This Article Took Me 1 Year to Finish— My Year End Review 2022
About Andrew Chu — Founder and CEO of Outo, an outdoor experience online travel agency providing curated journeys empowering young professionals to save time and energy for the desired lifestyle.
我的 2022 年度總回顧 中文版文章連結
Background
When I review the year 2022, I know this is a year like no other looking back, and here we go. I made the decision to leave my full-time job and focus on my venture Outo, acquired a second-hand van and converted it into a moving office, moved home from the shared apartment, concluded a relationship, and experienced one of the darkest mental state throughout the journey that I could only be grateful reflecting on it.
In this first blog post of 2023, I welcome you to join my journey of writing and journaling the way toward the ideal life. In this article, I’m sharing my year-end review which is split into four sections: (1) numbers, (2) major events, (3) reflection questions, and (4) personal learnings.
2022 in Numbers
“Track every action that relates to the area of life you want to improve.”
— The Compound Effect, by Kevin Hardy.
The book in 2022 that changed my life completely. I set up the challenge after reading the book to record everything I wanted to improve in life (basically everything) in 2022 on my personal Notion system. This has been incredibly helpful for me to analyze, reflect, and examine various aspects of my life from time to time. Below are some numbers I recorded in 2022 breakdown based on The Wheel of Life in nine categories :
- Inner: meditation: 240 days / average mood score: 3.78/5.0
- Physical: gym workout: 84 times / distance ran: 98.4km
- Family: family trips: 2
- Career: new mentors: 4
- Economic: annual daily spending YoY%: -15.9%
- Community: new acquaintance: 228 person times / old friends catchups: 335 person times
- Adventure: multi-day trips: 25 times (14 destinations, 12 in TW, 2 in VN)
- Impact: personal reflection posts: 20
- Growth: books finished: 7 / New habits built: 4
2022 Major Life Events
In 2022, I experienced several major life events:
- I left my full-time job as the business development manager at Nogle, a fintech solution venture studio powering one of the world’s leading derivative exchanges, and providing top-notch payment and SaaS/white labeling for exchange platforms. It was a pleasure and an exciting journey to work with the smartest minds on cutting-edge products to empower clients across Asia and Europe.
- I dedicated to Outo full-time. After spending more than a year spending post-work hours and numerous weekends part-time, I decided to take the leap. In 2022, Outo went from merely zero revenue in January, to 50x exceeding NT$1.5 million in Q3 on our gross revenue comparing to same period last year, with curated journeys across five destinations around Taiwan serving more than 300 customers with five star reviews.
- I bought a second-hand Volkswagen T4 found on Facebook, designed, restored, repainted, and furnished it into The Steady Van. The van served as accommodation, mobility, and workability (powered by a 230Ah Li-ion battery) to meet my work travel needs across the Taiwan island, and fulfilled a childhood van life dream.
- I moved out of the shared apartment near the Taipower MRT station in Taipei, where I lived for 21 months and shared many joyful memories with my flatmates during the Covid isolated period.
- I ended a four-year relationship, which was my longest. It was filled with adventures, bittersweet memories, and valuable lessons. This period of my life was also one of the fastest growing. These lessons will stay with me as I move on to the next phase of life.
Diving Deeper with Reflective Questions
To reflect on my year, I combined Ali Abdaal and Jay Shetty’s personal year-end review framework and listed down a few reflection questions below that matter to me the most. Here they are:
Top 3 person I’m grateful for
- Phil Chen : My best friend from high school who partnered up with me to become my accountability partner of the year. I’m so thankful to have a buddy to share life’s ups and downs, progress on life goals, and challenge each other to become better.
- Rybo Chen: An old friend and a Vancouver-based life coach who invited me to participate in his enlightening coaching sessions. He introduced me the “Wheel of Life”, the framework, which I now use every day, month, and year for personal reflection and recording.
