2024 was, hands down, the most unique year of my life.

There will never be another one like it.

Let’s start with the fact that I lived in 3 countries and literally retired for 6 months.

Not joking… Sarah and I quit our jobs and moved to Bali, Indonesia.

All we did was surf and watch Netflix for 6 months straight.

It was so sick.

But more on that in a bit. Here’s the quick run down of 2024:

🫀 health stuff

• started doing yoga consistently
• got in the best shape of my life, until I…
• injured my foot

💼 career stuff

• retired for 6 months
• started a consulting business
• launched a podcast / YouTube channel

🤑 money stuff

• finally started making money as an entrepreneur
• started reallocating back into equities

🕺 fun stuff

• surfed almost every day for 6 months straight
• went skydiving for the 1st time
• visited 2 new countries

🧬 life stuff

• had a wedding (was already “married”)
• moved back to the US
• rescued 2 stray dogs
• my parents moved out of my childhood home of 30 years 😢

The upshot: 2024 was the last year of the last chapter of my life and the first year of the next chapter of my life.

I will look back on it as the year in which I closed out 6 years abroad and restarted my career.

No fancy intro came to mind, so let’s rock.

2024 Goal Review

2024 was my 3rd year in a row of careful goal setting.

2022 and 2023 were horrible goal setting years. I wasn’t thinking about input goals vs. output goals.

Goals should be inputs, things you have control over (”I will run X miles per week”)…

…not outputs, things you have no control over (”I will make $1 million”).

Input goals, if achieved, increase your likelihood of getting your desired output.

Which is what we’re all here for.

2024 was my first year of setting input goals, and let me tell ya… ME LIKE-A-DA-RESULTS.

2024 Personal Goals

✅ Surf 4x / week minimum when living in Bali (safe conditions and health permitting)

2024 Fitness Goals

❌ Deadlift 1x / week (excluding traveling and deload weeks)

✅ Plan workouts for the whole month, every month

✅ Train ankle mobility before every workout

2024 Professional Goals

✅ Set up and market my consulting services until I get my first client

✅ Pick a new project by May 31st, 2024, and start it in earnest

✅ Write 30 minutes / week

Quick postmortem

Surf in Bali 4x / week

Great input. I just kept showing up, and lo and behold, by about month #4, I started doing some pretty cool stuff and having a ton of fun.

Now I can surf. Mission accomplished.

Here’s a pic of me on a bomb 💣. Very sick.

Deadlift 1x / week

This was going very well until I hurt my foot surfing.

Injuries are the #1 enemy of fitness progress.

Check out the below chart to drive that point home.

I started tracking total weight deadlifted per workout (weight x reps x sets) in February… got injured in August.

Once I’m healed (Q1 2025?), I’ll start deadlifting again at around half of my high watermark.

Think about the compounding I missed out on had I not gotten injured.

Things happen and I’ll recover, but the long term negative impact of repeated injuries is very real.

⚠️ AVOID INJURY AT ALL COSTS ⚠️

Plan workouts every month

Easy. Worked super well. I was in the gym making consistent strength and cardio gains. No reason to stop doing this in 2025.

Train ankle mobility

I trained ankle mobility almost every day in 2024, and the results speak for themselves.

Here’s the test: Move your foot as far away from a wall as possible while still being able to touch your knee to the wall.

Measure the distance between the wall and your big toe.

Here are the results.

You make what you measure.

Start consulting

If I commit to just starting something, momentum will take hold, and good things will follow.

And indeed they did.

I “launched” and started marketing in early October, and did $7K / month by December.

Money is nice, but there was one big unintended benefit…

I kind of winged it and tried a bunch of stuff during Q4.

Naturally, mistakes were made, and I got a clear idea of what works, what doesn’t, and what should be a priority.

Thanks to “just starting” in 2024, I have a ton of clarity about how I should spend my time in 2025.

Picking a new project

I started the Behind The Hustle YouTube channel while I was in Bali.

I believed in the idea, and my friend Julian forced me to start by blocking a time to record in my calendar.

Turns out the interview content resonates with people, and I have a roster of guests lined up for 2025.

One huge learning: Video production, however basic, is insanely time consuming. 1 episode per week is completely unsustainable.

