Everybody? The 22nd of December 2023 and welcome to the Unscheduled CEO Pod Cast! It's been a while! It's been literally 9 months since the last episode! What was it for the last 9 months? Did I have a new baby? Well, that's for you to speculate! Welcome to The Unscheduled CEO Pod Cast! I'm recording this with no expectation that I'll post it. But if I am going to post it, I'm posting it today right after I finish recording.
I'm not putting this one on YouTube. I don't have the camera set up and I don't feel like doing that. But hey everybody! Hey, 9 months ago was the final episode of The Unscheduled CEO. What? Maybe I'll just do a little episode for a couple of the listeners to hear over the Christmas period.
Yeah, in this episode, what am I going to talk about? Well, we're going to take a little retrospective of the year. One of the things I want to go to is in December, this time last year, I wrote an article called One Simple Rule that will double my revenue in 2023. So, I want to update you on, did I double the revenue? Did A.J. and Smart? Did we double our revenue in 2023? Did my genius strategies work? Where are we today? 12 months later with the business?
I think that could be interesting because I like publicly stated that I'm kind of looking for another 7-figure part of the business. That's one thing I want to go into today. A couple of other things I want to touch on or I'll see maybe we'll get to them. Alcohol, something I've thought about a lot this year. No, I don't think I have an alcohol problem, but I've definitely experimented with cutting it out, like changing how much I drink and my relationship to alcohol.
I've had some interesting results from that, which I'll talk about. I'll also talk about, I don't know, a lot of stuff. Yeah, I released a new article last week or two weeks ago called Things That Made Be Happy in 2023. So, we'll talk about that. Maybe I'll talk about a couple of other things I'm thinking about for 2024.
I'll just assume that at least one person is going to listen. Also, just expect major technical issues. Even if this episode gets out, it's likely that it's going to be broken stuff. Like me not knowing how to turn on. I don't even know what this sound like. I'm pressing the buttons here. I didn't know this song was going to play. That's playing right now. So we're good. Okay, so last year, you hear the way I faded that out beautifully.
Last year, December 22nd. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God. This is not, I am not playing this up. I did not realize. So I'm looking at this article right now and it says December 2022. But I wrote it on fucking 22nd of December 2022. That is such a crazy coincidence. I'm fucking that's insane. Why? All right, whatever. Okay, so exactly one year ago, I wrote this article. Now this is not the reason I did this episode today.
I just did this episode because I have two hours until we have a company, little Christmas lunch thing. And I said, oh, fuck it, I'll just do this. This is so weird. Okay, so on my sub stack, my blog, which I occasionally write on, it's called How to Business. So how to business dot sub stack dot com. Like all of my own personal projects, it's very unscheduled and very just like rat. There's no specific times when things come out.
But I wrote that one of the rules of my online course company, workshop, or is that every initiative attempt must be able to produce a minimum of 1 million euro in revenue over 12 months. It's called the one 12 rule. And I screen shoted this piece of that rule that we haven't internally. So the idea here is that at a Jane smart. When we are coming up with a new product.
When we're coming up with a new thing that makes money, we want to we want to make sure that it can it can really make a one million within 12 months. I'll really I'll read the rule. The one 12 rule each money making initiative must have the hypothetical potential to make one million euro gross within 12 months. And it must be the most effective and efficient way to make that one million.
It's easy to come up with things that will make money, but it's not easy to come up with something that consistently and reliably makes seven figures with maximum efficiency. The example of where this didn't work is we ran a retreat in 2021. It made 280,000 euro gross, but to make a million, we would have we would have had to run that retreat four times and running that retreat was a fucking nightmare. And I never want to do it again. I hate running events. I hate it.
This is an example of an initiative that we would no longer attempt as if we applied the same effort to something else like workshop or master, which is our kind of highest level course. We would have made a lot more money with a lot less effort and made a lot more impact for our customers. So that's an example. So when we're coming up with ideas for new products and new things, it should be able to make a million within 12 months.
And it should be like repeatable. And so, yeah, my plan going into 2023 was to try to double the revenue and to try to find another area of the business which could hit this 12, 12 months, 1 million, most efficient way possible. Now, let me just give you the break down or let me just tell you some kind of quick results, I guess. I'm just opening it opening up the background. If you can hear me clicking, I'm opening up like the financial report for 2022 and the financial report for 2023.
