Hello friends! I hope you are having a great start of the year and enjoying some rest before starting 2023 at full speed. I am loving this last part of vacation, spending a lot of time with family and friends, and with way too many carbs… I am definitely going to be leaving Italy with a lighter heart but a heavier body!
For today’s post there’s no starting tweet, but if you’re subscribed to this newsletter for a few weeks you might remember I am actually a big fan of setting and tracking goals. So it won’t come as a surprise that I actually enjoy defining new year's resolutions and using the occasion to think back about what I liked and disliked about the past year. While I still feel that the “new year” begins with school, and that September is really the “new season”, the Christmas holidays are usually a good moment to wind down, reflect and plan for the coming months.
Besides sharing my goals and resolutions, that I doubt anyone would find particularly original or interesting, I thought it’d be interesting to spend a little time thinking about the process of resolutions and how to leverage those to be “the best version of myself”. Last week I came across this very interesting article on the FT on “Entering the new year with a beginner’s mind, rather than setting resolutions”. I enjoy the writer’s PoV, which I will comment on later, but most of all it helped me put in sequence some structure on what I enjoy/dislike of resolutions.
I have not always been great at setting goals and more importantly following up on them. Until recently I did not appreciate the power and benefit I could take from setting goals, and there’s actually a few points I have cemented on how to make good use of this exercise. I am not by any means an expert, and I keep iterating on this so please let me know if you have good insights on the goal setting process or good ideas of goals I should have for myself!
The starting point, before talking about goals, is always the same: be thankful and approach everything with gratitude and positivity. Tweet below is something I often remind myself (also similar version: “in 15 years you’d kill to play for 15 minutes with your kids”).
SET AMBITIOUS BUT REASONABLE GOALS
The starting point of the article I resonate a lot with, from my past self: “With the new year under way in all its dark and dreary Januaryness, some of you might already be losing the motivation to follow through on the promises you made just a few days ago — to become healthier, wealthier, wirier and altogether more impressive versions of yourselves in 2023. If you haven’t already given up on them, 80 per cent of you are likely to have abandoned any resolutions you might have made by the second week of February.”
Setting goals that are already “expired” after a few weeks was something I did a lot, this is the classing “diet and yearly gym subscription” the first week of the year. I have learnt that, similarly to business practice, what works for me are less “inspirational” and more “operational” resolutions. I learnt to set for myself milestones that are marginally incremental vs my current habits, but that over time build up and leverage the compounding interest law resulting in material improvement.
A good example is on fitness: when I started running with continuity I set for myself a yearly goal of 1,000km/year. For experienced runners this would actually sound underwhelming and not too challenging, but when I set it in 2019 I said to myself “that is a way to measure I will be running regularly”. 1,000km/year means that, to keep up with the goal, I had to run on average 20Km/week, which in turn meant 4 short sessions of 5k. That sounded doable for me!
The good thing of setting reasonable goals is that they “get you going”, but then I eventually ran beyond the goal. Therefore the following year I increased it to 1,200km, and the following year to 1,500km… I always build up incrementally, and avoid the temptation to say “I want to run twice as much this year”.
The benefit of this approach, besides the incremental improvement tailwind, is the mood-boosting effect of “feeling on track”. I take good pleasure by monitoring the progress of my goals, and seeing I am “ON TRACK” or at least “CLOSE TO BEING ON TRACK”. The author of Atomic Habits (another book I quoted a lot in my previous post) has a good way to express this concept of small incremental improvements, and how it’s not the goal per se to be important but how you put them together creating a system to improve: “It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”
KISS APPROACH (KEEP-IT-SIMPLE-STUPID!)
Personally I have a temptation, when setting goals to myself, to have a lot of them (as I have maaaaany areas of improvement!) or to have complicated ones. I found out that was not working well for me, for instance having fitness goal by discipline (e.g. bike xx hours/year, do yoga every week, etc) gave me a constant feeling of being behind at least on one front. It is very hard to follow-through on everything, and therefore I ended up giving up on all the goals.
