Our 2021 Year-End Review and 2022 Preview

Our 2021 Year-End Review and 2022 Preview

Our 2021 Year-End Review and 2022 Preview

Our 2021 Year-End Review and 2022 Preview

by

Caroline Zook

his year went by so slowly and yet so quickly at the same time.

his year went by so slowly and yet so quickly at the same time.

his year went by so slowly and yet so quickly at the same time.

Another year in the books, folks! While 2021 felt a lot like 2020 in many ways, we were incredibly grateful to make it through some fairly rough patches and also some really great moments too.

2021 summed up in a GIF:

We love doing these year-end reviews as it helps us zoom the lens out and see the good, the bad, the ugly, and the in-between. It’s also really interesting to review these… reviews… as the years go by. If you’ve never written one of these, we highly recommend it (even if you don’t share it publicly).

Last year’s review had a callout to a (100% free) Notion Yearly Planning Template and we wanted to share that again. We’re biased, but we think it’s a solid way to go through end-of-year planning 🤗😉.

 

What Went Well In 2021? 👍

👩🏻‍🦰 Made consistent exercise a priority (and learned not to hate it!)

This was my one big personal commitment to myself in 2021, and I feel really proud to say that I was able to follow through on it. I’m no longer a person who hates to exercise! Hooray!

I want to be 100% clear here in stating that this goal did not come from a place of wanting to change my body, needing to hit a certain number on a scale, or the belief that exercising regularly somehow makes one a better person than anyone else. We have enough of that crap messaging being launched at us from the diet industry and the media.

For me, this was about a few things instead:

  1. I know from experience that regular exercise helps me manage my anxiety. Maintaining good mental health is the most crucial priority to me, so learning to not hate it seemed like a pretty worthy endeavor.

  2. I wanted to change this recurring self-perception and narrative that has popped up my entire life telling me I’m not capable of caring for myself in this way. One of the childhood stories I continue to work on in therapy is this idea that I am “weak” and I wondered if challenging this belief in this way could help reinforce a sense of self-trust and some lived experience to rewrite that internal self-criticism.

I’ve tried to work on establishing this habit for years, but it’s never stuck. I think the biggest reason I was able to finally to make it happen in 2021 is that this time, my desired change was coming from a place of self-love and not self-hate. My motivation was not to chase down something I felt I was lacking; it was born out of a deep desire to care for myself. This major difference meant that I approached everything from a place of compassion, joy, and curiosity, rather than making it about strictness, punishment or disappointment. And that little bit of grace was enough to keep me coming back.

I made up my own rules and I kept the expectations low. Just ten minutes a day. And yes, even stretching for ten minutes or a restorative yoga session “counted.” I would cross off a big X for every day I completed to track my streak. If I felt like pushing myself one day, I would. If I had zero motivation and just wanted to dance around in my garage for ten minutes, I would. If I got bored with an exercise session and “quit” after ten minutes, great! Totally allowed. Because I showed up. And the only person who was there to judge me was me. It was always about whatever I needed that day, and that’s how I was able to turn it into a daily habit.

This year, as we travel, I know it will be harder to keep this habit alive but I’m committed to trying because I know just how positive the impact has been on my life.

Caroline Zook workout goals achieved

 

🚀 We reached our “Enough Number” and had our best WAIM Unlimited launch yet!

In 2018, we agreed on an “Enough Number” for our monthly business revenue: $33,000. This number wasn’t just plucked out of thin air because it sounded good on paper; it was intentionally chosen based on clearly outlining our realistic financial and lifestyle goals. (Also, keep in mind, that number is revenue, not profit. 👍) We thought it would take us one year to achieve it when we started WAIM, which honestly seems laughable at this point, but, hey, these two kids can dream!

On September 28* of this year, this goal became a reality! 🎊🥳🎉

*100% honesty moment: During our launch when we hit our enough number, we were barely able to celebrate it due to some personal family issues that took us on a two-month emotional roller coaster. Life has a funny way of balancing out our emotions, huh?

