Parkinson’s Law and getting some rewrites in.²⁶ One thing I know for sure is that down the line, I’d like to get both an editor and a writing coach.

Networking

In the past, networking always fell by the wayside partially due to 1. opting for skill development 2. insecurity and thinking I’m not far enough in my journey to bring people value 3) creatives are typically way too liberal and I don’t need any more progressives in my network, so I’ve held back on meeting people who do the same work I do. As a result, my network is a lot smaller than it probably should be. But, without even meaning to, I began to expand my network this year. When I moved out I met many new people both in the apartment building and when I rejoined GoodLife. Then later in the year, I joined Sneako’s Creativity Kit and found myself in a rare community of young, based young creatives and entrepreneurs and thankfully, have built some really cool friendships!

It’s been growth-inducing to get out of my comfort zone, own wherever I’m at in my journey, and meet new people. Especially becoming very involved in The Creativity Kit where I know they’re all based and aware of what’s going on in the world, so there’s no need to have your guard up. Going forward, I’d like to continue expanding my network, but with a couple of changes. When my social accounts are active again, network without following people on social. And in preparation for the performance consulting business, instead of positioning myself as a content creator or freelance creative, start letting my existing and future network know that this is what I do. Nerve-wracking, but essential.

Humility

Everyone knows I’ve got an ego. But this year, I humbled myself in many ways a lot.

Firstly, teaming up with others to work on their businesses instead of my prioritizing my own because I wasn’t doing what was necessary to make my business win and I needed to survive. I took their desires into consideration to help them create not what I wanted, but what they wanted, while equally letting them know in a way that could be received what I thought the right path was, but ultimately letting them do what they want to. Bonus point, some of these clients were under 20. Thankfully, anyone I worked with who was younger was wise beyond their years so it was rarely an issue.

Secondly, taking an honest perspective of where I’m at. I accepted the fact that I’m not where I want to be and that while I am good at some things, I have so much to learn and grow in each area of my life. Even though sometimes I like to think I’m a genius or special, if I’m being truly honest, I’m not shit and I don’t know shit. No matter how much I win, how skilled I become, or how much I learn in one area, I’ll still be completely incompetent, ignorant and taking L’s elsewhere. While I’m objectively better than others in certain aspects, they’re better than me in others, so it’s all relative. And at the end of the day, we’re all just souls temporarily having a human experience anyway and we’re all going to die shortly.

Thirdly, joining the Creativity Kit. In the past, I liked being the person who’s sharing their point of view, speaking up and challenging ideas. But instead, if the professors were present, I humbled myself, shut myself the fuck up and showed up as a student eager to learn what Sneako, Musa and their guests had to share. While I asked a lot of questions, I acknowledged that my fellow members weren’t there for my take, so even if I disagreed with the professors on a topic, I didn’t challenge the teachers all that much. And instead, I paid them their respect.

Fourthly, how I deliver advice. Earlier in the year I watched a clip of Jordan Peterson talking about how he doesn’t want to bear the responsibility of someone’s decisions, and I don’t want to do it anymore either. While I still give people my 2 cents if I have something valuable to add, I understand that I only can only see so much and know so much, and I could be completely wrong. When giving advice about a decision someone needs to make, I always tell them to trust themselves more than me and make the decision they think is right, and in the process, I release myself from the burden of taking responsibility for their life. Though I have attained some knowledge over the years and therefore have some perspective that might be useful, the more I learn, the more I realize that in the grand scheme of things, I know virtually nothing. So ultimately, I believe the best thing anyone can do is strengthen their intuition to the point where they can read it, trust it, and let it guide them in ways that the mind could never fathom.

Training

After a challenging prior year plus a month and a half off from lifting in December/January²⁷, I still had some strength but my physique was lacking. I set a clear goal 1) rebuild my physique to the best it’s ever been (my peak was around mid-2019) and 2) reach my old numbers for strength but with better form — and I’ve been chasing both ever since. I got myself back in the gym in February, and save for an injury where I needed to take a month off to heal, I’ve been insanely consistent with lifting as heavy as possible in the lower rep range for the whole year, using both the apartment gym then later GoodLife after those criminal vaccine passports were finally dropped. And while I didn’t fully reach my peak physique or numbers, I did get quite close and with far smarter training (especially using pause reps) and much better form. I’m looking good, feeling good and excited to reach these goals and beyond very, very soon.

In the next year, I’m looking to train even more by upping my training frequency from 3 days per week to 4, 5 or maybe even 6 days per week depending on how it goes. I’m ready to build my physique to a whole new level and hopefully find a smarter way to bulk so that it’s less tiring. I also want to pick a better time for the gym, as I needed to cut into my magic time last year to make the car situation work and it took away from my daily output. Additionally, I need to find a better strategy for my nutrition — I need to improve my protein level, reduce carbs a bit, and change either the amount that I’m bulking and/or the healthiness of my food choices so I don’t feel damn exhausted to the point I can’t do practically anything.

I’m incredibly grateful for the gym and the weight-lifting lifestyle as it’s amazing for masculinity, testosterone generation and getting me out of the apartment that I’m otherwise in 24/7. It’s an incredible foundation to build the rest of my life upon.

Taking the red pill

In the summer, I got absolutely red pilled and I’d like to thank Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Fresh & Fit, Sneako and their guests for having such an incredible impact on me over the last 6 months or so. While I started out thinking much of what they said was awesome but that extra 20% I didn’t quite agree with, I now agree with almost everything, with rare exception. Hearing their nuanced explanations, especially in regard to women, really opened my eyes. They woke me up to so much about masculinity and exposed how much feminism has subconsciously corrupted my mind. Their teachings helped re-wiring my thinking, refocus me on what my masculine duties are, and gave me clear logic for explaining a lot of things that I intuitively understood, but couldn’t explain very well. A massive thank you to all of these men.

So as for women? Not going to bother any time soon. I’ve intuitively understood this for years now, but now I understand the logic behind it and it really affirmed my path. So while there’s part of me that would love if I could spend time on this — especially because I’m in my own apartment now — it’s a terrible investment of time and energy because I’m in the 90% of men who are invisible to women, so it’s an unnecessary uphill battle. And if I was to be dating any of these women, I wouldn’t be able to command the terms that I’d require to make it work. As of right now, I doubt I’ll waste my time with women until I’m making at least $250K/year, have levelled up my game and have healed enough of my insecurities and resistance.

I’m in my building phase right now, leaning as far into my masculinity as I can. Every second I might spend on women is another second I could be improving myself, building up my business, creating more resources, levelling up my skills and knowledge, upgrading my strength and physique — the list goes on. So, I’m leaning all in and playing the long game, because as a man, if you do it right, your value goes up over time, not down.

Politics

I began this year being very invested in politics, and I end it with a completely different stance. This section is long, but bear with me because it’s critical to the times we’re living through.

In early 2022, politics was very in my face and affected my day-to-day because mask mandates, lockdowns and vaccine passports were all somehow still a thing despite a complete lack of scientific backing.²⁸. But thanks to the (political) science “changing” in response to the Freedom Convoy and upcoming elections, restrictions were (mostly) dropped and much of the world returned back to a degree of normalcy.²⁹ I continued to stay tapped in afterwards, but between people continuing to fall for such obvious narratives with the Ukraine War and both sides of the aisle being blatant hypocrites during Roe v Wade, it was the beginning of the end for me.

I learned very early on in the year who the World Economic Forum was and their sinister plan called “The Great Reset” that I heard rumblings of in years prior wasn’t just a conspiracy theory — it was completely real, and the organization had completely infiltrated the Democratic Party, some of the Republican party and many, many governments across the world, including my government in Canada. It became increasingly obvious to me and anyone paying close enough attention that these were the people pulling the strings and that they were intentionally destroying America, the West and the world. If something’s fucked up, they likely had a hand in it.

The world became very awake to what was going on. It wasn’t just your local conspiracy theorist, but instead, the general population recognized the corruption and became tired of woke propaganda — no one was down for this shit. After observing real behaviour and underlying statistics ³⁰, it became clear to me that the political divide was just the far-left (5-10% of the population) vs. literally everyone else. I thought that this situation could be peacefully corrected through the 2022 mid-term election by selecting the lesser of the two evils, the Republican Party. But I underestimated two things: 1. people’s identity in voting for who they always voted for 2. TDS³¹ and 3. our elections systems aren’t safe and secure like they promised. I had faith in the election systems, but after watching 2000 mules, applying critical thinking and observing the corruption in the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 midterms³² — it became clear to me that the election system had been compromised, the US was being illegally occupied, and thus this was all just theatre.