Look out for 1 episode per month in 2025.

Writing 30 minutes / week

This was a great input. I would not have written half as much otherwise.

There were many weeks when I didn’t feel like writing, and I didn’t think I had the time, but I set aside 30 minutes anyway.

Many of those 30 minute sessions turned into 2 hour writing sessions. String a couple of those together, and a lot of content gets created.

The result: A few blog posts in 2024 and a handful already banked up for 2025.

Final takeaways on 2024 goals

These goals were comically more effective than the goals I set in 2023.

Input goals work better than output goals. Plain and simple.

Set inputs you can adhere to, and you’ll marvel at what you accomplished as you look back on your year.

String a couple of those years together…

Some amazing stuff will happen.

2025 Goal Setting

My 2024 goals were super low bars. They set me up for some easy wins and got the momentum machine humming.

It’s time to be a bit more ambitious in 2025.

I start my goal setting exercises by asking one question:

“What would I like to be celebrating 12 months from now?”

Credit: Ali Abdaal

This year, I would love to be celebrating the following in the fitness bucket:

1. I was injury-free the entire year
2. I hit 1-2 of my long term fitness goals
3. I’m better at surfing at the end of 2025 than I was when I left Indonesia (August 2024)

…and the following in the career bucket:

1. I’m profitable.
2. I turned my consulting business into a productized service. It’s generating several thousand $$$ per month in revenue. Customer acquisition is running almost on auto-pilot.
3. Behind The Hustle is still alive and getting positive feedback.
4. I delegated many business tasks.
5. I have early validation with a new, higher leverage business venture than consulting.

Working backwards from these targets… it’s pretty easy to identify the key input(s) that will enable success.

Fitness / Personal Goals

🎯 Never exceed rate-of-perceived-exertion (RPE) 8 on big compound lifts

RPE is a subjective measure of how hard you’re working in the gym. 1 being not hard at all. 10 being your absolute maximum effort.

I’m prone to going super hard all the time in the gym, consistently pushing RPE 9 and 10… a recipe for repeated injury, particularly on big, complex movements (squat, deadlift, presses).

Simple rule: Never exceed 8 out of 10. It will keep me safe while preserving the ability to work hard and progress.

🎯 Train 1 big compound lower body lift per week (excluding travel and deload weeks)

Compound lifts are the foundation of my (and basically everyone’s) fitness routine. Always show up to do one of these lifts each week. Magic will happen.

🎯 Take deload weeks when I’m feeling GOOD, not when I’m feeling overtrained

Recipe for overtraining and injury: Continuous training without giving your body a chance to recover.

You MUST take a week off here and there (a “deload” week).

In 2024, I waited until I was feeling overtrained to deload.

If you’re feeling overtrained, it’s too late. You should take a deload week on a set schedule to prevent overtraining.

In 2025, I will deliberately take deload weeks when I’m feeling good and have energy to keep training. This should be around every 6-8 weeks.

🎯 Buy a winter-grade wetsuit

I want to surf, but I live in Brooklyn, New York.

The problem? Waves in the Northeast are only good during the winter… and Winter is COLD 🥶.

If I want to surf half-decent waves, I need equipment to accommodate the conditions.

No wetsuit, no surfing.

🎯 Buy a surfboard rack for my car

There are 3 places where I can go surfing semi-regularly while living in Brooklyn:

1. Rockaway Beach
2. Far out on Long Island
3. The Jersey Shore.

Getting to those spots is too much effort to not drive.

If I don’t get a surf rack, I can’t drive. If I can’t drive, I won’t go.

Career Goals

🎯 Delegate 1 process/task to my assistant every month

One of my biggest learnings in 2024: The importance of delegation if you want to grow as an entrepreneur. More on that later.

I hired a virtual assistant on January 1st and have a massive list of stuff to offload to them.

Delegating takes a lot of up-front effort (training/documentation), and I need to carve out time to do it.

Holding myself to 1 delegated task each month seems like a challenging but doable bogie.

🎯 Engage consultant on paid ads

I’m a big fan of paying for help to speed up learning a new skill. YouTube will only get you so far.

