The YOLO Report 2020

Hi everybody!

What a ride!

I guess we all went through quite a year. Welcome to my very special sixth YOLO report. 2020 is over, and I am now 33,53390892 years old.

For the people reading this for the first time, I’ve always been a quantified-self freak, and as an end-of-year ritual, I like to gather everything I tracked during the previous year, reflect on this, and try to use it to loosely plan my next year.

But why? Why do I like to track stuff? Where does this all come from? Actually, I’ve never really thought about it nor tried to rationalize this. Let’s try a little bit below in the ”Why this Year-in-Review Report?” part of this report.

If you’re interested in doing the same, you can jump to the end of this article to learn more about my process.

Why YOLO you might ask yourself? YOLO stands for YOann LOpez.

YOLO has become one of my nicknames with my colleagues and friends.

Why this Year-in-Review Report?

For some people, I’m just a freak, for others, this report can be a source of inspiration, and for another population, this is just a fun thing to read.

As far as I’m concerned, taking a step back and looking at what I’ve done in a year is some kind of self-therapy and a good way to see what went awry, what went well, and how I can improve…well…my life.

But why? Why tracking things like that? The report actually came way later than my addiction to tracking stuff. So let’s try to start from there.

I think it all started after I got tired of being a little bit overweight when I was something like 14/15 years old, and I decided to take care of my weight and diet. To be honest, I got a little bit obsessed with my weight, and my calories intake. This is when I started to track what I was eating, and my weight obsessively. Well, that’s what you can actually call an eating disorder (by the way, if you are experiencing some eating disorders, you speak French, and you’re looking for some help, check Amapola, an amazing service launched by a great friend).

Anyway, these trackings led to another, and another, and another… My eating disorder slowly faded away, but my love and obsession for tracking stuff remained. In a healthier way though. Today it’s more out of curiosity, and to build better habits rather than for being a control freak. The YOLO report was born.

I could keep this to myself but putting it in front of the entire world is (i) a way for me to feel some peer pressure, therefore, to try to achieve my goals (ii) maybe inspire others to do the same thing, and (iii) just for fun.

Please remember that there are as many ways of doing this as there are Human Beings. You could just write what you read, where you’ve been, focus on the new people you met, etc.

Do whatever you want to look at your life from a different angle. It’s too easy to forget about all the things happening to you.

We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us. — Charles Bukowski

What’s new this year?

1. A new section dedicated to Entrepreneurship.
2. A new section about big changes showcasing the drastic changes in my life: Big Moves ⛰
3. I will use some amazing pictures from the great article of the New York Times 2020 — Year in Pictures to illustrate this YOLO report.

Table of Content

• Big Moves ⛰
• Friends & Family 👫
• Sports/Physical activities/Health 🏋️‍♀️
• Weight
• running 🏃
• Walking + Running 🚶‍♂️
• Sleep 😴
• Workouts 💪
• DNA 🧬
• Tracking my Digital Life 🧑‍💻
• Books 📚
• Travels 🗺
• Movies and TV Shows 📺
• iPhone Screen at The End of The Year 📱
• Podcasts 📻
• Side Projects 📝
• Music 🎶
• Articles of The Year 📰
• My Key Learnings in 2020 💡
• My Personal Finance 💰
• Entrepreneurship 🏗
• Random Stuff 🎲
• My 2020 Objectives 🔙
• My 2021 Objectives 🔮
• How to Write Your Own Year in Review

Big moves ⛰

• I quit my job as a full-time employee at Comet in August.
• I launched my own venture: Snowball. Today a bullshit-free personal finance newsletter. Tomorrow a full-fledged wealth management product.
• I bought my first building with 2 friends.

Friends & Family 👫

Circles painted on the grass at Domino Park in Williamsburg helped people spend time outdoors while staying socially distanced from others. Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Here is the related OKR:

Despite the COVID pandemic, I actually saw my parents and friends more often than in 2019. Maybe the pandemic actually got some people closer than before because of the lack of other more mundane relationships.

• I saw my parents 3 times compared to 2 in 2019.
• I saw my friends in the South of France way more often. Maybe because we started a huge project together (buying a building on the French Riviera).
• I actually managed to go on a trip with my great friends from Comet (my previous company) last summer in the South West of France near Arcachon.
• I managed to see my Parisian friends way more often than usual.

I believe this year brought a better balance between work, and friends & family. Probably because I have more freedom to do whatever I wanna do.

I’d like to keep this pace for next year.

Sports, Physical Activities & Health 🏋️‍♀️

Place de la Concorde was empty in what would normally have been the morning rush hour as France entered lockdown. Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times. This image illustrates well most of my run in March, April, and May 2020.

