First thing first, let’s address why the blog is super late, even though that wouldn’t matter if you are reading this in the future.

Initially, I had thought of writing a separate blog of my yearly review but it seems like that won’t be necessary because not only is this blog super delayed but also because there weren’t a lot of things to write about. So I thought of writing a special sort of blog and that judgment combined with the responsibilities at work was enough to take away my mental clarity and make me procrastinate on writing the blog for over 6 days now.

Now that I am done justifying my incompetence let’s get started with the “special” blog,

2021 Big Picture

How was my 2021?

Well, it was a very mixed year. It started off happy, stable and then slowly progressed to being a bit unstable. However, the instability didn’t affect me. I kept working and being happy, but looking back now, I realize how struggle some it was, trying to get into a new domain, learning a few lessons the hard way and still not giving up.

The ending of 2021 however was full of hope, despite all the struggles that I faced and not only I want to carry this positive hope (I felt like writing energy, but then I find the word “positive energy” very cringe, the only energy is I understand is the one Einstien used, not the one Sadhguru or beerbicep uses😤), sorry got carried away, where was I?

Yes, my plans for 2022, well I think I should write those at the end, so continue reading 😌

Personal Highlights Recap

Mindfulness

• Journaling : I had started the year with written journaling on Notion and kept doing it till mid feb.

  From March I had switched to audio journaling on an app called Otter.ai and I think I continued doing that too for a few months until I eventually stopped doing it.

  I wasn’t sad or anything. It’s just that I had lost interest in journaling as a whole and the only writing thing that I was doing was my blog.

  But then in November, as I decided to plan my way ahead and write a few points down, I fell back in love with writing and have been journaling daily on Notion since 1st Nov. However, this time, unlike last time, I have a fixed time for journaling and it’s early in the morning after I turn on my PC. It works great for me and I wish to continue doing it in 2022.

• Meditation : I remember starting the year with the habit enabled but then very soon this dropped. Despite trying to keep up with it, I still haven’t been able to quite adjust it in my routine.

  It’s one of those things that I want to do because others have said it works for them. Personally I feel like I haven’t tried meditation enough to pass a judgment and so I am going to continue trying to get good at being consistent with meditation in 2022

Fitness

• Morning Run
  Started the year strong with semi-daily running.

  Which continued till April end :(

  Once the 2nd wave of corona started, I knew I was done. As I wasn’t allowed to not wear a mask and run, I decided to stay at home.

• Walking: I eventually substituted running with walking on the terrace while listening to Podcasts.
  And honestly, I quite liked doing it. It was probably the only thing that I did for the longest among the others in the fitness category.

• Exercise : After a month or two of not running, I realized it was too much and I should probably start working out, which I did, but it only lasted for a month.
  Once I injured myself (minor) and decided to rest till it did not pain anymore, I had lost the habit of working out.

  I wasn’t able to get back the habit, but I started going for morning runs again from November. At this point, it’s a yearly ritual of losing the habit and then getting back.
  *Phir see udd chala’ plays in background.*

Learning

• Reading : I had decided to read 21 books in 2021, but I ended up reading around 8-9 only. With one of them being a re-read from 2019 [Atomic Habits]

  And surprisingly enough, I think the re-read was my best read of 2021.

  Not only that, I grew in terms of being ok with not reading a lot in 2021, because I realized that I am surrounded with way more information than its possible for my brain to hold and it’s kinda stupid to read just for the sake of collecting information and so my plan for 2022 is to read stuff that I can benefit out of in the short term.

• Coding : This is a new addition to the list, and it wasn’t there in the year before, unlike the others that I have mentioned so far, but I did make some basic progress in terms of learning how to build a basic website and stuff. Not sure how much I enjoy it but I started doing it because I am interested in building small SaaS apps in the future and learning coding seemed like a good start. I did have some coding background. I learnt C++ in class 11 and 12 and even though HTML and CSS weren’t related to that but I found a lot of similarities between them. I am not sure how the journey of coding is going to pan out in 2022 but I hope I am at least clear with all the basics.

• Music : For those of you who are new to my blogs, this is something I was semi-actively pursuing at the beginning of the year by practicing and recording piano every week, but I don’t know how I slowly stopped doing it and lost the habit in the first quarter and haven’t gotten it back yet.
  I don’t think I will be doing it in 2022. It is something I might say not now for this year.

Optimization and Organization

It’s hard to keep track of all the optimizations we do because once they are done, not only they make us forget about the problem that we faced but they also disappear. It is like a match stick in a way. I do wish I could share a few of the hacks that not only I implemented but that changed me.

Most of them were already coming from a long term but good decisions take time to solidify and once they do, they become part of us. I think I just repeated the above para XD

Disabling youtube feed was surely one of those wise choices that I made. Others were shifting to Notion for writing blogs instead of MS word, and a few other personal decisions which I can’t specifically remember because like I said …. repeats the above two para

Job Update

The year started with me being excited to work at Avalon, but that happiness was challenged very soon when I got to know about the salary XD but despite all my crumbled hopes, I did not say no to the offer and started working there. It was a good 3 months of working 9-5 Mon-Friday and it was my first ever job experience (Remote).

But then they decided to change stop their content game and focus only on their app and so that meant goodbye and I was even happy about it, happy to finally be free and do whatever I want minus the stable money.

After that, I took a month-long break from working at all and I remember not taking on any freelance project. (Wo baat alag hain ki koi offer aya v nahi that kaam ka)

Business Updates

After that, I decided to start my own agency and that is when Octalancer came into existence.

