So before I go on an extended guitar solo about my life, I want to pause and reiterate why I do yearly audits. As I said last year, these artifacts are part of the way that I’ve chosen to play the game of “My Life”. With any game, there must be an objective — a way to determine when the game is over and who won or lost.

My audits help me know where I am in regards to my objective. They are mile markers to help me know if I becoming the person I need to be. And right now I am in mile 7 of the ultra-marathon to become that man. This is important because who I am attempting to be is at variance with what the prevailing conventional wisdom claims I should be. Given my salary, my age and my presence in the adult-sized playground that is Los Angeles, I am clearly doing it wrong.

I am not leasing an Audi. I am not poppin’ bottles at the club. I am not travel-hacking or trying to sneak into a party I’m not invited to. And I am most certainly not posting all that shit to Instagram. I am not engaging in the tiny, high-visibility games of my peers because I don’t need them to cope with a mediocre life. Don’t get me wrong, there are times I wish I had more instagram followers and I seethe with envy when I pull my ’99 honda civic into any parking lot on the West Side. But then I remember that the stuff you own ends up owning you. These things are white noise, self-imposed barriers that get in the way of pursuing one’s calling. And we all have a calling.

I’m not saying this to be some holier-than-thou hipster luddite. Hipsters are at variance with something for the sake of being at variance with something. That’s not the point. Being different is only interesting as long as it generates different, presumably better, results.

So what are my results? Well.. nothing, yet.

The problem for me is that my pursuits are in long-range domains and I won’t see the true results for another 15–20 years. So in the interim I use heuristics to estimate my progress and track them in these audits.

I do this by pursuing projects that are similar in structure to my long-term goals but with varying timeframes so that I can ladder them to be accretive. Successfully completing a feasible, but challenging project enables me to pursue a larger, more challenging one. This allows me to accumulate skills and experiences that are highly-transferrable.

This insight compelled me to shift my methods in 2014. This year, I let go of precision execution in favor of intentional exploration. I stopped trying to predict what I would do in 2014 and embrace the opportunities that the uncertainty in my life creates. In the spirit of good stewardship, I chose to focus on employing consistency on a few key themes: nutrition, fitness, community, adventure and career.

Nutrition

2014 was the year I learned to cook for myself. I had been half-assing it with pizza and donuts for most of my twenties and during the first few months of the year, it showed. I started slow — making meals that would only take as long as ordering a pizza. Then I started upgrading the quality of my ingredients. Quinoa instead of rice. Greek yogurt instead of Yoplait. Then I moved to organics. At first I tracked calories, then just macronutrients, then nothing. The experimentation continued. I only did what worked within the constraints of my life. Eating clean is now my default, with the occasional pizza and donut thrown in.

Fitness

This year, I swapped cycling for high-intensity circuit training. My life no longer allows for 3-hour rides 5x/week and I needed something that would provide maximum results within 45 minutes. Given my chronic back issues, Crossfit was a risk I was not willing to take. I needed to build a foundation. Starting in May, I began the Exos program thanks to a serendipitous encounter with a new neighbor and have been enjoying the power of squats, deadlifts and kettlebells.

As I pursue the path to swolehalla, I am happy to report that at 27 I am in better shape than I was at 18. I expect to continue this trend indefinitely.

Community

I began the year determined to actively plant roots in LA: I became a regular at a bar, hosted after-work meetups, scheduled regular monthly skype calls and dinners, and coached at least two people on a weekly basis for about 4 months. I also tried to schedule coffee or dinner with friends of current connections whenever I traveled for business. Though I am finishing the year less social than the previous three quarters, I am pleased with my efforts to build a community in LA.

Adventure

I added adventure as a theme for 2014 because I need activities other than my career to remind me of why life is great. I explored downtown. I hiked. I traveled spontaneously. I went to Costa Rica in May and rediscovered my soul. I learned to surf and had arguably the best day of my life there. I put myself at risk, I tested my mettle and I emerged a deeper, more complete human being.

Career

My prediction that 2014 was going to be 2013 on steroids proved to be true. I developed new products, tried my hand at business development and began to develop new muscles in managing execution and delivery.

Building new products

In 2013, I led or conducted 17 weekly prototyping sprints across 3 domains — family coordination, mobile email and mobile video chat. In 2014, I led or conducted the same number of tests across 8 domains — ranging from subscription commerce to pets & babies to fitness & nutrition. I had the same time constraints but nearly 3x the pipeline. This means that I had to learned how to test multiple products simultaneously. This experience upgraded my managerial capability substantially and I am beginning to hone the craft of creating new-to-the-world products.

Hunting big game

This year I was pushed to land my own client. I swung way outside my weight class on this one. Over the course of three months, I played the business development dance with a billionaire-backed client only to lose them two weeks after we landed them. I hunted big game, discovered that I actually have the ability to close business and learned that maintaining integrity with your promise to deliver results is more important than money.

Execution

In the last quarter of the year, the Frequency Group team joined Beachbody to help create and grow the division that will bring the company into a new era. I am fortunate to be part of a world-class team pursuing multiple challenges simultaneously. I have had begin my education in mastering the fine art of executing through others whom I have no formal authority over. It is a new level of relating and while I am not as effective as I’d like to be I trust that, like most other things in my life, continuous and constant practice will yield results.

Conclusion

As 2014 came to a close, it became clear to me that I have come to the point on this journey where I’ve lost sight of land. It’s a necessary part of the journey but also one of the most difficult. It’s hard to feel like I’m making the right decisions to keep rowing while everyone is partying on their jet skis. My hope is that being a good steward of the opportunities I have now will enable me to be a good steward of bigger opportunities later on.