This is actually where it all started. I mean my passion for tracking things. As I said earlier it all started with tracking the food I ate (not anymore), and my exercises. Working for Withings, an IoT company specialized in helping people to track, and improve their health, got me even deeper into the topic. My first YOLO Report back in 2015 was actually written when I was working for Withings.

Weight 𐄷

• It’s funny how I lost weight during lockdowns while most people gained weight. Probably because I lost my appetite since I wasn’t moving a lot. I also have a tendency to lose weight around the end of the year and gain weight during summers. 🤷‍♀️
• At the beginning of the year I was around 58 kilograms: 👇

• And at the end of the year around 60 kilograms: 👇

• I gained some weight during the first lockdown between mid-March and mid-May. I actually started to lose some weight right before the end of the lockdown. Maybe just thinking about freedom, made me lose weight: 👇

• Here’s my weight graph for the past (almost) 9 years. My weight keeps being stable even though there’s a slight upward trend in 2020 probably due to less physical activity due to the COVID-19. But it’s barely visible.

I’d still like to reach a “healthier” weight of 62 to 63 kilograms by being more physically active in 2021. Let’s hope we’ll get to move a bit more than in 2020…

running 🏃

Well… How to say that? It was a disaster. I was supposed to run 12 half-marathons, but COVID got in the middle! I focused on the (way shorter) 5k because the first lockdown discouraged me to run longer runs.

• I ran 96 times. It’s actually 21 % less than in 2019 (121 times).
• I ran a total of about 484 kilometers or close to 57.5 % less than in 2019 (1,140 km). It’s the equivalent of a Paris — Lyon vs. Paris to Florence in 2019

• I ran a total of 43 hours or less than 2 days compared to 110 hours in 2019. That’s a staggering drop of 60 %!
• My fastest run was exactly the same as last year: a 5k in 23 minutes. 👇

• My most active months were April, May, October, and November with 60 kilometers each. In 2019, my most active month was June with 190 kilometers.
• My least active month was August with only 15 kilometers run, the month I went on vacation. Last year, my least active month was the month of May (the month when I went on vacation).
• I burnt about 29,000 calories this year compared to about 80,000 last year (64 % less). The equivalent of 398 donuts last year, and only 144 this one. 😭 👇

• This year I changed my habits by running later in my days as the year goes by: 👇

compared to 2019. 👇

Walking + Running 🚶‍♂️

• In 2020, I walked and run a total of 3,345,848 steps (30 % less than in 2019) or 2,125 kilometers (29 % less than 2019). The COVID effect once again. This is almost equal to a walk from Paris to Tallinn compared to a Paris — Moscow last year. 👇

• This year, compared to last year, I walked way more during the evenings. Probably because I did not walk to work (remote work + my switch to the freelancing life). This year. 👇

last year. 👇

• My daily average number of steps for 2020: 9,319 vs. 13,080 in 2019. Around 29% fewer steps per day.
• My most active month this year (not surprisingly) was a pre-COVID month: January 2020. 👇

• Once again, not surprisingly, the least active month of the year was during our strict lockdown in April with an average of 4,767 compared to 9,319 for the yearly average. 👇

• The day I walked the most was on the 19th of August during my holidays with 28,951 steps.

Sleep 😴

• I slept around 2,355 hours or 98 days. Exactly like in 2019.
• I slept an average of 196 hours per month.

• My sleep quality looks like the stock market. It crashed at the beginning of the year and increased around the beginning of the summer.👇

• The COVID really disturbed my habits including the time I went to bed. Because my routines were disturbed (no need to wake up early, no need to go out…) I went to bed quite later than usual in 2020. Especially during the first lockdown: 👇

• I also woke way way way later in 2020. Remote work or freelancing= more time to sleep and to arrange your day as you want. ;) 👇

• Going to bed later + sleeping later in the morning = not that much more sleep. A bit more than last year, but not significant:

• It took me way more time in 2020 to fall asleep compared to other years. More stress?👇

• If you look at the average time to fall asleep per day you can see that the difference is actually not that big compared to the previous year. 2020: 👇

and 2019: 👇

I guess it’s also linked to less physical activity. If you’re less active, you’re less tired, it takes more time to fall asleep. Logical.

• If you look at the time when I wake up you can see that on average I woke up way later, but if you look closer, it’s not that big of a difference (15 more minutes in 2020 on average). 2020: 👇

Vs. 2019: 👇

Workouts 💪

Since 2019, my routine is pretty simple. 3 times a week I do:

• 100 abs.
• 100 situps.
• 100 pull-ups.