- Andrew Heng: My supervisor at Nogle. I’m immensely grateful for his guidance and coaching (and sometimes dad jokes) throughout the period working in the business development team
Top 3 Accomplishments I’m Proud of
- Nogle: Sustained the forth consecutive quarters of 20+% growth in the total contract value closed, and no.1 deal closing BD team member
- Outo: Pivoted Outo for better product market fit, launched five products and increased YoY sales growth by 50x in seven months
- Personal: Built my life OS on Notion, and tracked it for 365 consecutive days journaling thoughts and reflections, here’s my Notion template for 2022
Top 3 New Skills I Gained
- Self-Awareness: I became more conscious of my emotions, intentions, and actions
- Meditation: I incorporated meditation into my morning routine, bringing me peace of mind
- Photography: I became more intentional about capturing moments
Top 3 Books I Recommend
- The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy (2011) — After reading this book, I identified my life vision and began tracking all aspects of life
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgensen (2019) — This book gave me insights from Naval’s life learnings as a venture capitalist
- The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (2007) — This book blew my mind with work concepts of outsourcing, automation, and made me dreamlined the ideal life
Top 3 Memorable Trips
- Solo trip to Vietnam to meet partners, friends, and local entrepreneurs
- Road trip with the van across the east coast of Taiwan with Phil Chen
- Family trip to visit grandma in Kinmen Island after three years of covid restriction from the day care center
Top 3 Emotions Recorded
- Empowered: Appears when I put my ideas into reality or receive thoughtful feedback from others
- Inspired: Appears when I am exposed to novel thinking perspectives, new experiences, and stories
- Overwhelmed: Appears when I am unable to complete works that piled up or participate in various meetings during the day
Top 3 Things I Spent More Time On:
- Exercising: My morning gym routine had helped me lose 6 kg in 2022
- Reading: I enjoy reading as a way to wind down before bed
- Daily Recording: Keeping a daily journal and tracking my habits has become a daily ritual to help me feel grounded
Top 3 Things I Spent More Money On
- The Van: My first van was renovated and furnished for work and travel purposes
- Online Courses & Tools: I registered for courses and purchased productivity tools
- Mental Health: I subscribed to Headspace to support my meditation habit
2022 Key Learnings & Takeaways
I often record key learnings and takeaways during my daily journaling session. At the end of the year, I have a long list of takeaways from my personal reflections. Below are the top takeaways I recorded for each category of the wheel of life in 2022:
- Inner: All emotions emerge equally, with no good or bad. However, getting to know the triggers of those emotions allows you to become familiar with your emotion seasonality
- Physical: Your body’s limits are not always your real limits; sometimes, it’s what your mind tells you
- Family: Instead of finding a soul mate, become the person committed to making the relationship work
- Career: If you want to know what your career will look like in 5–10 years, go and talk to the person who is in that position now. This allows you to get a glimpse into the career path and your life at that stage
- Economic: Set a reasonably high hourly rate for yourself, and if the task/work is not worth your input at that rate, you could save up more by outsourcing it
- Community: One-on-one meetings foster connections, while one-to-many meetings facilitate the exchange of ideas
- Adventure: An adventure can be curated by planning out the major experiences, while leaving space for the unknown
- Impact: When you put yourself out there, you attract like-minded people to join your mission
- Growth: If you harness the principles, you can harness basically everything
Why Doing This Year-End Review?
This has been my third year doing the year-end review since 2020. It started out with a few questions on my Notion notes, which later expanded to more systematic ways with the data collected from my personal operating system to review myself in a more holistic way. It’s a chance each year to open up a dialogue with myself to reflect on the highs and lows in life, examine my goals and gaps, and, most importantly, make myself feel more grounded instead of being overwhelmed by FOMO like I used to be. There are many more simple ways to the reflection which I also recommend the way how Tim Ferriss (link) and James Clear (link) did theirs. How do you do your own year end review? Feel free to comment below and let me know.
Plans for 2023
After reflecting on the year 2022, I created a list of goals for 2023 using Ali Abdaal’s Anti-Wastemen System but modified with more trackable and actionable version costumed to my needs (which I’ll explain in my next article). This year, I want to be more active in writing about topics I’m passionate about, covering career, entrepreneurship, personal growth, and life in general. If you want to be notified by my upcoming articles, follow my medium account, or subscribe to my newsletter.
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