So let's have a look here. So did we double our revenue in 2023 versus 2024? I'm going to see if I can put some did we double our revenue in 2023? The answer to that question is, fuck no. We absolutely, the answer to that question is, what's this button here? The answer to that question is, hell no, we did not double our revenue in 2023. Nope, we didn't. Actually, we had less revenue in 2023 than we did in 2022 by quite a bit.
And the reason for that in the end, right, I'm the CEO, so the reason for that is a bad strategic decision making. And I mean, okay, the truth is, as you probably know, the market's been all over the place for the last few years, but a CEO's job is to be able to ride the waves and figure these things out. And this year, I, yeah, I kind of dropped the ball a little bit in the first six months. I put my focuses potentially in the wrong areas. And we made less revenue.
We're still pretty good, like still very profitable, still over seven figures profitable. We haven't gone backwards in that way, but our revenue and profits are less in 2023. What a shame. No, it's fine. What did I learn? What did I learn? Well, honestly, I don't know, the learnings from, so let's go back to the article. The simple thing I learned, one of the things I, or one of the answers is, we did not come up with a, we did not get A.J. smart to eight figures.
You know, that was one of the, what are the ideas is like, can we get ourselves past the 10 million revenue mark? Nope. We did not do that this year. And I'm not even sure if we can do it next year to be really honest with you. I mean, I'm very happy with where A.J. and Smart is today. I'm very excited with what we're going to be working on next year. But like, yeah, like we did not, we're not, we're not going to get over 10 million. We're not going to hit that mark next year.
And yeah, a lot of, a lot of projects just did not work out in 2023. The biggest failure, the biggest project that did not work. And I may have like talked about it during the, during the pod, the previous episode nine months ago, I don't know. But the biggest, the biggest experiment, the biggest bet that did not work out is building an entire, separate, custom platform for corporates for corporate training.
So we invested in corporate, corporate training, white label, LMS and LMS is a, you know, learning, I think it's learning management system. I should know exactly what it's called for investing this much money into it. And essentially, you know, at this point, invested over a million in creating an LMS and build reshooting some of our courses so that they would be more corporate friendly.
At A.J. and smart like, so how it works, it's not like I am telling everyone, this is what we're going to do. One of the teams decided this is what they believe the best option was I wasn't 100% on board, but sometimes I think it's best to just let things play out and see see how it goes. And in this case, this is where I dropped the ball. I should have been more focused and it did not work. In fact, that team, we're ending the year on a minus. But yeah, it's a, it was an experiment.
It was something we tried out and what we've come to the conclusion, the conclusion we've come to, which is sort of the place we were already at last year, although it has developed. And that is that our online course business, the ones that the North like people just find and add on Instagram and they buy our courses. Those courses work extremely well for corporates just as they are. And so we are essentially back to selling bulk deals to corporates.
So I want to a large corporate just bought 20 workshop or master licenses and that's amazing, right? They get to, they basically we know we, we know our best courses are our B2C courses. So workshop or master is definitely our best course. And yeah, like why why give corporates like a water down corporatized version of this when they can get like the version where we have our strong opinions on how these things should work.
And in the end, we're back to there. We, we're back to the point where we're like, you know what? Okay, there are going to be some elements of this, which are specific to corporates. There's some elements where, for example, you know, if some, if a company buys 20 licenses. Maybe then one of our employees will do like a kickoff session with them or something, something custom. But yeah, we're, we're, we've, we've really dramatically in the last three or four months.
Simplified the whole B2B corporate side of a James Mart and the kind of consumer facing part of a James Mart. It's all one team now. It's been two teams for years. So yeah, it's, it's definitely much more simple now. But yeah. So yeah. And how do I feel? I don't know. I'm trying to think about what people might find interesting here, especially people who run companies or thinking of starting companies.
For me, I don't care so much that we have not hit our goal of doubling the revenue. In fact, you know, we did not, not only did we not double our revenue. We actually did worse than 2023. I have a very strong, we did worse than 2022. Sorry, 2333 was worse than 2222. I have a strong, I feel like we're going into 2024 with a much stronger position. I am much more focused.