I had success paying a consultant to teach me cold email in 2024, and paid ads will be appropriate for my business in 2025.

Engaging a paid consultant to work with me kills a few birds with 1 stone:

1. I will learn paid ads faster
2. The quality of my initial campaigns will be higher
3. It will hold me accountable to execute and recoup the investment

🎯 Release 1 Behind The Hustle episode per month

Behind The Hustle will resonate with a big audience, but it will take time.

I’m playing the long game, and the way to stay in the long game is to be consistent and keep things sustainable.

1 episode per month is a good cadence.

🎯 Post on Linkedin 1x per week (excluding holiday weeks)

Like Behind The Hustle, organic reach on social media is both powerful and a long game.

I’ve been posting on Linkedin 1-2x per week, and it’s showing early signs of life as a lead generator for my business.

Again… consistent and sustainable. 1x / week is the right volume for now.

🎯 Launch video pitch deck review service

Let’s be honest here. Consulting on pitch decks is not my ticket to massive wealth creation.

However, it is a proven way for me to generate income when I need it. This is incredibly freeing as an entrepreneur.

A lot of people quit their jobs and dive head first into their business with a fixed amount of capital.

Their business fails (because, yes, your first business will probably fail), they run out of money and go back into a 9-to-5.

Entrepreneurship rewards resilience and patience. You are unlikely to succeed if you can’t stay in the game for a long time.

Having a proven way to generate income is how you stay in the game.

It doesn’t need to be passive. It needs to be there for you when you need it.

I’ve been doing video reviews of pitch decks as a lead magnet for higher ticket consulting services.

They have been WILDLY effective.

So effective, that clients have told me they would pay for these reviews.

And it turns out that video reviews of digital assets is a proven productized service model (check out this landing page review service).

With a ton of demand validation, my plan is to turn these video reviews into a digital service.

My goal is to get this service up and running. Stay tuned.

🎯 Start validating a higher leverage project following my productized service launch

The video pitch deck review service is the “reliable way to generate income” I’m hoping to build.

But it’s not my ticket.

Get that to cruising altitude, then shift attention to a higher leverage venture.

It can be anything… starting a new service, buying a business, launching a product, etc.

I have a few front-runner ideas and the goal is to pick one and start validating it. That’s it.

The idea is to “just-start” and let momentum do it’s thing.

I’m not holding myself to any result with the next project. I’m making the move.

😅

Yeah, seems like a lot.

This list is definitely more ambitious than 2024… but they are all bite-sized inputs and things that need to happen if I want to grow.

Will let ya know how it works out. Off we go.

Things I already knew, but “learned” through experience in 2024

3rd year of doing this segment. Love this one.

Life’s not just about discovering completely new things.

When you experience a thing for the first time, even if you already knew it existed, it can give you a deeper appreciation for or understanding of that thing.

😊 You don’t need that much to be happy

When we were living in Bali, we had and did very little.

We lived in a very modest apartment, shopped at local markets, took quiet walks through empty rice fields, and spent countless hours in the ocean.

We surfed, exercised, cooked, hung out with some rescue hounds 🐶, watched Netflix and read books.

It was a temporary but full escape from the rat race.

“You don’t need much to be happy” is a common platitude, but it’s so true.

I lived it. Life in Bali was some of the happiest I’ve ever been.

Our backyard:

📝 Copywriting is hard

Launching my consulting business sucked me down the copywriting rabbit hole this year.

Landing pages, social media posts, emails, ads… copywriting is EVERYWHERE.

And it’s one of the 1st skills you need to master as an entrepreneur.

Until this year, I’ve only been a consumer of copywriting.

But this year… I built my website, launched cold email, and started posting content online.

Copywriting alone took almost half of the total time I spent on these projects, COMBINED.

I have a newfound respect for every ad that catches my attention.

Copywriting is an exercise in human psychology. Your goal is to elicit a specific emotion in your audience which gets them to take action.

And let me tell ya… it’s hard.

Good copywriters spend hours tweaking their copy down to individual words.

But it’s critical. Copy is the ONLY thing that gets someone to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to your business.

Without copy, your business CAN’T ADVERTISE.

Best copy I read this year?