Therefore I did last year around:

• 15,600 abs.
• 15,600 situps.
• 15,600 pull-ups.

I decided to go to the gym in order to have access to a free-weight area, but once again, COVID struck, gyms closed, I went to the gym like 10 times in 2020.

In my 2020 OKRs, I planned to exercise 260 times (runs + workouts). I reached close to 95 % of my objective with 246 runs + workouts (average of 5 days per week).

DNA 🧬

• In 2018 I did a DNA test with 23andme in New York City (mainly because they have the health part in the US while it’s forbidden for them to sell it in France.). In 2019 they updated my results with more accuracy. In 2020 they did the same.
• I lost 1 more percent of my European DNA. I’m now basically 48.6 % European (mainly Southern Europe), and 51.4 % Western Asian & North African (Iranian, Caucasian, and Mesopotamian).

For a reminder here are the ones from 2018 and 2019, side by side with the 2020 one.

Here’s my ancestry timeline updated as well, where I learned that I probably have a sixth or seventh-great-grandparent who was 100% British & Irish!

It means that:

• One of my grandparents was 100% from Iran or the region. Probably 100% Armenian as my mother’s name is Aydjian (the names ending in “ian” are usually Armenian). They were born between 1900 and 1960 (for sure the parents of my mom who were Armenian).
• One of my grandparents was 100% Iberian (probably the parents of my dad or great grandparents who were Spanish: Lopez).

Here’s the updated map of my relatives all around the world

What’s cool about 23andme (and probably other services like it), is that you can connect with your relatives and talk to them through the 23andme’s platform. It’s really amazing to see how we’re all connected all over the world. That’s when you realize that I find it really stupid to fight over state-related issues like borders, resources…OK I fall a little bit into a different topic but think about that a bit more thoroughly.

My Neanderthal Ancestry

This hasn’t changed since last year so I’ll just copy-paste what I wrote in 2018.

As you probably already know, We, the Homo Sapiens Species, used to live with another species of humans (in the genus Homo): the Neanderthal. Unfortunately for them, it’s really likely that we exterminated them because of our better ability to communicate and coordinate as a group (certainly through the birth of Culture, rituals, etc.), which helped us to build better strategies to conquer new territories and kill these rivals. But, because some Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal were probably good people willing to make love, not war, the two species had some babies together, that’s why we still find some Neanderthal variants in our DNA. If you want to learn more about this read the book Sapiens: a brief history of humankind. I apologize to my scientific friends if I made some mistakes.

Thanks to 23andme, I learned that I have 250 variants which is a smaller number than 80% of 23andme customers.

Here’s my wellness report:

Here’s my traits:

Here are my health predispositions:

And my carrier status:

Tracking my Digital Life 💻

In a pandemic-proof interview, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld spoke from his home quarantine about his new stand-up special and the future of comedy. “I’m not in the mood to be funny,” he said. Daniel Arnold for The New York Times

In 2020, just like this journalist interviewing Jerry Seinfeld through FaceTime, we all turned our heads to the internet in order to go through this year. Remote work, zoom parties, Amazon deliveries, or video games became an even bigger part of our lives. You can truly see that on my 2020 report.

• Once again…the COVID effect. I spent 3,487 hours online in 2020 compared to 3,024 hours in 2019! Staggering. I thought it was a lot in 2019... That’s 15 % more than the previous year. 3,487 hours is equal to close to 145 entire days. I spent 145 days online!
• I spent 1,897 hours on my laptop (79 days), and 1,590 hours on my iPhone (66 days).

• According to Rescue Time, I spent a total of 789 productive hours online, but it’s not exactly true as the categorization is not perfect. 👇

Some highlights:

• 356 hours reading and writing emails in Superhuman (15 days). That’s 58% more than in 2019 (225 hours).

• I spent 226 hours or 9.5 days in Substack to write Snowball (more about that later). Some data is missing starting in November as I move from snowball.substack.com to snowball.xyz. 👇

• I spent 161 hours on Linkedin or 8 % more than in 2019 (149 hours). 👇

• I spent 138 hours on Google Spreadsheet or 35 % more than in 2019 (102 hours). 👇

• I kinda replaced Google Documents with Notion (partially). I spent 50 hours on Google Docs compared to 115 hours last year, but I spent 60 hours on Notion.👇

• I spent 42 hours on Apple Note compared to 52 hours in 2019 (20 % less). Maybe because I was less on the go and took notes on Notion instead (I take more notes on Notes by Apple when I’m not on my computer).👇

• I spent only 71 hours on Slack compared to 195 hours in 2019. That’s 64 % less. Once again it’s due to less activity at work + the fact that I quit Comet in August 2020. 👇