You can read all about our Journey to Enough here (with the first update starting at $0 per month in revenue). In the 2022 preview section below, you can read why we’re actually updating this enough number three years later, not as a means to keep growing for growth’s sake, but just to adjust to the vision we have for this next phase of our lives.

WAIM’s monthly revenue increased 127% from 2020 to 2021

In the lovely chart below, you can see the monthly revenue line for 2020 (in magenta) and our awesome new revenue line for 2021 (in blue).

What feels most amazing about this chart to us is that our work output was probably LESS in 2021 than it was in 2020. It felt like we really found our groove in 2021 with our bi-annual launch model (Spring and Fall).

Wandering Aimfully 2021 MRR Chart

In 2021, WAIM Unlimited welcomed in 266 new customers (49% increase from 2020)

In looking back, 2020 was actually a solid year for WAIM. We saw consistent growth and ended the year with 165 new customers. But, 2021 saw an awesome increase thanks mostly to our affiliate program.

Wandering Aimfully 2021 New Customers Chart

Of those 266 new customers in 2021:

  • 167 came from affiliates (63% of total customers)

  • 16 came from our “passive” email sales funnel (6%)

  • 21 customers canceled their WAIM membership (6.7% churn for the year)

Speaking of customer churn, we made some great strides this year in reducing cancelations!

Any time you increase new customers, you’re likely to see more churn. However, in 2021 we saw a 44% reduction in churn from 12% in 2020 to 6.7% in 2021.

We strongly believe the decrease in churn boiled down to a few factors:

  1. Many new customers came via affiliates, which is usually someone they trust and know will lead them to buy something worth investing in

  2. We feel our business model is very dialed-in these days and new customers know exactly what they are going to get on a monthly basis

  3. We’ve continued to evolve our sales page and email sales copy to be extremely honest, transparent and lacking in psychological/fear-based tactics

Wandering Aimfully 2021 User Churn Chart

 

📊 Our email metrics are UP but our website traffic is DOWN 🤔

It’s weird to put this in the “what went well?” part of this review, but it feels like it was a good thing, so let’s run with it for now (we’ll check back next year on those feelings 👀).

Total new website visitors in 2020: 353,021
Total new email subscribers in 2020: 3,145
Traffic to email conversion in 2020: .08%

Total new website visitors in 2021: 206,574 (⬇️ 41% decrease)
Total new email subscribers in 2021: 4,469 (⬆️ 42% increase)
Traffic to email conversion in 2021: 2%

Here’s a look at our new email subscribers broken down over the course of the year. Two fun tidbits for all you tidbit fans out there:

  1. Highest day of subscribers: 46 people on September 5

  2. Lowest day of subscribers: 1 person 🤣 on July 17 (no days with zero tho!)

Wandering Aimfully 2021 Daily Email Subscriber Chart

We doubled our website conversion rate and nearly doubled our new email subscribers while seeing a 41% decrease in website traffic

When you compare our website traffic numbers from 2020 to 2021 it can feel like this:

But, when you break down the metrics that matter most for our business to thrive, it actually has us feeling like this:

Over the years, we’ve had a handful of articles that really pumped up our website visitor counts. BUT, the majority of those articles weren’t serving the core focus of WAIM that we’ve been moving into (un-boring and thoughtful business coaching). As those larger trafficked articles started to slump we noticed the traffic, decreasing but our email subscriber rate actually increased!

While we only published five new articles in 2021 😋 (our goal was 12), they were high-quality articles and would target our ideal email subscriber (and hopefully, eventually WAIM Unlimited customer). We also did some tweaking on a few existing articles and hope to see the fruit of those traffic trees in 2022. We’ll check back on that next year!

We also did our annual email purge and deleted 6,000+ subscribers 💪💪

Every year we do what’s called a re-engagement email campaign to our email list. It’s a series of four emails sent over the course of 20 days. In those emails, we ask subscribers who don’t seem interested in our emails to click a link to stay subscribed.

This year, that campaign (and some other cleanups) removed 6,000+ subscribers from our list. This task used to scare us, but now it empowers us. It keeps our email list healthy and reduces our monthly bill with our email provider (nearly $1,000 in savings coming our way in 2022!)

