2022 Annual Review — Jeff Li Chronicles

In 2021, I stepped into my “prime.” I felt happier than ever. I was a better surfer than ever. Made more money than ever before. Made a ton of new friends. I was rolling on all cylinders.

But like an annoying alarm clock, 2022 shocked me awake from my dream and back into reality. But that’s life. Like stocks, our lives don’t always live in a bull market. We have great runs, crumble back to earth, recover and go again.

Pivotal Moments

Collarbone Injury

I landed at 1am, slept 2 hours, hopped into the car at 4am for the 2 hours drive to Copper Mountain. Mixing these two hours of sleep with a few shots of liquid courage, becomes a recipe for feeling invincible.

As I hopped off the ski lift, carving through the soft, Colorado snow, a feeling of invincibility swept through the veins of my body, suffocating any fear that might crop up. I was with a new group of friends. So like a high school freshman with a chip on his shoulder, I wanted to prove how “good” I was at snowboarding. Mix this with some liquid courage, it was the perfect recipe for me to push myself.

I started to slide heel to toe, toe to heel, heel to toe, toe to heel, until I was rhythmically pushing a 360 butter. Like a 2013 EDM song, the rhythm moved faster, faster until……..BAM. I didn’t know what the f*ck happened to me, but I stood up. I couldn’t lift my right arm. Shit.

I carved down the slopes. My friend sees me carve down and its clear I’m not okay. I walk to the ER, get an X-ray and this is what I see:

Complete fracture of my clavicle. I ended up just chilling at the ski lodge for the rest of the day, wrestling with the emotion of a broken clavicle.

A week later, I was in surgery:

But you know, this moment ultimately made me a bette person……..F*ck that. As much as I want to say breaking my collarbone made me a “better person”, it didn’t. An injury is like running Slack on your computer. It just consumes all your computer RAM and makes your software slow as fck. Valuable RAM you could dedicate to other things.

I can’t say I’m a “better person” from the injury, but it did teach me an important lesson. Literally, nothing matters if my health isn’t there. Nothing. Relationships. Money. Success. They all go to zero without my health.

Quitting Alcohol

NYC Summer seduced me into the beautiful world of liquor and partying. Late nights dancing away at to electronic music at Brooklyn Mirage. Drinking cocktails at the Surf Lodge in the Hamptons. Lit BBQ’s at Brooklyn Bridge Park. 4am karaoke nights in Koreatown. Incredible memories I don’t regret.

When I first move somewhere new (college, SF, Europe etc), I always party a lot initially, but then stop. In 2018 and 2019, my friends knew me as the guy who barely drank. The challenge with NYC, is NYC life is centered around drinking. Without strong boundaries, one drink always turns into five.

I set a lot of goals for 2022. Alcohol got in the way. Whenever I partied, I’d piss away my entire next day watching youtube videos. I’d operate at a perpetual 60% through the week when I partied. I’d flush my discipline down the drain. I wouldn’t feel 100% until next Wed/Thurs. By then, I was already prepping for the next party.

In college, I felt like I could only express myself through alcohol. Now, I didn’t need alcohol to be social. I didn’t get more girls drinking alcohol. I didn’t feel good from being drunk either.

The cons significantly outweighed the pros, so I decided after my 30th birthday, I was done with alcohol for the rest of the year.

My biggest fear, was that I’d lose friends and I’d stop being invited to things. This was far from reality. I ended up making more friends. All my friends literally didn’t care at all whether I drank or not.

I’m gonna bring alcohol back at some point. Binge drinking has no place in my life anymore. Only exception(s) I’ll allow right now: friend’s weddings and MAYBE trips/vacations.

ML Course (Soft) Launch

The main goal I felt behind on due to drinking, was building my ML course and a big win was shipping this course. I guess I can call myself an “entrepreneur” now.

I formed an LLC in the beginning of the year and began working with my business partner to develop two courses for 365 data science. The first one, the Machine Learning Process A to Z is live! This was the first time I made a decent sum of money outside of my normal job.

The course was WAYY more effort than I expected, especially since I was working on this part time. We still have a lot more work to do, but I need to at least give myself a small pat for shipping this:

Energizing Moments

Building yourmove.ai

Web3 was hot in 2021. I tried to get into it, but I wasn’t interested. When generative AI got hot in 2022, I also wasn’t interested. But once I viscerally saw how generative AI could solve my problem(s), I became hooked. The problem? Dating.

A friend connected me with another friend, who’s building yourmove.ai. I built a tangential project where I automated tinder using convolutional neural networks. I decided to help him build his product out further:

A good heuristic to know whether a project or a job is my “passion” is if I didn’t get paid to do this, would I keep doing this? For most people, the answer is no.

