2023 Reflection

 “The best way to hear god laugh is to announce your plans.”

Overview

Though I’ve been doing them for years, this is the first time I’ve decided to publicly share my yearly reflection, which is part of my Yearly Ritual. I was inspired to do so by Tiago Forte, after he recently shared his own. As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, writing for an audience shifts one’s context in a powerful way: you go from journaling to storytelling.

There’s a certain courtesy that an author needs to extend to their audience. A good author has to keep in mind that they’re guiding readers through an unfamiliar world. They have a responsibility to provide the tools and directions necessary to help the reader navigate it.

The question is: why does this matter, and why am I sharing my yearly reflection publicly? The main reasons are:

1. Communication: I hope that this peek behind the curtain of Bullet Journal creates more transparency about us as company and me as founder. I learn a lot by reading these from other small business owners, so I hope this will serve others the same way.
2. Sharing: It's not often that I run across a way of journaling that really shifts my perspective as much as this new (to me) format. I found it very helpful, so I wanted to submit it for your consideration.
3. Future Proofing: When I journal, it’s for my current self. It’s easy to take shortcuts, leaving out information because I think I will remember…but I can’t remember what I ate for lunch two days ago. When writing for others, I fill in the blanks, and connect the dots in a way that makes the information evergreen. This matters because it will help who I will become over the next three hundred, or three thousand days, look back and clearly see how far he’s come.

Professional

Last year was a pivotal year for Bullet Journal®. First, it marked our 10 year anniversary. As someone who spent most of their career working in tech and startups, 10 years is ancient. Not only that, it was one of our most profitable years. The combination of the two provided the most encouraging evidence that Bujo continues to play an important role in this increasingly digital age… I’m pretty sure now more than ever.

Business vs Company

In 2023 I went from owning a business to owning a company. Few people know just how small we’ve been all these years. For most of this last decade, it was just two of us: me on content and product, Chandra, head of my sanity and customer success, with the occasional freelance support. Though we accomplished unbelievable things together, there is only so much you can do with two people. As of this writing between full-time, part-time, and contractors we’re at a dozen people! It has added a lot of new possibility…and complexity.

Management

In terms of content output, 2023 was one of my least productive. Instead, I focused on growing the team. Though I was happy to manage that transition, I’m worried about becoming a full time manager. This is a common pitfall where creators become so busy running their business, that they don’t have time to create. Matt D’Avella recently posted a video that hit close to home.

With that said, I’ve enjoyed stepping into a leadership position to support the growth of my team in any way I can. It’s the distinction between being a manager vs leader that isn’t clear to me yet. Maybe its the difference between the person who inspires you to play the game, vs the person who makes sure everyone has what they need to play and show up on time.

This year we’re exploring that distinction by restructuring the company into what executive coach Dan Sullivan refers to as a “self-managing company.” The short version is to set up your business in a way where you stop doing things you’re not good at, so you can focus on what you are good at. Because I create most of our content, this will be an interesting challenge to navigate in 2024.

Membership

Growing the team allows us to provide offerings that have been on my mind for years. The first major project was launching Bujo U, a dedicated platform for the Bullet Journal community. I wanted to create a place where we could share knowledge and learn from each other free from ads, bots, misinformation, trolls, and bad pictures of sad sandwiches.

In early 2023, we renovated the whole thing head to toe. Under the guidance of Jessica —our head of education, community, and…“vibes”— we developed a lot of exciting live programming geared toward learning about powerful tools from a variety of intellectual lineages and how we can integrate them into our Bujo practice/lives. It helped us grow Bujo U to over 5,000 members! The is an incredible number to write.

Certification

We also quietly launched a pilot program in 2023 to explore Bullet Journal® Certified Trainers. By providing a formal Bullet Journal training program, my goals are to:

1. Empower the community to make a living by teaching others how to Bullet Journal®.

2. Serve those I’d never be able to reach, from perspectives, audiences, experiences different than my own.

3. Preserve the integrity of the methodology. There is a lot of misinformation out there about what the Bullet Journal Method actually is.

