Borsalino Test #9: 2020 Annual Review
Readers,
I have recently conducted a complete review of this past year. Lots has come to surface, so I had to operate some cuts. The following is just a small selection of reflections I deemed interesting and worth sharing.
It goes without saying that most of the stuff here is genuinely close to my heart. I would lie if I said that it has been easy to make this post public, but I believe in leading by example.
You can read my other essays here.
Michele
2020 Annual Review
Don't be an asshole
As write this, I am been filled with an all-encompassing sense of gratitude. In 2020 many people around the world got sick, lost their occupations or a loved one. It’s important for me to stay grounded in the present. I acknowledge how privileged I am and have been through this entire time. So let me tell you from the get go what this piece is not going to be. This is not intented as list of meaningless achievements. Frankly, no one cares, and most of them don't matter after all. I am healthy, food is in my fridge and a roof over my head. That’s more than I could have asked for this year.
I am also fortunate enough to have the time to think and level set this experience for the next year. This is my first time conducting a structured annual review. I have never carved out time to sift through emails, calendars, and photos for an entire year.
After living for some time in San Francisco I developed a soft spot for westernmost points on continental land. So I booked an Airbnb here (pictured above), switched my phone to Airplane mode and down a rabbit hole I went. I also planned some surf and guided meditation. Yet weather conditions have been unmerciful to say the least.
I wanted to trap some of these thoughts in the amber of a newsletter post. And share them with you. This is a minimal part of my complete annual review, and there’s a lot of personal stuff I’m omitting there. Still, it turned out to be one of the most vulnerable post I have ever written, beyond this one. So be kind. Or, just don't be an asshole.
Debunking the myth of resolutions
Most of us love New Year’s resolutions because we are perpetual strivers obsessed with self-improvement. Don’t look at me. I’m not innocent for sure. The desire to clear one’s debts, dates back to both the Babylonians and, later, the Romans. They pegged it to the two-faced god Janus (god of dualities and transitions!). That makes sense. But the contemporary understanding of resolutions has a lot more to do with how the holidays. They been overloaded with significance intended to make us feel like we’re failing personally. And that we can probably solve that failure by buying a thing or, even better, some array of things.
This isn’t just New Year’s resolution time, of course. It’s all the times. No matter how much abundance you have received or generated, there would still be room to cultivate the feeling of lack. There’s more to be done, ways to improve, productivity levels to unlock. It’s resolutions all the way down. Significantly, this obsession with personal amelioration also distracts us from the sort of collective action that would actually change things. Or work towards a society where “eat a healthy diet” and “save money” weren’t in inherent contradiction to one another.
This ideology of self-improvement-through-consumption intersects with the Protestant Christian ethics, whose most hackneyed form suggests that we are undeserving sinners, in constant need of reform. Instead, you know, a perfect creation of God, absolutely deserving of God’s love and all of that gospel. It doesn’t matter if you’re not Christian. It doesn’t matter if you think capitalism is bullshit. If you live in the Western world, you are swimming in this.
Of course, you can swim against the tide. In the words of Alan Watts - only a society which is insane and unsure of itself cannot allow withdrawal to happen. When a society allows a certain number of people to withdraw, it should have no anxiety that everyone would want to withdraw. Some people are fascinated in competition, in being involved, in playing the game. Besides, withdrawing is exhausting in a different way. And like everyone, sometimes I have more energy to do it than others. Sometimes I’m writing a piece like this. And sometimes I’m buying a Percival overshirt after getting an Instagram ad. Whatever the hell an overshirt is.
A small movie theatre
In 2020 I started writing. It all started with a couple of blog posts on Medium. They then allowed me to muster the courage to do it at a regular cadence, and directed to an audience. Borsalino Test has been an incredibly meaningful experience. If you have been reading my posts, you might have noticed I wandered between the realms of technology and personal growth. I still don’t have crystal clarity of what exact intersection I want to target. I am sure that one will course-correct with time.
When I write, my head frees up so much room and I become calmer, and more focused. I have observed how the brain can lead us to a process of self-deception. It’s easy to feel our thoughts are clear, when in reality the mind is more clouded then expected. It’s a litmus test for lucidity. And it’s very humbling too. I am never satisfied with what I write. But I trust the compounding effect, and time is on my side.
Though admittedly modest, I did not expect the organic growth of this newsletter. A little community of friends, co-workers and acquaintances gathered around my essays. They sometimes reached out with a kind word. There’s an unbelievably deep social aspect in the practice of writing. It is a true bat-signal projected to attract like-minded folks, irrespective of location, age, gender or background. For someone who has long been battling with fitting in rather than belonging, it feels very much like the latter.
I haven’t been intentional in growing my newsletter audience. That has never been my primary goal, at least at this stage. However, this crowd of readers is now big enough to fit in a small movie theatre, and it feels scary to be standing on a stage. Certainly, someone among former bosses, past dates and loose acquaintances is just there to take a sneak peek, nothing more. But damn it, I sure do have accountability now. My time will be spent facilitating thoughts coming to the surface of a blank page. I am excited to witness the developments of this experiment.
No hurry, no pause.
Since the early days of lockdown I have been significantly inconsistent across a multitude of pursuits. I always thought of myself as a much better sprinter than a marathoner. A time of great emotional distress made me realize how bad I am at small, consistent improvements over time. I would often swing between long hours of hard work, and lazy days of couch potatoing. I’ll intermittent fast for days just to end up chugging a couple more Lagunitas on a Friday. And then back at furiously hitting the treadmill and the weight rack, in an effort to sweep my guilt under the emotional rug.
All that alternating between extremes finally reverted to a calmer, more centered state in the last few months of the year. I am consistent with my morning routine, sleep hours and healthy habits. There’s still much work to be done, but it’s important to practice appreciation for progress. It took me a while to get freed up from a guilt trap. The sense I was never working hard enough. So I made a deal with myself to be kinder if I skip a day, if things slip through the cracks once. I only take a closer look at things when mistakes happen twice. There’s so much headroom when you stop checking your posture.
I enjoy working as much as staying healthy and fit. ‘No hurry, no pause’, it’s shorthand for Derek Sivers’s story of the 45-minute versus 43-minute bike ride. You don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing, straining and red-faced. You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other. Perhaps I’m just getting old, but my definition of luxury has changed over time. Luxury is feeling unrushed.
Digital relationships
In 2020 I became used to socializing digitally. Obviously this has been encouraged by the pandemic, but made me realize something else. Almost all my relationships have been highly dependent on geographical proximity. My friends were the people that were living close to me, or in my neighborhood. And, as a consequence of moving a lot, my social circle was constantly morphing and churning. Lots of great friends have been replaced just because it became impractical to cultivate the relationship. This game made me lose track of what I valued in people, and who I wanted to keep close.
Sure, sometimes I would still catch up with a few friends overseas. But that would be the exception, rather than the norm. Confinement made every opportunity to socialize equally as valuable, because they were all behind a screen. So if everyone is just a FaceTime call away, who would I rather be talking to for the next hour of my Sunday afternoon?
This gave be the chance to revive a lot of relationships that over the years have just been slipping through the cracks. Mostly because of me. I rediscovered the delight of a genuine connection rather than the need to fit in an established community. It’s been a while since I have lived with my family, and nonetheless we are constantly in touch and very close. There’s so much value in cultivating a significant portion of your relationships mostly through digital means.
It’s refreshing to feel the Internet still has the potential to bring people together. I have been growing extremely skeptical about the true value of social media to me. Facebook and Linkedin turned into massive dumpster fires. Reconnecting with classmates from primary school at the expense of having to put up with the latest BuzzFeed post on a genius hack for wrapping a burrito is just not a good enough deal after all.
In 2020 Twitter has been an unexpected surprise though. Actually, it’s the only social media platform I am active on at the moment, and I will possibly stick to in the long run. It levels the playing field across great minds across domains. The platform is mature enough to drive content quality to the highest level of wittiness, sarcasm and wisdom. It’s enjoyable and honestly so educational. I learned a ton about investing, tech and books. And then, all that great content engineers the necessary serendipity for exciting new connections.
Antelopes and field mice
There is brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide. The analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope. The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die.
In my 2020, field mice were pretty slide decks and picking the right emoji on my Notion pages. Verbose emails and color coding my calendar slots. It’s like I’m carrying 10 extra pounds over my regular weight. I chase a lot of field mice, and it just drains my energy. I probably wasted years because I could not waste hours identifying what was genuinely important. Instead of getting to inbox zero every day. There are so many meetings, 30-minutes catch up slots that punctuate my entire workdays. These are all wasted opportunities for intentional, quality focused work. As someone wiser than me put it - the main thing about main things is keeping the main thing the main thing.
So hell yeah or no. There’s some ruthless discipline to be applied to how you spend your resources. Your money, time and energy. If the return is not worth it, then I’m not going down that route anymore.
Three questions for 2021
Finally, one of my favorite exercises is to identify my favorite problems. Open questions that spark my imagination in new directions. Here are three new questions I’m adding to my running list to think about over the course of next year
What would I do/have/be if I had $10 million? What’s my real target monthly income? In other words: How much does my dream life—the stuff I’m deferring for “retirement”—really cost if I pay on a monthly basis?
What would this look like if it were easy? If I feel stressed, overstretched and exhausted it’s usually because I’m overcomplicating something. Or failing to take the easy path because I feel I should be earning it by sweating it. Old biases die hard.
What if nothing changes? Relationships, weight, looks, wealth. Heck, even the place I live in. Would I still be fulfilled, centered? Would everything I am and own be enough?
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