2019 was probably one of the most pivotal years of my life as well as this blog. I was never really big on new year’s resolutions but the one I started to formulate last year about being consistent and restarting my blog has taken me to places I couldn’t have expected. I am just getting started though and 2019 is just the spark moving into 2020 for things to get even better and face any coming challenges head on with grit and determination.

It has also been a year of failures. For the first time I have been open and honest about my failures which has allowed me to start the process of learning from them rather than running away from them out of a fear of what people may think. Owning up to my failures has also helped me to change course and take things that weren’t necessarily going in the right direction on a new path. Failing has also taught me that it isn’t about me. As I continue to build my writing skills, marketing skills and interact with readers, I notice there is a lot of pent up knowledge that I have the opportunity to share with people to help them improve their own lives. Ironically, a blog about finance and investing has become more than about money for me.

With that said I want to go over 5 accomplishments and 5 failures I experienced this year and what readers may be able to take away from these for themselves.

Accomplishments

I want to start things out on a positive note so I will list what I feel we’re some notable accomplishments this year and how they changed me.

I Attained Joint Custody of my Son – Although I won’t get into the specifics, this was a great challenge I faced this year that only a few knew about. Every obstacle was thrown in my way to keep this from happening and I risked my job to do it. However my outlook has changed and I make decisions with a 30 or 40 year timeline of my happiness in mind which made tough decisions easy. It will cost me a pretty penny and requires a serious effort in time and logistics but the outcome will be worth it.

Writing – For the first time I consistently wrote in this blog for more than 3 months. In fact I have done it consistently for. The 31st of December last year since I didn’t want to wait for an arbitrary date of January 1st to start. This will be my 106th post. I have written about 150,000 words through my posts this year and readership, although small, has been consistently growing to about 250 visits per month.

I Stopped Drinking for 3 Months – Living in New York and working in the financial industry means there is great social pressure to drink to deal with the stress of the job. For the sake of my health and my family, I decided to take up a challenge I heard on a podcast about drinking: that only 5% of heavy drinkers who say they will stop drinking, do so for 90 days. I took up this challenge but not just for the challenge in itself. After a lot of thought, I realized that most of my drinking lately was done out of fear. Fear that I would be socially outcast for not drinking and fear that my career may suffer if I stopped drinking with managers or coworkers. Once I learned to look at the decision not to drink as an act of courage, that despite these fears, I was willing to risk those things to be my own person, my outlook changed and it motivated me to not drink. I was surprised to find that some people in the industry approached me and said that they too wanted to stop and admired my stance.

I Renewed Challenging Myself – If you want to change your life, start by not doing the same thing you always do. I took this mantra to heart. I got out of my comfort zone and joined the board of a charity. I started to pick back up my regular workout routine and I signed up to take level III of the CFA exam which I failed many years ago. This last effort was to broaden my knowledge for wealth management, which is where I see things heading for myself. It will also put a new difficult challenge in front of me that will force me to continue to push myself into 2020.

I Saved One Third of my Pre-tax Income – This was despite all the challenges of having a child, maintaining multiple residence, having a car, living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and initiating a divorce. I did this my shifting savings to tax advantages accounts and diligently focussing on every money decision. If I can do it under these circumstances then I can do it under any circumstances, and so can others.

Failures

My Marriage Didn’t Work Out – This really started in 2018 but was really at the heart of a lot of the changes I made in my life in 2020. I learned a lot about myself. One of the things I have learned is my own strength, when I was confronted with my marriage, my relationship with my son and my finances forever changed, it forced me to dig deep down and turn the experience from a negative into a positive. I re-evaluated everything I had done in my life up to the point when my marriage started to crumble and had to confront some hard truths. These hard truths led me to understand my partner, the people around me and my own uniqueness in a way more clear than I had ever seen them before.

I Couldn’t Quit Caffeine – The mirror opposite of trying to stop drinking, I got overly ambitious and tried to drop caffeine as well. This worked for about 3 weeks, even when I started getting up at 4am. As the early hours started to wear on me though, I found myself picking back up the habit. I did prove to myself I could do it though and I noticed my energy became more balanced off of caffeine. This is a challenge I would like to take up again.

I Had Anxiety Attacks – For the first time in my life I experienced some serious anxiety attacks and they came at times I didn’t expect. With the pressure of work, blogging, multiple homes caring for my son all weighing on me, I felt that I was going to crack at some point. It culminated in the post So I Fainted at Work Today. As before though, I took this failure and I crushed it. I used the insomnia, which was due to the anxiety, to start to occupy my mind when I began to feel that way. This upped my production in all facets of my life while at the same time calming my mind. Not long after, I stopped drinking as well.

My Side Hustles Didn’t Pan Out – One of my goals was to start earning some money from side hustles. This didn’t come to fruition in 2019. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I did manage to make a few sales on EBay but lost a few bucks instead of making anything. It did teach me a few lessons though and pushed me to focus on the long term vision of finishing my book so that I can self publish and sell it.

Writing – Speaking of writing that book, I didn’t make the progress I hoped to. I have probably jotted down about 10,000 words at this point and the book will need heavy editing. My research has slowed my writing to a crawl as it requires a lot if reading to get just a little output. On the positive side, finding tricks to increase my production has helped. In the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I learned about the application of the do something principle to writing. One writer who consistently published books over many years claimed all he did was write 200 words a day. This inspired me to set a similar goal for myself. I have not always achieved it but the confidence I have built over the past year keeps me trying to return to my book rather than get frustrated and leave it to the side. In terms of my blog writing, after a year of writing I have noticed that my writing needs a lot of improvement. Consistently trying though has enabled me to notice my slow progress and become more patient in writing. Initially I struggled to come up with topics. When that became easy I hated editing. Now I am focussing more on editing but the content in my head doesn’t always get produced on paper the way I envisioned. I have to keep pushing a striving in this regard to make more useful and engaging content for readers.

The Results

The results of the accomplishments and failures is that I have lost a lot of the fear that previously dominated my life. I not longer have fear that relationships won’t work out, about money or shifting my career. The changes I have made this year have slowly brought me to the realization that I want to take my life and career an new direction. Rather than a complete change, as some may expect, I find that I like finance, I just would like to shift my focus. I feel there is a grey area between motivation, personal finance and wealth management which is not being exploited and I am in a unique position to carry out a vision which brings these topics together to help people. I would like to help people shed fear of judgement and social exclusion to lead to better financial decisions.

Along those same lines, you will notice the title I chose ended with what I can teach, not what I have learned. This is an important distinction that was intentional. What started out in this blog as writing for my own personal purposes has turned into writing for things bigger than myself. I have learned that over the years I have acquired a unique skill set in terms of my disciplined approach to investing and personal finance. These were not just things learned in school but learned at home. The difference being that I think that they are teachable skills. These are skills I shouldn’t just keep to myself but should share with others to transform their lives for the better. It’s has taken a year of writing and interacting with people to realize that many could use guidance in order to master the basics of the psychology that produces wealth. I will continue to learn but also focus on sharing my journey and my knowledge more intentionally.

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