SDS 118: New Year Resolutions

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, and to the concluding episode for this year, to the concluding Five Minute Friday episode. Super excited to have had this journey in 2017 with you, really looking forward to what’s coming next, all the guests and speakers and all the discoveries that are coming up next in 2018. And today I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about resolutions. So I would be really curious to find out if you set yourself resolutions for the new year, and I’ve been doing that for the past 5 years or so. And I wanted to share my process on how I set my resolutions and what it entailed and how I go about it.

The first thing that I would like to share is there is this type of card, and it’s like a magical card. It really does magic. It’s called “because I said I would.” So you can find them at becauseisaidiwould.com, it’s a not-for-profit. I really don’t remember how I found out about them 5 or 6 years ago, but basically, you can go on that website, and you can ask them to mail you a set, like 10 of these “promise cards”. And it’s just like a white plain card, and at the bottom it says “Because I said I would.” And since this podcast is going out on the 29th of December, it might be a bit late to request them now, but you can just go there and get their template and print it out for yourself. Or some time next year, you don’t have to just request 10, you can support them and buy some cards. Because if you request 10, they’ll send them to you for free, which is just really nice of them. They have actually sent out 8.5 million promise cards to 153 countries all over the world. And I’m not sure how recent that information is, but that’s like 8.5 million cards they’ve sent out, that’s a lot of cards! And I’m assuming that’s all that they send out for free as a social movement and non-profit organisation. Maybe that’s the total they send out, but that’s a huge number.

Basically, what that card is, is it’s just a white card and you write down your promise. What I do is I write my promise and my resolution for the new year. It doesn’t have to be a new year’s resolution, you can do it during the year, you can make a promise any time. And you can use the help of other people to help hold you accountable, you can give them that card. So write your promise, put the date, sign it, and give it to another person, and then they’ll hold you accountable for it. So like let’s say “I will quit smoking”. And you write that down, and then the other person holds you accountable for it. But I don’t really do that, I just write my resolution for the new year, and I stick it up on my wall, or on a poster which I have. I stick it smack bang in the middle of the poster, and I just accumulate them over the years. So I think I have like 5 hanging on that poster right now.

And so this year, I’m going to add a 6th one. I do that on the 31st of December, and I keep it simple. I keep it very small. I don’t make promises to do lots of different things. That I will do throughout the year, I’ll decide it for myself. But I always identify what’s the most important thing for me to do in the coming year that I feel that that’s really going to change my life. And right now, I’m recording this podcast a few days before, so it’s the 24th December, Christmas Eve, and I haven’t yet decided what is going to be the most important thing for me in 2018. I usually decide on the very last day, on the 29th, on the 30th, or even the 31st of December, and then I write it down, and that’s when I know what it will be.

But I can definitely share some of the things that I’ve written in the past. In the past, I’ve been predominantly focused on professional, career, and business goals. So previously, when I was still at Deloitte, so this was in 2013, so on 31 December 2013, what I wrote on the card was “I will quit my job next year.” And that was a promise. I had to keep it! And that really pushed me so hard to send resumes, to look for other jobs, because at that point, I knew that, that’s it. I’m not growing any more. And I loved Deloitte. I think Deloitte’s an amazing place. But I felt that that was the time for me to move on. And once I made that decision for myself, I really pushed myself really hard to find where I’ll go. And I did. I found SunSuper. I went to an Australian pension fund, into the industry, and that was great. At the same time, I was already starting out my online business and I had a few things going in parallel.

So that was 2013 December. Then in December 2014, because I also felt that my online business was going well, it was getting better, and it was time for me to focus on that. But I also felt that I don’t think I’m ready to completely quit my job yet. So I wrote on the card that “I will transition to working 3 days a week or less.” And again, I actually did. So I think within a few months, in February or March, I transitioned to working 4 days a week, so I actually talked to my manager, and to the executive team, and I said, “Hey guys, look, I got other things that I’m interested in as well, but happy to work less, you can cut my salary proportionately, but I’m going to work 4 days a week.” And they were fine with it, and so I wasn’t working Wednesdays. And then my next step would be transitioning to working 3 days a week, and that would fulfil my promise, but what I did instead was just quit my job, because I felt that’s it. I felt confident to focus just on my online business.

And after that, I started setting myself financial goals. And looking back, I think that is a big mistake, a big no-no. So I actually set my next goal in the middle of that year, in the middle of 2015, because I had already achieved my previous one, and then at the end of 2015, I set myself another resolution for 2016, and both of those were financial goals. Those were goals to make a certain profit, or have a certain amount of money in the bank account by the end of the year, and my personal experience with that is that is not a good idea because you end up just being consumed by that, and that is always at the top of your head, and you miss out on life. Life goes by, you say no to interesting adventures, you say no to really cool things to do, because all you’re focused on is making sure that your business is running and that you’re growing – financially the business is growing or your funds are growing, and so on.

