Q3 2023 Review
Last quarter, I talked about narrowing my focus and executing with consistency. The only problem was I hadn't decided where to point my narrowed focus. I spent Q3 thinking a lot about that question, and now I can say with confidence that I have a project where I'll be focusing the entirety of my creative energy for the foreseeable future.
If you've been following along for a while, you know I've been creating a lot of content in various forms for a long time. It's all generally followed the theme of self-improvement, but it's been a winding road of following my interests.
As a result, I haven't developed a niche. I'm not the habits guy, or the writing guy, or the fitness guy, or the real estate investing guy. I'm just the guy who sends a newsletter about something different every week. It's been fun for me, but it hasn't led to any clear focus or meaningful audience growth.
Finally on July 1st, I had an idea that has become my sole focus. It combines my interests and my strengths. It's clearly defined. It's something I'll be able to build an audience around. And if you've been here for a while, I'm pretty sure it's something you're going to like.
I'm not quite ready to announce it yet, but I will be in the next six to eight weeks.
For the first time in my life as a creator, I feel like I'm on a clear path. I have a road map to follow. I have a purpose to pursue.
One of my major goals for 2023 was to transition from the career I've been working for 10 years into a role as an independent creator. I won't be there by the end of the year, but if I can stay on this path I've laid out for myself, I might be by the end of next year.
I'm sorry to be so vague here, but I promise you'll know what I'm talking about soon enough. And everything that follows is colored by this change in my creative focus. This narrowing of my creative focus.
So Q3 doesn't look like a big success on paper, but I think it's actually one of my most successful quarters since I started writing these reviews three years ago. Because now I have clarity that I didn't before. Doing the work has never been my problem. Deciding which work to do always has.
I think I've finally solved that problem.
Let's dig in.
Complete Successes:
These are the goals I nailed.
One investment program analysis.
This was another boring quarter for investing, but I made a few moves I'll detail here.
First, I sold entirely out of my VTSAX position in my taxable brokerage account. When I sold, my position was up 17.7% year to date. Based on some advice I received, I decided it was more likely that the position would decrease by the end of the year than increase, and the alternative was holding the money in a money market fund with a guaranteed 5% return. So basically, I'd made 18% on the money, and I could park it in a 5% guaranteed account for the rest of the year and lock in ~20% gain for the year. This seemed like a no-brainer when I thought about it that way.
As of today, VTSAX is down 5% from when I sold it, so this seems like a good decision at this point.
At the same time I made this move, I also sold positions where I was down and wanted to reduce my exposure to those holdings. Doing this allowed me to offset all the gains I realized from the VTSAX sale. I sold shares of UPST, LMND, FSLY, and SE to realize losses. SE is the only one of those positions where I still have strong, long-term conviction, so after 30 days, I repurchased shares of SE. Lucky for me, they had dropped 40% in that 30 day period, so I bought 3x as many as I sold.
These moves allowed me to increase my cash position:
during a time I want to hold more cash due to a potential house purchase in the medium term
during a time when I'm not bullish on the market as a whole
without paying any taxes
while reducing exposure to positions I'd like to represent a smaller portion of my portfolio
On another note, I'm still holding all 26 small cap stocks I mentioned in previous quarterly reviews. I purchased equal dollar amounts of all 26 companies in May 2020, November 2020, and May 2021. Now the plan is to hold through 2025 and see what happens. As of this writing, the "fund" is down about 27% since inception, down from a -24% paper loss as of last quarter, and down from a 128% paper return at its all time high. I will probably end up selling out of these positions in the next six months in order to totally rebalance my portfolio, but I'll still track the performance through 2025 so I can evaluate my initial thought process against the actual outcome.
One workout program analysis.
Some stats for the quarter:
43 CrossFit classes attended.
6 runs for a total of 20 miles.
845,189 steps or about 9,187 steps per day.
Last quarter I attended 41 CrossFit classes and ran three times for a total of 44 workouts. I attended two more classes this quarter and ran a little more. I tallied 49 workouts for the quarter.
I walked a bit more this quarter, enjoying regular long afternoon walks in the park with my daughter. I also made more of a habit of doing one mile walks after CrossFit classes with friends. Although I'm not tracking weight or body fat percentage, it seems like the extra walking has leaned me out a little bit.
I ran a little more this quarter, but it wasn't intentional. Most of my runs were just light weekend recovery runs with my wife. Most of my exercise energy was focused on CrossFit. For the second quarter in a row, I attended the most classes I've ever attended in a quarter. I'm really happy with my performance in the gym, and I can feel myself improving.
I didn't measure any notable strength gains this quarter, but I've been focusing on better pacing during workouts and working with weight that's appropriate for my strength level. I think the better pacing is both improving my performance and helping me score better times because I'm not crashing as often mid workout. Working with the appropriate weight has been an exercise in taming my ego, and it's helped me get more out of my workouts by hitting the intended stimulus. It also decreases my soreness, so I feel good enough to attend more classes.
Send 13 newsletters.
This one is pretty straight forward. I sent 13 issues of The Lake Street Journal—one each week. At this point, I've sent 196 consecutive issues of The Lake Street Journal. I haven't missed a Friday in three years. If you're reading this and aren't subscribed, I'd love for you to sign up. Drop your email in the box at the bottom of this article.
Spend 50 hours reading.
I fell far short of my reading goal in Q2, but I came roaring back in Q3, and I read some excellent books.
I spent 57 hours and 41 minutes reading. I read for about 21, 16, and 20 hours in July, August, and September, respectively.
I'm trying to figure out what the big difference maker was this quarter, but nothing immediately comes to mind. I think I just watched almost zero television, and whenever I had free time, I picked up a book. That's kind of how it goes with anything you want to accomplish. You don't need huge bursts of effort, you just need a lot of small efforts, stacked on top of each other.
