When I'm 100 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I'll look back upon 2023 and say, "dang, that was a good year."

Aside from 2020 (The year of Covid-19), 2023 has been the most life-changing year of my life. Here are some of the things that happened:

• Had and broke up with my first girlfriend ever
• Cultivated deeper friendships than I ever have
• Grew my podcast, email list, and YT channel more than ever before
• Created my first two video courses ever
• Travelled to Asia for the first time
• Learned some essential life lessons

In this article, I intend to reflect on all of the goals I set for 2023 and recount some of my greatest lessons in health, work, relationships, spirituality, experiences, and personal growth.

Feel free to skip around to the sections that interest you most. This is a long post. But I tried my best to chock it full of value and intimacy.

Have fun!

Reflecting On 2023 Goals

Cultivating Inner Peace

One of the significant things I talked about in my 2022 yearly review was how restless and shameful I felt throughout my days.

I found it hard to differentiate between work and leisure, had unrealistic expectations for myself, and my past self's identity was fighting me. That's why my theme for 2023 was inner peace.

My goal was to become so wise I would become a Buddha, burst into blazing light, and float into the sky.

I'm just joking; I wanted to cultivate my ability to enjoy being for beings sake.

Ever since my anabolic dieting experience during COVID-19, I've had no problem with procrastination and getting things done; I have stuck to a time-blocking and task-management system for years. The problem is even when I get a lot done, I often find myself at the end of the day thinking, "Ya, but you could have done a little more." I remember one-day last year, I was standing in front of the laundry machine with five minutes to go and agonizing over how I could use those five minutes the most productively.

So how did I do with this goal?

I'd say I mostly succeeded.

I'm much less restless now than I was a year ago. I'm more playful, don't take myself as seriously, and don't try to optimize every minute like some industrial factory boss. A few things helped enormously with this.

First, and most importantly regular reflection and review.

I have come to realize regular reflection and review on my journal entries, in writing, and on long walks without technology is the the most important routines in my life (aside from healthy sleep, diet, and exercise).

It's in these reflections I spot patterns on what fills me with energy and what sucks it away. It's also where I spot my restless tendencies and prepare myself to navigate them. For example, one habit I found out through these reflections is a great way to navigate my restlessness is by asking this question whenever it comes up: what have I done today I'm proud of?

This question forces me to recognize all the stuff I have already done, instead of focusing on everything I didn't do.

A new type of reflection I also started doing this year was writing philosophical meditations as if I was Marcus Aurelius.

Now all I need is a crown, some servants, and a Roman bathhouse, and I can be a Roman Emperor! Nothing too serious, just 15 minutes of philosophizing per night or when I needed it was enough to ground me in the present and keep me in line with my values.

But unlike Marcus, I write these meditations at someone instead of just for myself (more to come in the future, they have no idea 😉).

Second, I kept a regular meditation habit of at least 10 minutes throughout the year.

Meditation is the art of taking an outside perspective on your mind. This allowed me to notice my characteristic feeling and thought patterns. When they came up outside of meditation, I could navigate them better.

Here are some of the thought patterns I identified:

• Bisy Bert: Bisy Bert wants to do things optimally. If there is five minutes before the laundry goes out, he doesn't want to sit and wait for five minutes doing nothing. That's time to optimize.
• Aurelius: Aurelius cares about building character. He believes it's in the building of a fantastic character and exercising it that the most honorable best life is lived.
• Curious Cameron. Curious Cameron is insatiably curious about the world. He is deeply intrinsically driven by a hunger to learn more about and understand the world.
• Hungry Hannah: Hannah is the past residual hunger that came out of Aidan's anabolic dieting experience. While she isn't a constant insurmountable hunger, she comes in short bursts to remind Aidan to eat throughout the day because food, food tastes good.
• Insecure Chameleon: The insecure chameleon is the part of me that doubts whether I'm truly worth any salt on the internet. They think, who am I to tell other people what to do with their lives? Isn't telling myself what to do enough? Other people create better stuff anyways!

Third and finally, my ex was a massive help in cultivating inner peace as well.

She is the best at grounding herself and enjoying the present out of anyone I have ever met. She once told me she could sit and wait for a bus for three hours, as long as there were some squirrels she could watch playing and music she could listen to. I remember one day, we were walking through the engineering quad at Cornell, and I noticed she wasn't behind me anymore. I turned around and saw her literally "stopping to smell the flowers"--something that hadn't even crossed my mind to do.

All in all, these three things have significantly improved my inner peace.

But it's a constant journey and something I'm sure I will navigate more in 2024.

Finding A Girlfriend

One of my major goals for the last quarter of 2023 was finding a girlfriend after breaking up with my first one ever over the summer.

Dating is one of the major pillars of growth in your 20s. At the beginning of the Cornell semester, I started my dating journey from what felt like square one. While I had one relationship at that point, I wasn't looking for it; it fell into my lap.

So I did what I would do learning any other skill, read, talked, and practiced a ton.

I read Magnetic, Models, Plays Well With Others, listened to many podcasts, and re-read How To Win Friends And Influence People. I blocked off two days per week for dates, installed Hinge, and made an effort to go to one physical event weekly to look for women.

While I wasn't successful, I learned a ton about girls and myself, which I think other women or guys in the dating scene will find valuable.

Firstly, I learned how to adopt an abundance mentality.

The abundance mentality means realizing there are more women in the world than you could possibly date. This helps fight against one of the biggest problems guys face, approach anxiety. Many guys are scared of getting rejected by women because they're needy. They care too much about what the woman thinks. But if you have an abundance mentality, you see rejection as an indicator that the woman probably wasn't right for you anyway and that there are other women out there.

There were many times women would reject me, and I would have an abundance mentality.

Like when a girl said she wasn't comfortable dating me because she was one of my dad's students, and I thought, great, there are plenty more fish in the sea! One Southeast Asian girl legit said during a group discussion in one of my classes, "I don't think a white guy and a Southeast Asian can ever have a successful relationship." I felt personally attacked by that one, but I also found it funny because my ex was Southeast Asian and we were together for 8 and a half months.

As much as I would like to say I followed this mindset perfectly, I didn't...

That's because I'm fantastic at intellectualizing.

Intellectualizing is a Freudian defense mechanism that involves using reason to avoid feeling uncomfortable emotions.

