A review on my chaotic yet productive 2020
As I sat down to write my personal tradition for this year-end review, I’m filled with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. Probably more than usual. This past year, so many people worldwide got sick, lost their jobs or businesses, or lost family members and friends. I’m going to start this annual review by acknowledging how lucky I am.
It’s felt strange to me since the pandemic started how little my household has been impacted. Of course, Adrian has been affected with remote learning, and Steph and I both have worked from home most of the year, but professionally, both Steph and I had probably one of our best years ever.
When you work in eCommerce and data science as I do, I almost feel guilty explaining to people how Covid has caused some of the growth goals I set for my day job this time last year to seem like sandbagging or cutting myself short by a lot. It’s incredible how much people shop online when they are essentially trapped in their homes.
Now sure, there were things we did that put us in an excellent place to be lucky, preparation and luck work together in strange ways, but it’s been my observation that sheer luck is playing a large part in many of our personal and professional lives. Zoom built a great platform, but I guarantee that if you reviewed their internal financial packages from 2019, you wouldn’t find anything that predicted revenue growth over 300% in 2020. You also wouldn’t find anything expecting that offices would be moving from Wall st. to Airbnb’s in Florida.
But luck is a double-edged sword, and there is such a thing as bad luck. In Zoom’s case, 2020 was the year Zoom was the queen of the ball. The further off from that same scale of growth Zoom is in 2021, the more they turn into a pumpkin. This is where many companies and people learn that too much of a good thing can be, well, not good.
Either way, there several lessons that I’m still working through, but I want to begin by recognizing several successes from this year and reviewing some of the goals I set at the end of 2019.
Personal Margin
I became really intentional in planning goals around 2014, and it’s been a remarkably productive process for me. This annual ritual has lead to promotions, engagement, marriage, financial security, and a host of other goals. But in 2019, I began to feel a bit of burnout. Not burnout in the sense that I was not motivated to continue to get better, but burnout based on the idea that any efficiency I gained was only filled with more work.
So at the close of 2019, I created a more thematic goal for 2020—the goal of Margin.
What do I mean by Margin? Margin, in the context of my 2020 goals, symbolizes how much I won the year by. How much was left over after I paid all of the costs of time, effort, investment, etc. to accomplish the things I needed to do in 2020.
At the beginning of 2020, I began sitting down at the end of every month and calculating my professional, personal, and financial Margin, and then I tracked it throughout the year.
Personally, my goal was to decrease the “busy-work” feeling that I was experiencing and create more Margin for myself to learn and grow. Now that sounds really warm and fuzzy, but you would probably ask yourself how you would measure something so abstract? I calculated that by the number of tasks I completed in my task manager (ToDoist) and how many vacation hours I took throughout the year compared to the previous year. The combination of these two numbers is part of a straightforward calculation. Did I complete more tasks than I did last year while taking more time for myself and my family? The answer is yes, and that is a success in my book.
Professionally, my goal was to grow eCommerce revenue across all of the channels that I manage by an average of 10% YoY. I don’t need to tell you that this goal successfully hit this year. Covid put all of the channels I manage on fast-forward, where we hit sales and revenue goals for 2020 that weren’t forecasted for 5 to 7 years.
Financially, Steph and I accomplished our goal for 2020 by averaging a 23% margin for our household for the year (Total Income – Total Costs/ Total Income). That’s including completing several home improvement projects and other unbudgeted projects for the year to keep ourselves from going insane from being stuck at home for 9 months.
What Am I Most Proud of From 2020?
I love learning and learning about myself. My #1 trait of my Strengths Finder profile is “Learning.” With that, I finished my MBA back in 2015 and thought my days of formal learning were over. But I’ve missed the academic side of studying and gaining knowledge, so when more of the “luck” of Covid caused some of the largest universities in the country to begin slashing prices on some of their most expensive programs, I began to take notice.
That led me to apply to, eventually being accepted to, the Master in Data Science program at The University of Texas. It’s been a dream of mine all of my life to attend Texas, and now I get to do it by studying a discipline that I would be developing myself in anyway. Needless to say, really excited about this development.
One Thing I Learned That I Would Want Everyone to Learn?
This will sound silly but learn about yourself. I’ve invested quite a bit of time this year, reflecting on myself, studying my personality, and learning about how to put myself and those closest to me in the best position to be successful. It’s incredible to me how many people don’t really understand themselves and what drives them. I think a lot of us think we do, and we probably do have a great sense of what we enjoy, or dislike, or what makes us uncomfortable, but I don’t think we research deep enough why things are the way they are.
As far as practical steps to learn about yourself, first, I’d suggest taking the Strengths Finder test. Think of it as basically your talent DNA. I have taken this test every five years for the last 15 years, and it’s a game-changer.
The second thing I would suggest is that you read Ray Dalio’s Principles. This book is a masterpiece and serves as a manuscript to take those strengths that are a part of you and view them through a different lens that helps you frame and develop your personal principles to shape your life around. It’s a remarkable book that I highly recommend.
What Kept me Up at Night with Excitement?
Two things, both work-related.
1 – I refined and further developed my machine learning skills this past year. Working from home created an environment that worked really well for exploratory data analysis. I made several predictive models for acquisition and churn in Excel with Xlstat and Python that I think will be critical to my success in 2021. Using data to be able to refine the coming chaos post-Covid is going to extremely important.
2- I spent some time developing my creative video skills this year. I’ve never been overly excited about creating video content for either my day job or side hustles, but I’d say I’m probably an intermediate at Adobe Premier Pro and Rush. Leveraging YouTube, both professionally and personally is on my roadmap.
How did I Have Fun Differently?
The quarantine from Covid caused us to have to be creative on how to entertain ourselves. We spent quite a bit of time improving our house and the yard, and surprisingly to myself and Steph, I enjoyed it. Steph created an entire remodel for our laundry room, and we knocked it out in one weekend. I never thought I’d enjoy looking at and spending time in our laundry room, but I do now. We also sealed our backyard patio, installed some outdoor covering over the patio, renovated our living room, remodeled the office. The quarantine was an unsurprisingly strong nudge to tidy up and improve our home, so we did.
How did I Suffer Differently?
In two ways.
1 – I spent quite a bit of time this year worrying about the mental health of my family, friends, and myself. I’m a highly social person, and the isolation that we all felt during different periods this year was something that took a toll on me several times this year. It’s incredible how much we take for granted just being able to go to the local Biergarten downtown and have a few drinks with friends, for Steph and I to just go out and have a pleasant evening in town. The ability to not do those things when I needed to do them freaked me out a bit throughout the year.
2- I have begun to worry about Adrian and how he is adapting to high school and remote learning. I’ve seen a lack of interest in school, and the constant chaos is taking some sort of toll on him, and it’s showing in his grades. Some of this is just a 14-year-old boy becoming a man and his father struggling with that, but I can’t help but think he’s suffering somewhat because of the lack of socialization at school for prolonged periods. I’m also noticing that the same parenting techniques do not have the same impact as they did when he was younger. He’s not terrified of disappointing his father anymore.
So those were some of the things that I went back through and wrote down. However much time I put into doing my annual review, this process creates so much clarity for me heading into the new year.
Here’s to all of you having a great year in 2021!