• A new entry this year: Google Meet and Zoom. I spent 36 hours on Google Meet (1.5 days), and 21 hours on Zoom with way more activity during the first lockdown in Spring 2020:👇

Books 📚

A bookstore in China

Here are the related OKRs I set up last year:

As you can see, I’m lagging behind my objectives. A lot. I read even fewer books than last year. 😞

• I read 10books compared to 12 last year. A 17% decrease
• 3,284 pages read. 1.4% less than in 2019. This means that the books I read were much longer than last year. It equals 8.9 pages per day (compared to 9 last year). By simply reading 10 more pages per day (maybe 15 minutes more per day), I would have read about 20 books, and I would have reached my goal of 30 books by reading about 30 pages per day!
• Here’s the list of all the books I read:

• My favorite books this year were:

→ non-fiction:

Morgan Housel is an American venture capitalist with a passion for personal finance. This book is truly amazing and does a great job at teaching you why money is so important. Not money for the sake of money, but money as a way to buy your future freedom. I actually wrote two entire editions (in French) of my newsletter Snowball based on this book. You can find this book here.

→ Fiction

Once again I did not read many fictions this year… I don’t know why but I have a real hard time to spend time on this. It feels like I am wasting my time by doing so… But I know it’s not really the case! I know that you can learn a lot by reading fictions and novels. I don’t know… A psychological barrier probably. I should work on this, but I have no idea how. Anyway, out of the two fictions, I read this year (😅) my favorite was:

Funny thing. I read this book a second time this year without realizing it as I read it a second time in French. This book is not extremely well-rated, but I found it really amazing. This is the story of jealousy, obsession, and what we lose when someone you love goes away. You can buy it here in French or here in English.

Other facts about books this year:

• The shortest book was The Possession with 62 pages.
• The longest book was Churchill: a Life with 1,088 pages.
• The average book length this year was 328 pages compared to 278 pages in 2019.

Travels 🗺

A woman wearing medical scrubs, a protective mask and a face shield traveled on a nearly empty subway train in the Far Rockaway neighborhood as subway ridership plunged. Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

Once again, the COVID pandemic hit my travel habits quite hard in 2020. for the first time since I was 16, I did not take a commercial airplane once! This is the first time in 17 years that I did not leave the European soil once in a year! I did not even think about that before writing this report!

Despite the limitations we’ve experienced in 2020, I was still able to discover at least 10 new cities.

• I visited only two other countries outside of France: Switzerland and Germany compared to 5 in 2019. A drop of 40 %.
• I explored 10 new cities in France, Germany, and Switzerland: Strasbourg 🇫🇷, Arcachon 🇫🇷, Metz 🇫🇷, Cochem 🇩🇪, Munich 🇩🇪, Neuchâtel 🇨🇭, Fussen 🇩🇪, Rothenburg 🇩🇪, Bremen 🇩🇪, and Reims 🇫🇷.

Movies and TV Shows 🎬

A drive-in movie in San Antonio. During the pandemic, the drive-in theater, a low-tech vestige of another era, emerged across the country as a popular pastime. Christopher Lee for The New York Times

My favorite movie was: A Ghost Story

2020 was a movie year! My consumption of movies exploded compared to other years. Thanks, COVID!

I saw way more entertaining movies this year like The Gentlemen, which was amazing, or Tenet, which I loved as well, but A Ghost Story was a really touching movie where space, time, and emotions are intertwined in such a poetic way.

My favorite documentary was: Hold-up

NOOOOOOOOOO I’m kidding 🙃. If you’re not French, Hold-up is a hilarious conspirational French documentary. It’s more than two and a half hours of (almost) pure b******t.

No, my favorite documentary was: My Octopus Teacher

I did not watch a lot of documentaries in 2020. I think I only watched one actually, and that was My Octopus Teacher. I’m an octopus fanboy so I’m a bit biased, but I really enjoyed watching this documentary, which is more a story than a real scientific documentary in my opinion. Anyway, if you like these very intelligent animals, go watch this entertaining documentary.

Movies’ Data

• I watched 35 movies in 2020 (66% more than in 2019).
• About 64 hours or 2.6 days (52% more than in 2019).
• Not surprisingly (lockdown), March was the month I watched the most movies: 7.
• Here’s the complete list (DO NOT WATCH JUMANJI: THE NEXT LEVEL)

TV Shows 📺

My favorite TV show was (once again an Apple Original):

Why? (OK, I haven’t finished Dickinson yet, but still, I know it’s my favorite TV show of the year):

• I love the music (Hip Hop, RNB, sweet melodies… Very eclectic)
• The characters are great
• It’s full of anachronism, which gives a certain taste to this TV Show
• It’s smart and witty

My iPhone Home Screen at the End of the Year 📱

Some noticeable things

• The personal finance app family is getting bigger!
• Welcome Lemonade (little referral link if you need a new great home insurance).
• Bye-bye Overcast. I’ve been listening to way fewer podcasts in 2020.
• Bye-bye Notion. I love Notion, but I find the Apple Notes app way faster to use when you’re on the go.

