As part of the monthly review, a format I’ve been using has been examining the systems in my life to be healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Healthy
Quite awful this month. The gyms in Toronto closed again on October 9th because of COVID and I contemplated if I should fly back to Vancouver but alas I did not. Unfortunately, I learned of this closure whilst I was in the gym for a mobility session…hence feeling like I wasted my last opportunity to train heavy.

Diet was also sub-par as I consumed about 5-10 cans of beer this month. Quite the record for alcohol consumption, maybe it’s because my body was unconsciously reminiscing the Oktoberfest in Munich from last year. It’s crazy to realize travel has been closed since March and it was only last year that I was drinking some amazing beer with some Bavarians and a couple from Louisiana.

After realizing weighted pull-ups (45lbs of water bottles in my hiking backpack) led to the pull-up bar leaving a dent in the wall, I decided to stick with bodyweight for the month. Of the 22 post-gym-closure days, I trained for 14 of them for 926 total reps of pull-ups. This resulted in some equal amount of push up variations (incline, diamond, one-hand, archer).

Suffice to say, I haven’t felt strong for much of the month. Prior to the closure, I had built my strength up to comfortably squatting 365lbs and deadlifting 430lbs without using a belt since the gym re-opened in September. I imagine I will have to restart the slow climb once again.

It’s also been a month making the effort to reconnect with some close friends. One of my best friends moved to NYC so that was a significant loss to my small group of coffee shop/walking entourage. But it was a month of carefully thinking about those with who I wish to spend more time with and I found it hard to make a list of even a dozen.

I imagine the poor diet resulted in about a 2% increase to my body fat to what appears to be ~14% give or take now. The loss of strength training will have a big effect here. The average sleep is about 7.5hrs a day and I Imagine not using an alarm clock for 95% of the days has helped improve the quality…though much work needs to be done with my efficiency as I seem to be awake for about an hour every night. Much of the poor results were during the period of my Petrious Rosea, which thankfully left my body by the last week of October.

Wealthy
Launched a new project. In some ways, it’s odd that it’s taken this long but I reached out to a number of entrepreneurs I met on the journey to see if they’d like to be coached by me. To create more opportunities for myself, I’ve been thinking about opening it up to leaders in larger organizations as well. But this required editing the website, which still has more updating work to do, and really just putting an end to my procrastination.


As far as my investment has gone..what can I say…it went up and it went down. October ended with much of the market on the decline and my portfolio wasn’t spared from that movement either. It did give an opportunity to add more to my core holdings.

Most of the investment work was focused on rereading my notes on Phil Fisher and continuously getting attuned to how I should invest. This continues to be a rather challenging pursuit as I juggle the learnings I have from the many investment greats and weight it against what I’ve learned about my own behaviour as an investor. A core area I’ve been thinking a lot about has been position sizing and the number of investments and the stage of companies I’d like to look further into. Suffice to say, it’s still a work in progress.

Wise
It was a month of buying books. I believe I purchased ~10 new books. I read four books over the period and this is probably the first time I hit the pace of finishing a book a week. Thankfully, each of the books were extremely easy reads.

This might be part of ‘healthy’ as it’s part of training for the mind but because of the introspective nature, I wanted to write about meditating here. I had stopped daily meditations since 2018 (I think) but restarted again this month. Previously, I did breathing vipassana meditation for 10-15 minutes but this time I decided to just sit with my thoughts for an hour. It hasn’t been daily, I’m aspiring to that cadence.

It might be a recency bias but I want to say that introspection played an important function this month. Whether it’s through meditation, journaling, or just plain sitting and writing, this has been a major component of the month. What have I got to show for it? Probably more in what I’ve decided not to do than to do.

Looking ahead at November.
The most important thing is to push on with the same mission of working with entrepreneurs. This will mean reaching out to folks who do what I want to do for further insights and continuously exploring opportunities for application. This might also result in more projects to further learn on the topic through more writing, books, etc….