Wandering Aimfully 2021 Subscriber Chart

 

✨ We created two new products this year: the Notion Starter Pack and Page Layout Library

Everything we create these days is for our WAIM Unlimited members. While we still have a few straggler products out in the ether, we spend zero time on those and make very little revenue from them (no surprise in that correlation). When we make a new product, it’s to help improve the lives of our WAIMers!

🧴 The Notion Starter Pack

Notion has REALLY been a game-changer for us. Maybe you’re drinking the kool-aid too? They’ve just done such a great job of building a productivity tool that is powerful yet flexible, and it works really well with our brains. We laugh all the time while asking ourselves, “how the hell did we get anything done before Notion??”

The Notion Starter Pack is our own cobbled-together Notion system. We took parts that we learned from other awesome Notion folks (h/t Marie Poulin and August Bradley) and built something unique to us and the way we manage our business/life blend in one system. We built this system and test drove it ourselves for six months before we launched it in Spring of 2021, including it as an added bonus during our WAIM Unlimited enrollment.

During that Spring enrollment, we saw 15% of new customers say they joined because of the Notion Starter Pack. If we extrapolate that out, it equates to ~$40,000 in total revenue. Not bad!

Wandering Aimfully Notion Starter Pack

📐 Page Layout Library

A difficult task that can often delay launching ideas within your online business is layout and copywriting for your website. Whether it’s your home page, about page, sales page, etc, it can be a mental grind to know what to put where especially when you’re starting with a blank page.

While we know there’s no “one-size-fits-all” right way to design a web page, we wanted to make it easier for our WAIMers to get pages designed and live so they could continue experimenting to see what worked for their unique audience. We created 10 page layouts that include step-by-step prompts to write compelling copy as well as design and layout advice for each page (and section within it). Within 24 hours of launching the Page Layout Library we had a few WAIM members who had turned an existing homepage or about page from something they weren’t excited about into a page they LOVED. That’s exactly what we wanted this project to do, so we call it a success 💪.

And yes, if you were wondering, the library was built using Notion!

Wandering Aimfully Page Layout Library

 

🗺 Committing to our dream of travel and building a plan

Departing from the world of business (see what I did there??), let’s talk about huge life changes.

As of writing this year-end review, we are planning to move to Europe and live abroad for all of 2022.

This has been in the works for five years and for obvious reasons it didn’t happen last year. With the current omicron variant of COVID, we of course have to be mindful of taking every safety precaution to try and make sure we stay healthy as we travel, and more importantly, to make sure we don’t thoughtlessly spread this disease to others as we travel who may have less protection. As of writing this, we are triple-vaccinated and our first destination has almost 90% of its citizens fully vaccinated with a much lower hospitalization rate than the United States. These are things that will stay top-of-mind for us as we travel and we will consider the risks with every decision we make, not just for ourselves but the people we come into contact with.

WAIM Around The World

Where are we planning to travel in 2022??

That’s a great question, and one we’re kind of keeping close to the vest. As you can probably tell by these review articles we share A LOT, but this is one instance where we want to keep a bit of mystery.

We can tell you that our travel plans look like this:

  • We’re planning to spend 2ish weeks in each spot

  • We’ve currently booked everything through March 25

And we can also tell you that our priorities in choosing destinations are as follows:

  1. We’re not interested in big cities, so we’ll mostly be going to smaller cities

  2. We’re not interested in museums, site seeing, etc, we want to try to live like locals

  3. Food and great restaurants are HIGH on our list (we may have booked one destination just on its food alone)

  4. Fun Airbnb options that will feel unique and different in each country

  5. Balancing between city life, country life, and seaside life

🎥 Will we be documenting our travels? 📸

We will!

Video – We’ve decided we want to try to record and upload one travel video from each location to our YouTube channel.

Instagram – We’ll be sharing some travel updates on our Instagram account @wanderingaimfully.

Podcast – We’ll definitely be sharing more behind-the-scenes stories on our weekly podcast.

