2022 Year End Review Part 1 -- Building Myself a Leakproof Ship
we sink to the standards of our ship
It's 7am. I looked at my watch and it's time for me to hit the gym. But my body didn't want to get up. I can just snooze the alarm and eventually skip just for today. Tomorrow I'll get back to it. After all, it's just skipping a day, no biggies right?
After a long life struggle with building habits and the discipline to stick with them, I can now honestly tell myself -- skipping a day is a big deal. Because I know the hard truth -- the subpar results that I am getting are the direct consequences of skipping one thing here and there. Eventually, I became a ship with many holes on the bottom -- energy, efforts, dreams leak from the cheese holes of skips.
In reflecting how 2022 went, I've made strides but also got sidetracked many times. I had a system to ensure I steer the ship in the right direction. But that system had many holes in it and it fell apart eventually.
🚢 Let’s take a look at how my ship is leaking
In 2022 , I set a goal to cut back on social media consumption -- yet I am still a slave to the algorithms. Looking at the charts from RescueTime, I’ve experienced major regressions of the red bars which meant “distracting” times. And I know it is actually much worse than that.
I also wanted to publish videos and grow my Youtube channel, yet I've only made 2 episodes thus far. In looking at my task (and habits) tracking app TickTick, things died down towards 2nd half of the year.
I wanted to become a Life Coach making $5k a month. So far it’s 0 client and 0 dollar.
The lessons learned here are that I need to concentrate my attention and efforts into a single place where I can view and review my goals with a religious fervor. Otherwise, any momentum and energy built up would leak from my ship.
To be honest, I was using 3 different apps to track my goals and habits, and most of the time I wasn’t even looking at the metrics at all. The results definitely speak for themselves.
Rebuilding my ship to be airtight and leakproof
I've come to the conclusion that a few things are required to build an airtight ship (my life operating system):
Building the Dashboard of my Life OS. This consists of tracking how I am spending my time (RescueTime), my daily habits (TickTick), my daily + weekly + monthly + quarterly + yearly goals (Notion), my personal development areas (TBD), and my spending and finances (personalfinance)
View and review the dashboard as #1 priority . These metrics aren't useful if I don't look at them!
Upgrade my self-image to be a person who never skips a rep.
Set a low bar for a rep but a high bar for completion.
Build my victory rituals every time I stick with my habits. And store that in my Victory Journal.
I’d like to reword James Clear’s quote:


In other words, to get to the destiny of my aspirations, I need my ship to not leak. My new life OS rules are:
Rule 1 -- Design and Build a 100% airtight ship for my life
Rule 2 -- Make sure the ship is 100% airtight
Rule 3 -- Stick with rule 1 and 2.
With this in mind, I am giving the last 2 weeks of 2022 a final push. Become a person who never skips a day.
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(if this resonated with you, I'd love to hear about how you are making yourself also an airtight ship who never skips a day)
Forgive me if I over stretch the analogy here, but an airtight ship sounds awful and wouldn't serve me well. Being a new parent, it feels like the ship is rocking, leaking, swaying all the time. If tried to make this thing airtight, it'd capsize and not sink, but it'd still be useless to me
Rather I've tried to live a ballasted life. Ships have ballasts to intentionally let them take on water for stability in the storms of life. Without that margin, without using the water against the waves, I'd feel like a balloon in the surf. Tossed all the time, never settled. Consider what your ballast could be in this analogy?
Anyway, hopefully this is an encouragement to you, either as a proof that your airtightness is what you need at this time, or maybe an invitation to build your ship with a ballast. I'm stoked to see what you do in 2023 man! Keep it up!