I kind of have a much better handle on the business. And I think we have a super strong team. So yeah, I'm, I'm not trying to sell this tiny one. We don't have any investors. I'm just talking to myself, basically. But yeah, I'm very, I'm very confident about 2024. 2023 was still good. But yeah, well, didn't nail it. Didn't nail it. That's all I can say. Right. So we didn't nail it. Although we release some cool stuff and some of the things are really working well.
We had a great Black Friday, for example, it was our best Black Friday sale ever, which is always great. So yeah, company, that's the company stuff. It was definitely quite it was, it was one of those years where it was like, either really everything was like too good, like as it was almost boring. And then sometimes it was just like too intense from my perspective.
And so I was definitely I went from being unscheduled and unscheduled CEO in the beginning of the year, where I didn't need to be called into anything. And that was sort of like, that was also kind of confusing for me. If you listen to the early episodes, I'm not sure exactly what I should be doing in this business. To the point where shit fucking hit the fan majorly in about between like June and September shit was hitting the fan.
And the the corporate team was just like burning through a lot of cash. And so I had to jump in. And then yeah, the really really worked with my mentors, really worked with my coaches, really worked with my team, really worked well with Laura. And we turned it around. So yeah, we're
doing the year in a good place. But yeah, it was, it was, yeah, the good news is I've, whereas last year I was like, what am I going to do? Where's my role? What am I doing now? It's definitely a lot more clear. So yeah, what else? What else? What else? Yeah, we, we like one of the big projects that we did was we turned our, no, that's not that interesting. Let's just let's jump into something.
That I think the general public will find interesting right now are the general people who might be listening to this. We're going to jump into the things that made me happy in 2023. Let's go. All right, so on the 21st of November this year, I posted a list of things that made me happy. And these are things little life hacks, little things that I think some of you might find very useful, especially one of them, especially the first one.
So the first thing that really changed my life this year was deep brown noise. Deep brown noise. Let me see if I can play it here and let's see if you can hear it. Does this work? Welcome to the white noises. This is deep brown noise. What you're hearing right now. Kind of sounds like you're on a plane. Okay, so I moved into a new apartment year and a half ago. It is.
I love the apartment, but it's also a little bit. I'm very sensitive to noise. I can hear people walking in a different apartment. I can hear like, you know, I can hear someone's playing there. Whatever, I know I live in a city blah, blah, blah, blah. But in general, I'm high per sensitive to noise and light and everything.
I guess, you know, there's a new label for it. I'm a whatever, highly sensitive person. I'm very sensitive, right? But instead of I mean, I first wind and complained about it for a long time. I'm like getting woken up in the middle of the night by a neighbor walking around. And eventually I started googling it angrily at night. I tried earplugs.
I don't like earplugs because I kind of have a bit of tinnitus, tinnitus, you know, when your ears are ringing. And so putting earplugs in just makes that more loud. And I also like to sleep at the window open so that I get fresh air blah, blah, blah, blah. So eventually what I what I found is you can buy these white noise machines. I know people know about this, but I kind of hadn't really thought about it.
I bought a white noise machine and I put it next to my bed and I started using it. And already the first night I used it, it was amazing. I slept through the entire night. I didn't get woken up. And you know, sometimes you don't even know why you're getting woken up. Is it like, oh, is it just my way I sleep or whatever it is. But it was this, these small noises wake me up.
And then I have a daughter and you know, her coughing or some, some like small noise can wake me up. And then I can be awake for like an hour. Then some new neighbors moved in below me and started playing a lot of techno music, which is, you know, Berlin. What can you do about it? A lot of techno music had, you know, just had like an awkward interaction with them, trying to ask if they could turn it down didn't work. And so eventually I realized I'm going to have to live with this.
And the white noise wasn't enough. I could still feel the bed vibrating. It could still hear the boo, boo, boo, boo. And so got a very angry, got ready to know I started googling what I can do, you know, by bigger curtains, all of this stuff, but everything didn't really stop the bassy noises. And eventually, I don't know, I was, I was googling again and somebody pointed out deep brown noise.