Podcasts 📻

I listened to very few podcasts this year (probably because I ran less often, as I’m listening to podcasts mostly when I run). Here’s the list:

• Generation Do It Yourself → A french podcast mainly covering French entrepreneurs.
• La Martingale → A french podcast about personal finance and especially how to invest your money.
• Transfert → Another French podcast about amazing stories from random people.
• Making Sense → A great podcast about the complexity of the human mind.

Side Projects 📝

Here are the related OKR:

OK it’s getting complicated. I added Snowball along the way, after writing these OKRs because I actually started this side project in February 2020. I won’t talk about it here but it’s the new “entrepreneurship” section of my YOLO Report.

• I successfully launched a new side project, which became my full-time project: Snowball, my new personal finance venture.
• Thanks to Snowball, and Behind the Curtain (where I build Snowball in public), I wrote 85 articles this year. That’s 7 per month.

I did not touch Happenstance or Unmakr this year either :(. I still love those two projects so here’s a reminder:

Happenstance

Sarah Marga and I launched Happenstance on Product Hunt (Check it out here) at the beginning of 2016. Just like in 2017, 2018, and 2019, the project is still on hold as we need to automate everything. We have a waiting list of more than 5,000 people now. I’m sure it could be a great service. I just need to devote more time and money to this project.

Since 2016 the tech landscape has tremendously evolved. More and more no-code tools have seen the light and I’m sure we could automate this service through one of these tools.

Just a reminder about what is happenstance:

We created happenstance because we wanted to meet new interesting people, with no other purpose than sharing thoughts, ideas, and life experience. We had that burning desire to expand our world, and to discover the lives and adventures of other people we don’t know yet. Although internet is pretty great for finding jobs, dates, and old friends, there is no service that would allow us to meet some random people, who are obviously cool and curious just like you (and us).

With Happenstance, we want to allow everyone to meet someone new and different, but yet kind of similar. Maybe a teacher from Japan, or a student in Europe, or a traveler in Asia, or a journalist from Africa, or a gardener, or a dentist, or an archeologist, or a professional gamer, or…well you get it.

Unmakr

Unmakr is still alive. Kinou (AKA Christophe) and I started a project called Unmakr where we pick our favorite iconic objects and we tear them apart to observe their guts. Last year we did not do anything. You can still follow us on medium or on Instagram.

One way I’d like to make this project evolve is to also interview a product manager, project manager, or developer who’s worked on the product we’re unmaking, and to learn a bit more about what happened behind the curtain.

Music 🎶

Milan, March 13 Italians played music on their balconies as a show of solidarity in the face of the coronavirus, which spread rapidly through the country that month. Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

Here’s my Spotify Year in Review

It seems like (just like last year) I felt like a teenager in 2020…

• I listened to 60,952 minutes of music or 34% than in 2019! Probably the COVID effect once again (being stuck at home and listening to music on my Alexa).
• My top artist was Pomme. I’m part of the 0.05% top fans. Wow!
• Here’s the playlist of my top songs of the year 2020.
• Since 2016 I track my music by creating monthly playlists. Every time I like a song a lot I add it to my playlist. You can find all of them on my Spotify profile:

Yoann Lopez

Articles of The Year 📰

Washington, Feb. 6 President Trump holding up a copy of The Washington Post to show its banner headline about his acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial. Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

Here’s the related OKR:

As you can see, I kinda fail my objective to read 365 articles in one year. I read “only” 146 articles. But! I probably read more than 365 newsletters and I did not count them. Indeed I basically switched my reading habits from articles to newsletters. I’ll probably change these OKRs for next year in order to reflect this change.

But still, out of those 146 articles, my favorite ones were:

Business:

• The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius: once again, the great Paul Graham is part of this list. This article written in late 2019 is about obsession and entrepreneurship. On how obsessions can sometimes help you build great things, and sometimes
• Being a Noob: on why it’s good to feel stupid sometimes. By Graham once again.
• Tech Nations: Welcome to Apple: “The tech giants have as much money and influence as nations. So what if we reported on them like countries? What would Apple be? A liberal China…”
• 1,000 True Fans? Try 100: one of the articles that actually pushed me to go all-in into building Snowball. “More than a decade ago, Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “1,000 True Fans,” predicting that the internet would allow large swaths of people to make a living off their creations, whether an artist, musician, author, or entrepreneur. Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he argued, creators only needed to engage a modest base of “true fans” — those who will “buy anything you produce” — to the tune of $100 per fan, per year (for a total annual income of $100,000).”

