Q4 2023 Review
This is my 16th consecutive quarterly review. It's a reflection on my goals for the fourth quarter of 2023. I conduct these quarterly reviews to track my progress on my ten year plan, which I published at the end of 2019 and suggest you read to get the most out of this article.
If you want to conduct your own quarterly reviews, here's my free comprehensive guide and my toolkit with templates, trackers, and video instructions.
First, I want to reflect on some of my progress against my ten year plan. I don't typically do this in the quarterly reviews, but since it's the end of a year, I'd like to reflect briefly on a few topics.
More fitness: 2023 was another good year for fitness. This was my second year of CrossFit. I'm still enjoying it, and I attended 166 classes in 2023. I also logged 35 runs for the year totaling 156 miles.
The consistency with CrossFit has translated to some awesome progress. Last week, I hit my heaviest deadlift ever at 415 (I weigh 180), and I also hit a power clean PR at 225. Surprisingly, CrossFit has also kept me in good running shape. I ran a half marathon in October with no running training, and my time was 1:56. This isn't an impressive time for a good runner, but I was surprised I could run this time without any training. I think it's a testament to the value of CrossFit style workouts.
Additionally, I ran a Cooper Test earlier this month to test my VO2 max. I ran 1.89 miles in 12 minutes, which amounts to a VO2 max of 56. I'm really happy with this number, but I'm hoping to increase it to 60 in 2024.
Fitness is the area in which I'm most happy with my progress, and I hope to continue making incremental progress through consistency. In 2024, I hope to do about 140 CrossFit classes and run somewhere between 500 and 1,000 miles.
More risks: I lived pretty conservatively this year. I worked a boring but relatively high paying job all year, and I didn't make any alternative investments.
I've changed my thinking on risk taking slightly. I still think it's important to take big risks, but I don't think it's important to take them frequently. I've shifted my mindset to adopt more of the Buffet/Munger punch card theory of investing. Basically, you imagine that you have an investment punch card with a finite number of punches. When those punches are gone, you can't make any more investments. The idea here is that you spend more time being patient and waiting for good opportunities, then you divert a lot of resources into those opportunities.
Right now I'm in the 'being patient' phase. That includes accumulating capital, waiting for the right opportunity, and making sure I'm positioned to act swiftly when I find the right opportunity.
More money: I set a net worth goal of $2 million by age 37. In 2022, my net worth decreased by 19%. In 2023, it increased by about 33%. I find this outcome so interesting because my behavior was very similar this year as it was last year, but the outcome was wildly different. I made slightly less money. I spent slightly less money. I made very few investing moves—in fact I primarily held what I owned and saved cash instead of contributing to existing investments.
The big difference was market performance. In 2022, the S&P 500 was down about 19%—the same as my net worth. And in 2023, it was up about 24%. So I saw my assets bounce back, plus I saved a good chunk of money, which accounts for the difference. This is a great reminder about the importance of patience. It's also a good reminder to control the things you can control and not worry about the rest.
More philanthropy: This has been non-existent for me. Right or wrong, I'm more focused on accumulating money now so I can do good with it later.
More readers: I set a goal to have 50,000 email list subscribers by age 37. I started the year with 1,382 and finished the year with 1,303. I fell way short of my goal of 3,000 subs. I actually had a YoY decrease of 6%. I'm not thrilled about this performance, but I'm not surprised. I originally planned to do a lot of writing in 2023, but I only published a handful of pieces.
2023 was a year of figuring out my content strategy rather than executing. I think it was one of those situations where you take a step or two backwards so you can take a bunch of steps forwards. That's not to say that 2024 will be a huge year for adding email subs, but I have a better sense of direction which I believe will allow me to still hit my ultimate goal of 50k subscribers by the time I'm 37.
Okay that's it for my ten year plan progress. Now I want to take a moment to review my full year goals from 2023 and outline my full year goals for 2024.
Full Year Goals:
In 2023, I had six main goals for the year:
Grow Wonderful Words from 0 to 1,000 subscribers.
Perform at least two hours per week of Zone 2 training in the first six months, then re-evaluate for the second six months.
Transition away from compliance work into being an independent creator.
Spend 200 hours reading books and complete notecards for all the books I read.
3,000 LSJ subscribers.
Spend less than $72k for the year ($6k/month average).
I grew Wonderful Words to about 450 subscribers and then pulled the plug in July. This was a fun experiment, but I originally gave myself permission to quit if I hadn't hit 500 subs by the end of June. I decided after six months of working on this project, it wasn't something I wanted to keep doing long term. I learned the value proposition wasn't enticing enough to attract a lot of subscribers, so it wasn't worth my time to keep going. I didn't achieve the goal, but I had fun working on it, and I don't consider it a failure.
I started strong with the Zone 2 training, but after my daughter was born in February, I quickly realized I didn't have the time to keep up with this goal and CrossFit. I decided to focus on CrossFit instead, and I just mixed in running as I could. This is still something I want to work towards in the future because it's super beneficial to my health and fitness, but with limited time, I currently get more bang for my buck from CrossFit.
I'm still working in compliance, but I feel like I made progress toward this goal in 2023. I experimented with one project and learned it wasn't the right one (Wonderful Words). I also started a second project that I think has potential to become a career over the next couple years (Better Than B-School podcast). For the first time in my "creator" career, I feel like I have a clear vision of what I want to pursue and what the path looks like.
I spent 163 hours reading books this year. This was six hours more than I spent reading in 2022, but it was still considerably short of my goal. I'm happy with this performance, but I want to do much better in 2024.
I already briefly discussed the LSJ subscribers. I fell way short of this goal. I'm not making this a focus for 2024. I'll continue writing the newsletter, but I probably won't promote it very actively until I make a lot more progress with my podcast.