And I googled it. I found a playlist on Spotify. If you go to my how to business dot sub stack.com, you'll find it. In the latest article. And I, you know, the first night, you know, there was a big party going on downstairs and I turned on this deep brown noise, which is a basic kind of who hum, which you can play. And it covered it like blocked out.
It basically stops, you know, sudden noises from really waking you up because it's all this one bassy noise that's taking over your room. And it kind of sounds like you're on a plane. And sometimes, you know, nowadays, when I forget to turn it on, I like it's such a, the noise blends into the background. So you don't even know it's on.
But when I forget to turn this noise on like, I don't know, some, some car will pass outside and wake me up and I'm like, what the fuck, why did I, and I forgot to turn on the deep brown noise. So yeah, deep brown noise has been an amazing addition to my sleeping routine.
Another thing, speaking of sleeping, I got this eight sleep mattress. If you've never heard of the eight sleep mattress, the eight sleep mattress is essentially a mattress cover that keeps your body at the correct temperature throughout the entire night.
And it increases your deep sleep and it reduces your wake ups. And basically, I got it during the summer when it's so fucking hot in Berlin. And there's no air conditioning. So you can fall asleep and be sure that your bed is going to be cool all night. And it keeps it at the right level of coolness.
And so I went from like, nothing able to sleep the whole summer to at the end of the summer having the eight sleep. And it was just fucking amazing. And the winter keeps you warm in the summer keeps you cold. I will say this product is extremely expensive. You have to pay monthly subscription. And it's also finicky. They break pretty regularly. My, I don't want to get sued by saying they break pretty regularly. Let me just reframe it.
Just in case, you know, someone's like, oh, they don't break. I, my one broke pretty much within like three weeks. And the process of getting it fixed and the process of getting a replacement, though it did work out in the end. I was waiting approximately probably at least a month to get a replacement.
But they did replace the product. They did replace it. So I just want to clarify. I just want to say that there, there was some there and there does seem to be a lot of issues with this product. But of course there are. It's a very complex product.
It's like pumping water into your bed. And it's like it's doing so many things. And there's this app. It's a pretty high tech product that measures your heart rate. It does all this stuff. So I guess just it's probably quite hard to produce this thing. In general, it's, it has improved my life. It has improved my happiness. It has improved my sleep. If you have enough, if you're, if you feel like investing in your sleep to that level to that price.
I think it's a very clear recommendation. Just, just if it breaks, don't blame me. Don't, don't reach out to me and say it broke. Looking through my list here, another thing I discovered, another thing that made me happy in 2023 is I finally got myself a product, the OP one field. It's called it's a synthesizer from the company Teenage Engineering.
For me, every single thing that this company makes is beautiful. I just deeply love everything that Teenage Engineering makes. If you have not seen the products from Teenage Engineering, you need to go to their website and you just Google you need to stop this podcast and Google Teenage Engineering.
Their products really remind me of the classic brown, brown, deeter Rams era. So he, deeter Rams has been like, I mean, he's, I guess it's cliche that every designer who is into product design loves deeter Rams. But I love deeter Rams and I love his products. And I would say that these products from Teenage Engineering, I don't know, I don't know if they think that they are inspired by deeter Rams, but they definitely are.
I bought the OP one field and it's a, it's such a great product. It's like an all in one music making device. You can make like, it's like a, you don't need a computer to make songs to build tracks to it's just really great. I love it. I love just sitting down, playing that thing for an hour and just getting lost and making some music. It's kind of like a mixture between like a piano.
I beat, I don't know anything about this world, by the way. So I'm one of my, what about you been saying it's it's a really cool product. I also bought the OB for or something. It's like a, it's like their Bluetooth speaker, which is also super cool. I just love the, I love the love and energy that goes into making these things.
And they're the type of products where people who don't understand like niceness and aesthetics, they hate these things because they're like, oh, it's so expensive. It's so stupid. What's the point of it? It's like, yeah, there doesn't have to be a point necessarily in some things. Some things just just make you feel good. Like there doesn't have to be a point. What's the fucking point of this podcast? There is no point.
I am making it because it entertains me to do this right now. There's zero business value of me doing this podcast for the business. I just had the urge to try out the, the recording stuff again, just so that I kind of know that I can still do it. And yeah, I don't know. I just felt like making this podcast. And yeah, there doesn't have to be a reason for anything. You can just sometimes do stuff because it feels good.