A skydiving company in New Zealand had a sign on the sidewalk outside their storefront that read:

“IF NOT NOW, WHEN?”

🔥🔥🔥

📩 Cold email marketing works

I launched a cold email campaign to speed up the validation of an offer this year.

I paid a consultant to help me (who I highly recommend) and executed pretty well… but if I’m being honest, I was winging it and expected ZERO results.

But, to my extreme surprised… it worked!

People responded, and I made enough sales for the campaign to be profitable.

I also assumed cold email was this spammy thing only used by high volume marketers shilling garbage.

Not the case.

It’s a very effective marketing tool, and requires a ton of thought and effort.

Couple key cold email and marketing takeaways I learned this year:

1. Cold email is a reliable way to validate offers. Organic content is powerful and cheap, but it takes a ton of time. Paid ads are super fast and powerful, but can be very expensive. Cold email gives you big reach at a modest cost, quickly. It’s high effort and tough to scale, but it’s a great tool to force early results and validate.
2. Running a successful cold email campaign is very technical. It requires many software tools with many configurations to choose between. Each have varied implications for cost and results. It also requires thoughtful offer creation, campaign email sequencing, copywriting, and A/B testing.
3. AI tools play a HUGE role in building qualified lists. Most sales tech platforms have AI agents that can research 10s of thousands of prospects while you focus on other work. This is a ton of leverage. AI prompt engineering consumed a huge amount of the total time I spent on my cold email campaigns.
4. The infrastructure necessary to support a mid-sized cold email campaign (~20K sends / month) costs around $1,500 / month.

💁 Delegation is CRITICAL if you want to grow

Follow any business influencer on social media, and you’ll hear them singing the delegation gospel.

We know delegation is important. You can’t do everything yourself if you want to grow a business.

And until this year… I kind of accepted that as a common business principle.

I was shocked by how quickly I needed to hire outside resources.

I’m not talking about hiring resources for one off tasks here and there like “design my website”.

I’m talking about delegating recurring tasks that consume a lot of your time every week:

• email management
• database management
• invoicing & collection
• social media management
• video editing

That’s only a few of the things that a) someone else can do, and b) consume a TON of my time every week.

So much time that these tasks limit how much revenue-generating work I can do.

The upshot is this: if I spend that time on lead generation and sales, I would make a lot more money.

But those things still need to get done… enter delegation.

Couple key delegation takeaways I learned this year:

1. It’s a ton of work unto itself. You can’t say “please do this task” and expect it to get done. Communicating how to do things requires detailed documentation. This is a ton of work. I often see other entrepreneurs delay delegation because they don’t want to put the time into the delegating itself. This is kicking the can down the road. Delegation work is one of the highest leverage things you can do. The sooner you bite the bullet, the better.
2. It’s hard to trust anyone but me. As I ramp up delegation, I worry that “no one can do as good a job on this as me”. By letting someone else do it, the quality of my business will suffer. This is a limiting belief and a big growth area for me. Learning to trust others with my business will unlock scale over time.

🥅 Having something you want is a great catalyst for action

Flexibility and mobility has always been a weak area for me, and never a priority. I could never get myself to stretch or do mobility training over the past 15 years.

Then along came surfing.

I fell in love with a sport that demands incredible mobility to progress.

My desire to progress in surfing is so strong that I built flexibility and mobility training into my routine overnight.

And it felt effortless… just something I do now.

This would have never happened without my North Star of surfing progression.

Think about something you really want.

What are the limiting inputs or bottlenecks that are keeping you from getting it?

What I changed my mind on in 2024

We don’t know enough about the world to not be changing our minds on a few things each year.

I like to think I’m pretty open-minded, but I started tracking these each year to make sure I stay that way.

Re-allocating to equities

Ahead of mini-retirement and moving to Bali, we re-allocated assets into bonds.

Rates are high, it generated cash flow to cover our modest life expenses, and it’s risk-free.

But as our time in Bali came to an end and I started generating some income, I reviewed our portfolio, and it dawned on me:

This is not an exaggeration.

AI is already starting to dramatically impact how we work, and it’s in the early innings of transforming every aspect of personal and professional life.