There were A LOT of learnings. As with any big goal, we learned many lessons we had not anticipated. One being that we needed two different offerings: One for people who want to receive the most in-depth Bujo education possible for themselves. One for those who want to teach Bujo to others.

We also learned how complex and sensitive it can be to navigate creating new offerings to a community that reaches all over the world with different understandings of what Bullet Journal is. We want to create something that is of service, acknowledging that Bujo has expanded to become so much to so many, while preserving the proven core methodology. This is a loving challenge

We’re now synthesizing these lessons into a curriculum that we hope to be offering later this year. More on this soon. Sign up to be notified.

Bullet Journal Community

One of the two offerings mention above also addresses a personal need. I’ve spent years communicating through email, and youtube videos. Going on book tour, right before the pandemic, was the first time I actually met and interacted with the Bullet Journal community face to face. It was a powerful experience that inspired Bujo U, where I get to talk to directly to Bullet Journalists regularly. My experiences in Bujo U led to the idea for what I will be launching next, and I couldn’t be more excited to publicly announce this project when it’s ready this year.

Professional Community

I switched career paths later in life. So for years, I’ve been operating without a community of professional peers. It was a real felt void. This year I’ve been able to connect directly with people in a similar space that I look up to, and it’s quickly become one of my most powerful sources of inspiration. If there were two pieces of business advice I would give, they would be this:

1. Make a product that solves your problem.
2. Find your people.

Impact

When I launched bulletjournal.com in 2013, it never occurred to me to turn it into a business. It being free was kind of the whole idea. It was to give back to others who shared their knowledge for free online. That was until I learned something that changed my mind:

Businesses can be force multipliers for supporting anything you care about.

This moved me to a new space of creating a mission-driven company that is sustainable while being able to make an impact in a variety of ways.

For example, I donate 10% of my income to charitable organizations. Bullet Journal, the company, donates 10% of its profits, which is a lot more than my contribution as an individual. This year we were able to provide hundreds of scholarships, and make our most sizable contribution yet to our charitable organization of choice: Giving What We Can. In a world with subjective business metrics, this felt like an objective measure of success.

Lighthouse Goals

The reason to create a self-managing company is so I spend less time tracking product development, warehouse shipments, and sending bill payments and get back to what I really love to do, which is: to learn, to teach, and to keep evolving Bujo to become the most effective framework for conscious action that it possibly can be.

This year I intend to increase my creative output and offer content that is more raw and vulnerable than what I’ve created in the past. Why? Because I think that my personal standard for quality is often driven by fear, not service. The narrative being that if I can’t show up perfectly, then I shouldn’t show up at all. That’s what keeps happening. Then someone asked me a question: Who inspires you?

I find myself most inspired by people who: dealt/deal with something, teach from empirical understanding, they teach what they need because it works for them. The relatability doesn’t come from them commenting on the game, but from being in the arena. They’re candid about what they don’t know, their mistakes, change their mind when someone provides better data.

I also want to better embody what I teach: progress over perfection…beginning with this article.

Personal

Though my personal theme for 2023 started as ‘play,’ it ended up being the year of ‘education.’ Having a team allowed me to focus on my formal development. I find myself in a position of influence, and I don’t take that lightly. I think the best way to serve my community, and myself, is to remain a student and commit to my ongoing education.

Some of the courses I took were planned, some appeared organically. I found myself in an exhilarating rabbit hole of finally finding answers and discovering powerful questions. A lot of this inquiry was motivated by one of the most challenging periods of my life: 2020-2022. It required me to look for a whole new set of tools to navigate a set of conditions that I had never experienced before.