And yeah, the teenage engineering products for me, they are beautiful. They're fun to use. And if you're the type of person who looks at these products and says, I could build a, I could make the same, I could buy all of the components of this and make my own version of this for half the price. Then we're probably not going to be friends because it's, it's not the point. That's not the point. So yeah, teenage engineering, the OP one. I love it so much. It's so amazing.
And yeah, I'm just kind of reading stuff from the list of things. And by the way, I'm kind of reading from the list and then coming up with stuff. So another thing I bought recently, which has been a great product. The only issue is that I'm having back trouble at the moment. And so it's kind of hard to use it. I bought the Valve Steam Deck OLED edition, which is a handheld games console.
And what's really great about it is it, you know, it uses the steam store. A steam store is basically a store, which has every possible video game you could ever possibly want. And really the games are also really reasonably priced. And so you can just try stuff out and not worry so much if you don't like it. I'm loving this. It's a very beautiful. No, it's not a beautiful looking product, but it feels very beautiful. And my girlfriend and I are playing a lot of Diablo 4 multiplayer.
And so she has a steam deck. I have a steam neck. We play Diablo 4 together. It's just fucking cute. I mean, how cute is that? So that's been a great addition as well to my life. But you know, sometimes with these products, you buy them and you just stop. You never use them again.
So yeah, that was a great improvement to my life. Alcohol. Let's talk a little bit about alcohol. If we're on the topic of happiness. So for me, alcohol. I am from Ireland. I grew up in Ireland. And even though I don't appreciate the cliches around people saying, oh, you're from Ireland. And I honestly don't care at all. It doesn't bother me. I'm just like, yeah, yes, whiskey. It is true that compared to many other countries in Ireland, alcohol is really integrated heavily into society.
Of course, it is in Germany as well. But it's different in Ireland. In Ireland, you fucking drink a lot like you do the binge drinking culture is intense. You don't just have a drink like in Germany, people can have a beer after work with friends. In Ireland, there's more of a tendency to have more. It's the same. It's similar in the UK. But anyway, that's not the point. I'm from Ireland is less of the point here. Me being from Ireland is less of the point.
The point is alcohol for me. I've started to notice also a journal sometimes. So I started to notice that it was causing me some issues. The first and most clear issues that I spent like from about all I think was like August 2021. I started to get extreme heartburn. It's acid reflux. And like nothing was fixing it. I was taking medication. I was going to different doctors. It's so interesting. Right.
I go to a doctor and they just every different type of doctor went to specialists. They're just like take this medicine. And so for me, they were giving me these pro-tum blockers, whatever. They don't bother kind of talking about what things could maybe be causing the issues like types of food or drinking whatever.
But anyway, I started to like reduce coffee and I started to do and I think even earlier in this year I was on this podcast talking about like that cold brew coffee really helped. And that was true. But the answer was alcohol in the end. I was getting acid reflux. And by the way, the thing with alcohol that's important to understand, especially if you're a casual drinker like I am, especially if you don't have like an issue with it.
If you just have like three units of alcohol in a week, it still causes problems. So my acid reflux got so bad in like, I don't know, it was like June or something that I actually decided to that I had to stop alcohol because my suspicion was that it was alcohol that was causing it.
So I said, fucking, it's getting so bad I need to stop. It was just like unlivable levels of discomfort. So I stopped drinking for six weeks in the summer and it stopped the acid reflux after a year and a half of basically chronic acid reflux. It just stopped. But it took a while, right? It took a while for it to go away. It wasn't like one week after stopping alcohol. It was like, you know, maybe seven or maybe six weeks. It would really calm down week by week.
And because of the after I'm not I'm not now saying, oh, I'll never drink again because acid reflux because of that. Now I know when I drink that I get acid reflux, then I also know that if I'm going to drink, I have to be mindful about maybe taking something that reduces the chances of me getting acid reflux. So now when I drink alcohol, just a little solution if people ever have this thing where it goes on like where acid reflux kind of goes on for a while.