Email List – Our weekly email content hasn’t been decided on yet with how much we’ll be talking about our travels. It might just be the place we share links to the podcast, YouTube, etc. The jury is still out on this one and we’ll figure it out as we go!

What did we have to do to get ready to become full-time travelers for a year?

The first thing was simply committing to this enormous life change. When we moved across the US from Florida to California in 2015, it wasn’t an easy decision. Leaving your routines, comforts, family, and friends behind is daunting just to think about… let alone DO!

Once we got over the mental hurdles of making this big change, it was time to do all the practical stuff. I’m going to boil it down into some bullet points, but just know it was not as easy as these simple statements make it seem 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫.

  • We sold… EVERYTHING. Well, 99% of everything.

  • We had one three 📦s we sent to my Mom with a few memory items and important papers.

  • We sweet-talked friends into storing Caroline’s first large canvas art piece (thanks Caleb and Jen!)

  • We whittled our possessions and wardrobes down into 2 roller suitcases and 2 travel backpacks.

  • We ended our rental lease.

  • We sold our car.

  • We updated our address to a virtual mailbox and changed it on all. the. things. (Twice, because I screwed up the first time 😤.)

  • We canceled all our US insurances and got travel insurance.

  • We stayed as grounded and levelheaded as possible during that entire process 🥵😂.

Needless to say, the final two months of 2021 were very busy and full of small emotional moments realizing how much our lives were about to change!

We sold all our stuff!

 

🍿 Our “Classic” Movie Night Continued!

Okay, the last item of business in this section, but one of our favorite things we do together as a couple. On Saturday nights we hunker down, pick two movies from the 80s, 90s, or 00s, and just enjoy the time together.

Here’s the highlight reel from 2021’s watched movies (2020’s movie highlights are in that review if you are dying to know what movies we watched last year and loved):

  • The Guest (our favorite rewatch of the year – suuuuuch a fun and unique thriller!)

  • Virtuosity (omg, what a ride of a movie – truly a gem!)

  • 2012 (just a really great disaster movie)

  • Skyfire (not nearly as good as 2012 but definitely entertaining)

  • Taken 1/2/3 (Liam Neeson doesn’t disappoint)

  • Scream 1/2/3/4 (while mentioning an enjoyable series, Scream ✅)

  • Away We Go (for the Enneagram 4s out there + the soundtrack is great!)

  • The Net (Sandy B, you nailed all that computer hacking!)

  • Sudden Death (Caroline actually enjoyed this JCVD classic)

  • Volcano + Dante’s Peak (super fun to watch volcano disaster movies back to back)

  • Dune (the new one… not the classic… absolutely FANTASTIC movie)

We’ll see if we keep up with this ritual as we travel in 2022. Every time we think we’re running out of movies we find another genre we forgot about (like volcano disaster flicks 🌋🤣).

 

 

What Didn’t Go Well In 2021? 😰

✋ Content warning: If reading about COVID-19 is triggering for you or you struggle with family trauma and don’t want to read about ours, please feel free to skip these next two sections.

🦠 COVID-19 hit our family pretty hard

When I finished writing last year’s year-end review, I knew the odds were that someone close to us would likely be hit with COVID, we just didn’t know it would happen so soon after hitting publish. Unfortunately, one of our most vulnerable family members who lives in Florida ended up hospitalized for 5 weeks starting in January of 2021.

This was before we were eligible for the vaccine, so traveling back to Florida unvaccinated amidst the largest (at the time) case numbers didn’t feel safe or responsible to us. That made the experience especially hard because you can’t really do much from far away except provide emotional support to your other family members and FaceTime as often as possible to help someone through it. Of course, we know just how lucky we are that this family member was able to get good healthcare and survived two rounds of pneumonia throughout those five weeks. We know other families were not this lucky, and we just want to take a moment to say our hearts go out to you if you have lost someone you love during this pandemic. We know the collective pain everyone has gone through is immense.

Though our family member survived 🙏, the lingering effects of COVID on them are still present a year later, and this continues to inform our decisions as we try to balance navigating COVID-era life and mitigating risk at the same time.