Despite all the self-help business knowledge, I found myself in a position of a fool with octalancer, as I struggled to get clients (international ones), but in my struggle, I did learn a lot. I am still at the client getting phase even after 3-4 months of trying but not all my time goes to it now, as I got another job in December.

Job Update 2.0

I found this new job to be much better than my last one both in terms of quality and quantity of work. The best part or the worst, in whatever way you see it is the stable monthly salary that you get out of it. It was missing in my entrepreunship journey and while I personally find it sexy to not have a safety net, I am not in a position to not have a safety net and try. It is a bit hard to explain but I guess you get the point.

For 2022 my goal will be to stay humble at my job and be full ‘atitood boy’ in my business. I am going to use the safety net the best way possible and also not burn out by saying yes to whatever external offers I get. I am going to focus a lot on the business and work side of my life in 2022 and I mean it wholeheartedly because this is the best short-term ROI positive thing.

Thoughts from 2022

This section of the blog saw a massive change with the inclusion of the podcast. I started podcasting because I loved the idea of getting good at talking by just practicing it publicly and I did get good to some extent, but the problem which I faced is I did not enjoy podcasting like I enjoy writing a blog. I was just pushing myself hard and while that worked for 10-14 weeks, I eventually gave up on it and in the most TRB way possible by saying I would record and then ended up not recording.

Honestly, a podcast is a very effective way to grow my personal brand, because not a lot of people have the focus to read an entire but they sure can listen to an episode of my podcast on spotify every week, but like I said I don’t enjoy it that much also my gears aren’t of that great quality, so I had to spend a lot of my time in post-production of the audio which was again big friction in the process and it led to me not recording.

So for 2022, I have decided to say No to anything that I do Half-assedly and so no podcast this year, till I get a better quality microphone in which I don’t have to spend too much time correcting the audio.

Opinions

Not all opinions are worth giving opinions.

Social Media updates

I did not grow a lot in terms of followers in social media. If anything, I lost followers from my main Instagram but I did manage to stay somewhat connected with a small set of followers(friends) on my 2nd insta and also on my telegram group which replaced my discord server in a way.

Also, despite being active in front of a few people on twitter and tweeting whatever the F I wanted, none of my tweets went viral aaaaaaah but what’s more embarrassing is this tweet that I did in January 2021

2021 Wish List📃:

- Do a successful piano livestream 🎹
- 100 Pushups 🥱
- Run 15Km 🏃‍♀️
- Publish 60 Blogs✍
- Meditate For 60mins in 1 sitting 🧘‍♀️
- Make 3 video essays 📺
- Be a guest on 4 Podcasts🎙
- 12 hour editing livestream [which prolly no one will watch]
- Go full ret

— TRB (@teeaarbee) January 7, 2021

I honestly thought that I could pull at least 50% of it but guess what happened? I did not achieve any of these 💀

Looking back now, I see how most of these are stuff that I wanted in December of 2020 and even though I was able to make a decent judgment of things that I could have accomplished, I forgot to account for the uncertainty of life and most importantly how much my interests would change over the course of a year and so with that new insight in mind, I won’t be setting any long term goal this year.

My Favourites from the Week ⭐

For this section, I found it difficult to look back individually at all the past blogs and so for 2022, I have decided to track all my consumed content in a notion database. That way not only will I be able to share it easily in the future but will also have a nice cool archive of everything.

Maybe I will make a site and connect the database to it ;) stay tuned for it.

Songs 🎶

My 2021 Spotify Wrapped Playlist: Here

Podcast(s) 🎙

I spent a lot of time this year listening to podcasts and I think for me it was the highest consumed source of knowledge for 2021 and so I gotta mention few of my fav. pods, even though I have lost track of episodes.

My fav Podcast of this year is undoubtedly

Huberman Lab 🏆

Followed by

Not over thinking by Ali and Taimur 🥈

My First Million 🥉

Woice with Warikoo Podcast 🥦

What went well?

• My mental health this year was at its peak. I have never been happier and content with life, despite not having a lot of what most people of my age want.
• I also started investing money in stocks and crypto.
• I think I was a nice friend to everyone who knew me this year.
• Also, I was lucky enough to get work when I most needed and not go bankrupt even with my “won’t work for less money” arrogance.
• Overall, understanding of How things work in real-world expanded a lot more and lot of things got more clear.

What did not?

Life can’t be all sunshine and butterflies despite all the positive mindset, things do get out of hand and not everything is in our control. I did my best not to get bothered by things that were not in my control, but they still did make me sad a few instances.

• Struggled with making hopeful business progress.
• Despite all the knowledge, I found myself lacking.
• Learned how Network is more important than Networth.
• A few minor personal things, but it’s nothing compared to all the things that did go well.

What will you focus on next year?

Like I said above, I won’t keep any long term goal for 2022, not because I am afraid of failing them, because I fail most of the time anyway XD

But because I recently re-read Atomic habits and my whole motto now is to focus on daily habits, but I have also realized that not everything can be made a daily ritual and there are things that require intensity over consistency, why did I just confuse myself by writing that,,,, Great now I don’t know what to do for the year……..

But one thing which I do know is that I will try my best to make this year the most productive year of my life, and yes I do realize that productivity requires sacrifice. So, I will be saying ‘NO’ to a lot of good things, because like I mentioned above no Half-assed commitment this year, it’s either I will or I won’t 🥶

Most of my 2022 decisions will be money and time driven, and so naturally I won’t be the best person in any relationships this year, which is kinda sad if you look at it from a life-partner POV, but that is a sacrifice that I will be making this year. I am not very happy about it but I know that I will have time for it in the future.

Thanks for reading this week’s blog.
I hope you found something of value from it.

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