If I do drink, then next to my bed, I have these like liquid gavaskon things, which I just even if I don't have acid reflux before I lie down, I take one because what happens is that might if I drink alcohol,
I guess the little sphincter in your esophagus, whatever it is, you know, if you're googling this stuff, it becomes looser because of alcohol. It like loosens it up and then the acid comes up and like burns your esophagus and then makes leaves a kind of burning like it inflames everything down there. So yeah, I'm a doctor now. So yeah, basically the kind of the one of the things that I one of the things that forced me to stop drinking this year was acid reflux.
But the key thing, the key thing that I've been thinking about and I've started to notice this over the years is that alcohol and one of the things that I've been focusing on a lot and thinking about a lot this year is that alcohol also dramatically fucks with my mood.
And I'm not talking about a hangover. Oh, my computer. Oh, yeah, I'm not even using my computer. I'm not talking about a hangover. I'm talking about for the A.J. and Smart Christmas party. I had a lot of drinks with the team. That was and six days later, I still felt a little bit anxious and a little bit on edge. And for me, this is what happens with alcohol. I feel my mood is down. I'm more tense. I'm more anxious and my thoughts are just much more negative. And it's not a one or two day thing.
It's like, you know, it can be a full week of mood change if I drink too much alcohol. And this is something I've really been noticing and I also noticed it on a vacation. Earlier in the summer, where I was in Italy and Italy, you just like you casually just have like an apparel spritz here and there. It's again, it's not like hardcore heavy drinking. It's like a glass of wine with dinner level. That's what I'm talking about.
First day, fine. Second day, fine. Third day, starting to notice the vibes, getting a bit weird. And you know, fourth day, I'm like, wow, I just feel a bit like worried. And it's this idea. It's this thing that the alcohol for me. And I, but I know for a lot of people is just that it's hard to notice sometimes.
Also, what happens is people get drunk, right? They get fucked up on a Friday. They get drink a little bit on a Saturday. Then they're feeling bad, but they're like, oh, it's a hangover. And then Monday, they're like, oh, Monday, whatever, Tuesday, they're like, I don't know what it's things are starting to feel a bit better.
Then they have another drink on a Wednesday, even if it's just one and it almost hides the fact that you are feeling bad because there's this like element of it never really stops. And I know people who, you know, I would not consider to have issues with alcohol. But they'll have a glass of wine with dinner every night or they'll have a beer after work every day. You can like alcohol weed, whatever, you can kind of in like put these things, whether it's a glass of beer or a joint or whatever.
These things are all like these sort of numbing have these numbing effects, but they do also have really strong side effects for some people in my opinion for everyone. But some people it's worse than others. And so, so what I've realized or what I've come to the conclusion of in 2023 is, and I wrote an article about it, I just remember. When did I write that article? Let me have a look here when I wrote that article. My great podcast, this is, I'm just googling stuff and snorting.
If this is your first time, well, first of all, you wouldn't have gotten this far if this was your first time listening to this podcast. But it's unedited obviously. It's like a live stream essentially. Why can't I get into my computer? Maybe this? Oh man, I'm locked out of my computer right here. Whatever. Yeah, it's kind of like a live stream. It's not edited so that when I'm searching for something on my computer, oh wow, I can't get into my computer.
Okay, well, whatever I wrote an article about alcohol this year. So you just checked that out on my sub stack. But yeah, for me, what I've come to the conclusion, it's not like I'm like, now I'm never going to touch alcohol again because I do think there's, I do think there's times where it's kind of fun to drink and I enjoy it. But I do think I needed to go, I needed to mentally go a little bit hardcore and be like alcohol is actually just very bad.
And so now my opinion on alcohol is even one drink, it is toxic. It is bad. It fucks with my body. It fucks with my sleep. But the most important thing is it fucks with my happiness. And it does it in such a subtle way that I would never notice if I wasn't paying attention. And this small little nuggets of feeling less good build up. And yeah, it's just sort of undermines the general feeling of clarity and happiness and whatever in life.
And I don't want to allow that to happen anymore. And so now I, of course, I still drink alcohol. But I, the difference is I do it mindfully. When I'm having a beer, I, so I won't just have a random beer in the middle of the day or something for a celebration because that will ruin my whole day. But if I'm going to do it, let's say I'm meeting someone who's like, I don't know, super important. And sometimes there is this element of like, it's an honor for someone if you have a drink with them.