We are fully vaccinated and boosted as of writing this review. If you are able to do the same, we highly encourage it to keep our more vulnerable communities safer.

 

💔 Complicated family interactions derailed the end of 2021 for us

Without getting too specific on this one, we’ll just say that family relationships can be incredibly hard to navigate as you get older. We grow up and sometimes it becomes clear that the way our family of origin systems functioned when we were kids wasn’t always healthy. As an adult, trying to set boundaries to protect yourself from harm within that system can be extremely difficult, and we found ourselves entangled in this after our trip back to Florida post-vaccination.

Again, we’ll spare you the details for sake of privacy of those involved in this, but we felt it was important to share because it was a HUGE part of our year and it left both of us in a very tumultuous and at times low mental health state for the last quarter of the year. Thankfully, we were able to move forward through it (with the help of Caroline’s awesome therapist!) and ultimately will look back on this last part of the year as a very transformative time when old patterns and ways of being had to be shed in order to make room for new, healthier ways of being.

*I do want to add a note of positivity here. We DID get to hug our Moms (and other family members) for the first time in nearly two years and that definitely was a highlight of our trip back to Florida.

Hugging our Moms in 2021

 

🥴 Did we mention Caroline got shingles for a 2nd… and 3rd time in 2021??

Soooooooo… yep. There’s a reason we didn’t write a year-end review for 2019 and it’s because it was the hardest year ever for Caroline. She dealt with terrible anxiety and depersonalization for almost the entire year on top of getting severe shingles for the first time.

The only silver lining to 2019’s bout with shingles is that 👩🏻‍🦰 is acutely aware of what it feels like when shingles is starting to flare up. There’s an unmistakable sensitivity to a localized area of her body, and she immediately can detect that something isn’t right.

The 2nd shingles battle happened after our family member was in the hospital with COVID. And the 3rd shingles battle happened a few weeks after our October trip and difficult family interaction. HUH. Seems to be a (shitty) pattern emerging here. We know that as a Highly Sensitive Person and someone who has an anxiety disorder, Caroline is highly susceptible to internalizing emotions and this often has very real physical consequences. We are both learning how to support her through this when it happens, and how to accept this as the reality. Being sensitive has incredible benefits and tremendous value, but there are unfortunately costs as well.

Anyway, again, not trying to be a Debby Downer, just sharing the reality that is life for all of us (ups and downs). We feel very fortunate that Caroline knew shingles were creeping up both times, and both times she was able to get the medication she needed early, which prevented the painful rash from developing like it did the first time.

Sucks that shingles came around twice this year, hopefully, that means it’ll skip the next 30 years?? 🤞🤞🤞

Caroline Zook in her shingles perch

 

🖥 Let’s transition to business: we didn’t have time for a passive income project

For two years we’ve had this itch to create a smaller passive income project. Not because we want to make more money—we have pretty modest financial goals for this project compared to our other businesses. It’s really because we believe in diversification in business, and we love experimenting with new business ventures so we continue to bring value to our WAIM members.

We finally landed on an idea we felt good about for a new biz venture, but it always fell to the bottom of our priority ladder. The sad part is, we REALLY like the idea! It seems like something fun, fairly low investment of time, and right in our technical + creative wheelhouse. It’s just, there wasn’t enough time this year with everything else we wanted to do.

Maybe you’re like us and you’ve had a side project staring you in the face for years, but you simply can’t muster the time to work on it? We’re here to tell you that’s 🆗. It’s more important to keep your mental and physical health in check and focus on having a strong business foundation before adding yet-another project to your mix (we’ve definitely fallen into the trap before).

Instead of pushing ourselves to make this project happen, we simply accepted we didn’t have time for it. We won’t have time for it in 2022 either, but that doesn’t mean we can’t revisit for 2023! We shall see.