I used this all the time to get out of talking to attractive women. I came up with the stupidest reasons like "oh they're at the gym front desk, wouldn't want to interrupt their front desking (it's a verb now lol), ehhhh the temperature isn't right, actually I have a class in four hours I can't talk to this person." By the end of the semester I realized the best way to overcome this was to just talk to attractive women no questions ask within 3 seconds of seeing them.

But by that point it was already too late.

Lastly, I remembered important things take effort, and dating is no different.

If you think you'll find the love of your life after just three months of searching, you're delusional.

The fact is, lots of people are screwed up. I can't tell you the number of girls that canceled on a date the day of or even AN HOUR before. Some were uncomfortable setting up a date, walking even one minute outside the central campus as if I were an axe murderer. Others had no personality whatsoever. Funnily enough, the solution came from an Alex Hormozi's business tip: "get more leads."

3 months isn't enough time to find someone special.

I don't think anything was objectively wrong with my dating methods. I just haven't done them for long enough.

I'll keep trying again in 2024.

Maintain My Creation Of One YT Video, Podcast, And Newsletter A Week

During 2023 I maintained one YT video, one Kaizen podcast with my brother and one PKM With Aidan Helfant Podcast with myself, and one newsletterper week (not counting random posts on my blog).

Apart from a few missed weeks, I successfully stuck to this cadence for all my content channels. I made some content I'm really proud of, which you can get a curated list of here. And it showed with the growth of my content mediums:

• YouTube Channel: grew by 3k+ subs to 3.74k. Over 250% growth in a year!
• PKM With Aidan Helfant: Surpassed 1000+ monthly podcast downloads.
• Aidan's Infinite Play: Grew to over 1600+ subs
• Kaizen: Still only at around 10+ monthly downloads but this pod with my brother is more for fun anyways lol

This regular content cadence once again makes me realize how incredible public learning is.

It provided an avenue for me to showcase my learnings which helps me learn it better. I met people I never imagined I could, helped hundreds of thousands of people (one of my YT videos went viral and has almost 100k+ views), and more.

Nowhere was this more apparent than on my podcast.

I started my podcast, PKM With Aidan Helfant last year in November. At first, I had small guests like my brother, parents, and friends. But as it grew and I got more referrals and social proof, I started being able to have larger and larger names on the pod. I got to interview people I never dreamed of like Nick Milo, Yu-Kai Chou, Matthew Dicks, Dr. Barbara Oakley and more. Many of the guests I still communicate with regularly to this day. While a podcast isn't a medium I would recommend for growth, it's the best content medium for forming intimate relationships with others.

Create Obsidian University With John Mavrick

This year, I successfully created my first ever video course with my best friend John Mavrick, Obsidian University--a premade student vault filled with school templates, Obsidian plugins, and a tag-along course that explains how to use the various aspects of the vault as well as training you in the core concepts of personal knowledge management.

It was a wild ride. I had to learn many new skills I didn't have before, like copywriting, sales, payment processing, community management, course creation, meeting management, and business analytics. All in all it took around 3 months--3 months less time than I was expecting for my first course ever.

It's a lot easier to create a course when you have a back catalog of relevant content before you even get started.

As for the success of the course, I'd rate it a moderate success. In total, we have made around $8000 in total revenue (not counting refunds), and more sales are coming in. But we made many mistakes, some of which I'll be diving into more in the next section. For one the course should have been a service business first. Second, we should have released it earlier. And third, I wish we had realized something pretty obvious looking back: students don't have a lot of money.

As passionate as I am about helping students fall more in love with learning, they just don't have much money to give.

So for the effort we put in, we don't get much back.

Accounting for how much I value my time, I likely lost money overall. But the skills and lessons learned are invaluable, so I'm still very glad we made it. I loved the process so much I even made a second video course on my own at the end of 2023, The Art Of Linked Reading--a course that helps people who struggle to understand, connect, remember, apply, and smartly share insights from non-fiction books learn to do so with linked notetaking apps like Obsidian, Tana, Logseq, and more.

I think this course is even better than Obsidian University--although it's only made $2200 in course sales in one month of being out.

It's too early to tell where it will go in the future; you can read more about my reflection on it in this article.

Improve My Public Speaking And Charisma Through Speech And Debate And Stand Up

My last major goal for 2023 was to improve my public speaking and charisma through the Cornell speech and debate club and doing regular Stand Up Comedy.

This was a major success.

Firstly, for Speech and Debate, despite it being my first time ever doing it and joining halfway into the semester, I made it to AFA Nationals in California. Now, I was absolutely destroyed by the competitors that were literally being paid to do Speech and Debate in College, but that's besides the point. I learned a ton about how to be a better public speaker, like using musicality, A + B = C structure, the power of emotionality, logic, research, gestures, movement, and more. Writing for Speech and Debate is very different from writing for content creation which gave me tons of insight into a different writing style. Plus, I met one of my best friends at a Speech tournament in Texas, Shurika (Rushika's her real name, but I know it will drive her crazy if she reads this, lol).

Doing Stand Up Comedy every other week has also been incredibly successful.

The first time I did stand up I remember I was walking down the slope at Cornell, scared out of my mind. My brother had encouraged me to try it out, but I was thinking of every reason not to go. I'm going to bomb, I'm hungry, I'm kind of tired. Now, I can walk onto an open mic stage with complete excitement instead of nervousness.

It's insane how far I have come since the beginning of the year.

One of the biggest helps and inspirations was my brother. Apart from encouraging me to start, over the summer while in Indonesia we took a number of courses together on Charisma: Charisma University by Charlie Houpert, Steve Martin's Stand Up Comedy Course, and we even made a bunch of funny balcony conversations which you can see on his YT channel.

Both of these avenues have increased my self-esteem immensely, made me more humorous, and allowed me to express myself outside of my content creation.

I plan to continue doing speech and stand-up in 2024, but without the seriousness I give my content creation.

Lessons Life Taught Me

Work

Speak To Your Customers BEFORE Creating Anything

As an entrepreneur, it's easy to get stuck in your head.

If you're not careful, this can lead you to create something that nobody actually wants.

The caricature of this is the author who goes into the forest, smokes some cigarettes and drinks some alcohol, writes for a year, and then reveals their "masterpiece" to the world (I mean it's not like I have done this before cough cough. This is why it's essential to speak to your customers before you create anything. I realized this most notably while creating my video course The Art Of Linked Reading. Following the advice of Pat Flynn, I had a beta testing group go through the course before releasing it to the public.