Others:

• The Way I Ate: a great story by The New Yorker about eating disorders. “Diet is a strange word, used to describe both a deviation from the norm and the norm itself: the foods that make up a day, a week, a lifetime. From the beginning, my diet was a big part of my story, even the one that others told about me. “All babies like rice cereal,” my mother will say. “But you didn’t.” In the high chair, I would tighten my lips and turn away. When I was two, at the first preschool parent-teacher conference, they told my mother, “Susan never eats snack.”

My Key Learnings in 2020 💡

During 2020 I read some books, articles, listened to some podcasts and audiobooks. Each time I ran into some great quotes, ideas, concepts, I wrote them down in a Note folder on my iPhone. Now it’s time for me to share them with the world as some of them might be useful for you.

My Personal Finance 💰

This section has a special taste for me as it’s the reason why I started my new company: Snowball. Indeed, after publishing my YOLO Report 2019, and adding for the first time a personal finance part, I received dozens of questions from friends and strangers regarding investing issues. That’s where the idea to write about personal finance started.

Here’s the related OKR for this year.

I did quite well this year as well.

• I managed to save around €1,400 per month except for a couple of months.
• Two of my friends and I bought a building in the South of France in a city called Frejus. If you’re a Snowball Premium member you can read all the details about this purchase here.
• Just like I did in 2018, and 2019, I wanted to buy some vehicles to rent them on the car rental platform Getaround. I wanted to buy three vehicles, but because of COVID, I managed to buy just one: a Renault Clio from 2016.

Breakdown

Here’s the breakdown of my spendings and revenues:

Some stuff to highlight:

• The savings part is wrong. I messed up and did not count it well. It should be closer to €15k and not €10K.
• For those wondering what amortization is, it’s money I put on the side for stuff I know I will replace. For instance, when I buy an iPhone, I put around 60€ per month on the side because I know that I’ll sell my iPhone for about 600€ in one year and getting a new one will cost me around 1,200€, and if I have more money because I sold my previous iPhone for more than €600, I just use it as an insurance if I break my phone. The possibility to create vaults with Revolut is a great feature for this usage:

• Contrary to last year, I spent more money on groceries than on restaurants. I spent €2,531 on restaurants (including deliveries) compared to €3,194 last year. That’s a 21% decrease. I spent €2,755 on groceries in 2020 compared to €2,393 in 2019 (a 15% increase). #CovidEffect
• Bills and rents are still the biggest sources of cash burn: €9,238 for rent (22% less than in 2019), and €7,076 on bills (-0.5%).
• I spent “only” €1,202 at bars compared to €1,592 in 2019. That’s a 25% decrease thanks to lockdowns.

Investments

It’s funny that this year, this passion of mine: investing & wealth management actually became my full-time job. A lot of people think that I like money just for the sake of money, but I like money because I love to build stuff and to build stuff that can have an impact on society you need money and time. Investing is a way not only to make your money grow but most importantly to buy you time in the future. Here’s the recap of my year regarding my investments. What did I invest in?

• Public Stocks
• Managed fund
• Private Equity
• Real-estate
• Cars and trucks
• Crypto
• Art

In December 2019, my net worth was around €34,655:

• €26,410 in stocks (stock picking). This portfolio at the end of last year was up 136% from €15,652 in January 2019.
• €3,245 in a managed fund.
• €5,000 in a startup investment

In March, my portfolio crashed to around €14k. I bought more stocks.

Stocks

By June, my portfolio on Binck jumped to more than €40,000, and around €20,000 on other platforms. Here are the details for Binck after I sold my positions because I wanted to start again (my portfolio was driven by Tesla, and Apple → unbalanced):

Here’s the detail of the portfolio before selling everything:

So after being up by 136% at the end of December 2019, my stock portfolio was up by 53% from December 2019 to June 2020.

• I invested again in the stock market but slowly I invested around €10k in the stock market. I’m counting only new investments and not the money coming from the sale of my portfolio at the beginning of the summer. My portfolio gained around 12% in more or less 4 months. I’m using trading 212 (here’s a referral code thanks to which you can get a free stock, and me too), and Interactive Brokers to invest in the stock market (here’s a referral code if you wish). Here are my different “diagrams” on Trading212

And the total value:

And on Interactive Brokers, one of the best brokers out there. (referral code if you want to get some free Interactive Brokers stocks):

• I also have a PEA on Boursorama to invest in some ETFs (still small at the moment, I have only like €800 on it)

Managed fund

I use Yomoni (and soon Nalo as well) for an “assurance vie”, and a PER.