My approach to tackle this is to leverage the “Big Rocks” approach, and define a few aspects where to focus my resolutions. These are by definition not all the aspects I want to work on, as I do not expect resolutions to be MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive). I try for them to be, however, the key things I want to keep my attention on. For instance I tend to have few resolutions that are work-related, because I feel that I have enough structure and process, in my professional life, to be pushed to improve and develop even without “paying too much proactive attention”. My work is built in a way that I am constantly pushed, reminded when I am not fully on track, and it has a lot of processes that allow me to receive feedback on the trajectory.
Similarly I do not like setting too generic goals: being a good father, or a better husband is hardly something you can measure and track. I prefer to have goals that are expressed by simple metrics and that I can track easily. A good example for me is on goals to increase the quality time I spend with my family. This is a generic area, yet the biggest rock among my priorities. I found a good operational trick for this, in setting an indirect goal: reduce the time spent on my iPhone.
I find that if I do not pay active attention, I end up being “sucked” by the phone which is an experience that I largely do alone (vs for instance watching a movie with my wife) and that takes away time from things that I want to do more of (e.g. playing with the kids). Additionally the iPhone has a very clear and easy-to-track metric in the usage statistics. It is very easy to see how I am doing on a given day/week/month. I find that by reducing the time spent on the phone I end up having more time for things I consider more important.
SELF-INFLICTED SOCIAL COMMITTMENT HELPS (ME)
One interesting point, that works a lot for me, is the power of what psychologists call “commitment device”. Atomic Habit has a quote I saved because I found it particularly brilliant to explain the concept: apparently the write Victor Hugo at some point threw away all his clothes so that he could focus on writing, as he would have no clothes to leave the house.
I find commitment devices very compelling, another example are the trick that some people invented to avoid “snoozing” the alarm when waking up in the morning. Basically someone created a “money shredding alarm” where you place a money bill in the evening and the alarm starts shredding it unless you block it in the first 30’ after the alarm starts ringing. Good incentive to get up from bed!
In my case what I found to be working is actually the social commitment, I tend to tell a lot of people about my goals and “lock myself” into respecting it due to the social debt I have with people I told. I do this both directly (e.g. this post) or indirectly. For instance I love the Strava feature that shows my progress on yearly goal as first image when I log-in, or the progress bar on the reading challenge Goodreads has. Everyone can see those and I feel pushed to show to my social circle I can do what I committed to.
AVOID RESOLUTIONS BECOME LIMITATIONS
The FT article I linked above has a very interesting point about resolutions and on how to avoid they backfire. The considerations are somewhat counter-intuitive to a lot of things I believe in, but I liked the fact it made me reflect. The author claims that sometimes being a “master” at something can be a disadvantage, taking you further away from enlightenment, not closer to it. “So rather than trying to become the world’s greatest expert in whatever it is that you have decided is necessary to justify your existence this year, you might focus instead on something a little simpler: cultivating a beginner’s mind.”
The expert, unlike the novice, has over time built up a whole range of assumptions, preconceptions and habits. These might have helped them reach their level of expertise, but holding on to them without any questioning or re-examination can end up clouding the mind instead. Studies have over the years identified a “curse of expertise”, showing that it makes people overestimate their own knowledge and become more closed-minded. Even the very perception that one is an expert, whether or not that belief is warranted, can have this effect.
This is something that Albert Einstein identified in his writings on the philosophy and epistemology of science. “Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such an authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens,” Einstein wrote in 1916. Scientific progress depends on such an approach, but this is a lesson that we can all take into 2023. Whether in our work or our personal life, fostering a sense of almost childlike curiosity about what is going on around us can reap a whole range of benefits — and it is more enjoyable than trying to become some kind of productivity machine.
MY 2023 RESOLUTIONS
As I said above I do not consider this list MECE, there’s a lot of other areas where I want to keep improving, there’s a lot of other priorities I have (family, work, finance, mental health, etc) but here are the things I decided to track proactively in 2023:
TRAIN
I kept the same goal as 2022: run 1,500km. I failed the goal in 2022 (I ran 1,250km) because of an injury and so I still feel 1,500km is challenging yet achievable for me.