Talking with them made me realize what I thought people wanted didn't necessarily align with what people wanted.

They wanted more visuals. Half of the first weeks' worth of content on creating a reading habit they didn't find useful. And the third week's worth of content on creating linked reading notes, they wanted more of.

The truth is you don't know what people want until you talk to them--I intend to do it in every future product or service business I create.

Don't Skip A Step Of The Wealth Ladder

The biggest mistake I made in work this year was creating two video courses instead of two service businesses.

By doing this, I was skipping a ladder in Nathan Barry's Ladders Of Wealth. The ladders of wealth creation are described by Nathan Barry in his article, the ladders of wealth creation. In brief, the ladders of wealth go first: time for money, then your own service business, then productized services, and finally, selling products. Here's the image from Nathan Barry's article: 

Each ladder takes significantly more skill and luck then the previous ladder to succeed.

But the higher up you go, the more leverage you have. If you're successful, you can put in significantly less effort and get significantly more money. The mistake I made was going skipping the service business or productized service ladder straight to the selling a product level.

The problem is I don't have enough leads to have a product yet.

Around the launch, I got around 20,000 views per month on my YT channel, about 1000 downloads per month on my podcast, and around 1500 subscribers on my email list. That might sound like a lot. But keep in mind that a very small fraction of those people are likely to buy. And I only sold the course through my email list. I had 76 people on the waitlist, half of whom were probably students and are struggling to pay for their daily ramen noodles. A good content friend of mine, Demetri, told me it's normal to only have around 5-10% of those people convert (depending on the product of course).

By his estimates, I actually had a fantastic launch for the amount of leads I had.

But if I had done a service business, this would have solved the lead issue.

Sure, the course would be more expensive. But I would need fewer leads to actually buy.

You Can Only Accelerate ONE Area Of Personal Life And Business At A Time.

It's cliche, but there is a lot of truth to the statement, less is more.

I think doing a ton, especially in your teens and early twenties, is a great idea so you can figure out what you want to prioritize in the first place. But I have experienced much more than your average 20-year-old and know generally what gives me energy and what takes energy away.

So for me, prioritization is the name of the game.

If you try and accelerate too many areas of your personal and business life at the same time, it will go to shit.

I realized this at the beginning of the year when I was trying to balance Speech And Debate, Stand Up Comedy, a YT channel, podcast, newsletter, Twitter account, blog, friendships, healthy diet-sleep-exercise, The Outing Club, and a girlfriend all at the same time. Surprise, surprise, it slapped me in the face when my girlfriend almost broke up with me halfway through the year (we broke up for real later, but it was mutual and very respectful).

I learned my lesson: you can only accelerate ONE area of personal life and business at a time.

It's WAY easier to maintain than it is to gain.

Once you have built a muscular physique in the gym, keeping it isn't as hard. You could practically half the load and still maintain your physique.

Real life is like the gym.

Once you have built up a skill, and systemized it, it's much easier to maintain. This frees up time and energy to focus on accelerating other skills.

So going forward, I'm going to make an active commitment to accelerate only one area of my personal and business life at a time.

By accelerate, I mean learn a new skill or invest an enormous amount of effort in something in a rapid amount of time. Like creating a new video course, learning to date more effectively, or improving at stand up comedy.

Once I learned this lesson in the second half of the year, I put everything else on maintenance when accelerating something.

For example, while building The Art Of Linked Reading, I put everything else in maintenance. In the gym, I was only going three days a week and doing cardio four days a week. For school, I relegated my schoolwork to just Monday and Friday mornings. If I'm being honest, that usually didn't even take that long. Schoolwork outside of classes often only take me around 5 hours a week (I did get a C+ in one class but every other class was a B+ or A).

The secret is creating systems to maintain the other areas of your life.

I had a system for creating videos, a podcast, a newsletter once a week. A system for working out, eating healthily, and sleeping. A system for consuming new information. However, it's super easy to get complacent. One of my friends, who is a personal trainer, watched my workouts one day and realized my form was not good.

Following this principle means I can't do many things I want to do.

Start a fiction analysis channel, write a novel, write a non-fiction book, start a long-running Dungeons And Dragons campaign with friends, and more. But that's okay. Because when I do do these things I want to do them well.

The path to meaningful change isn't in doing more, but doing less, with more focus.

Relationships

Intimacy Can Be Cultivated Forcibly

One of the things I'm most proud of from this year is how much deeper I made my best friendships and family relationships.

I cultivated some especially deep friendships with my friend John Mavrick, Rushika, Chris, my brother Skye, and my mom and dad. And I kept fostering some other relationships close to me as well.

How did I do it?

I cultivated such deep relationships by forcing intimacy.

Most people think intimacy is something that comes about slowly over time.

I agree, the better you get to know someone, the easier it is to be intimate. But ever since my self-improvement journey at the start of Covid-19, I have been bad with small talk. When I become interested in someone, I want to talk about intimate things quickly. I'm a trusting guy.

So I found a way to force intimacy.

I listened to a podcast (can't remember what) where the guest said you can ask your friends if they want to discuss intimate questions with you to foster deeper relationships. At first I thought it sounded forced, but I decided to give it a try. I wrote down a list of intimate questions and asked some of my friends to go through it with me over the following months.

It's incredible how much this improved my relationships.

The first person I did it with was my brother while we were in a coffee shop in The Netherlands. We went through all 22 questions in an hour and a half. I learned things about him I had never known in 18 years of living with him. After this spectacular experience I did it with 7 other friends and had excellent experiences with everyone.

This made me learn another important lesson:

If you don't make an effort to grow your friendships, they won't.

If I hadn't taken the initiative to ask these questions, they likely would never would have.

This didn't just apply to the questions but also to the hangouts and experiences I had this year. The vast majority of my friendship hangouts, I set up. Part of this is because I am a very scheduled person, but it's also because I realize, you have to make an effort to grow your friendships or they won't.

Too many adults I know let their friendships lose intimacy because of complacency, or they lose touch.

This principle even goes outside of relationships to life as a whole.

If you only follow what you have been socialized to feel, think, and behave, you won't ever create a life of authenticity and autonomy. YOU have to be the one to figure out what you want with your life and follow through on it.

Love Is Selflessness

One of the avenues I realized this in most is with my brother.

Since going to college he's struggled with figuring out what he wants to do with his life. But I respect how he's always made a consistently hard effort to try new things. That latest thing is acting. And while I'm skeptical about the long-term financial viability of a career in acting, I support him full heartedly.

