A 2023 Recap & Retrospective: Surviving A Hard Year
It’s the end of 2023. WOW, we made it. It’s a good time to review last year and prepare for 2024. It was a crazy year and I think many of us really needed this last winter break to rest and recover. So I try to break down the year and grade it in the key components as I see it.
Business and Personal Finance was good overall: It is a B. I made a bunch of investments both on the stock and startup side. I’m super excited for how well these are positioned for the future. Doubled down on energy, commodity and natural resource stocks. Cut my publicly traded tech stocks. Way too overweight there. I also started doing many more Defensetech related startups as well as unsexy B2B Enterprise Software/Saas & Developer Tools. I’ll keep doing these going into 2024 & beyond. Not jumping on the AI startup bandwagon. Seems way too overhyped right now. But still bullish on Silicon Valley startups and will do a bunch more LP checks into emerging VC fund managers this year. I will also continue to explore international opportunities.
My cost structure went a bit out of control so I will aim to do some cost management and relooking at my budgets. But I want to up the percentage of my stock investments and charitable giving. I will also aim to cut back on my public speaking for next year. Need to focus more on writing as well as building out more income streams and my core investment business.
Travel: No real grade. I overdid it in 2023 because of a bad home life. All of my own making. But the list of travel I did showed how nuts it was.
Saudi Arabia: 3X
Canada: 4X
Georgia: 1X
North Macedonia: 3X
Azerbaijan: 2X
Ukraine: 1X
Japan: 2X
Taiwan: 2X
Poland: 3X
Portugal: 1X
Romania: 2X
Czech Republic: 1X
Italy: 1X
Australia: 1X
Scotland: 1X
Kazakhstan: 1X
This obviously does not include all the US domestic travel like Hawai, Vegas, Miami and Los Angeles. It was nutty this year.
Health: It’s a B+. Got a new personal trainer and am still working with my dietician to finetune my eating. Doing my regular work out every day is good but not spending enough time with heavy weights in the gym. Will have to fix this in 2024. Signed up for some MMA & Muay Thai Fight training camps in Thailand for the new year. If this does not get my sense of urgency to accelerate my efforts on the health side, not sure what will.
Family & Relationships: It was pretty bad, so it’s a D. Lots of relationship issues with my teenage daughter, mainly due to miscommunication and my own lack of empathy or plain stubbornness and ignorance. Family therapy has only seemed to exacerbate it. But I remain hopeful as it seems to have gotten to some semblance of normality with her during the winter break. This remains a work in progress as I try to undo the damage.
Personal Development: I give it a B+. I was very happy with the Levelling Up mastermind Community as well as Capital Camp this year. I met so many awesome and accomplished people. I also read a lot of books and took lots of classes. Youtube and podcasts have been great as well. I learned a lot to help me with the business and investment side.
Overall, I am healthy and my family overall is good. So I cannot complain. Retrospective recaps are helpful to figure out the gaps in your life.
It will also help you plan for next year. I am a fanboy of Sahil Bloom and he provided a great template to use that you can find here. https://www.sahilbloom.com/annual-planning. Check it out as I think it is really good. Happy new year and wishing you all a great start to 2024!