 

⚙️ Last item in this section, we definitely didn’t make as much progress with Teachery this year

For those of you reading this who have no idea what Teachery is, it’s a small SaaS (software as a service) that helps people build and sell online courses. It’s been around since 2014 when the idea popped in my head to build an online course and I couldn’t find a platform I liked. In 2020, we spent the entire year redoing the branding and interface of Teachery which was wonderful! A difficult task indeed, but it created a really solid foundation for Teachery moving forward.

We had some fairly lofty goals for Teachery in 2021, most of which were NOT financial. Instead, they were features we wanted to create and launch. Given the last few sections you just read, you might understand why we didn’t accomplish our goals with Teachery this year.

But… We’re not too upset about this. Would we like to have gotten more features out the door for our awesome Teachery users? Heck ya! But, we still knocked a few features out and made some solid infrastructure improvements along the way.

We’re trying to keep our goals with Teachery very modest and realistic in 2022, as traveling full-time won’t afford us much extra bandwidth to work on features or marketing. It’s something we want to prioritize in the future, just probably not next year.

The good news is, word of mouth continues to grow Teachery’s revenue slowly and steadily 🐌📈🥰…

Teachery Revenue 2014-2021

 

 

📜 2022 Preview (What’s Next?)

🌏 Full-time travel: Wish us luck! 🤞

As of writing this review, we’re just days away from departing on a year of living out of two suitcases and two backpacks. We are SO excited, but also nervous at the same time (COVID doesn’t help that, obviously).

We’re hopeful we’ll be able to leave, make our way over to Europe, and bounce around feeling as safe as possible.

Be sure to subscribe/follow our YouTube Channel, Podcast, Instagram, and email list if you want to hear about our adventures!

🥐 Side goal during travels: My hope is to try a cinnamon roll in every destination we hit. I hope to find the best cinnamon roll in the world (okay, not really, but it seems fun to try to find one in every place we go!)

Editor’s note in January 2022: We’ve officially made it to our first destination! WAHOOO!

WAIM Around the World - Zooks in Europe

 

👨‍💻👩‍💻 WAIM: Maintain what we did this year and deepen the connection with our members

WAIM is working as a business! (Honestly, there were times the past few years when we would have DREAMED to be able to say that!) We’re able to deliver value to our members each month, and we’ve found a reliable system for growing our revenue through our bi-annual launches.

It will be interesting to navigate our live monthly coaching sessions from Airbnbs around Europe. That could get a bit hairy, but we’re not stressing out about it until we have to.

If you’re a WAIMer and you’re reading this, we heart your face REAL HARD. We hope to keep bringing you helpful, un-boring, inspiring business content all year long in 2022! 😍😘

 

💸 $57,000: Our new monthly “enough” number

Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. You might be thinking $33,000 -> $57,000?! What’s the deal?! That’s a huge jump! But, allow us to add some context.

We aren’t just doing this just because we want more money to buy Jason cinnamon rolls. Three years after setting our first goal, we need to adjust this number because:

#1 It costs more money to make $33,000 than we thought

When we set that original revenue goal in 2018, we had no idea that WAIM affiliates would ultimately be the driving force of our revenue. In fact, in the original breakdown of our $33,000 enough number, we earmarked $5,000 for our total average business expenses and $3,000 for our total average taxes to set aside.

To put those initial cost projections into context, now that we actually hit that $33,000 per month revenue number, we pay $10,000 per month just in affiliate payouts (which we LOVE doing). But that means our profit is much lower than we projected in 2018. Also, our taxes nearly tripled from our original estimations 😬. So, that’s the first reason we need to adjust that number to account for the costs associated with reaching our desired profit.

#2 We have different life goals for the next chapter of our lives than we did in 2018

Taxes and affiliates are enough to justify the enough number increase for us, but we also want to build a larger savings buffer (especially after watching family members get hospitalized, and let’s just be honest, the US healthcare system has the power to put any one of us into a very precarious financial position.)

We want to save up a down payment for our first home together, and account for the fact that we want to have children in the next few years (we’re told they cost just a bit of money, right? 🙃)

You can see in this chart that while the difference between the $33K to $57K seems like quite a jump, for our lifestyle it ultimately boils down to a $3K/month increase in mortgage, a $2K/month increase in living expenses (hi, kiddos!), and a $2K increase in our savings contributions.

