#292 Past Year Review

by Stephen Michael White

Author

June 1, 2021

Last Updated

Podcast

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Resources Mentioned on this Episode:

https://tim.blog/tag/new-years-resolutions/

Show Transcription:

Eric Worral: (00:00)
Hey everybody! Welcome back to another episode of RentPrep for Landlords. I’m your host, Eric Worral. And this is episode #292 and we’re going to be talking about a past year review in my head. That rhymed a little bit, but I don’t think it did, but either way, we’re going to get to all that right after this.

Voice Over: (00:20)
Welcome to the RentPrep for Landlords podcast. And now your host, Eric Worral.

Eric Worral: (00:25)
All right, all right! So I subscribe to Tim Ferriss’ blog and also follow him on social media a little bit. If you’re not familiar, most people are. Tim Ferriss wrote The Four Hour Work Week is kind of a hero to many people and he’s kind of a human Guinea pig of sorts who performs all sorts of tests on himself to try and optimize his life. He’s a pretty interesting guy to follow.

Eric Worral: (00:51)
If you haven’t read any of his books, I highly suggest it. But I was recently reading an article from him, which I thought was pretty pertinent and relevant to the fact that if you’re listening to this right after it published it is a new year. It is 2020. And if you know, you’re like most people, you’re setting your goals for this upcoming year thinking about what you want to achieve. But Tim actually says that he doesn’t do that anymore and he hasn’t done that in about eight years. So he said that he’s often asked about how he approaches new year’s resolutions, but that he hasn’t done them even though he did for decades. And he says what he does now is past year review is, or what he calls PYR. He says it’s because they’re more informed, valuable and actionable and half blindly looking forward with broad resolutions.

Eric Worral: (01:40)
I think we can all kind of a, you know, agree with that. Cause I know if you’re like me, you come up with these resolutions. I’m going to journal, I’m going to journal every morning and then I do it like twice and it doesn’t happen again. And usually by February, pretty much all of them have fallen off and you’ve gotten back into your habits and which if you’re not familiar with Keystone habits, take some time to Google that and look that up and get familiar. A quick overview of that is basically that there are certain habits that you can establish that have an overarching effect on other habits. So for me, and maybe I’m jumping ahead here because I do want to kind of talk about my past year review but for me, sleep has been a habit that has not been great.

Eric Worral: (02:29)
And not this past year, but really this past 14 years maybe 16 years or so. I’ve never been great with sleep. And when you’re not sleeping well, then it’s easy to eat poorly. Maybe because your willpower is depleted because you’re lacking sleep. And then it makes it harder to exercise and do those other things that have a positive impact on your life. So it’s a Keystone habit because it affects other habits. So if you’re gonna improve your sleep, you can potentially improve the way you eat. Maybe it’s easier to exercise, maybe it’s easier to be kind to people. Better relationships, all those things. So just something to consider if you are looking at new year’s resolutions, that’s a huge one. So Tim talks about the fact that he has been doing this and only takes 30 to 60 minutes and it looks like this.

Eric Worral: (03:18)
Number one, grab a notepad and create two columns, positive and negative. So I am actually going to do this kind of right now as we’re talking through it. And it says, go through the calendar from the last year, looking at every week for each week. Jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in the respective columns. So that’s an interesting thing right there in that if you’re like me, I used to keep a really tight weekly calendar. I knew exactly I could look back about three years ago and tell you exactly what I was doing a week to week. I can’t do that as well right now. I can tell you roughly month to month before whatever reason, week to week is a little bit tougher. I feel like I’m a costume, but it says that once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask what 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks.

Eric Worral: (04:15)
And then it said, based on the answers, take your positive leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now. Book things with friends and prepay for activities, events, commitments that you know, work. It’s not real until it’s on the calendar. Then that’s step one. Step two is to take your negative leaders put a not-to-do list at the top and put somewhere you can see them each morning for the first weeks of 2019. These are the people and things you know, make you miserable. So don’t put them on your calendar and out of an obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense. So I think these are some really great points that Tim is bringing up. I am terrible at this. For me sometimes, like it’s so easy to fall into a habit or a ritual of the way you kind of live your life.

Eric Worral: (04:59)
And I can give you a good example is I got into coffee about a year ago within the last year. And I could actually probably pinpoint that cause I could look up on Amazon when I was ordering some of this coffee stuff and I got this dripper coffee. It makes like one coffee and you put in your grounds, there’s no actual, you know, a filter that you had to put in and then you, you had to boil water and then you pour the water and, and then you get a cup of coffee about like, I don’t know, maybe 10 minutes later, 15 minutes. But as this whole time, I’m slowly pouring water and I’ve been doing this for a month and I kinda chalked it up to, okay, I’m getting a real good cup of coffee. I’m helping the environment cause I’m not even using a filter where I was using a Keurig in the past, which is really bad.