As a result, I’ve completely changed my stance on politics. For one, I no longer identify as a “conservative”, especially since conservatives proved themselves just as hypocritical as “liberals” in regard to bodily autonomy. At this point, I’d say I’m very anti-establishment and a free thinker who relates most with libertarianism — especially after learning about how taxation is theft and big government is an L — and I no longer identify with any one party but instead, I take things from all of them. And while I recognize there are some behaviours and tendencies that separate the left and right, ultimately, we’re not that different, we want very similar things and the divide between left and right is merely a tactic pushed forward by the parasitical elite class to keep us occupied, fighting amongst ourselves. Because the moment we realize that whether we can agree on policy or not, it’s still top vs. bottom, 1,000 vs. 8 billion, they’re finished.

After feeling incredibly hopeless about the facade of politics and being unsure of if we’ll win the current war for the world, I’ve adopted a new creed: “Personal excellence is the ultimate rebellion.” This one simple line, coined by one of the people I look up to most, Andy Frisella, has completely changed how I view the world. This is a lifestyle, mentality and effective response to the corruption all across the world. They want you, fat, stupid, poor, depressed, unhealthy, physically, mentally and emotionally weak, medicated, vaccinated, unaware, confused, fearful, disconnected — the list goes on. They want you this way because you’re easily controlled and they profit off of your debt and keep you needing their systems so that they don’t break. But if enough people dedicated themselves to excellence, they can opt out of their systems, say no their agenda and their plans for the world and existing corrupt systems will completely collapse. So the best thing we can do right now is to improve our lives and get our house in order in every way possible. Become successful, create resources and build your wealth. Keep your energy levels high, and grow closer to God/the universe. Become healthy, stay healthy and drop the trash. Become strong mentally, emotionally and physically. Stay awake, stay aware, master critical thinking — and get to the point where your life is set up in such a way that you can reject every single aspect of their agenda. It’s time to set your life up to escape the matrix and help those closest to you to do the same.

mic drop

As a result, this has shifted my political content strategy too. Knowing that we were living in unprecedented times that would be looked back on in the history books, I originally wanted to be one of the people who were leading the charge in helping to expose the corruption that was happening, doing my own version of what Andy Frisella and Jordan Peterson are doing now. I got very political for a minute in all of my social media posts and newsletters, but by the middle of the year, I had a major change of heart — I no longer felt the need to share everything that was going on. Firstly, I don’t have the level of experience, skills or time required to be able to research these topics, decipher exactly what is happening and then communicate it back to my audience in my own words (yet).³³ Secondly, I’ve been right about so much over the past few years (very sadly in the case of things like vaccines), as proven by data, the court of law and even Twitter files, but it’s time to shift things. Unlike in 2020 or even 2021 when I was the loudest, people get it now. They see the bullshit. The world is more awake than ever to what’s happening, even if they might not know all the specifics or be able to effectively communicate it. I don’t think we don’t need more explicit commentary — those tackling that are doing a great job. Instead, we need solutions for those who do see it.

So while I’m not fully leaving the political world and it will continue to be an undertone and something sprinkled in with my content, if I’m going to share a message about politics or world events, it’s going to need to be a significant highlight or event. And if I do say something, I don’t need to be the main source, I can always just share or react to theirs. In my content going forward, I plan to shift the theme of my content towards personal excellence above all, because this is the most effective way we can solve our problems at a cultural level. And thankfully, this is the niche that I’ve always loved the most, so it looks like we’re going back to our roots of self-improvement.

Insights

“Personal excellence is the ultimate rebellion.” —Andy Frisella.

If your value as a man is primarily based on the hair on your head, you’ve failed miserably. Looks are how women are measured, not men. Men are measured primarily on their ability to create resources, to protect, provide and create security for women. Forget your looks and focus instead on building up your life. [IAndrew Tate]

Men and women aren’t equal. We’re completely different. We’re wired differently, we want different things, we bring completely different things to the table and our success is measured on polar opposite metrics — we’re not supposed to be the same. It’s in our best interest to ditch the destructive ideology of feminism and instead revert to our traditional gender roles again, where men are masculine and women are feminine so we can fulfill our natural hardwired duties instead of trying to go against it. [Andrew Tate, Fresh and Fit, Sneako]

