My Ambitious Plans For 2024

Ring out the old, ring in the new! I hope the past few weeks have left you feeling well-rested, recharged, and inspired to crush the new year.

Today I want to share with you what I’ve been up to the past few weeks, my plans for 2024, and a simple, yet important reminder for those pursuing an ambitious goal.

Let’s dive in.

Social media has changed my life in more ways than I can count.

I’ve made friends, learned valuable skills, and generated a more than modest income.

But it also has its dark sides.

One of them being mimesis. You’re constantly bombarded by unrealistic highlight reels, persuasive rhetoric, and provocative opinions.

You begin to want what others want. You begin to imitate, mimic, and copy others until you’ve forgotten why you started playing in the first place.

It’s easy to lose your way (trust me, I’ve fallen into that trap many times).

Don’t get me wrong, social media is fantastic for inspiring you to do great things. But if you’re not careful, you can be pulled in directions you didn’t intend to head.

I felt that unwelcome pull grabbing ahold of me, so I took a break to give me space to realign with my vision.

For the past 3 weeks, I’ve been:

• Going on lots of walks

• Limiting social media to the afternoons

• Catching up on some long-overdue reading, reflection, and planning for the year ahead

The difference between where you are now and where you want to be isn’t motivation or momentum, it’s clarity. As Seneca once said, if a person knows not to which port they sail, no wind is favorable.

The Core Four

Looking ahead, I have four main priorities for 2024 and beyond:

1. Build my body

2. Expand my mind

3. Grow my business

4. Cherish my relationships

1) Build my body

Last Spring, I went all in on health and fitness.

I went on a strict diet, worked with a personal trainer, and gained 15 lbs. of lean muscle in only 12 weeks.

While I’ve still been lifting consistently, I’ll be honest, it hasn’t been my main focus.

That’s changing this year.

“You won’t realize it when you’re young,” my grandpa said when I asked him what advice he’d give to his younger self, “But everything catches up to you when you’re older. Take care of your health.”

Here’s the workout routine I’m following (Sundays and Wednesdays are also running days):

2) Expand my mind

The older I get, the more I realize how important continuous learning is to both our personal and business development.

The aim is to gain what Naval Ravikant calls ‘specific knowledge’. When you obsess enough about a topic, your mind begins to see patterns and make connections between ideas that most people miss.

There’s no fancy secret. I’m simply doubling down on the advice people smarter than me have shared:

• Read more books

• Conduct learning sprints

• Invest in courses & masterminds

Amateurs think they know everything. Professionals never stop learning.

3) Grow my business

I’m grateful to share that my business is doing better than ever.

Clients are happy. I’m enjoying the work. And the results speak for themselves.

But I also know that my time is stretched thin. I’m saying ‘no’ to a lot more opportunities that, only a few months ago, I’d be giddy to accept.

A few big tasks for the near future:

1. Creating systems for repeatable results

2. Bringing on my first hire to alleviate workload

3. Packaging my knowledge into a digital product that can scale beyond my finite time

4) Cherish my relationships

One of my biggest worries is sacrificing my relationships for the sake of business growth.

I have one semester left before I graduate high school and am off to who knows where—so I want to maximize my remaining time with family and friends.

You only get to go through high school once, and I don’t want to look back and regret chasing the wrong things.

Looking Ahead

A trend I’m seeing across social media:

More and more people are getting fed up with the know-it-all gurus who preach generic advice but have little credibility to back their advice up.

People don't want another guru preaching from the top of the mountain. They want someone real. Someone raw. Someone to climb with them.

I’ve always been a huge advocate for building in public. But, honestly, I don’t think I’ve done the best job I can at bringing you along on my journey.

My goal this year is to more deeply document my journey of, quite simply, growing up in public and striving for the ‘good life’.

What’s the good life?

To me, it’s a healthy, wealthy, high-performing life where you’re surrounded by the people you love doing work that inspires you.

Hopefully, my life, my journey, my story, will inspire you to get one step closer to your definition of the ‘good life’.

And if I can do that, if I can authentically share my story in public and inspire others to be relentless about what inspires them... then I've succeeded.

What are you prioritizing this year?

Let me know how I can help!

Catch ya next Sunday,

Jay “Let’s get after it” Yang

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