Well, I am thinking about, okay, if I'm going to do this, it's going to have these side effects. So one, how can I mitigate these side effects? Like how can I sleep extra long tomorrow, even if I'm just having one or two beers? And two, well, that means I'm also going to really reduce any other future situations in the next few weeks where I'm going to potentially be drinking alcohol.
The cool thing though is that a lot of the people I've been meeting recently don't really drink. I was in LA recently and we spent a lot of time with Sam Evans. I hope he's okay with me mentioning that we didn't like post about it or anything. Sam Evans is just this guy who he runs a company called school. It's an LMS, by the way, the one that we should have used in the first place instead of trying to build a fucking custom one, which was a waste of money.
And yeah, he doesn't just not a big drinker. Right. So when we, when myself and Laura were in LA, we basically didn't drink for the full eight days. We were there because none of the people we were spending time with were big drinkers. LA seems to be a place where people are just like very focused on health and not really into fucking themselves up with alcohol, whereas for example, New York, a lot of, a lot of drinking as part of the day today, sort of fun culture.
And I know and I love New York, but yeah, like having a boozy brunch is a very New York thing. And I love it and it's super fun, but it just fucks me up. Yeah, alcohol definitely something I think a lot. And because of this, I'm also starting to notice and trying not to like and trying not to preach to people too much, but I am noticing people whose lives are not.
I would say alcohol is being used just like as a way to just not really think and then a lot of decisions around be also because of the use of it. Just makes life worse. So for example, I'll just give you an example. Let's say someone is drinking or smoking because they are very stressed. And at the end of the day, it's like a good, it's like. Like, yeah, after work, having a glass of wine is like the, or a beer is like the kind of come down, right?
Well, that also stops you from getting to the point where you just feel the stress enough that you really want to do something about it or that you want to really think of solutions to it. If you can always just sort of opt out using alcohol or using whatever numbing tactics, then it's unlikely that you're going to, it's almost weird.
It's like, if you don't numb yourself, then you really have to feel it. Then it really hurts. And then at a certain point, you start to get creative on how to solve it. So for example, like, if every day for me was insanely stressful, but if I drank at the end of every day, well, I'm not going to have this capacity to figure out how to solve it.
It also alcohol reduces my capacity. Like, when I drink alcohol, the next like three days, even if I'm talking about two beers, the next two days, I am so much more overwhelmed by simple things. Like, if I get a bill or like, what do you call it in English in German, it's a man on, if I like miss a payment on something and I get a fine, yes, a fine. I'm like, and if I drank two days ago, I'm like so nervous. I'm like, oh my god, how did this happen? I'm going to get kicked out of Germany.
I'm like, and I'm talking about, I don't know, energy bill that was late, and there's a 20-year-old fine or something. I don't know. I can catastrophize. Then another thing happens that day, and then something in the business happens, and I'm like, oh, fuck, that's so overwhelming. And then I start to kind of check out a little bit by just watching YouTube videos and whatever.
Anyway, because my capacity is lower, if I haven't been drinking in weeks, my capacity is so high, these things are like, oh yeah, 20-year-old fine. I need to make sure that I don't mess this one up again, so I'm just going to change this and this, but alcohol, it just brings my capacity down so much. I'm not here telling everyone that you need to stop drinking, but what I am saying is, I do think you should think about whether it's really not having an effect on you, because I think it is.
Even if you're only drinking, even if you're staying within the limits of how much you can drink, the healthy amounts, whatever, I think that one glass of wine has an effect the next. So I think the way I look at it is every unit, so every glass of wine or every beer, has a one-day effect. So for me, having six drinks, which rarely happens these days, but it happened on the Christmas party, we're talking about six days worth of just feeling weird.
And the funny thing is, when I tell other people this and we talk about it, they also notice it. They're like, yeah, fuck, I'm just having a really bad day today. And then I'm asking, hey, did you drink recently? Yeah, and it also has health knock on effects, right? For me, it's heartburn, it's migraines. A lot of stuff like this is caused by consuming alcohol.
I'm lucky I haven't gotten into any drugs. I don't smoke weed, I just don't like it. It makes me too paranoid. But like these types of things, they're not free. The high you get, the high you get from anything isn't free. Like there's very few things where you can just do it so you can get you can feel good so quickly that isn't going to have a negative side effect. So if you can just drink something and it makes you feel amazing, you like you have to pay the price on the other end of that.
I think there's the only things I can think of, yeah, I can't think of so many things that are just like you just consume it, you feel good, and then there's no price coffee even has a price, right? I guess like, you know, that's why people say, and I don't do this, but I want to see if I can bring it more into my life in 2024. Like working out, you know, working out gives you this dopamine hit, but yeah, it's not easy. You have to go and do it. You have to put effort in.
So yeah, alcohol is something I really carefully carefully, and I'm coming up to the Christmas period and there will be more drinking. But I'm rather than going into it being like, oh, God, I'm going to have to drink a lot now. I'm going into a thinking, okay, I'm going to choose the hey, I decide to do a podcast. Yeah, random. I'm, yeah, of course, yeah, take your time.
I'm talking about alcohol. Yeah, it's going to be the most boring podcast of all time. But yeah, I'm going into this Christmas period, not thinking, oh, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to get super fucked up, and it's going to be so crazy, but you know, I have to do it because it's Christmas and rather going into a thinking, yeah, I'm going to get a little bit more.
I'm going to get super fucked up, and it's going to be so crazy, but you know, I have to do it because it's Christmas and rather going into a thinking, yeah, I'm going to drink when I think it's going to make the experience better, but at the same time, every one of these drinks costs something. And so I'm not just going to get super fucked up, even if it is this Christmas period and New Year's period.
Yeah, there's my lecture on alcohol, right, 45 minutes, I didn't think we'd get there. Yeah, okay, you know what? I think I'm just going to finish this up now. I think it's getting close to lunchtime and agents, Mart here. The only thing I want to finish it up with is how I am going to end the year in terms of setting goals.
I thought that could be interesting for this audience. I mean, okay, I'm joking. There's like, it's still not so many people listening to this, but it's maybe like, you know, 1,000 people. So maybe this will be interesting for you all. One of the things that Laura and I are going to do is a past year review, which is a Tim Ferris exercise.
So if you search Tim Ferris past year review, it's rather than coming up with goals, you look at New Year's resolutions, you look at the last year, the year that has just passed, so 2023. And you look at your calendar, you open up your calendar, you open up your photos app, and you literally spend like an hour looking at every single thing you did, and you categorize them into things that drained your energy and the things that gave you energy.
So for example, one of the things that you might be looking at your January 2023 calendar and photos app, and you look at, I don't know, some trip you did, and you're like, oh, that trip. Oh, yeah, that like really drained my energy. It was a work trip. And you put, you just put that into the drained energy pile. And then you might look at, oh, I did this yoga retreat or whatever, and that really gave me energy.
I went to this gig or I went to this reunite restaurant or I don't know, I just, or I took six weeks off drinking. Here's, here's how I felt a drained energy or gave me energy. You make that, you do that review and Rich Litfin, he's a LITVIN also does this energy audit with his clients, but it's essentially an energy audit of the year.
And what you're trying to do is figure out what do you want to do more of and what do you want to do less of in 2024? And so that's what I'm going to be doing in on the 29th of December, going to be blocking out about three hours. What do I want to do more of a month? Why I want to do less of in 2024? So yeah, that's going to be how I'm ending the year in terms of setting goals and all of that kind of stuff. And with this podcast, will there be more episodes of it?
I don't know, probably, maybe, I mean, let's see if anyone listens to this. It's still, it's still also fun for me to make it. And in terms of content directly from my personal channels, I don't know, we'll see, we'll see, we'll see. Also what books? Well, I'll be reading and checking out over Christmas. I'm going to be rereading double your profits, just looking at how to make a company more profitable. It's always good to reread that one.
It's just a good one about like how managing expenses is kind of sounds boring, but I'm going to be checking that one out. My favorite book of this year, I think it was the same as almost my favorite book from two years ago, which is Hell, yeah, or no. I basically reread it multiple times, and I still love it from Derek Sivers Hell, yeah, or no. You definitely got to check that one out if you didn't check it out yet.
And yeah, have a lovely Christmas, have a lovely New Year, have a happy holidays, and see you all somewhere in 2024.