The amount of value created over the next 30 years at the hands of AI technologies will be astounding.

I acknowledge stretched valuations, tariffs, and the return of inflation… but I cut through the noise and reduced my thinking down to 1 question:

❓ 30 years from now, what are the odds that I look back and say “I wish I had less money in the stock market the 2020s?”

Call me crazy, but the answer to that questions is: Very low odds.

We’re now on a monthly allocation schedule into stocks until we hit a target in 18-24 months.

Warm outreach isn’t as important as I thought

I am the Warm Outreach King.

Nothing will stop me from reaching far and wide through my network to validate ideas, find introductions, and drum up new business.

It started in college when I was networking for jobs.

I would call everyone I could think of and push for introductions.

It worked. I attribute a huge amount of my early career success to aggressive networking.

“If it worked for the job hunt, it will work in business”, I thought.

This is true, warm outreach is an effective way to do a few things early on in a business venture:

1. Finding free work to validate ideas
2. Generating early social proof / testimonials
3. Getting a few referrals

But… as I worked through my network to launch my consulting business, I realized it has diminishing returns and becomes a poor use of time quickly.

There are a few realities about warm outreach you must accept:

1. People don’t actually want to help you as much as they say they do
2. Most of your network aren’t qualified leads or don’t know qualified leads for what you’re validating
3. It’s time-intensive for limited reach

There is a place for warm outreach because it’s free and you can quickly access the few qualified leads in your network, but the returns melt away fast.

If you have positive early results with warm outreach, it’s a better use of time and money to roll those results into a cold outreach campaign.

This usually means cold email or paid ad campaigns. Set a fixed budget you’re willing to risk and clear performance thresholds to validate demand.

If you can’t hit those thresholds in 3 to 6 months, move on. You lost your modest investment and a little bit of time.

But most importantly, you QUICKLY learned that you were pursuing the wrong idea.

The value of handwritten notes

I am a Notion power user. It runs my life.

So much so that if I lost all my data stored in Notion, I’d be in a pretty bad spot.

Like it would be seriously not good for my life and business.

It’s the best productivity and life management tool ever, but I won’t belabor the point. See my productivity diatribe on Notion for more info.

One of the most basic Notion use cases taking and organizing notes. I’ve taken and stored all my notes in Notion for the past several years.

This year, however, I became overwhelmed with the demands of my business.

I found myself gravitating to handwritten notes as a way to mentally de-clutter

This evolved into a full blown business audit that looked like this on paper:

I’ll tell ya what… I’ve never had so much clarity about where to take my business than I did after this exercise.

There is something about hand moving across the page that TEASES the next thought out of me.

Writing stuff out on paper feels like a manifestation of the contents of my brain.

I can see knowledge gaps and make connections faster.

I’ve started to incorporate handwritten notes into other high-cognitive load tasks.

Anything that requires a lot of thoughtful and detailed planning is usually a great fit. For example, I’m in the middle of building out a big cold email campaign for Q1 2025.

This is what fell out of my brain on the prospect list building portion alone:

Note to self: take more hand-written “output” notes in 2025.

Biggest Ls of 2024

New section this year. Even good years have some losses, and it feels a bit silly to not shine a light on them.

Lack of focus on top priorities

I started a consulting business and was all over the place for the first few months.

Trying different things… doing stuff that doesn’t generate revenue… trying to do everything myself…

It’s especially easy to become unfocused during the early days of starting a business. Nothing is immediately working, and there are tons of options… so you try everything.

Don’t do that.

There are always a few priorities that should take precedent over everything else.

I should delegate or delete everything else.

Succumbing to the temptation of working on things that aren’t those priorities is a mistake.

I should have focused on organic content marketing, cold email campaigns, and client work.

Instead, I validated other business ideas, took pointless networking calls, and podcasted too much.

This wasn’t a total L since I now have a very clear idea of what my top priorities are for 2025… but there’s no doubt I would have generated more revenue in 2024 had I been more focused.

Wasting time on unnecessary calls

This one deserves it’s own section.

So many calls can be handled via email or are completely useless.

It pains me to think about the time wasted on calls that I shouldn’t have agreed to taking.