You may not have read our enough number article so we just want to remind you that our goal does not have to be your goal, nor should it be! And, we don’t share our goal to be aspirational. We share it to be honest, transparent, and to demystify the conversation around money.

Oh, last note here, we aren’t sure what the timeline looks like to hit our new monthly $57k enough goal. Will it happen in 2022? Probably not. Might it take 3 years like our last enough goal? Keep reading these reviews to find out!

 

🙏 Hoping everyone is healthy (by your own standards!) and happy (also by your own standards! 😉)

Given the new variants of COVID we saw in 2021 and the continued uncertainty of this disease, we hope you, your families, and your friends are staying safe and taking as many precautions as possible. Wishing everyone a healthy and happy 2022—whatever that means for you given your circumstances!

 

 

🗄 Let’s Wrap It Up! How Are We Framing 2022?

Each year we pick a word that helps us frame the next year. The word becomes a mantra and we’ve done this since 2015!

👩🏻‍🦰 Caroline’s word(s) for 2022: Discomfort and Magic

When I thought about what over-arching theme and intention I wanted to set for this year of flux and adventure, I couldn’t limit myself to just one word, as I usually do. So the TWO words I’ve chosen to guide my 2022 are DISCOMFORT and MAGIC.

First, discomfort. I know this year is going to present me with so many situations that challenge my comfort. Going places where I don’t speak the language. Sleeping in a different bed every few weeks. Taking more flights than I have in years. All of these things are potentially anxiety-inducing, and as someone who struggles with an anxiety disorder, that scares me.

AND YET… the past few years I’ve assembled an array of tools that make me feel capable of weathering that discomfort. I trust myself enough to take care of myself in this sea of uncertainty, and I’m actually excited to challenge my own limits. I’ve learned that the more I practice being comfortable with discomfort, the more resilient I become and the more my world expands. I’m eager to stretch myself in that way, as I know it will benefit me throughout the rest of my life.

Embracing discomfort though is only one aspect of why we want to take this trip. I wanted a second word that would speak to the more joyful benefits that happen AFTER you do the scary thing. I wanted a kind of guiding “why” behind all that discomfort. And that’s where MAGIC comes in.

Amidst the uncertainty and anxiety of next year, I want to stay ever-mindful of the delightful, unexpected, and exciting moments that will undoubtedly arrive. I want to notice the magic of a jovial shop owner; the reflection of the sun on the water of a coast I’m seeing for the first time; a new cuisine; a cobblestone street; a helpful stranger. I want to collect these little magical experiences as I go and make sure that as I’m learning to live in this more transient way, I’m staying open to noticing these tiny rewards for making myself uncomfortable.

👨🏻‍🦲 Jason’s word for 2022: Absorb

We are going on a HUGE life adventure in 2022 and I want to soak as much of it in as possible. My nature is to optimize and do things as efficiently as possible and I’ll be fighting those urges at every turn. Having the word absorb as my focus should help me to slow down, take a beat, and not worry about how much faster something can get done.

It’s not lost on both of us how amazing of an opportunity traveling full-time is. I want to savor as much of it as I can, each and every day!

Are you writing a “Year-End Review”? We’d love to read it!

If you decide to write your own Year-End Review post feel free to send it to us via email (head to our contact page).

We hope you enjoyed reading our review! 👋👋

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Get our Growing Steady newsletter with 3 tips every Monday for making your business more profitable, more predictable, and more peaceful.

By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy and provide consent to receive updates from our company.

© 2024 Really Awesome Company. All rights reserved.

Get our Growing Steady newsletter with 3 tips every Monday for making your business more profitable, more predictable, and more peaceful.

By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy and provide consent to receive updates from our company.

© 2024 Really Awesome Company. All rights reserved.

Get our Growing Steady newsletter with 3 tips every Monday for making your business more profitable, more predictable, and more peaceful.

By subscribing you agree to with our Privacy Policy and provide consent to receive updates from our company.

© 2024 Really Awesome Company. All rights reserved.