And life is much more than that. And that experience made me realise that, that that is not what I want from my life, or for my life. It’s ambitious, but it’s also a very ego-driven approach to setting your goals and deciding what you want to accomplish. And so I decided to steer away from that, and that’s why in 2016, at the end of last year, I set myself the goal for 2017, which my brother actually gave me some advice. Some of you might know Ilya, who’s also co-author on some of the courses. He gave me a really good piece of advice, and he said to set myself this goal of “Doing 100 amazing things in 2017.” And that was such a good piece of advice. And he said to actually buy these sticky notes, and every time you do an amazing thing, write it down and have this stack of sticky notes, and he actually said put them all into a jar, and at the end of the year, you can pull them out and based on that, see what actually makes you happy. How many of those things are related to family, how many things are related to personal relationships, how many of those things are related to adventure, and so on. And it’s been really, really good.

So I started writing them down. I did, during our trip with Hadelin, I did kind of um, slack off and stopped writing them down. But up until July 2017, I wrote down I think it was 30 or 40 things that I’ve done, and these things range from, “I went and watched the swarm of bats fly over Brisbane”. In February, we have these bats that fly over Kangaroo Point, and you can just lie on the grass around 7 pm and you just see hundreds and hundreds of bats. It’s a mesmerising view. I went on a camper van trip with my parents. What else did I do? I tried aerial yoga. I tried flying a helicopter. I went hiking for the first time in my life. I tried doing a cryo session, where they put you into -180 degrees, or -160 degrees celcius for 5 minutes. I tried a floating session. I went to Vietnam. We launched a Kickstarter campaign. Did the road trip with Hadelin across Europe. So lots and lots of things. And even though I stopped writing them down in the middle of the year, I was just on a roll. After those 30, I think I’ve done probably another 100, or at least another 70 for sure. I got into the mode of doing amazing things pretty much, if not every day, then twice a week we would do something really cool and go somewhere. And don’t get me wrong, we still worked a lot, both Hadelin and I and everybody in the business. We all worked tons. But still we find time to go – well I set myself the goal of finding time, and it became easier, and that’s why I stopped writing them down, because I was just not keeping up, and got consumed with doing these 100 amazing things.

And looking back, I’m so happy I set myself that goal, that resolution, because I have had such an exciting, interesting, amazing year. I’ve met so many people and visited so many places, done so many new things for me. Or even not new things, but very nice, like even going on a bicycle ride with my parents, that I can consider an amazing thing as well. It doesn’t have to be over the top, it just have to be something where you feel alive and enjoy that moment, that time.

And so hopefully those are a few examples of different types of resolutions that I’ve set for myself. There are tons of those out there, different things to choose from. But for me, I have understood the importance of setting resolutions that relate to adventure, exploration, growth. Career resolutions are great. And they definitely served me well at the start. But also, I guess it’s important not to get carried away with them. And the way I approached it this year was yes, I still want to grow the business, I want to develop professionally as well, learn things about data science and record the podcast, and do lots of things in that space. But I also figured that those things will come automatically. Those things will come. I will still work on them, they will happen. If they need to happen, they will happen. And I’ll progress in those fields and spaces as well, but what is the most important thing?

And the most important thing for me has been to actually live life and enjoy how I live life. And the way I quantified that for myself was through setting the goal of doing 100 amazing things and I’m really happy I did that. By the way, there’s a really cool app that you can use. I was only introduced to it a few months ago, it’s called “One second every day”. I think it costs $5 on the app store. But basically, what you can do is you can record a one second video of you every day, and then at the end of the year, it will put all those one second videos together, and that will give you what, 360 seconds, so about 6 minutes of video which consists of 1 second every day. So that way you don’t really have to write it down on sticky notes, you always have your phone with you. So whenever you’re doing one of these amazing things, that’s maybe how I would have gone about it now, you just record yourself doing it for a second, and then you will have this whole compilation of all the amazing things that you did. Or you’ll have a compilation of every day of the year, and among them will be the hundred amazing things.

But again, everybody has their own journey, and so that was mine. I wish you the best of luck in choosing your new year’s resolution. I really think they’re valuable. Whatever you choose, I really think it’s valuable to set some goal. Because as they say, a ship without a destination will never get there, or something like that. Or without an aim, you will miss every time. Unless you have a goal, something that you can reflect upon at the end of the year and look back and be like, “oh, actually, yeah, I did have a great year, I did this and this and this” and take a moment to reflect. Unless you have that, you won’t be able to reflect at the end of the year.

So yeah, I really encourage you to make a new resolution. I wish you the best of luck in picking one that is going to suit your personality, suit your desires and passions, and most importantly, I wish you to have an amazing, amazing celebration of the end of 2017 and the start of 2018. I hope you have a fantastic year. I really look forward to hopefully meeting you in person, or at least staying in touch, and going through 2018 together just as we did through 2017. And I’ll see you back here in the next year. Until then, happy analyzing.