2022 Year End Review Part 1 -- Building Myself a Leakproof Ship

we sink to the standards of our ship

how leakproof is your 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

I’ve been slacking off in Q4 of this year (RescueTime)

youtube is the blackhole…

and my task/focus tracking says so too (Ticktick)

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):

1. 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)

2. View and review the dashboard as #1 priority . These metrics aren't useful if I don't look at them!

3. Upgrade my self-image to be a person who never skips a rep.

4. Set a low bar for a rep but a high bar for completion.

5. 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:

Bryan Liu @AceBryanLiu

You don't sail to the destiny of your aspirations. You sink to the airtightness of your ship.

James Clear @JamesClear

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

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)