I now qualify hard via email to determine whether a call is a good use of my time before booking something. Even at the risk of coming off as a dick (though I am as polite and respectful as possible).

Getting dunked on in a negotiation

I was so excited to close on my first inbound lead that I agreed to deal terms that underpriced my work.

This mistake cost me exactly $12,925 in revenue.

That alone would have been a new monthly high water mark. Not to mention the resentment.

I no longer negotiate on this type of work.

Foot injury

My surfboard broke and the only available backup board was for more skilled surfers.

I went out with it anyway into waves that were too big for my skill level.

Surprise, surprise… I got hurt.

It hurt fitness progress and my mental health.

Won’t belabor this one. It was a huge L.

2024 Content Review

Best YouTube content

Sick drone video up to the top of Mount Everest. Clear day, great music. I don’t have to hike it now.

Most Viewed YouTube Videos from 2005 to 2024. What a walk down memory lane.

Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel. I’m SO glad I discovered this. Mark Laita interviews people who are “frequently invisible in society”. Convicts, prostitutes, drug addicts, computer hackers, mobsters, crooked cops, abuse victims, cult survivors… My favorite episode is an interview with a brothel owner named Freddy. SO interesting. Some episodes are too dark to watch.

Best shows

Bad Sisters Season 1 (2022). 4 sisters plot to murder their 5th sister’s husband in Ireland (he’s a dick). The story is original, the writing and acting is great, and the Irish countryside is beautiful. But most of all, the show jumps through time to before and after the murder, telling the story in bite-sized puzzle pieces. It makes for an incredible arc. Highly recommend.

Better Call Saul (2015). Finally got around to this, and it didn’t disappoint. Deliciously gritty. Maintains the quality and mythology of the Breaking Bad universe.

The Sopranos (1999). Finally got around to THIS while mini-retired in Bali. Iykyk. This show is incredible.

The Diplomat Season 2 (2024). I’m not interested in politics, but the dialogue and intrigue are delicious. The characters… so likeable. I screamed “NOOO” when the last episode ended and I knew I’d have to wait for season 3. A good sign if I’ve ever seen one. Recommend.

Best movies

Alien: Romulus (2024). The story, the special effects, the gritty feel… this was an all around great space horror movie. I especially liked how true this film was to the original. The set looked like something out of the 70s. Highly recommend.

Deadpool & Wolverine, credits footage (2024). The movie itself was excellent, but the footage played during the credits stood out to me.

It was a montage of behind the scenes footage of all the FOX Marvel movies of the last 20 years. Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds clowning around on their respective movie sets, early 2000s interview footage… all to Good Riddance, by Green Day in the background.

This was an incredible display of knowing your audience. If you’re a huge superhero fan like me, you’re nodding your head in agreement.

You’ve been on a journey with these characters over the past 20 years.

This montage brings you back to some of that journey’s most memorable moments with the real people who made them happen.

It’s heartfelt and well-timed, strengthening the connection between fans, the heroes, and the actors behind them. Well done.

Best books

Didn’t read much this year, but this was the best one by far:

Outlive (2023). Longevity expert, Peter Attia’s, content in one place. This is an easy one-and-done book to read if you want to implement the highest impact lifestyle changes for a long and healthy life. Highly recommend. Punchline: exercise and sleep more.

Predictions for 2025

Here were my predictions for 2024:

Prediction	Outcome
We’ll see an explosion of purely AI-generated YouTube channels with 1m+ subs	❌ Wrong, but there are many with several hundred K subs
I will hit my fitness goal of deadlifting my body weight 10 times	❌ Wrong, injuries kill progress!

Way off! Nice try, Ed. Better luck in 2025.

Oh wait, I can’t think of anything and don’t care that much about predictions at the moment!

Finally, a cool thing I discovered in 2024

If you put milk in your scrambled eggs, they get super fluffy! Game changer for me… I don’t make scrambled eggs without milk now.

You’re welcome!

---

What a year!

There will never be another one like it… at least until actual retirement (which I may never do).

2025’s year in review is gonna be SUPER business content-heavy methinks. Will report back in 12 months.

Hope you found this useful or inspiring.

See you in the next one.

Thanks to Sarah for reading a draft of this post.