Well, that’s another amazing year in the books!
2017 was an exceptionally great year for me, so much so that I thought that 2018 wouldn’t be able to stack up. But this year was even better than 2017 by a decent margin.
As is now tradition, I’ll talk about some of the highlights of the year for me.
Marriage
My first year of marriage was pretty awesome! There was obviously some adjustment as could be expected during the merging of two lives, but I felt like we handled it really well and have found harmony. I’m even happier to be married now than I was when we first got married, and I’m enjoying our life together. Just as my years keep getting better and better, hopefully this trend of my marriage getting better and better also continues.
Coaching
I cut down on the number of coaching clients I have, generally not replacing people once others “graduate”. I like having a little more flexibility in my schedule and only opening a few days per month per call, and I really enjoy the long-term I’ve been able to work with people. I err way on the side of privacy so I won’t give specifics, but it’s been really amazing to see people make huge gains over the year+ I’ve been working with most of my existing clients.
I also did my first live event last March and it went better than my greatest expectations. I really chalk most of that up to having such an excellent group of people that came motivated, open minded, and willing to trust the process. I’m doing another one in March that’s now full and will do one in Budapest later in the year (if you emailed me about Budapest but haven’t gotten a reply, don’t worry— I have a big list of everyone and I’ll figure out the event in the next month or two and email you).
CruiseSheet
CruiseSheet has really become very stable and consistent. It made 25% more than the previous year and required far less work from me since the heavy lifting is done and I hired an employee. I worked a lot on it early in the year but then put it on the back burner for the past few months, largely because what it really needs now is marketing and I just have zero interest in doing those sorts of tasks.
Vegas
We now have 11 units, up from 7 last year. My wife and I now own two adjacent onces which we’ve sort of converted into one big one. One room is a full gym with leg press, cables, rows, a rack with weights, etc. She also motivated me to finish a lot of projects on my original condo, so now it’s even more pleasant to be there.
Now that we have so many units, there are basically always people besides us in our neighborhood. It feels sort of like a luxe version of college where you can always find someone to have a meal with, except now we all have cool apartments instead of bedrooms in a dorm.
Hawaii
As predicted in last year’s update, we got one more place for our little real estate empire: a condo in Hawaii. I’ve already been 3-4 times in the 6 months we’ve had it and it’s been a really nice change from the places I normally go. My favorite part of it is going scuba diving all the time. I bought a used set of scuba equipment and now I just go scuba whenever I want, even by myself sometimes.
Budapest
I spent a bunch of time in Budapest and had even more family members visit, which was really a blast. Near the end of the year we finally found some contractors to renovate the place (extremely difficult in Budapest), and those renovations are almost done. I can’t wait to go again in the next month or two to see how it all came out.
Island
I got solar and electricity going at the yurt and my cabin and we finally got the yurt furnished. It really makes a big difference to have couches and a table to sit at versus a few camping chairs. I had six family members visit in one trip that may have been the most fun island trip yet.
One disappointment is that I wasn’t able to make much progress on my cabin. I didn’t put any shingles up and my attempts to waterproof it didn’t amount to much. I’m really hoping to get those things done this year so that I can work on the interior.
Writing
As I mentioned a few posts back, I wrote an entire year of blog posts in ten days so that I didn’t have to worry about the looming deadlines. I think it was the first tangible improvement to my writing system in many years (though some people said that it felt different once they knew they were pre-written). I published Forever Nomad, which got great reviews, and may very well be my last non-fiction book.
Travel
I did a TON of travel this year, but only went to one new country (Kazakhstan) and a few new cities in the US and Taiwan. Overall my interest in getting deeper into the places I really like is very high, and interest in exploring new places is relatively low. My interest in traveling solo to new places is just about zero. This year I did a great job of only going on trips that matched my criteria of good places with good people. It was easily the year in which I had the most family trips, which are some of the most important to me.
For a while years back I felt like my traveling was out of balance, but I don’t feel that way anymore. I did start to feel like I wasn’t getting enough work done while traveling, but I’ve adjusted my habits to correct that and will continue to do so.
I don’t keep exact records, but I probably went to Hawaii 3-4 times, Tokyo 3-4 times, Budapest 3-4 times, the island 3-4 times, China 2-3 times, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, one cruise, and a handful of other trips, plus lots of domestic travel.
Overall
At this point I feel like I’ve acheived all of my real goals and have gotten a lot more out of life than I expected I ever would. That’s a great thing overall, but I do feel like I have a bit less fire than in years past. These days I’m pretty happy to enjoy the fruits of my labor, explore random projects like anodizing titanium and building LED candles, and make incremental improvements to various things. I oscillate between thinking that that’s exactly what I should be doing and thinking that maybe I should fire myself up a bit.
It feels like in the past two years the groundwork that I’ve been laying for the past 5-10 years has all paid off and come together and life is better than ever across just about every axis.
Next Year
People keep asking my what my goals are this year and I don’t have too many big ones. All of our properties need some finishing touches so I’d like to get all of those taken care of. I’d like to get my cabin on the island fully waterproofed properly. I’ll throw an event in Budapest this year. I’m still working on getting a place in Tokyo but it’s a tricky nut to crack and I haven’t found the right fit yet. I’ll continue to put energy into building our Vegas neighborhood.
But mostly my goals are to just keep doing what I’m doing — working with good people, spending time with friends and family, and traveling to my favorite places.
Hope you had an amazing year as well and that your 2019 will be even better!
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Photo is a really cool world time thing, I think in the Taipei airport, but possibly Shanghai.
The March Superhuman 2 Event is now full, but if you want to be on the waiting list or be first to know when I anonunce next year’s, feel free to email me. You can also email if you want to be added to the Budapest list, though I suspect I already have enough people to sell it out, as I’m going to keep it very small.
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