Luckily, I found tools and strategies that were life changing. Unfortunately, a lot of these tools can only be found after crisis. I wondered: why not bring them upstream, greatly simplified, to mitigate or avoid crisis entirely? So that’s my goal! A lot of my new work has been synthesizing this information and my experience into an approachable and practical framework that has taken my Bujo practice to a whole different level. This will be the subject of the first of the two offering we hope to launch in 2024

Here are some of my personal educational highlights from last year:

Byron Katie’s School for The Work

I try to learn from teachers who have been around the longest. Byron Katie is one of them and I see why. This 10 day workshop hosted at a grim hotel, overlooking LAX, was the most intense and eye opening personal development experience I’ve had the privilege to attend. I will digest this experience for years, but here are 3 of the biggest lessons distilled into 3 bullets.

1. Suffering = arguing with reality
2. You can’t change your beliefs, but you can question them…
3. Our choices are limited to our beliefs. Change your beliefs, remove those limits.

Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP)

The greatest investment that we can possibly make into our personal and professional growth is the consistent cultivation of our mental fitness. Towards that end, I have not found more powerful personal technologies than journaling and mindfulness.

My greatest investment in my professional development in 2023 was my enrollment in M.M.T.C.P. It is a two-year intensive program taught by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield, two meditation teachers who have greatly influenced my thinking over these last 10 years. A lot of that learning will be incorporated into what I’m calling Bullet Journal 3.0. A lot of that evolution will be rolling out this year.

3 biggest takeaway so far:

1. The importance of understanding the relationship between intention and impact.
2. Thoughts are not good or bad. They’re just sensory data, like sights, smells, or sounds.
3. Meditating is not the end, it’s the beginning. It’s training for the game.

Silent Retreat

As part of my teacher training, I was required to go on a seven day silent retreat. No screens, music, books, or even, gasp, journaling. This is something I’ve been equally excited and nervous about.

In 2020-2021 I learned just how powerful, and cruel the mind can be. The idea of spending seven days with nothing but my thoughts gave me real pause. You know how your mind has its Top 10 greatest hits of anxious, angry, depressing, or embarrassing thoughts? This retreat revealed my Top 100 and played them on repeat.

I’m happy to report that, though I had plenty of resourceless thoughts, I was able to navigate them. There were plenty of lovely thoughts, and stretches of intense boredom. It was validating to have developed the capacity to be with all the things the mind conjures to fill hundreds of hours of silence. There was a powerful sense of accomplishment…especially considering I did nothing. Four stars.

Surgery

In December of 2023 I needed to get surgery to fix torn ligaments in my right hand. As someone who makes their living writing, I found myself detached from the very tool I used to navigate my life.

On the one…hand…it had a real negative impact on my well-being because I could neither work nor play. For the first time in my life I felt claustrophobic, trapped in my body. I had all this time to read but no way to process my thoughts or make notes.

Dictation is so inaccurate that I often lose my train of thought half way through correcting the transcription. Many transcription auto corrected words to the point where I no idea what I had meant at the time. One time I sent an email to a community member with the following line “I’m a big fan of Japanese icky guys” (I’m a big fan of the Japanese concept of Ikigai.

On the other…hand, it’s very validating to experience what life is like without Bullet Journaling. When you’ve been doing something for decades, you forget what it was like before you found your solution. You can forget the thrill of discovering the key that leveled up your game. I can’t wait to begin again.

There were a lot of lessons from this time that I will share throughout the year.

Conclusion

2023 saw me in over a dozen cities with half a dozen teachers. In all honesty, I simpy overdid it with the amount of learning. Learning isn’t complete without integration. For me that’s a process of moving the information from my head into my life, and that happens through my body: being in action. In 2024 it’s about staying still and putting it all into play.

There are many other lessons that 2023 has taught me, that I will continue to share as part of my integration process, but I think if it all had to be reduced into a single sentence, it would be this:

Pay attention to your quality of being.

That is my intention for 2024, fortunately I have the perfect tool to do just that…

Let me know in the comments below what you think of this format. Is it useful? Would you try it?