90% of men are invisible to women, so it’s a far better option to allocate your time, energy and money to become a top 10% man than to waste it fighting an uphill battle. That way, not only do you have a far better chance of attracting the women you want with less effort, but you’ll be able to be in traditional gender roles, you have the negotiating power and you’ll lead the relationship because there are fewer of you and more of her. Focus on building your world up to the point where you’re bulletproof and every aspect of your world is dialled and then you command whatever situation you want, especially what men want — open on our end, closed on her end. [Fresh and Fit, Andrew Tate]

Be very careful who you share your environment with. Pick the wrong people and you risk creating hell on earth for yourself and your business.³⁴

Flow with creativity, not against it. You don’t need to finish the creative stage you’re working on at all at once.³⁵Take your time with it, take breaks, take walks, and let your video breathe. Don’t force things — let creativity occur naturally. It’s also completely okay to jump back and forth between the stages of creating — modifying, tweaking or recreating whatever is needed. Creativity doesn’t need to be so rigid or linear. [Sneako]

Create at the level you’re at, not above where you’re at. If your standards for releasing are too far above your skillset, you’re not going to advance as much as the person who’s consistently releasing. Create the best thing you can, then ship the work. Learn on the side, then get back into the game and repeat, each time upgrading your work through practice. The best way to improve is through reps, not by exclusively observing on the sideline.

The end product is much more valuable than the process and behind-the-scenes of making it. It’s extremely rare that you will look back at a piece of work and want to see the process of creation. The end product will almost always suffice.³⁶

Documenting the highlights of your journey is incredibly worth it. Most of what you might document is junk that you’ll never use and find value in anyways, so be sure to capture just the essentials — whether it be writing, photos, video or audio — and then someday, you’ll have enough material to be able to tell your desired story.³⁷

Marijuana is a better choice than alcohol. After almost a decade without THC, I experimented with marijuana a lot this year and I’m now fully convinced that it’s a far better substance than alcohol. If you’re in control of it instead of it being in control of you, weed is great because it’s more cost-effective, better for your health (especially in edible form as I take them), way more fun, interesting and expansive to your perspective and you can wake up without hangovers.³⁸ The main exception here though is if you’re under 25, it will stunt the development of your brain, so use it at your own risk.

The best time to edit is right after you film. The longer you wait, the more of a burden it becomes and the less of a chance there is that you’ll finish it. Edit now. [Casey Neistat]

A calm mind and calm energy are essential to productivity and performance. The calmer things are in your world, the easier you can see through the matrix and manage the chaos — whether that’s building a business, managing a project or creating something from nothing.³⁹

Lifting is an incredible foundation on which to build the rest of your life. Lifting as heavy as possible until exhaustion, pushing your body to its physical limits, growing your strength and improving your physique — the mindset, self-image and masculine energy that comes from building your strength and physique in the gym is a tremendous anchor for forward motion and growth throughout your entire life. Don’t let the lifestyle slip. Always keep it active for dominance in the other areas of your life, too. [my gym experience this year]

Communication down to the smallest of details is critical. Outline the smallest of details in contracts and agreements so that there’s no room for any grey area. And if it’s verbally discussed, make sure to have proof. That way, there’s no wiggle room. Both parties are completely clear on the arrangement. [A few mishaps]

Conclusion

If you got this far, thank you for reading and thank you for your time. I meant for this to hover around 4,000 words, but it ended up being a whopping around 12,000 words,⁴⁰ so I hope at least one thing in here had a positive impact on you.

I’m very excited about 2023. I don’t say this about years ever, but something just feels different. A lot is to change for me and my world.

In the upcoming year, I expect to take on a lot less so that I can focus on the few rather than the many, and go all in on them — especially performance consulting and content creation. By building this consulting/energy work business up I can get out of freelance, create content for myself again and get in real-time with all forms of creation, so that I can make take things from conception to completion in record times. I’m going to work on consistency, levelling up my skills, changing my financial situation and of course, healing through anything that’s essential along the way. I’ll be building myself, my world and my body, continuing my masculine journey, and ultimately striving for personal excellence, as this is the ultimate rebellion. And, I can do so at this blessing of an apartment, with no distractions — just focus, work and growth.

I hope each and every one of you reading this makes this year a tremendous one, no matter when you’re reading this. At the end of the day, it’s 100% up to you. Get after it.

Thank you for your time and attention. If you got value from this content — whether it was an insight, strategy or even a laugh — please consider sharing it with a friend who might benefit from it too. By doing so, not only do you help them out, but you also help support my my content creation efforts.