REDUCE PHONE TIME
As I said above this is an indirect goal, I want to reduce time spent on the phone to increase time dedicated to things I deem more important (mainly family and friends). I feel ashamed that my goal is so underwhelming, but I want to ensure I stay below 3hrs/day every single week. This might sound incredibly non-ambituous but when factoring a little time for work things (i.e. emails, chatting, etc) and some whatsapp with friends and family it basically means 45’ on social/web surfing. I have already eliminated all the social networks and gaming apps from the phone last year to help with this goal.
READ
This is the oldest among my goals. This year, however, I read something on a book that made me challenge the very existence of this goal. The author of the book (Almanack of Navi Ravikant) has two excellent points on reading. The first one is very intuitive: “It almost doesn’t matter what you read. Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life. Just like the best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day, I would say for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time.” I apply this concept to myself stopping setting goals on type of books (e.g. fiction vs non-fiction) and having a generic goal.
On his second point though, the author says something on reading that made me think: “I’ll start a book at the beginning, but I’ll move fast. If it’s not interesting, I’ll just start flipping ahead, skimming, or speed reading. If it doesn’t grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningful, positive way, I’ll either drop the book or skip ahead a few chapters. I don’t believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books. The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power. Generally, I’ll skim. I’ll fast forward. I’ll try and find a part to catch my attention. Most books have one point to make. (Obviously, this is nonfiction. I’m not talking about fiction.) They have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world. Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down.”
I fully appreciate and agree with the point, but I am still working on my muscle of putting books down easily. I feel that for me having a goal of total books read, similarly to what I said about running, helps me feel whether I am on track. 2023 goal is to read 35 books, and I track this using Goodreads “reading challenge” feature. I used to set a goal of 25 (pic below) but the last years gave me confidence to increase in 2023.
SLEEP
This is a new goal for 2023, I wrote last week about the importance of sleep and its impact on the quality of life so I won’t expand too much. I decided to set a very simple goal: average 8hrs of sleep every single month. This is very easy to monitor using the health app on my iPhone, and the app also has a feature that sends notifications every time you are losing track vs the goal.
IMPROVE SPANISH
Finally something less defined and measurable but where I want to put focus in 2023: improve my proficiency speaking Spanish. I will action this by taking lessons but hopefully mainly through putting more effort in speaking more. I need some help here though, and last week I stumbled upon this post that made me think:
I admit I have done that many times with people struggling with Italian, thinking I was actually doing them a favor by putting them at ease. Turns out I was probably wrong, and so please Spanish friends: if you see me in 2023, hablamos Espanol, don’t switch to English!!
What are your goals for 2023? Do you love or hate New Year’s resolutions?
THINGS I LIKED THIS WEEK
Extremely interesting policy at Shopify: the company decided to cancel all meetings with more than 3 people. “Every recurring meeting with three or more people would be automatically cancelled by the end of the day, and they should not add them back for at least two weeks—if at all”. This might sound drastic, and maybe too strong, but I actually love the provoking thought. The policy also has some less controversial declinations: “The new policy, which also includes re-instating “meeting-free” Wednesdays and mandating that large meetings only be held in a six-hour block on Thursdays”. And also “If people don’t comply—though Nejatian says he believes they will—he has other ideas the company may institute. One is to disburse a “budget” of meeting hours to managers that they can’t exceed; another is to add a counter to the top right corner of workers’ video conferencing screens to remind people what the cost, or dollar value, is of participants’ time while they’re in the meeting.”
In the commentary of the article above I saw this image that speaks more than a thousand words about the meeting-after-meeting fatigue I believe a lot of people resonate with:
Very interesting development on ChatGPT. Apparently Microsoft announced it’s working on integrating the conversational AI tool (that I wrote about in a post here) into its search engine Bing… that generated a lot of memes of the possible revenge that the “last of the pack” (among search engines) could finally get! Microsoft is cool again!
Apple is slowly but surely reducing its reliance on China for its supply chain: