Howdy folks,
It’s coming up to that time of year again.
The end of year celebrations.
And between all the festive fun, food and holiday vibes.
Then there's that looming change of a number that for some brings some unpleasant thoughts and feelings.
The change from 2023 to 2024
It’s funny because really it shouldn’t mean much.
As the new year be strikes and we officially have to start to remember to say 2024
Has anything anything really changed?
Or you might get this feeling in birthdays.
Do you feel your age?
Anyway, I think these moments we tend to be a bit more reflective of the past.
And then put our hopes into the future ahead.
Some people get on a downer - you are reminded that you aren’t a sexy millionaire even thought that’s what you said you would do a year ago. (Am I projecting here?)
Regardless of what you 2023 goals, dreams, intentions, manifestations - whatever you want to call it. (I’ll call them intentions but you can replace that word with wherever your woo-woo scale is)
If they became true or they didn’t even come close.
I think it’s a good chance to start talking about setting up your intentions for 2024
I’m a big believer of being able to shape and design your own life.
So it’s probably no surprise that whenever there is a chance to reflect and set intentions.
It’s something that I tend to look forward too.
There’s something about having a fresh start that is always so energising.
You can reflect on what’s happened so far and then you set out what you would love your life to look like in the days, weeks and months to come.
I call it a fresh start because. Yes it’s great to look back and to take note of what has happened.
This helps in shaping where you want to go forward.
But once you’ve done that. It’s time to let that sh*t go.
The turn of the new year is the perfect chance to start fresh and go into it with new energy & enthusiasm.
This is important because it’s too easy to hold on to our didn’t do list.
But this really isn’t helpful for anything sort from defining what you’d like to focus on from now on.
It’s too easy to get swept away with all the things that never happened.
But by holding on to this it’s just disheartening and an energy drain tbh.
Take your lessons from 2023 - use them to set your intentions for 2024.
But how about setting up your intentions.
What if you have no idea how to set yourself up to win.
Well this is what i want to talk about now
Setting yourself up to win
I believe the best thing you can do in order to start designing the life that really brings you joy, happiness and fulfilment.
Is always to just set yourself up to win.
Do this by giving yourself intentions that are just in touching distance from where you are now.
Here’s an anagram if it helps
S. Specific
M. Measurable
A. Achievable
R. Record
T. Time
I won’t got into too much detail about this.
But if you want to look into SMART goals there’s a lot written up about these
But for me I just like to keep it lazily simple
Past, Present, and Future to set intentions
Let’s think of it like the famous “A Christmas Carol” film and the many adaptations of the famous Charles Dickens’ novel
Past
This is always the 1st step. How did you do the past year. Look at all angles - what worked what didn’t. What is your current life set up.
What are all the factors that have come into play that puts you in the current situation that you would like to change.
That’s the only question you need to ask. No matter what you’d like to change. You first need to accept that are in it.
And most importantly
You take 100% responsibility to get yourself out of it.
This is a core principle of lifestyle design.
You are creating, designing, goals setting manifesting. Whatever you words of choice.
The idea is the same.
It’s you who wants the change so you are the one who will take the steps to make it happen.
Don’t fall into the trap of secretly expecting outside influences to magically change your life: winning the lottery, job promotions, finding a secret weight loss pill.
These are unhelpful in the long run. You are putting the responsibility and control into an external factor.
You cannot influence this. I don’t put all your eggs in that basket.
If any of these things happen by chanceS that’s luck. But that is all.
So by looking at your past.
You’ve now learned a bit more about yourself.
This leads you to your present
Present
Here is your present self.
This is the person you are today.
Now it’s time to be honest with yourself
What are you happy with.
Now think about what you’re unhappy with.
As always it’s important to think of both.
Don’t ever trap yourself in the perpetual cycle of always being dissatisfied with everything.
It’s not helpful, it’s not cool and ultimately it helps no one.
No one wants you to live a unhappy and miserable life.
If you struggle with this.
Gratitude can be your best friend.
Again forget woo-wooness this isn’t about the word and how loaded it can be in modern culture.
There is real, scientific evidence that backs up the benefits to this.
Don’t believe the woo. Trust in the evidence. Then try it yourself.
Then the best evidence will be do you feel better for it.
Because that’s all that matters
Even if it helps you 1% feel less miserable
Then it is 100% worth doing.
Don’t get swept up with the lies of the “quick and easy” pill that will change you in an instant.
Often the best things for us in life only move the needle forward 1%.
It’s the compounding of time and commitment that leads to the result.
This ain’t sexy, it won’t sell millions of books, but it’s reality.
So you’ve got your happy and unhappy list.
I didn’t talk too much about the unhappy list because.
You know we’re human. If given the task to talk about what we’re unhappy. This is the easiest thing that we can talk about.
Example: People can complain about the weather no matter what it is. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too windy, it’s too cloudy.
You’ve got your present list of things you’re happy with and things you’d like to change.
Great now let’s look to the future
Future
Honesty this is where I feel we create ourselves the biggest problems.
We set ourselves ambitious targets that almost destines ourselves to fail
Why is this?
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s the hyper-sexiation (yes I made this word up) of what life should look like.
We see it on tv, papers, magazines but more than anything on socials.
It’s hard to go a day, no even a few hours without being reminded of our apparent failures of being human beings.
But here’s the secret
It’s all lies and BS
Don’t believe that little negative voice or feeling in your body.
This set up is unnatural and unhelpful
But it is the way the world works now.
But instead of getting swept away with it all.
Let’s take a minute to pull ourselves out of this rat race of what gets out in front of ur eyes on a daily basis.
It doesn’t matter what the algorithm pushes in our face.
Yea it’s there for a reason.
Omg you’re unhappy with your weight. Here’s a bunch of ripped healthy people because you tend to look at them more.
Omg you’re unhappy with your work. Here’s a bunch of entrepreneurs and people who kickass at their work.
Omg you’re unhappy because you don’t experience joy day to day. Here’s a bunch of cat’s being silly.
Now you can feel that thing you desire but it only comes from you being behind the screen.
Let’s try to make 2024 the year we try to take ownership and give ourselves the thing we most want.
But howwwww??
Yea let’s get to that now.
First let’s stop with comparing ourselves to what we see in others.
Always step one.
You take what you’ve learned from the past, what you see in your present self and you create a future which is finger distant away:
That’s it stop putting ridiculous goals, intentions and dreams that you will never be able to do.
Why?
Because it sucks that’s why.
If your odds of success is like 1% or less then if you don’t hit it.
You’re going to get so bummed out and unmotivated.
This is the shit that compounds over time.
Until you reach the lowest of all lows.
Apathy.
You go.
I’m done trying. It never works.
New year, new me?
What bs what’s the point of trying
This is the worstttt place to get to in life.
And often it’s self inflected.
Let’s stop putting unrealistic expectations on ourselves and start putting in the tiny micro steps we can move towards
If you’ve done a vision board.
And all it has on it is sexy people, mansions, Lamborghinis & beaches.
Everyday you wake up and look at that you won’t get inspired.
You’ll start to feel disheartened that you are no where near that.
Create a vision board that’s real, true and within touching distance.
Oh look a big number that says 2kg right list, oh look an image of your family with a goal of spending 3 quality hours with them a week, a bigass number of £500 you’d love to have as savings in your bank account as an emergency fund
Honesty, I know this is so unsexy with modern culture.
Everything points us to the direction of dreaming crazy big. Be ambitious it can be disguised as.
This isn’t me saying that I am against have a crazy dream.
We should all have a crazy dream
But it isn’t something that we should dwell upon
Let’s instead focus on the things that are in touching distance to ourselves right now
Only once we’ve got to there that we can again look to go to the edges of our finger tips.
What!? You’ve lost 2kg you absolute badass why not extend that 1kg or now you can look at adding some flexibility in there whatever.
What!? You’ve saved £500 this year. You absolutely badass. Congratulations on building yourself an emergency fund. Oh what you want to add another £500 to it this year.
That sounds awesome. Imagine being £1000 positive in the bank account. What’s better you know you can do it. Because that’s what you did the past year.
I hope you can see what a difference this makes to the mentality, motivation and just in general how not to make this a miserable experience.
So I’ll end it there.
In preparation of 2024
I genuinely hope and wish that your journey to 2024 and beyond is a good feeling.
That you are excited by the possibility of a fresh start
And you feel better than ever that you know how you can make 2024 a great one.
If you have no idea where to start I’ve just decided that I’ll do a 2024 intention live video.
I’ll stick up on YouTube etc. The idea will be I’ll set up a framework - past, present & future.
Give you some prompts and a time and space where you can figure this out.
Hopefully they’ll be a few of us there as well so we can make it a fun event we can all get excited about.
Just sign up to this newsletter so you’ll know the time, date and link to join in.
Or don’t. That’s all good too.
I’ll record the live video and will share it across socials too.
But as always.
Thanks you for reading, sending me messages and supporting me across the interwebs.
It means a lot and keeps me motivated to keep creating content.
Wishing you the best folks from today and into 2024 and beyond
As always let me share some dope things that's been happening the past week
1. Kuala Lumpur is a Hidden Gem
I'm on a short trip to KL this week. I've been here probably 6-7 times and each time I've grown to love it here more and more.
It's such an underrated destination, especially for Digital Nomads.
Yes in SE Asia you are spoilt for choice. There's Bali, Thailand, and Vietnam but I don't hear many people chat about Malaysia and specifically Kuala Lumpur.
But for me, this is quickly becoming my favourite place for a city break.
Why?
I could write a whole article on this.
In short, it's the perfect blend between Singapore & Bangkok.
It's a multicultural hub like Singapore but it has that raw buzz and excitement that you get with Bangkok. (Singapore is beautiful, modern, clean but also can be pretty vanilla in my eyes)
In contrast Bangkok can be a bit much so KL for me is the sweet spot.
I love the diversity of peoples, the big shopping malls, the different food you can get.
It has everything you need to really enjoy your time here.
On top of that it is super affordable and probably the best value for money city you can live in SE Asia that I've found.
Why is that?
I'm no expert but on my taxi journey from the airport to my Airbnb I had a super cool driver who spent the guts of an hour explaining why to me.
Again he talked about so much.
But highlights would be:
- Has its own oil supply = this makes most things cheaper by default
- It's a big country with a relatively small population = he said it was 1/3 the population of Vietnam but had the same size of land
- Taxes are good = he mentioned they mostly tax on higher earners
- People have 'pocket money' this was my favourite expression he said. Most people could just work and still have money to use to eat out, coffee or karaoke = for me this is the best. Being in a place where everyone feels good
- Property is cheap = buying and owning a place is doable even in the capital city
- Hospitals are capped = healthcare is great and they have limits to how much you can charge, this is set by the government
- Cheap to start a business he has a little restaurant, and he's saving to open a new one in a few months = he said you don't need big bank loans etc to get started
There was definitely more he talked about - it was a super interesting drive as you can imagine.
I can't vouch for all the accuracy of the details - but these are what he told me.
My biggest takeaway was that it felt really cool that someone could be so positive about the place they live.
That in itself is rare. If you ask someone living in London what it's like. They're more likely to give you a list of things that is a problem with the city and the country.
This guy absolutely loves it here.
And I'm starting to see why...
2. Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals
It's that time of year when we all buy stuff that we don't really need because Amazon was able to create the ultimate FOMO weekend.
Not that I'm complaining since I sell on Amazon so it always feels like a little bonus.
But anyway I've splashed out on a few software.
In fact I spend more on software than I do on anything else in life.
Maybe I'm addicted to software - but then again.
Anything I can do or use that makes my life a bit easier is often worth the investment.
- Opusclip - Ai automated clips - 50% OFF
- Tubebuddy - YouTube research - 50% OFF
- EpidemicSound - Easy licence music - 2 Free Months
- Ecamm Live - Streaming - 40% OFF
- ScoreApp - Quiz Score Cards - 70% OFF for 3 months
These links will have an affiliate link but will lead you to the best discount on offer. They're all things I've paid for and will use. You'll get the best deal, pay the same amount if you join up but they'll send me some change for referring you 🫶.
That's it so far but it's a decent chunk of change
As you can probably see I've invested heavily in video production software.
Which maybe gives you an idea of what I'll be focusing a lot on in 2024.
And that's all folks.
Wishing you a great week ahead.
Chat soon
Matt
🫶
P.s If you ever find any cool products or software feel free to send them over to me by email or socials. I love geeking out over these things so I'm always on the lookout for new things to play with.