🎉 Happy Halfway 2024
Transform Your Year with my Simple Life Check-in Template
Aloha fellow learn-it-all 👋
Greetings from Honolulu, Hawaii 🌴
Why wait until the end of December to realize that you didn’t do what you intended to do this year?
That’s bogus.
It’s not too late. Every day is a new day to begin again with living the way we want to.
I’m making this letter a little bit different from the usual. For a special occasion….
It’s almost the end of June!
That means six months have passed in 2024, and there are still six whole months to go to make this a zesty year full of love and learning 🙂
I’m trying out an experiment with a donation-based product called “🎉 Happy Halfway 2024 Life Check-in Template” that you can download here:
Your future self and I thank you for taking the time to reflect on all the life you’ve lived so far this year.
If you’ve been reading my letters, you know I go inward and get reflective often. So…
Why is reflection important to me?
Time and time again, I set out on resolutions for the new year. And then… drop the ball. I was hungover at a Tim Hortons at 2:32 pm in Oxford, Ohio, when I set these resolutions in 2018:
I took a community ice skating class with ten-year-olds swirling around me. That’s the only goal I actually remember hitting of the 15 I set here. One out of fifteen. Yikes.
In 2020, I took a workshop led by Tiago Forte to review 2019, where I dedicated a weekend to remembering, connecting, and creating a plan for the upcoming year. I was fascinated by a new way of approaching life with more integrity and alignment with my intentions. Even though none of my plans of moving to the Netherlands or doing the Chicago 10K panned out due to COVID-19, I found it as a grounding experience that clarified where I wanted to go.
I granted myself grace and recalibrated my compass when things drastically shifted.
The one word I chose as my intention for the year was “practice.” This led to me publishing for 100 days and running 100 miles. I share more about rewriting my story here:
Reviewing the year even at halfway has power. I get the opportunity to figure out why certain intentions or projects aren’t coming to fruition. The learning comes from assessing how to tweak them and run an alternate experiment instead.
Reflection is a key part of setting my future self up for success.
I want you to be set up and feel set up on how to live your life.
If you have never done a reflection before, fear not. Here’s where you can download my template. To test it out by listening, click the recording below to use.
🎤 Recording:
If you’d like to download the template, I’m accepting donations based on how valuable you find it to be. If you are interested in accountability for completion or coaching, feel free to contact me as well by responding to this email.
Whether you use my template or your own, be sure that you:
Set a timer for one hour without distractions. Grant grace if you do not finish. You can return to this again.
Understand there are no right or wrong answers. This is for you, so make what you like of it. Filling in something is better than nothing. I invite you to react to impulse and first-draft answers without being a chronic overthinker of your responses.
Make the template your own by using prompts that support your reflection process and neglecting those that are not useful.
Allow for 10 minutes to retrace favorite photos or notes to jog memories. Beware: this might make you sidetracked and live in nostalgia lane longer than anticipated. (optional)
🌟Five Quotes to inspire
On the value of reflection: “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”
– John Dewey, psychologist and educational reformerOn the value of questions: "Once you have learned to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know."
– Neil Postman, professor and authorOn achieving success: “It’s so simple: you spend less than you earn. Invest shrewdly. Avoid toxic people and toxic activities. Try to keep learning all your life. And do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. And if you don’t, you’ll need a lot of luck. And you don’t want to need a lot of luck. You want to go into a game where you’re very likely to win without having any unusual luck.”
– Charlie Munger, investorOn the value of learning from small steps: "Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance, they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins. This rapid and frequent feedback allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes."
– Cal Newport, productivity expert and authorOn the importance of mindfulness and intentionality in thinking: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
– David Foster Wallace, novelist and philosopher
~~~
For even more reflection resources:
📚 Annual Review Resources
In letter 191, 🎊 2023, the year that I..., I shared a handful of annual review resources. below are more resources than you could ever need. I recommend choosing one and going for it. My intention is not to create analysis paralysis for you.
Here are eight free frameworks from people I admire:
Tiago Forté’s template and his step-by-step guide.
Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole’s The Yearly Review Template
James Clear answers these questions:
What went well this year?
What didn’t go so well this year?
What am I working toward?
—> You can find his past reviews here.
Anne Laure Le Cunff created this template in slides last year that I found helpful with different buckets similar to James Clear.
Khe Hy has a Notion template with some really quality questions I am liking. My favorite: what makes me come alive?
Steve Schlafman’s Ultimate Annual Review Template
Sahil Bloom’s 2024 Annual Planning Guide
YearCompass’s 2024 planning booklet
Remember to make your reflection process your own and make it fun. :)
👂 Listening
Small Worlds by Rayland Baxter
Yeah, nine times out of 10 I get it wrong
That's why I wrote this song, told myself to hold on
I can feel my fingers slippin'
In a motherfuckin' instant, I'll be gone
Do you want it all if it's all mediocre?
Staring at the wall and the wall's full of posters
Lookin' at my dreams, who I wanna be
I guess you gotta see it to believe
Oh, I been a fool but it's cool, that's what human beings do
Keep your eyes to the sky, never glued to your shoes
Guess there was a time when my mind was consumed
But the sun coming out now, clouds start to move
Don't tell me nothing but the truth
I'm tired, I don't gotta spare a second
Win or lose, win or lose
I don't keep count, nobody checkin'
📸Photo Collages of the Year so Far
🙏Shoutouts
To all who nudged me that this template was a good idea, especially Camilo Moreno-Salamanca , Nate Kadlac, Michelle Elisabeth Varghese , and Dan McGlinn
I appreciate you reading this!
If ideas resonated, I’d love you to press the heart button, leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetjl@gmail.com. If you forgot who I am, I welcome you to my online home.
Keep on learning 😁
Mahalo 🌺
Jen
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I love this! I definitely need a mid year reflection too!