That’s a great product if you want to invest money without the hassle of picking stocks. Here’s a referral code for Yomoni if you want, and here for Nalo.

Crypto

My cryptocurrency portfolio exploded. I had something like less than €2k invested in 2019. I invested around €4,000 in 2020 and my portfolio is now worth around €15,560 → a 250% increase. I use Shrimpy to automate my crypto investments for the curious. Here’s a referral code is you want. ;)

My strategy is simple: 70% Bitcoin et 30% Ethereum with a rebalancing every 2 weeks.

Private equity

• I still have €5,000 invested in Comet.
• I invested €1,000 in a new small side project called 1984 (more about that later).
• I invested €1,000 in a beer company that I love: Brewdog.

Art

I have $5,000 invested in two artworks on Masterworks, a product allowing you to buy fractional shares of paintings from great masters (Warhol, Bastiat, Soulages…). Here’s my portfolio:

• $2,500 in a Pierre Soulages
• $2,500 in an Alex Katz

In December 2020 my net worth is €80,325 so a 231% increase since December 2019 mainly driven by my stocks and cryptocurrencies portfolios + my savings. €55k already invested and €25k in cash to invest. I invested a total of around €20k in 2020.

If you want to read more about my investment strategy you can read this free Snowball edition or that one if you’re a Premium member.

I also bought a car to rent on Getaround, but due to the COVID, I will probably start to rent it next year. If you want to learn more about this small side project you can read this Premium edition of Snowball where I detail how I rented two trucks in 2017 and 2018 to generate a small passive income.

Entrepreneurship 🏗

This is a new section of my YOLO Report where I’ll detail what happened in my entrepreneurial life.

Snowball ❄️

In February 2020 I launched a small side project: a personal finance newsletter in French. Here it is if you’re curious (and read French).

This newsletter quickly got some traction and became my full-time project in August.

The long term vision is to build a full-fledged product to help people manage and build their wealth. Wealth management for Humans in a nutshell. This is the first step.

Here are some key figures:

• $84,000 of annual revenues
• Close to 7k readers including 1,367 Premium members

• €6,000 have been given back to Premium Readers (I am redistributing 20% of Snowball’s revenues to paid members).
• €6,000 for a charity that I created: Les Flocons that will focus on young children's education.
• 71 editions of Snowball have been sent.
• I wrote 291 881 words. As a comparison, the entire Harry Potter saga is composed of 1 084 170 words.
• Snowball (free + paid) it’s a Week over Week (WoW) growth of 4.84% or 20.8% Month over Month (MoM) growth. If you look at paid members it’s a 7.12% WoW growth and a 31% MoM (higher numbers than the free version as it’s an average and I started the paid version of Snowball later than the free version).

If you want to follow Snowball you have some options available to you:

• Subscribe to the free version of Snowball here 🇫🇷
• Follow Snowball on Twitter here 🇫🇷
• Follow Snowball on Linkedin here🇫🇷
• You can subscribe to Behind the Curtain, a free newsletter where I build Snowball in public

Real-Estate

We launched a real estate company with 2 friends in order to buy apartments and buildings to rent them. In 2020 here’s what happened:

• We bought a 180sm building in Frejus for around €160k
• We divided the building into 6 flats.
• The idea is to rent the flats during the first semester of 2021.

I’ll give you more details in 2021.

1984 🧢

With some friends, we launched a small clothing company. We’re still very early but you can follow the beginning of this venture on Instagram here.

Stay tuned in 2021. ;)

Kitchen Factory

With 2 friends we plan to buy a small kitchen factory in Montpellier. The idea behind it is:

• Improve operations.
• Increase visibility and marketing.
• Increase in output.
• Increase offering.
• To increase revenues.

We haven’t bought it yet, but are well into the process to close the deal in early 2021. More about that next year! It’s a very exciting project!

Random stuff 🎲

• In 2020 I drank 218 liters of beer (- 8.5% compared to last year) the COVID did not have such a big impact on my drinking habits.
• The month I drank the most beers: June with 29.5 liters.
• The month I drank the least beers: March with 13.25 liters (lockdown).
• I cut my nails 35 times (+ 6% compared to 2019) or once every 10.4 days → 2020 has been a year where I’ve been less tired and less stressed, therefore I’m sure it has affected my overall health, and therefore of my nails’ health. For some reason, I started to track this weird thing, but I should read more about what’s behind nails’ growth and how it can be a proxy of your overall health (I keep saying this every year, and this year is no exception).
• My Codex Vitae or “book of life” is now updated→ Yoann’s Codex Vitae.