I'm trying to help him become the person he wants to be, not who I want him to become.

I came to this insight after watching more of the fantastic YouTuber Actualized.org specifically his episode on love.

In it he defines love as selflessness.

The higher your selflessness the higher your ability to love. Selfishness is the opposite of love. Selfishness comes when you're needy. It's hard not to be needy when you lack some of your deficiency needs.

Most people haven't fulfilled their deficiency needs, and therefore, most people struggle to show love.

Important caveat: I'm not saying you can't show profound love when you lack your deficiency needs. It's just harder because you are struggling to survive.

Below is a list of things he provides in the video on how to show love. Honestly, I could sell this for $1000s of dollars, but instead, I'm giving it for free because everyone should have access to it. It's that valuable. So, how can you love someone?

• Give them your attention, time, and awareness
• Be physically close to them
• Connect with them emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually
• Extend their agenda into your own
• Help them realize their agenda
• Help them surpass you
• Protect them from too much suffering, but allow them some suffering
• Mix your self with their self
• See their suffering as your suffering
• Respect them as they are
• See their wins as your own. See their losses as your own.
• Sacrifice to help them
• Try to understand them. Their goals, values, experiences.
• Ask them, "how are you feeling?" And listen.
• Meet people where they are at. Don't teach a drug addict in the same way as a intellectual friend. Don't talk to a child as you would an adult.
• Love someone for their uniqueness. There is no other person in the world like them.
• Love someone as they are, not as you want them to be
• Build your relationship on truth
• Love someone even when they are selfish and unconscious
• Love someone even at their lows
• Respect the sovereignty of their consciousness

Everything mentioned above is how you raise incredible children, have a great marriage, and also how you love yourself.

You can't love someone else if you don't love yourself.

Seriously. Read the above list again and ask yourself how many of those things you apply to yourself. Probably not a lot. Neither does most of the world.

That's why people are so crap at forming and keeping intimate relationships.

Intimate relationships require profound levels of love.

You need to love the other person for who they are and aspire to become, rather than what you want them to become. Neediness from either person can cause conflict in the relationship. The problem is most people are needy.

The more selfless you can become the more you can love.

Health

Bad Habits Can Spiral.

At the beginning of 2023, I was pretty happy with where my physical health was at.

I had a consistent sleep schedule, great diet, and a routine for going to the gym 3 times per week plus 4 days per week of cardio and yoga for recovery. I'm good on the health front I thought. No. That's the thing about habits.

Bad habits can spiral out of control without you even noticing.

It started when I came into the dining the first day of the fall semester at Cornell.

The dining hall had sunflower butter, and because I love peanut butter I decided to try it. It was incredible. So good in fact, I started going to the West Dining halls more often to get more of it. One day, I came into the dining hall and they didn't have any sunflower butter. Any normal person would have said, ehhh guess no sunflower butter.

Not me.

I got a physical container from the convenience store and started filling it with the extra sunflower butter at the dining hall. This way if there wasn't any sunflower butter, I could just take out my own personal container from my backpack. I'm a genius! I thought. This went on for a few weeks. Go to the dining hall, eat sunflower butter, and fill up my personal container. I started cutting work sessions short just so I could have some sunflower butter. I had dreams of scooping up sunflower butter from the Rose dining hall.

Then one day I opened up my backpack, and found the personal container of sunflower butter had exploded.

My backpack was ruined, and I shamefully had to buy a new one. I came to a split moment insight, what the fuck was I doing?! Here I am philosophizing how to be a better person while addicted to sunflower butter from the Cornell dining halls. Aye, every artist needs there addiction am I right?! That same day I threw away the sunflower butter cannister and haven't looked back since.

This experience made me realize how easily bad habits can spiral out of control.

I know you are likely reading this thinking, that doesn't sound like too bad a habit. But for me, this is what I consider a bad habit. I'm not trying to brag, just saying I rid myself of the worse habits a long time ago.

Drinking, eating, exercise, or any bad habit can spiral out of control if you aren't careful.

It reminds me of a quote from Jame Clear's Atomic Habits, "miss one day, you're fine, miss two days and it's the start of a new habit."

See Life As A Game

This year's most powerful mindset shift is seeing my life as a game.

I have written many articles about how I used to be addicted to video games and how I gamified my life to become more addicted to studying and learning. But after reading Jane McGonigal's SuperBetter, I literally turned my life into a game. The benefits have been countless.

I'm a firm believer that by taking principles from games and integrating them into our real lives, we can dramatically improve our health, work, and relationships.

I'll name a few of the most powerful ways making my life into a game has changed my life here:

1. We are more willing to fail in a game. We understand failure doesn't have terrible real-life consequences. And failure is necessary to progress. We can take this mindset into real life by adopting a growth mindset.
2. We connect with others through games. When we do physical or mental things in synchrony, like playing a game with someone in the same physical space, mirror neurons activate, making us feel more empathy and therefore connection with others. This can actually help people in usually hostile or aversive groups connect across differences. Plus, games provide an easy way to keep in touch with someone we haven't connected to in a while.
3. Games get us into the flow state. The flow state is the state in which we become completely immersed in the present activity. Games do this very well because they make things not so hard they are frustrating but not so easy they are boring. They give us quick feedback. And they adapt the challenge to the player.
4. Games give us clarity over our goals. Great games make it crystal clear what we must do next to progress. Many break down goals into quests and quests into individual actions. We can do this in real life by breaking goals into projects and projects into tasks.
5. Games distract us from the negativity of everyday life. By honing our attention, games stop us from focusing on negative feelings. If the negative feelings should be focused on, this is bad. But often we have negative feelings just because humans have evolved to have negative feelings. In this case, games can make us feel better.

If you want to learn more check out my gamification resource list, to turn your real life into a game and become addicted to learning, make healthy habits fun, 10x your work productivity by getting into the flow state, and cultivate deeper relationships.

Spirituality

There Are Four Types Of Knowing

This year I finished the epic 50-episode lecture series, Awakening From The Meaning by John Vervaeke alongside my friend John Maverick.

The series was nothing short of a spiritual experience that completely changed how I came to myself, others, and the world. It was so good I made an hour long primer video to it on YT to help anyone wanting to dive into it themselves. The most insightful thing I learned from the series is the idea that there are four different types of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory.