I don’t get paid to work on yourmove.ai but I feel drawn to work on it in my free time, which passes this heuristic. But why do I feel drawn to certain projects and not others? My recipe for successful projects are:

Child-Driven: The project needs to speak to my inner 7-year old. If I showed this project to the 7 year old version of myself, would he be excited?
Skill Development: The project must improve my skillset in a domain.
Creation: The project must force me to create something in some form that can be shared with another person.

Sports

When I think back to my childhood, sports was the thing I truly loved as a kid. I note this down every year. Sports like Surfing, Snowboarding and now, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu + Running. Sports will always be a part of my life, no matter what. I’m happiest when I have a sport I can grind on.

Biggest Improvements

Leadership

I’m not a natural born leader. I had to learn how to be a leader. If I could point to one skill I improved the most at in 2022, it’s leadership. Whether it’s leading a cross-functional work project, or planning a friends trip, I now relish the opportunity to do this.

My philosophy of leadership is not to be the domineering, commander-in-chief type of leader. I see my job, as serving the team, to the best of my ability, in order to accomplish our goal or mission. Whether that means leading from the front and commanding everyone, or if that means just removing roadblocks/getting out of the way or coaching someone’s skillset. Every team or group is different and will need something different.

Social Skills

My goal of attending 1 event per week dramatically upleveled my social skills. I feel super comfortable in all social environments and feel confident I can make friends with a bunch of strangers. I want to continue attending 1 event per week in 2023.

Deep Relationships

Success in friendship is not about making as many friends as possible. It’s about building, deep lifelong friendships. The friendships that last a lifetime. The only way to do that, is depth. The benefit of quitting alcohol, was that it forced me to build my relationships not around alcohol, but other activities too. Bonding comes from experiencing a wider array of emotions with someone. Alcohol can accomplish this but I’m not willing to pay the price. But there are other ways to experience these emotions: extreme adventures, exercise, deep conversations, vulnerability.

Expressing my Feelings

In the past, when I needed to express how I’d feel, it’d take me at least a few minutes to put words to those feelings. From going to therapy every week, for the last year, those few minutes have become a few seconds. As a side effect, it’s made my writing a lot better!

Biggest Areas to Improve

Diffused Focus

I’m interested in A TON of things. My natural instinct is “yes, yes, yes, gimme.” This instinct results in my focus diffused across too many projects & hobbies. Right now, it’s diffused across BJJ, ML Course, yourmove.ai, career, running. It’s too much. My downfall, will be being focused on too many things. The signal, is when I start feeling overwhelmed and scattered.

On the flip side, I have been TOO focused at other points of my life, where I became obsessed with a singular focus, ignoring other areas of my life. How do I stay focused while not dropping the ball in other areas?

My theory, is that because humans have a working memory of four items, we should not have more than four focus areas at the same time. And even when we do have four focus areas, they need to have a priority. If I have too many disparate threads, I’ll either need to combine threads or drop them.

Takeaway: For 2023, focus on a fewer number of goals.

Friend Diversity

The typical profile of my friends is an asian male working in tech. While I love my friends, I feel that being friends with only one type of person, limits my worldview. I’m less in tune with the problems of the world, I’m more in tune with the problems of this profile. The challenge here, is that it’s easier to connect with this profile since that’s what I am. While I want to continue making friends in general, I also want to intentionally expose myself to people very different from myself.

2022 Grades

Become a two stripe white belt in Jiu Jitsu (outcome) - N/A

This goal is no longer relevant. My new BJJ gym doesn’t do “stripes”, however, I did attend class for about 5 months.

Maintain 10 to 12% Body Fat (outcome) C-

Last time I checked, I landed at around 14%. Did not achieve this but I wouldn’t give myself a complete F. This goal also isn’t well-written as what does it mean to “maintain”? Also, why do I want 10 to 12% bodyfat? The reason why I want 10 to 12% body fat is to look good, which is fine. However, I need to do some more thinking on why I want to look good. If looking good was the goal, I’d still be OK here.

Continue improving on emotional health - A

This has been successful. Whenever I was in NYC, I went to therapy every week for the purpose of personal development. Verbalizing my specific feelings every week has not only made me more aware of them, but also, made me a better writer, as I can more vividly describe how I was feeling at a specific moment.

In the next year, I’m going to consider looking for a new therapist, as I do feel like I’ve plateaued in my development here.

Grow my email list to 1000 subscribers (outcome) - F

Did not achieve this at all. The reason why I didn’t achieve this was because the ML course I was working on ended up requiring significantly more effort from me. Every year, I put on a goal for content creation and it’s something I don’t end up doing, which ultimately means, I don’t actually care enough about this to make it a priority. Next year, I’m not going to have any goal here.

Takeaway: Stop setting content goals. It isn’t intrinsically important enough to me.

Earn at least $3000/month in side MRR (outcome) - B

Didn’t hit this number exactly, but I give myself a B because I did end up earning close to $20k outside of my 9 to 5 job with the launch of the ML course. This equates to around $1.6K per month outside of work which isn’t bad at all. $3000/month was a stretch goal when I set it.

Get promoted - A

I achieved this in the middle of 2022. To be honest, this as an easy goal as I already had known that I was probably going to get it. I was already doing the job and my team needed a manager.

Build 5 deep, new, meaningful friendships (outcome) - A

I probably developed 3/5. However, I give this an A mainly because I feel like these new relationships are great. Better to go deeper in a few than to have too many, otherwise, it makes it difficult to make a relationship “deep.”

Find a romantic partner that I can "move to the next stage" - C-

I went on a lot of dates, but I did not really achieve this. I found that I met many people “willing to go to the next stage” but I was not willing. I think 2023 requires a reframing of this dating goal. When dating is my fourth priority, I can still get dates, but the quality isn’t there. So dating needs to be at least a top 2 priority in 2023.

Be profitable for at least 10/12 months - B

In the beginning of the year and during summer, I was roughly break-even. What I noticed, is that once I stopped drinking alcohol, my savings rate shot through the roof up. When I was partying, I actually had to watch my spending a lot more, since I was spending nearly $200 every time I did go out. After quitting, I no longer need to think as much about money, will saving more than I did earlier in the year.

Total, three A’s, two B’s, two C’s, one F.

Life Review

Health: B+/A-

My health is really good compared to the average person. However, what would make this an A is improving on (1) sleep and (2) nutrition. For sleep, I sleep reasonably well, but need to take CBD gummies after BJJ. My overall sleep hygiene is an area for improvement. For nutrition, I still have vices, like eating sugar and eating out a lot. This has always been a recurring bad habit for me. However, from taking my blood tests, all my markers check out super well, so I’ll score this a B+/A-.

Takeaway: Do more experiments, similar to quitting alcohol. Quit sugar for a month. Quit carbs for a month etc. etc.

Career: B+

Career-wise, I’m very happy in the role I’m currently in. An A or A+ would mean my careeer feels like my “calling.” I don’t feel like my career is my “calling” quite yet, but I would say it’s pretty good right now.

Finances: C

My finances are actually really solid, but naturally, staying at a tech company actually reduces your compensation. So relative to what I know I can get, I feel like my earnings are on the lower end. This is DEFINITELY relative, as I earn enough, relative to the general population and many peers.

Relationships

Friends: A

I’m super happy with my friends right now and feel like I have an abundance of friends and people who can support me. I’m very happy in this area. And this is an area that I’ve intentionally invested in in 2022.

Romantic: C-

I’m not super happy with this area. I don’t have a problem getting dates, but it’s more about dates I’m very excited.

2023 Goals

A few changes I’ll be making to my goals this year. I will have (1) fewer goals and (2) these goals will be more “general.” I’ve always leaned specific. The benefits of specificity, are that it’s very clear if you’ve achieved them or not, but they are less flexible to change. The benefit of general goals, is that they are flexible with new information, which means, they likely won’t be irrelevant end of year.

Find one “Hell Yes” (dating).

The best way to define this goal, is to define it by my level of excitement for the other person. In the past, I’ve defined this as quantitative goal (6+ dates or “move to next stage”). The problem with this framing is it ignores how “excited” I am. I can game it by going on dates with women I’m not excited about.

So the goal should be me feeling excited about the other person. It’s hard to find someone I’m a “Hell Yes” about. And a “Hell Yes” doesn’t equate to her being smoking hot. For me, there’s a baseline level of attractiveness they need to be, but its really values alignment & chemistry that gets me really excited.

Level up my Machine Learning Engineering Skillset

All the podcast interviews, business opportunities, raises, job offers, promotions came from one thing: being good at data science. So if I want to keep building on these opportunities, I should lean back into growing my data science skills. More specifically, my machine learning, causal inference and engineering skillset.

I’ll write another post outlining my deliberate practice/learning plan. But in summary, I need to focus on two core areas: engineering & modeling. And to differentiate myself from other practitioner’s, I’ll throw in causal inference.

Increase my overall earnings (or earning potential), by at least 2X.

Increasing my earnings will open the door for my dream life. While I’ll keep this vague on what exactly I’ll do since this is a public post, but this could be any form, within my job, side projects etc.

Compete in my first Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Competition

I started training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu consistently in July 2022. While training consistently is good, the best forcing function to push my skillset is to sign up for a competition. If I knew I had a looming competition, my competitive instincts would kick in. It’d push me to train harder, learn the technique better and drastically accelerate my skillset. I will target this in the latter half of 2023.

Continue

BJJ Training: Keep training BJJ 3x a week, however, this is not going to be an explicit focus initially.
Therapy: Continue talking to a therapist each week.
1x a week social event: Keep going to events where I don’t know anyone.