Eric Worral: (05:48)
I’m sorry if I made you feel bad by saying them and then, but really it’s frustrating. It’s annoying. Like I’m tired of doing it and frankly the cup of coffee, the pre-ground grounds that I could put in a to a pot would be so much better. So one of the things I’ve put on my list is to just get a standard old coffee pot or I can push a button, leave and come back and have coffee because 10 minutes, seven days a week, seven times 10 is 70. Let’s just call it 50 weeks. I’m going to say that’s 3,500 minutes is my guess. If my math adds up if you, if there’s 2,400 minutes, right, that’d be about 10 days. So probably over 10 days of time just spent making coffee. Please correct me. Email me, Eric. I run probe.com and let me know how wrong I was on that math.

Eric Worral: (06:34)
But you, you guys get the point, like you have these things that just add up and it’s just ridiculous. So that would be a way not-to-do list is to stop making single cup pour-over coffee because it’s ridiculous if you’ve got all the time in the world that burn, you know, go for it. But I don’t suggest it. I’ve found this to where like there’s certain, especially cause I do marketing for rent prep and there are certain channels and certain things that we do that work really well yet sometimes like you spend all your time with the squeaky wheel cause you’re like, Oh we’re not good enough. Like our, our LinkedIn postings could be stronger. And it’s like really? Is anybody looking at that? Like they really aren’t. Why don’t we just stay where we’re 80% strong and make that better rather than focusing on things that are, so in terms of like maybe your properties and real estate, if you’re someone with a portfolio, you might have that one property that you look at it and every year you’re like, you know what, 80% of my headaches come from this one property.

Eric Worral: (07:33)
What if I sold it and did 1099 a, excuse me, 1099, a 1031 and a, exchanged it into a, a, a nicer property and reinvested and got rid of that one headache. You know those are the types of things that you can do. But it’s hard if you’re not taking the time to think about it. I know for me this past year I sold my rental property. That was huge for me. More so timing of life. The second kid joined the family. A wife is going to be out for a few months, you know, I just didn’t want to be pulled over to the property while we have this young growing family. I was able to take some of the proceeds of that and start college saving plans, 529 plans for my kids feel like I’m a kind of setting up in that way.

Eric Worral: (08:19)
And was just able to really kind of level my concerns and anxieties quite a bit from doing that. But it just made sense for me at that point in time as far as you know, other little things with properties and real estate maybe have that one sink and I am, this is really a personal story behind that one sink that always leaks no matter what you do to try to fix it. Well, hire somebody to fix it and call them back if it keeps leaking, you know, that kind of thing. I sometimes call them orbiters those things that kind of popping in and out of your life cord a bit where you notice them. And for me, like I painted a like a playroom at my house when we got it and I never liked the color.

Eric Worral: (09:02)
Finally, took the time a few weeks back to paint it. And I love the color now and I don’t see it everyday and be like, ah, I got a paint that looks awful. You know what I mean? The best example of that is that I, if you’ve ever watched modern family, and Phil always goes up the steps and trips on the one-step and he’s like, I’m going to fix that. I feel like I’ve got a lot of those and I’m trying to hammer out. But yeah, I just think this is an interesting way. A do a pasture review. Think about your year take 30, 60 minutes. I know it sounds like a long time, but you know what, that’s a for me, that’s six cups of coffee and figure out what, what to keep doing and spend more time on and what to put on your a don’t do list.

Eric Worral: (09:41)
And don’t worry about the obligations, guilt or FOMO that or to attach to that just to take those things out of your life. So I think it’s a pretty helpful exercise. I’m going to be doing this to in more detail here for myself and I hope you guys have a really great year. I’m excited. 2020 is just kind of a cool year anyways. Right? It’s neat but I’m always excited for a new year. You know, it’s more opportunity for growth and to continue this journey of life, right? Figuring yourself out, figuring out what’s working, figure out what’s not working, which is really the point of this exercise we’re talking about. And continuing on your path and figuring out what the future holds for you, where you’re trying to take things. So I really appreciate you guys listening. I love people who have an eye for the future and are thinking about things bigger down the road. And it’s a great thing to do and I appreciate you guys, so hope you had great new years and here’s to a happy new year ahead. All right, guys. Have a great week.