I finished six books in Q3: The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant (rating 3/5), Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (2.5), The Wizard of Lies by Diana Henriques (5), Savage Son by Jack Carr (5), Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (5), and The Devil's Hand by Jack Carr (5).
The first two books were not great. I understand why so many kids hate reading—because school makes them read shitty books like Brave New World and tells them, "this is what a good book looks like." The key to loving reading is to find good writing about topics you enjoy. The last four books I read were exactly that. I'd highly recommend any of them if you're interested in the topics.
As you know, I track the number of books I finish, but it's purely for the sake of having information. I care about time spent reading far more than number of books finished.
I also spent a ton of time reading articles, which I don't track. Many of them end up being shared in The Lake Street Journal.
Partial Successes:
These are the goals I didn't quite nail but I didn't strike out on either.
Spend 20 hours writing.
I spent four hours and three minutes writing in Q3 for a total of 5,652 words written. This is obviously way short of my goal, but there's a caveat.
As I mentioned above, I started working on a new project in Q3. I'm not launching it until later this year, and it's not technically a writing project, but it required a lot of writing. I didn't closely track my time spent writing for the project, but it was in the neighborhood of 15 hours, and I wrote about 15k words.
Since I'm shifting my focus away from publishing written content—at least in the short term—I'm not upset about falling short of this goal. And as I discussed, I probably still spent at least 20 hours writing. It just wasn't writing as I defined it when setting my goals for the quarter.
Failures:
These are the goals I didn't accomplish. They serve as good lessons and points of reflection.
Publish 8-10 articles.
I published one quarterly review for a total of 2,369 published words. I also published eight Wonderful Words emails for somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 words.
This is a pretty weak performance, but as I've already explained, I shifted my focus in Q3 to gear up for a new project to which I'll basically be devoting all of my time. So this was a failure, but I'm not upset about it.
Journal at least once per week.
This is so lame. I didn't write a single journal entry this quarter. Not thrilled about this performance, but it's not the end of the world either. I'm more focused on other things right now.
Send 26 Wonderful Words newsletters.
I started the quarter planning to see this project through the end of the year, but by the end of July, I decided to pull the plug. I sent eight issues of Wonderful Words in Q3, bringing my grand total issues sent to 60.
This was a fun project, and it's something I might revisit in the future, but in the short term, it didn't feel like it was worth the time I was spending on it. It wasn't as inherently easy to grow as I thought it might be, and I didn't have the time to spend on promotion to make it grow.
As I mentioned last quarter, I need to focus on doing fewer things more consistently, and the potential ROI on this newsletter is not high enough to make the cut. I'm glad I started it because there is a ton of value in trying little experiments, and it's another nice project I can use as part of my portfolio. But for now I'm putting it on the shelf to make room for something else.
While this is in the failure section since I didn't send 26 newsletters, I'm not considering it a failure. It was a conscious decision to stop doing something that didn't align with my long term goals, so I consider that a success.
Spend less than $18k as a couple.
My wife and I set a goal to spend less than $72k this year, or $18k per quarter. In Q3, we spent $22,989.23 which was way over budget.
When we went back and reviewed our spending, we realized the overflow was due to a just a handful of purchases. Two big vacation purchases. One more hospital bill from my daughter. New tires for my car. And one big frivolous purchase that was totally unnecessary but something I'd wanted for a long time. We didn't regret any of this spending.
When we set this goal at the beginning of the year, the purpose was to maximize our saving rate. But when we set the goal, we also clearly said that we wouldn't let our arbitrary target keep us from missing out on something we wanted to do. It was more to make sure we didn't inflate our lifestyle with recurring monthly expenses for things we didn't REALLY want. The purpose was to make us audit our spending decisions, and that has worked.
This quarter, we indulged a bit more than normal, so technically we failed to meet our goal. But we're not worried about it. And we'll do our best to rein it back in for Q4. Just to be clear, we didn't spend money we don't have. We just saved a little bit less than we otherwise would have.
So far this year, we've spent $57,262.19, so we're about $3,000 over budget at this point. We likely won't hit our full year target of $72k, but hopefully we'll hit our Q4 target of $18k and stay under $75k for the year. This would put us about $2k under what we spent in 2022.
Conclusions:
I'm very happy with where my life is right now. I'm not satisfied. I still have work to do, and I always will. But I'm happy.
I finally have a clear project I'm pursuing in my creative life. I'm checking my fitness, finance, and family boxes. And I'm enjoying most days way more than I did four years ago.
My life was good before COVID, but I'll always look at the beginning of 2020 as a watershed moment in my life. And every part of my life since that moment has gradually continued improving. A lot of that is luck, I'm sure. But I also attribute a lot of it to setting goals, pursuing them, and reflecting on them every single quarter.
I've been doing this methodically since the beginning of 2020.
It's interesting because it's not something you see benefits from in the short term. But doing this process over four years has helped me define the areas where I want to remain consistent. Keeping those areas top of mind has helped me to chip away, little by little, and improve tremendously.
It has also helped me weed out the areas I don't care about as much. This part of the process is as important, if not more. Figuring out where I shouldn't be spending my time has given me more time to spend on the areas that are important. And that extra time equals extra growth.
All this to say, setting goals may not seem like the most useful practice in the beginning. But if you do it consistently for long enough—I'm talking years not months—it can change your life. I'm nearly four years in, and I'm just starting to realize the power. I can't wait to see my progress in the years ahead.
Q4 2023 Goals:
One workout program analysis.
One investment program analysis.
Spend less than $18k as a couple.
Send 13 LSJ newsletters.
Journal at least once per week.
Spend 50 hours reading.
Publish 4 installments of my new project.
Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash
