ANNUAL LIFE REVIEW 2020

This is a summary of how 2020 unfolded for me. It is based on my journal entries composed throughout the year.

Its purpose is to serve me as a reminder and you as inspiration.

2020 was truly a bad year for me in regards to my goals. I barely succeeded at 45% of my goals even though I did an additional planning session at the end of Q2. Adherence to my standards (habits, routines, maintenance efforts) I rate as follows:

1. MIND: 7/10
2. BODY: 2/10
3. SOUL: 7/10
4. PLAY: 4/10
5. VOCATION: 8/10
6. VOICE: 9/10

My slogan for 2020 was „A year quantified“. I aimed to start measuring all areas of my life: productivity, health, social metrics,… I rate myself an 8/10 in this regard since I gathered a lot, but not all the data I set out to measure. For more, please see my separate quantified self report 2020.

So while some areas still rank high, all in all, I rate my life in 2020 a four out of ten. It has not necessarily been the worst year of my life, but definitely the worst of the last six. COVID disrupted a lot of my plans and forced me to adapt. But, assuming I was not infected by the virus, my health condition (whatever it was) really brought me down. It drained the happiness and joy out of everything else I achieved.

Here is how everything unfolded for me…

January ‘20

2020 kicks off with a lot of love. A great year behind me, I spend New Year’s Eve with my girlfriend, family, and friends. There is a somewhat magical motivation in the air. It feels like the perfect year is about to start. I set high goals and standards for myself: Start quantifying every area of my life. Go 99% vegan. Complete 3 trail run competitions. Reach 74kg. Start freelancing. Releasing my first iOS app. Little do I know, that soon, everything was about to change. Yet, January unfolds smoothly: I celebrate my 30th birthday with a big group of friends. I make good progress at the gym. I embark on a short trip to Austria (Salzburg & Hallstatt). My newsletter list at Ubermind reaches 500 subscribers. Only very far in the background, the C* word begins to appear.

February ‘20

January reaches into February. My fitness and meditation practices continue to improve. I start journaling again. I am on track with my weight loss. Everything seems to work. Then my girlfriend’s VISA ends, and she has to go back to Thailand. The day after I bring her to the airport everything starts to go downhill: I get sick and have a severe fever and trouble breathing. Soon I would find out, that this moment will have some big health implications for me. I get better. Only to find me with a 2nd illness a week later: this time I again seem to have infected my lungs. Unfortunately, this remains no single occurrence. Rather, this trouble would go with me for months. The sickness completely disrupts my plans. I fail to finish the Ubermind app which I had planned to do in February. It further disrupts my concentration at work. My daily meditation practice breaks. Most of all, it jeopardizes all my health goals.

March ‘20

March burns itself in my head. It is a rollercoaster ride with great implications. My health continues to go downhill. My breathing problems continue. Additionally, I develop some sleep issues and a strange “heart ache”. At about the same time COVID-19 is conquers the world. While my doctor reassures me that my health issues are not related to the virus I am at the worst point in years. Since 2015 my life had bettered itself every year. Now this upward spiral had stopped. It makes me feel insecure. And it shows. Again, I don’t reach my weight goal. Again, I have to delay the Ubermind app. Further, the virus causes me to lose a lot of money on the stock market. The only positive side is, that with all the sick days and working from home, I gain some more time and freedom. I rediscover my favourite teenage music artist (Hayley Williams). I explore some of the more useful sides of Youtube. I manage to get a daily 20min meditation routine in. Humans are antifragile. They usually grow stronger from adversities. I know that intellectually. Yet experiencing it is a different thing. And I am a fool to believe that I will recover from it much faster.

April ‘20

April is like a second march. My health remains fragile. I gain more weight. I still have bad sleep quality. I still cannot exercise much. Also, my acne gets worse. All my other projects seem to fail, too. Even Ubermind.de seems to come to a sudden end since we decide to produce no more blog posts for the time being. As if it were not enough, the virus now also blocks my girlfriend from reentering the country. We planned this for May. Unfortunately, her VISA request is a week too late. Germany closes the borders. So she now has to wait until August and waste some 4 months of her life. April shows me two things: First, COVID will not go anywhere anytime soon. Second, COVID is not within our circle of control. We cannot change it; we cannot power through it. It requires adaptation instead of mere persistence. So I am forced to be creative. I start to do workouts at home instead of hitting the gym. I leverage some new opportunities and abandon some of my death-born goals for 2020. I order a lot of food and start cooking for myself instead of going out.

May ‘20

Hoping for betterment I get disappointed in May, as my health hits rock bottom. I still fight with my breath. I gain more weight. Additionally, I am not allowed to exercise for a month. I develop more acne. My blood pressure rises due to continuing sleep issues. I lack any motivation to improve since I don’t expect my circumstances to get better any time soon. I still have no idea what is happening to me: was it the sickness from February that caused all this? Did I have COVID-19 after all and now suffer from long-term damage? Is pollen the cause of this? Is it my vegan diet? Is it my posture? Luckily, some new beginnings start to take place. We pivot Ubermind.de from blog posts to a monthly mastermind newsletter. I get ready for creating my first ever newsletter series. I rediscover my passion for writing. At work, some key people leave the project and make things more interesting for me. I realize, that this low point also resembles the turning point of the year.

June ‘20

June is much like May. I know that from now on it will (presumably) get better. The stock market starts to recover. I spend more time outside. My girlfriend gets approval to enter Germany in August. I can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But it is still a long way and I have to persist. am lucky enough. Luckily enough I can draw energy from life domains that have not been affected by the virus. At work, for instance, it’s going quite well. I also continue developing my Ubermind newsletter course on GTD. Still, my breathing issues remain. Blood work shows that I lack vitamin D, but that I am “healthy” otherwise. I am still clueless about what happened in February. Yet, I now gain even more confidence that the low point is behind me.

July ‘20

The end of the second quarter brings some nice changes to it. I finally realize that I need to throw my goals for 2020 overboard. Instead of drifting along, I conduct another annual planning. My girlfriend gets her VISA for August. I complete my GTD newsletter course. My blood pressure goes back to normal. The stock market gains some more. All this finally gives me some new momentum. Unfortunately, I still have some severe problems breathing at times. Even though a lung doctor now concludes I am completely healthy I don’t feel like it. Also, my weight is now at 83kg. This is far away from the 76kg which I had set out to achieve by July. So even though July has some good sides to it, it shows me that health is everything. Sickness has the power to overshadow every other area of life, no matter how good it’s going. I am thankful that July 2020 ingrained that lesson deep into my heart.

August ‘20

Finally! August is the first good month since February. At work, we manage to get our application released into the App Store. My Ubermind app is now available on Testflight for Beta Testing. Chia (my girlfriend) reenters the country. I take a short but nice trip to the Black Forest (COVID seems under control now). I welcome all the change after this long dread of being locked in at home. I take some days off from work (physically and mentally). I don’t consume any coffee for two weeks to reset my caffeine tolerance. I freeze my task manager for a week to prove that I am in control. I start to work in the office building again (where I have silence, a standing desk, and some good coffee). I discover and watch some interesting new movies. I read The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem for the first time. And I am immediately hooked by Nathaniel Branden’s style and intellect. August for me is the month of breaks and pauses. Due to the monotony at home, I didn’t realize how overdue these breaks were. Taking these breaks did not only recharge my batteries. It felt more like I traded in my old battery for completely new ones.

September ‘20

September represents an interesting ending to Q3. For the first time in months, I have the hope that my breathing issues are gone for good. My lung doctor now declares me completely healthy. I have some amazing sex. My meditation practice gets better again. I start to experiment with sleep tracking using my new Dreem 2. My flatmate cancels the apartment towards the end of the year. I try eating a Pescatarian diet for a month. I gain some first followers on Twitter, which I am experimenting with since August. On the other side, my physical performance has suffered some severe damage. And somehow at this point my self-image is not yet updated. When I start to exercise more I always feel that I should be way better or at least that I should improve much faster. I am puzzled. So while the adversities caused real physical damage my mental faculties did not adapt. Starting again at the gym feels dreadful, for example. My VO2max finally seems to rise again, yet every run is torture. Further, I reach my highest weight to date: 86,6kg.

October ‘20

October extends September. My sleep and health seem to get better. Big changes begin to emerge. I start to search for a successor for my flatmate. I finally spend more time with my friends again. I discover an awesome Restaurant in Munich (Pad Thai). Still, even if some areas of life are great, it is rarely the case, that everything is perfect. Life, after all, seems to be a never-ending juggling game.

November ‘20

November is a very varied month. My social life improves again. I spend a week of quality time with my parents and I celebrate Chia’s birthday with her. I complete 16 workouts, meditate for 30 minutes for 5 days in a row. I receive a “Corona bonus” at work. I finally buy myself an espresso machine which I had planned to do at the start of 2020. Since the stock market is recovering, finances seem to be about the only area that went great for me in 2020. I manage to save as much as I had intended to. Still, I am able to buy all the things I had planned for. Additionally, I have enough capital to buy two expensive high-quality online courses. It looks like I have some end year rally going on. Yet, my weight reaches another all-time high of 87kg. And, once again, I start to develop some acne on my scalp. This usually happens to me based on stress and the consumption of milk products and sugar.

December ‘20

The year ends with a lot of gains: the stock market rocks. My physical performance starts to come back. A new flatmate enters my life. I now have a better-equipped home office. The final beta testing of the Ubermind app is also ongoing. And an extensive annual review and planning session takes place. I reach 88,9kg after Christmas, a number I never wanted to see on a scale. This means I gained a total of 9,1 kg in 2020 (and lost in lean body mass percentage!). December shows me that sleep, after all, might be one of the reasons for my unexplainable weight gain in 2020. Throughout the whole year, I was maintaining a sleep schedule of 8/9 pm - 4/5 am. I always scheduled enough sleep opportunities per night (8h). Yet, still, I got only an average of <7h of real sleep. I decided that in 2021 I will focus to make sleep 1st priority in my life. This will entail shifting back to a sleep schedule of 10pm-6am. Falling asleep at 8 am currently does not work for me. Especially since I live with a flatmate that stays up longer. But also, since I want to maintain a healthy social life. In 2021 I additionally set out for a 365 challenge of eating no sweets (desserts, chips, chocolate, gummi bears, …). I expect this to be another main contributor. Lastly, I am to reduce my overtime at work. Throughout the last 3 months of 2020, I had accumulated over 160h of overtime. I once had a 70h work week and averaged around 50h. 2021 I want to prioritize self-care above my vocational and financial goals. Also, I want to reduce my workaholic tendencies.

Looking at it from a meta-perspective 2020 taught me some other invaluable lessons:

• First, this year of in-depth journaling showed me how little we remember. You cannot trust your memory; without a journal, it is hard if not impossible to recreate the past.
• Second, another year I did not take meditation seriously enough. I managed to up my sessions from 10 minutes to 20 minutes. But I only very briefly experienced real benefits like calmness thorough the day. At least now I know that for real meditation “gains” your sessions need to be 20 minutes or longer.
• I think this year I really experience psycho-cybernetics. What I think my physical performance is, is one thing. My actual abilities and reality are quite another. After 5 months with a lot of idleness, I expected my gym and cardio performance to decrease only slightly. When in reality, I should have realized, that such a long-term break would take months to recover from.

These are not necessarily new insights. But they are real ones. I experienced them first-hand and so I can assume that I really understand them now.

Going forward…

2020 was a low point for me. But, this also means, that it was a turning point. It only gets better from here. As humans, we have the capacity to rise from adversity stronger than ever before.

In 2021 I want to put more focus on self-care.

That is why I set myself some ambitious quality-of-life objectives*:

1. Become an expert reader
2. Reach meditation stage 3
3. Crush 3 willpower challenges
4. Make sleep 1st priority
5. No sweets for 365 days (365-day challenge)
6. Move to ******** w/ Chia (couple goal)
7. Become a smart worker
8. Release a paid app
9. Kick-off GrowthPilgrim
10. TBD (Opportunity goal)

*I also set specific, measurable key results for each of them to evaluate success or failure.