My 2020 Objectives 🔙

Let’s see what happens in 2020 regarding my personal OKRs:

Just like last year, I completed only a bit more than 50% → 51.06% vs.51.38% in 2019. I’ve always been too optimistic.

• I did quite well here with a completion close to 80%.
• The only thing where I failed was the creation of my rental car fleet. I only bought one out of my objective of 3 cars.

Here’s the Renault Clio I bought late 2020

• FAIL!!! I planned to run 12 half-marathon but managed to run only one at the end of the year. Thanks, COVID.

A picture I took during my only half-marathon in Marseille.

• I still managed to run pretty often. Mostly 5ks.

• I think Key Result 1 is false. I ate more meat than I thought.
• I drank less than last year but more regularly. Cutting the daily beer at the end of the day will be part of my routine next year.
• I decreased my social smoking habit, but it’s still too much.

• My side projects took me a lot of time. I didn’t find the time to draw more often. :(

• I did not read enough books in my opinion.
• I failed at the number of articles read, but I switched from reading articles to reading newsletters so I’ll have to take this into account for my next year’s OKRs.

• It’s a fail here as well. I did not find the time to improve these skills.

• I did quite well here.

• I launched new successful side projects but did not manage to enhance the projects I launched a few years ago. I’m not sure if I keep working on them or just kill them…

• Clearly a success here.

• Well…COVID…But here are some pictures of my trips in Germany, France, and Switzerland:

• I got 2 new tattoos in 2020: a woman on my left arm, and the wold from The Incredible Mr. Fox movie on my upper body.

My 2021 Objectives 🔮

As I said before, I’ll use the OKRs method to design, follow, and achieve my 2021 objectives. Some are short terms goals, others are long terms ones that will keep showing up year over year (like financial independence for instance).

As a reminder, OKR stands for Objectives & Key Results. Objectives should be ambitious and inspiring, they are what you want to achieve. For instance: Enhance your overall health. Key Results should be ambitious and measurable. They are the different things you have to achieve to reach your objectives. For instance, in order to enhance your overall health you’ll have to:

• Exercise 3 times per week or 156 times a year
• 4 days/week without alcohol or 156 days cold turkey
• etc.

You can check, comment, or copy my OKRs spreadsheet if you want to do the same for you. Here they are. Otherwise here are the screenshots of my OKRs:

Those objectives are not set in stone. They’re guidelines. A north Star. I can change them whenever I want.

✨ BONUS — HOW TO WRITE YOUR OWN YEAR IN REVIEW ✨

Here’s a quick guide on how I collect and write my year in review.

YEAR IN REVIEW - HOW TO + APP I'M USING AND THEIR PRICE $$
1/ I use my iPhone 12 pro (€1,250), my Apple watch (€450), and my Macbook Pro (€1,500) as electronic devices.
2/ For tracking my weight I’m using a Withings health scale (€100) paired with the Gyroscope app (€60/year).
3/ For tracking my runs I use runkeeper go (€30/year) paired with Gyroscope.
4/ For tracking my sleep I use the Sleep Cycle (free) app on my iPhone.
5/ For tracking the books I read, I'm using Goodreads (free). Which is also great to save books you want to read later or discovering new ones + Gsheet.
6/ For tracking my travels I use gyroscope + Gsheet.
7/ For tracking the movies I watch, I'm using a simple Gsheet (free).
8/ For tracking my TV show, I'm using the TV time iPhone app (free).
9/ For tracking and listening to my podcasts, I'm using the Overcast iPhone app (free).
10/ For tracking my music I'm using the Spotify year in Review.
11/ For tracking my digital activity (app/website usage on my mac), I'm using Rescue Time (Paid + free) paired with Gyroscope.
12/ For tracking random stuff like my beer consumption I'm using a simple Gsheett (free) that I'm filling out every day.
13/ For tracking my OKRs, I'm using a simple Gsheet (free).
14/ For tracking my personal finance I use a spreadsheet + the different platforms I'm using to invest.
15/ At the end of December I gather all the data in a note saved on the Mac Notes app, then I start writing this medium article. It usually takes me a week or two to finish it.
16/ You can find more informations about my OKRs here.
17/ I did my DNA analysis through 23andme (about $200). You can get 10% (and me $20) if you use this referral code.

If you have any questions, remarks, or just want to tell me what you thought about this, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at yo@yoann.co

Happy 2021 everybody ❤️.

Thanks for reading!