My wife and I rounded out our spending tracker for the year at $72,602.55. I'm thrilled with this number. Our monthly spending fluctuated a lot—with our highest month just under $9k and our lowest month just above $4k—but it all averaged out to almost exactly our goal of $6k per month.
Onward to 2024.
I have five main goals for the year. I elaborated on them in great detail in my journal, but I'm going to give you the abbreviated version.
Publish 20 episodes of the Better Than B-School podcast. I think this is on the very high end of what I can manage while still working full time.
Spend less than $52k in the first six months of the year, then re-evaluate for the second half. This is the same $6k per month average, plus $16k to buy out my car when the lease is up in March. We're also planning a move to another state in July, so we don't want to set a spending goal for the back half of the year until we have a better idea of what our expenses will look like.
Run a marathon in 3:30 or less. This will force me to do more zone 2 running, and it's also a bit of a stretch goal given that I'm going to continue training via CrossFit.
Eat one serving of fruit and one serving of vegetables every day. I generally eat a pretty good diet, but I'm lacking in my fruit and vegetable intake.
Spend at least 200 hours reading books. This goal also overlaps with the BTBS episodes. The more time I spend reading, the easier it will be to hit the podcasting goal.
Alright, now that I've got those down in a public place, I'll finally move on to my review of Q4 2023.
Complete Successes:
These are the goals I nailed.
One investment program analysis.
I finally turned this over to a professional.
I'll still review my plan quarterly and be involved in the decision making, but I won't be the one picking the investments anymore. This was long overdue.
I'm still holding a significant portion of my net worth in cash, as I anticipate buying a house in the next year or two, and I generally like the security of holding more cash than most people think is appropriate.
One workout program analysis.
Some stats for the quarter:
43 CrossFit classes attended.
10 runs for a total of 61 miles.
843,923 steps or about 9,173 steps per day.
Last quarter I attended 43 CrossFit classes and ran six times for a total of 49 workouts. I attended the same number of classes this quarter and ran a lot more. I tallied 53 workouts for the quarter.
I'm really happy with this performance. As I mentioned earlier, I'm the strongest I've ever been. I'm probably the fastest I've ever been for short distances and pretty close for long distances. I've avoided all but minor 'ache and pain' type injuries for an extended period of time. And I've been very consistent with showing up.
Ideally I'd like to be doing more. Mostly a bit more running, a little bit more focused strength work, and more recovery/prehab work, but given my current time constraints I'm very happy with what I'm accomplishing.
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 209 consecutive issues of The Lake Street Journal. I haven't missed a Friday in four 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 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 Q4, we spent $15,344.81, which was well under budget.
This helped offset our extra spending in Q3 and allowed us to come in less than 1% over budget for the full year, which I think is fantastic. We also spent about $5k less than the previous year. I'm considering this a huge accomplishment in not moving the financial goal posts, especially considering we had some sizable hospital bills from our daughter's birth, and everything just generally cost more due to inflation.
Unlike in Q3, we didn't have any big, out-of-the-ordinary purchases for the quarter. This tells me our process is working perfectly. It's fine to splurge in some months on some things we want as long as we aren't doing this consistently.
Partial Successes:
These are the goals I didn't quite nail but I didn't strike out on either.
Spend 50 hours reading.
This wasn't a great quarter for reading. I spent 28 hours and 15 minutes reading books. I read for about 12, 7, and 9 hours in October, November, and December, respectively.
I finished four books in Q4:
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis (rating 4.5/5)
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.
Publish 4 installments of my new project.
No need to be cryptic about this anymore. This was in reference to my Better Than B-School podcast.
My goal for the quarter was to publish four episodes. I published three:
I actually had the fourth one complete, but I chose to delay it until the new year because I didn't want to publish it during the holidays.
I know the success of this project will come slowly, but I'm happy with how it started. The first three episodes all have over 100 downloads, and the Madoff episode has over 200.
I pay attention to download numbers, but the metric I'm measuring here is episodes published because that's what I can control.
Failures:
These are the goals I didn't accomplish. They serve as good lessons and points of reflection.
Journal at least once per week.
I only wrote four entries in Q4, but I wrote 5,371 words.
The bulk of my journaling was documenting our family trip to Greece. When we got home, I did my best to write a day by day recap of the trip.
I did this with our honeymoon too, and I love looking back at that and remembering things I otherwise would've forgotten.
I'm bummed I didn't journal very much, but I'm happy I captured the memories from an incredible trip.
Conclusions:
This was another great quarter, and life feels like it just keeps getting better and better.
I know there will be bumps in the road ahead, but I also know the work I'm putting in now will help me deal with those bumps.
2023 was the year I became a father. Aside from getting married, this was—and probably will always be—one of the best and most important moments of my life.
I am immeasurably grateful for all the good things in my life: an incredible wife, a wonderful daughter, my health and fitness, the ability to make money and accumulate wealth, the opportunity and desire to pursue hobbies and interests that excite me, and a supportive extended family.
Building a life you love is a process. It takes a long time. It takes planning, and work, and patience, and luck. Although I still have dreams I'm chasing and visions of what my life might become, I can honestly say I love where it is right now. I'm fortunate that the journey has become almost as enjoyable as I imagine the destination to be.
I hope you can say the same, or at least I hope you're making progress in the right direction.
Q1 2024 Goals:
One workout program analysis.
One investment program analysis.
Spend less than $34k as a couple.
Send 13 LSJ newsletters.
Journal at least once per week.
Spend 50 hours reading.
Publish 5 episodes of BTBS.
Eat at least one serving each of fruit and vegetables every day.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