Modern society prioritizes propositional and procedural knowing at the expense of perspectival and participatory. In other words, we prioritize intelligence and traditional metrics of "success" over wisdom and kindness.

To understand what I mean, let me explain to you what the 4 types of knowing are.

1. Participatory Knowing:
   • This is the most fundamental type of knowing, according to Vervaeke. It is not about knowing facts or how to do things, but about knowing how to be in a certain context. This form of knowledge is pre-conceptual and not describable and has to do with the fit between the agent (the person) and the arena (the environment or context they are in). It's about the attunement of the individual to their surroundings, which enables a flow state as opposed to confusion. For example, if you were playing The Witcher 3, participatory knowing would be the immersion of yourself within the Universe. The identification with Geralt, other characters, and the Witcher Universe, and the affordances those relationships give you.
2. Perspectival Knowing:
   • This refers to the viewpoint from which one perceives the world. It is the knowledge that emerges from one's embodied and situated perspective, providing a context-dependent understanding. It allows individuals to grasp the salient features of their environment from their particular vantage point. In the previous video game example, perspectival knowing would be your understanding of your position in space and time within in the Witcher world and what is happening around you in relation.
3. Procedural Knowing:
   • This is knowledge about how to do things. It involves skills and procedures and is often tacit, meaning it can be hard to explain verbally but is evident in action. It ranges from simple tasks like tying shoelaces to complex ones like performing surgery. In the previous video game example, this would be your ability to establish hand-eye coordination for various game moves like killing vast amounts of bandits, and set up routines like quick saving before leaving the game.
4. Propositional Knowing:
   • This type of knowledge is about facts and truths. It's expressed in declarative sentences and involves assertions that can be true or false. It's the kind of knowledge that can be easily communicated and argued about. In the previous video game example, this would be knowing the mechanics consciously, like how to use signs in combat, that a specific game item increases your health, or the victory conditions for a certain quest.

When you think of the most traditionally "successful people," who do you think of?

You likely think of Steve Jobs, Alexander The Great, or Elon Musk. These people all have incredible propositional and procedural knowing. For Steve Jobs he knows a great deal about computers and IPhones. For Alexander he knew a lot about military tactics and how to fight. For Elon Musk he knows a lot about rockets and how to look chronically tired.

All of these traditionally successful people have a ton of propositional and procedural knowledge, which are incredibly important.

The problem is this comes at the expense of the deeper and more foundational perspectival and participatory knowing. Rarely in society do we venerate the person who's not traditionally successful but is incredibly wise. We might venerate them on a small scale, but they don't rise to the same level as the individuals mentioned before because most of society is still unconscious.

It's harder to see when someone has deeply explored their perspectival and participatory knowing.

It's also hard to explain how to explore them because they are both pre-conceptual.

The exploration of these types of knowing has been relegated into circles like spirituality, mysticism, and more, which unfortunately, many see as wa wa wee wah. Don't be one of those individuals. Spirituality and mysticism are not some abstract practices that should be ignored by any rational person.

They are core to exploring the perspectival and participatory knowing that form the foundations of wisdom.

Every Person Is A Perspective

Another key spiritual lesson I learned this year is we see the world not as it is but as we are.

We see through the mind, but the mind creates the mind. The mind is influenced by our genetics, background, experiences, environment, and more.

It's like everyone is wearing completely unique tinted glasses.

And because everyone is wearing different glasses, they literally see the world differently.

Realizing this can help us become more empathetic and compassionate. One example highlights this particularly well from my Intergroup Dialogue class at the end of 2023. We had to do an interpersonal narrative assignment for the class which tasks you with talking to someone of entirely different social identities to you. As a white straight male, of U.S. nationality, and English first language I was put with a black, Nigerian, Christian, female. I was terrified, what if she stereotypes me as being like all those other white males?

Thankfully, that's not at all what happened.

From the moment she saw me, she had a massive smile on her face and gave me a hug. The rest of the conversation was fantastic. I learned how her social identities and past had shaped her perspective of the world at Cornell.

The conversation made me realize how valuable you can interact with people if you see them as perspectives.

She saw me as a unique perspective on the world, and wanted to uncover that. Instead of prematurely judging me, she remained open-minded and asked questions to uncover what I was really like. I haven't forgotten it.

Now, in my conversations, I try to ask open-ended narrative questions.

Open-ended narrative questions like "How did this belief evolve? What's the story behind that? And how did you come to this decision," invite narrative answers with perspectives embedded inside them. It's not just what the other person says but the why and how behind it that matters.

This has also led me to purposefully search for interactions with people who differ from me in some values.

It broadens my mind. I want to find people way better than me at things. Ideally, I'd be one of the more stupid or inept people in the room so that I could learn and grow.

Experiences

A Death In The Family

During the beginning of May, my 93-year-old great aunt Evelyne passed away from euthanasia after she fell and broke her hip in her home.

This is the second major death that has happened in my family--the first was my grandfather on my mom's side three years ago. Both were dear to me. When I heard of Evelyne's death, I left immediately for the funeral despite being in the middle of my Cornel semester.

The funeral made me realize a question we should all be asking ourselves more often: what would we like said about us when we are dead?

I came to this question because the things said at Evelyne's funeral were incredible.

Everyone who went up had a meaningful experience to share. Say one thing about Evelyne: she loved people deeply. I remember her visiting Hamilton in 2019 and walking down with her to the Colgate bookstore. We walked hand in hand while snow softly danced down to the ground. We talkd about all sorts of things, literature, life, old age. At one point, she stopped me, took a hard long look at the land around us and said, and said, "this used to be owned by Native Americans." Then she sighed.

I want to live a life that touches peoples in the way Evelyne did.

To do this, I must use death as the ultimate reflector. The Stoics would often get clarity on a situation by asking themselves, "How will I see this when I'm on my deathbed?" My preferred version is to ask myself, "What would my 100-year-old self think?" Right now, a few of my ultimate goals are to raise a happy, loving family. Also to help people fall in love with learning so they can learn more about themselves, others, world and transcend the self. And finally, to be a great teacher. Hopefully, asking this question will help me get there.

One more thing Evelyne taught me is what it means to be young: journeying after something

Evelyne was 93 and still doing the type of physical activities I have seen some 50-year-olds unable to do.

She was walking fine on her own, still driving, and a few years before her fall, went kayaking! How? It's because she was still journeying for something--journeying by trying to make the world a better place while helping grow the next generation with her intimate handwritten letters. Going after this gave her a reason to get up in the morning, to get excited.

When you stop journeying, you get old.

Singapore And Indonesia

One unforgettable experience from this year was traveling for a month during the summer to Indonesia and Singapore with my brother.

It was an experience of firsts. It was my first time in Asia, my first time in a big city for more than a week, and the first time I saw true poverty. Both visits changed me a lot, and deepened my relationship with my brother.

Firstly, Singapore.

Singapore was more beautiful than I had expected. The entire city is only around 50 years old, so the architecture, design, and feel of it seem almost futuristic. It's the small things that you notice. For example, the elevators in the malls stop if nobody is on them to conserve energy. The city was almost eerily clean as well. It took three days for my brother and I to spot our first piece of garbage--a Skittles wrapper on the street. It was nothing short of breathtaking to visit some of the tourist attractions like "The Hotel Boat"--literally a massive boat sitting on top of two skyscrapers, the Science Museum--shaped like a Lotus Flower--And the Gardens at the Bay.

When you're inside the city, you feel like you're living 20 years in the future.

Another great aspect of visiting Singapore was seeing my ex's family.

In many Eastern countries, the whole family stays together in one house. Generally, Eastern countries value community and collectivism more than Western countries like North America and Europe--this doesn't count South America. With her family, we played pickleball, went out to amazing restaurants where we tried daring food--I had durian and chicken feat-- and watched awesome movies like Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning and Oppenheimer.

Seeing the whole family together made me realize how much I value family and want to be an amazing dad someday.

However, it wasn't all raindrops and sunshine.

The major thing I hated about Singapore was the consumerist culture. It's as if the city personally hired Amazon as a sales consultant to try and get you to buy things. In the city, there are many, many massive industrial mall complexes, some with more than 5 or 6 floors. Inside shops are stuffed together like an overfilled popcorn bag to try and fit as much stuff as possible.

Whenever I was in one of the malls I felt like I was literally breathing an atmosphere that said: come, buy something, you know you want to.

I'm not surprised this was the most distasteful part of Singapore for me because I hate consumerism in America. I have always been someone who can live on little--my room is smaller than most people's bathrooms. I understand the temporality of money on happiness when it comes to buying material possessions. Experiences are much more valuable then material possessions for happiness.

That's why I don't respect people who put too much value on material items and can't stand this aspect of Singapore.

Next Indonesia.

Indonesia--or at least Bali where we spent our stay--was the polar opposite of Singapore.

Where Singapore was futuristic, rich, and clean, Indonesia felt like the past and was mostly poor and dirty. Lots of houses were made out of wood, the shops were filled with plastics, and many of the people generally looked poor and malnourished.

But, it was beautiful in its own way.

For one, most of the people were incredibly kind. One shop owner was so amazed at finding Americans in Bali that he took a picture with my brother and me outside his shop stall. He even pointed us to a stall with more protein--it was surprisingly tricky to find dishes with enough protein in them in Indonesia. There were also so many cool activities to do there. My brother and I went all out on martial arts like Ju Jitsu, Muay Thai, and Capoeira, as well as ATving, surfing, and a cooking class. We also took some courses together while travelling like Charisma University, Steve Martin's Stand Up Comedy course, and made some balcony conversation skits. It made me realize one of my favorite things to do in new places I travel is to learn. Learning through courses or classes, through exploring, or through museums.

There was one particular experience I wanted to remark upon that will stay with me forever.

I was sitting with my brother at a coffee shop, talking about what goals we envision for our future business-wise. I'm telling him how I wanted to create more courses that people could buy after Obsidian University, a book, an online cohort course, and more. Suddenly, an Indonesian guy at the coffee shop sits down with us. His eyes are drooped, shoulders draped, and back hunched--he looks tired. He starts telling us about his dream. He was going to work for the next five years as a coffee server to make enough money to get his family a house they could move into together from Lombok.

"5 years?!" My brother says. "Is there any way you could go faster?"

The man shakes his head. There is no way for him to afford an education, and if he did he, would need to finish school and quit his job, likely making it take longer. In that moment, I realized more than ever how privileged my brother and I are. So many people in the world suffer without the degree of choices we have. It makes me grateful for the autonomy we have in the U.S.

I won't forget it.

90 Mile Adirondack Canoe Race

One more experience that deeply touched me this year was my 90-mile Adirondack Canoe Race.

The 90-mile Adirondack canoe race is a 3-day race split by around 30 miles each day. Over 5-7 hours of paddling each day in the gorgeous nature of the Adirondacks. I did the race last year with my dad, but this year, I decided to do it with the Cornell Outing Club.

The race was deeply meaningful to me for a few reasons.

Firstly, the pure physical gruel of it builds character.

Paddling for that long at a time is easily the hardest physical thing I have ever done. I wanted to throw up multiple times, and had a back that felt like crushed ramen noodle's for a week afterward.

Secondly, it's just plane gorgeous.

I feel truly blessed to have the Adirondacks, one of the most majestic mountain ranges in the U.S., just a few hour's drive from where I go to school. Getting to be on lakes and in rivers, next to the slowly changing fall colors of the trees, was truly spectacular. I'm increasingly realizing how much I love being in nature and want to make sure where I live in the future has access to something that taps into that love.

Thirdly, the people.

A 90-mile canoe race attracts a certain crowd. People who also love the outdoors, physical gruel, and camping. I met quite a few people I would like to continue to interact with in the future, especially after future 90 milers.

Lesson From These Experiences: A Happy Life Isn't Necessarily A Memorable One

I learned an important lesson from these experiences: a happy life isn't necessarily a memorable one.

I'm happiest when I'm in my routine. But the most memorable experiences occur when I break out of it. The 90 miler, Evelyne's funeral, Singapore and Indonesia, running a 5k up Greek Peek in the rainy mud with my mom, when I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. watching Three Idiots with friends, when I spontaneously walked around Beebe lake with a girl I found cute at Cornell.

I'm not dismissing routine.

I'm a very routine person because it helps offload mental energy in choosing what to do so I can spend more energy on things I care about.

The problem is routine takes away novelty, the most important aspect of forming new memories.

When I'm in my routine for too long, life starts to become a blur.

But it's also when I'm my happiest, writing, reading, exercising, seeing friends over lunch and dinner. Breaking out of the routine can be anxiety producing, hard, but ultimately necessary to have a memorable life.

This realization made me reflect upon one of the critical things I learned in Thinking Fast And Slow.

There are two different kinds of self: the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self is how you experience things in the moment. The remembering self is the self that looks back upon the experiences you've had. My experiencing self likes being in a routine and doing novel things when I'm doing them (the planning part I'm stilll learning to enjoy). However, my remembering self doesn't like looking back upon my routine as much as it does my novel experiences.

So, should we aim for a happy life or a memorable one?

To me, the solution isn't an either-or. You should find a routine you could do every day that immerses you in the present and gets you into the flow state, using the minimum amount of pharmaceutical, technological, or other tools possible. Then, occasionally break that routine to create peak moments that can pay you happiness dividends for the rest of your life.

To do this, I need to be MUCH more flexible with my time.

I used to be super rigid and structured with my time, especially during my anabolic dieting period in 2020. But thankfully, as the years have gone on and after making this realization, I'm becoming more flexible. If I wasn't, it wouldn't open me up to the incredible experiences that could be around the door.

Personal Growth

Growth Requires Reflection

The more I do reviews like this one, the more I realize reflection through reviews, writing, and no technology walks, is the foundation of growth.

I have never been someone who can experience something and immediately make sense of it. I have to write about it. I have to put it into words.

This is the first year where I successfully stuck to daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reflection for the entire year.

And it showed. It's in these reflections I spot patterns on what fills me with energy and what sucks it away. This applies to the information you consume as well. Consuming without reflection or application is useless aside for entertainment. I read 100+ books this year. That might seem ridiculous, but for almost every one I created linked reading notes. I created a Who Am I note in my system, reflecting upon how every major person in my life has impacted me. I created a Lindy Effect Content List reflecting upon the information that impacted me most and how.

How can you know where to go if you don't know where you have been?

The Importance Of Purposeful Practice

Another massive lesson I learned is how crucial purposeful practice is to improving a skill.

I have been writing almost every day for more then three years. When I first started, I improved a ton. But recently, I noticed I'm starting to stagnate. So I asked, why?

After reading Eric Anderson's book Peak, I have come to realize: I'm stagnating because I'm not doing enough purposeful practice.

Purposeful practice is defined in Ander Ericson's fantastic book Peak as a specific, structured form of practice intended to improve performance.

Out of all the aspects of purposeful practice, the most crucial is stepping outside of your comfort zone.

If you don't step outside of your comfort zone, you can't improve at any skill.

Think of it like progressively overloading in the gym. Without slowly increasing in weight, rep, or quality of form, as you get more muscular and strong, you will stagnate.

That's why I'm stagnating in my writing.

I haven't done purposeful practice inside of it for a while. I have gotten complacent. Writing things in the same voice, with the same argumentative style and vocabulary. So, one of my big goals for 2024, which I will dive more into in that section, is purposefully practicing in my writing to get more emotional resonance and broaden my style. I will also apply purposeful practice to all of the other essential skills in my life, like resistance training and cardio.

The Importance Of Doing Nothing

One last lesson I learned inside personal growth is the value of doing absolutely nothing.

I'm the type of person that loves doing. So doing nothing has always been a struggle for me. But because my theme for this year was inner peace, I made an active effort to be more comfortable with just being. I kept up a meditation habit every day for the whole year. I did multiple no-technology fasts. I created a daily habit of walking in nature for at least an hour almost every day.

Paradoxically, doing nothing actually helps you do more.

I learned from A Mind for Numbers by Dr. Oakley that our brain goes through focused and diffused mode thinking. In focused thinking, we focus intently on one thing. In diffused mode thinking, however, we broaden our awareness and don't focus on anything in particular. Our brain isn't doing anything while in diffused mode thinking; it's subconsciously working through problems we did during our focused mode thinking.

When we give ourselves time to do nothing, we leverage our diffused mode thinking to help us solve problems

That's why we often have our best ideas while in the shower, or in the grocery store, or looking out a window. But we need to give ourselves this diffused thinking time. Not block it with mindless Tik Tok scrolling, YouTube, or texting.

By doing nothing more often, I became more creative and less restless.

Goals I'm Excited For In 2024

In no particular order, here's what I'm excited for in 2024.

Get A Girlfriend

After having such a wonderful experience with my first girlfriend ever, I would love to find another one, maybe even for life.

It would have to be the right person, a goddess would do. I'm just joking, lol, but the characteristics I want in someone are pretty hard to meet. The three most important things I'm looking for are someone who is physically active, introspective, and loves learning intrinsically (text at XXX-XXX-XXX if you know someone who fits the bill wink). I know this person exists at Cornell. It's largely a matter of "increasing the leads," as Alex Hormozi would say. I just haven't gone on enough dates, and I plan to try more next semester.

Make $5,000 A Month In Revenue By The End Of 2024

I have been creating consistently online for almost three years at this point, and currently only make around $650 a month in revenue from my various online endeavors.

If I plan on turning my content creation into a passive and active income stream that can support me in the future, I need to make more than this. I want full autonomy so I can work on what I want, when I want, where I want, with who I want, and how I want. And I think I'm getting close doing that; I have accumulated many of the necessary skills, I just need to let them compound. So for 2024, I'm going to continue creating a YT video, a newsletter, and a podcast every week. But instead of creating more products like I did with my two video courses this year, I'm going the service business route and learning the skills inside of that. This way, I don't skip a ladder of wealth, as Nathan Barry would say. This will likely hold me for the first 3-6 months of 2024.

Then, in the second half of 2024, I want to refine my craft of creating YT videos, newsletters, and podcasts.

I literally want to go one by one through each of those mediums and put dedicated effort into improving the systems and quality that underly each. While I believe quantity is more important than quality at the beginning of a creator journey, I'm past the stage where I only need to worry only about putting as much stuff out there as I can. I want to create some great work that will also stand the test of time.

What type of content will I create?

I plan on continuing to create content about notetaking and Obsidian, but I want to dive more into the connection between gamification and learning as well. Integrating principles of games into real life can dramatically improve our lives in health, work, and relationships. In addition, I want to write more about general habit, productivity, and personal development advice that I have long not written about because of fear of "not being niched enough." I have a bubble of things I would like to say about those topics I haven't gotten to talk about. Also, I want to create more content sharing what I'm learning and how so other people can benefit from it.

Learn Intermediate Spanish In 6 Months

For 2024, I have set the goal to learn intermediate Spanish in just six months.

This is a difficult goal, but there are a few reasons I want to do it! Firstly, I could talk to native speakers when travelling to South America. Secondly, I can see the world in a different light because different languages make you perceive the world differently. Thirdly, I can delve further into my love for the science of learning through language learning. And fourthly, I can connect with my friend Rushika who knows Spanish fluently.

Improve My Writing Emotional Resonance

I have gotten complacent over my three years of writing almost every day.

Writing is the foundation of my personal and business growth, so if I improve my writing, I improve everything else. In 2024, I plan on putting more effort into doing purposeful practice with my writing. I have analyzed what my favorite writers do that makes me love them. Here are some of the areas I have realized I can improve on from doing this:

• Musicality. Shorter and longer sentences. Punchy and sometimes airy.
• Using analogies and metaphors.
• Using more vivid language. Stuff that makes people see things in their head.
• Implement more humor into my writing
• Use more rhetorical questioning to spark interest, awe, and wonder
• Use more images to spark awe, wonder, and curiosity, as well as break text up
• Use more sources throughout my writing and embed links in footnotes
• Tie the introduction back in the conclusion
• Make the main idea of the article very clear with its own header, bold, or something else
• Use more buts, ands, and therefores.

I believe great writing has the potential to break readers out of their normal patterning of the world and into the sublime. Poets do this. Great fiction writers do this. But rarely do self-help, industry gurus, or many other non-fiction writers do this.

Great writers balance intellectual stimulation with emotional ones.

To do this, I'm reverse engineering my favorite writers, rewriting their best posts in my voice or theirs, and then comparing and contrasting them to the original piece.

I'm also prioritizing creation over consumption over this next year. Usually, I write a ton in the mornings, but I start consuming more in the afternoons or evenings. This allowed me to read 100+ books this year, but that's not going to help me improve my writing as much as just writing more. So I will write for 5 minutes every time I feel like consuming out of the evening to encourage more writing.

Also, I'm transforming my book club with my friend Chris into a writing club where we will practice writing short story fiction. Writing fiction is one of the best ways to improve your emotional valence in your non-fiction writing, so it should help.

Finally, I need to find a person or group where I can get feedback on my writing. For all of my writing journey, I haven't had someone I can do it alongside because no one I know loves writing as much as I do. Getting outside feedback is one of the essential parts of improving writing, so I need to find someplace I can do this in.

Continue Practicing Mindfulness, Philosophizing, And Create Mantras For The Different Areas Of My Life

I have made it a long way in fostering inner peace over this last year.

But cultivating inner peace is a lifelong journey. So I plan on continuing to meditate every day in 2024, philosophizing like Marcus Aurelius in my meditations, taking walks in nature, and lastly creating mantras for different areas of my life. Mantras are incredibly useful for grounding you in the present and realigning you with your values. I have a general life mantra I cringily admit to using every day to get out of bed. It's from the Stormlight Archives and goes, "Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination."

But I would like to create mantras for other walks of my life as well like in relationships, work, and health.

Continue Doing Speech And Debate And Stand Up

I plan on continuing to do speech and debate and stand up in 2024 but more as hobbies.

They both help me a ton in developing my humor and argumentation style, but I don't have the time or energy to invest in them heavily. It's not sustainable to do more than 4 hours of deep work a day. And if I tried being serious with these alongside my writing for content creation, I would go over that. So I'm going to continue doing them, but not super seriously.

Supercharge My Resistance Training, Cardio, And Dieting

Like in my writing, I have gotten complacent in my resistance training, cardio, and dieting.

In resistance training, I haven't been as assiduous, progressively overloading over the last few months, and have only been going 3 days a week. My form has broken down, which became abundantly clear when a personal trainer friend of mine checked out my form and corrected all the major errors I had over the summer. I haven't been progressively overloading on cardio either. For diet, I have eaten very healthily for years, but I have been between 155-165 pounds for 3 years now and definitely not gained as much muscle because of it. Therefore I would like to learn how to bulk and cut.

So this next year, I want to supercharge my resistance training, cardio, and dieting.

I'm planning on moving to a four day upper-lower split, improving my form, progressively overloading on my lifts and cardio, and learning how to bulk and cut effectively in the gym. My ideal body in a few years would look like that of Jace Tallis in Arcane (if you know, you know, lol).

Foster Deeper Friendships

This last year, I did a great job cultivating my deepest friend and family relationships, and I want to continue that.

This summer I'm planning on visiting my friend John Mavrick physically in Vancouver (Finally! We have known each other for a year and yet have never seen each other physically). I will likely be going to The Netherlands as well and would like to organize something fun in nature to do with friends over the second half of the summer. I'm going to try and spend more time ice skating and climbing with my friend Rushika. I'll be more intentional with setting up novel experiences with friends outside of lunches and dinners too. Lunches and dinners are great, but they aren't as memorable as those novel experiences. Perhaps I could start a board game club or Dungeons And Dragons Campaign.

Unfortunately, I will also be pruning some of my friendships.

I'm not going to name them here for obvious reasons, but if I want to have a girlfriend, I can't see as many people as I do. I have cultivated enough friendships for my time in college. Now is the time to deepen relationships. This doesn't mean I won't invest in relationships I don't see a long-term future in--I know the value in grappling with many perspectives.

I will simply be seeing fewer people consistently.

Invest In My Video Gaming Hobby

Finally, I would like to invest more in my video gaming hobby.

I have been playing weekly video game sessions with my friend John Mavrick for around six months now. We have been going through Gloomhaven and having so much fun. In the future, I would like to play more video games with John and maybe some other friends--I've had my eyes on Balder's Gate III for a while cause I love Dungeons And Dragons. I plan on having a personal library and board game closet someday, so this is the starting point of that.

Theme Of 2024: Cultivate

Taking all of these goals into account the theme of 2024 will be, Cultivate.

Cultivate captivates the essence of continuous improvement and growth across all my life dimensions. The seeds for awesomeness are planted. I have all of my keystone habits in place. Now like a sapling growing into a great tree, it's a matter of cultivating them.

That's my 2023 annual review!

If you have read this far, I can't thank you enough for sticking it out! This is the longest article I have ever written. But I know my 100-year-old self will look back upon 2023 as one of the most transformative of my life, and I am glad I spent the time to do this.

I encourage you to learn to do one of these yourself if you're interested by checking out my video on it.