Starting with a review of the month on being healthy, wealthy, and wise. Followed by the focus for December.

Healthy
The gym gods…who really are the provincial government… let me taste the gym for one week on Nov. 16 before closing it back again. It was a wonderful week where a maximum of 10 was allowed in so it almost felt like having my own private gym. But alas, I’ve gone back to daily pull-ups and push-ups.

The one month gap was felt more manageable than the 5+ months one from the first COVID lockdown as my body seemed to remember the movements better and putting the bar on my back felt more familiar than foreign. Given how I had a hard time even balancing the bar on the back when I returned after the first lockdown, this was a big improvement.

I also noticed my strength level hadn’t deteriorated terribly. When the gym closed on Oct 9th, I was comfortably squatting 365lbs, deadlifting 430lbs, and benching 225lbs over a two month training period. When I returned on Nov 16, I was comfortable squatting 295lbs, deadlifting 315lbs, and benching 205lbs. Surprisingly, I had maintained more strength on my bench press.

A theory I have is that I changed from static push-ups to lots of clapping push-ups and using resistance bands to focus on ’speed’ squats and hip hinges. Given the two variables for power is lifting heavy things and/or speed….I’m going to have to focus on speed with weight being a constant.

For December, this means changing the pull-ups and push-ups to have dynamic speed elements. For squats, I’m still unsure. Jumping is rough my knees and I’ve contemplated sprints out in the cold…or finally getting a kettlebell. Will see.

The diet has been fine…at best. I haven’t missed any of my daily fasts with the shortest being 14 hours for 2 days with a weekly average of ~17hr per day over the month. My parents think my face has gained some weight when we FaceTime so that’s not a good sign. I’m probably at ~12% body fat as there has been an improvement since October. I’ve been really cutting down on my bread intake.

Sleep has been ‘fine’ too with the average Fitbit sleep tracker score at ~78 for the month. I’m getting about 7.5hrs of sleep a night but the quality could be improved significantly.

It’s been a rather difficult month mentally, and conversations with friends have been extremely helpful, not to mention the many books I read (which I’ll mention in the latter section). The way I’d measure my mentality is on daily levels of motivation and feeling of clarity on direction and this has been improving near the end of November but the middle part really felt like a shit show.


Wealthy
No action on my investment portfolio. It went up, nothing crazy. One company on my watchlist of ideas to research tripled….I think all in this month. I felt like an idiot for a few days, but I didn’t do the work, so it didn’t earn the result. Simple as that. Which leads to becoming more systematic with my research process.

The goal for December will be to understand a company a week, to make time for this practice. Another strategy to explore is the use of 2.5-5% starter positions for these companies that do not have a dominant moat but seem to be in the process of building it…while the 10-20% positions are for the big boys that will do fine but I have the greatest confidence it won’t impair my capital.

On the front of designing a career of building utopian organizations….things haven’t been as fruitful. The response to the coaching program from the folks I reached out to hasn’t turned out the way I had hoped. The silver lining is that many who replied no were already working with a coach. But it’s also brought me down the path of narrowing in further to entrepreneurs specifically (like I wanted to originally) rather than a broader group of ‘leaders’.

I interviewed and spoke with a few startups for HR/People Ops positions but nothing came of it, unfortunately. This has been a rather frustrating experience to date and I think after some ~250 applications and a dozen interviews I’m going to have to call it quits on this hypothesis. I hypothesized that given my background in high performance in athletics, investing in businesses and operations from consulting that I would be able to bring a diverse and rather crucial experience set to people operations work where the focus should be in merging finance and operations to help people perform better….but most interviews frustratingly focused on my lack of education in HR or HR work experience. I guess telling them I wasn’t qualified for any of my other jobs in high octane careers wasn’t enough to convince them I could do an entry-level HR job? I guess this is why HR’s focus on diversity of skin colour over diversity of thought continues to lead to why consultants will cut them out first for any ‘operational improvement’ project (shots fired). Overall, it does seem like a blessing in disguise as I would probably get frustrated trying to convince people up the HR chain why all existing models were broken and why HR should really be made up of people from non-HR backgrounds.

With that, I’ve turned my attention to applying to Chief of Staff roles in November. It’s the role that will get me working closest with entrepreneurs and as they are the individuals I want to exclusively work with, it makes sense. I explored this area last year but the small startup ecosystem in Canada meant this was a role with slim pickings. Hence most of my applications have been abroad but Visa/COVID brings it different challenges so it’s a Hail Mary attempt…but an attempt I’d rather make over others.

Wise
I beat my target of two books a month in November by finishing three (When Breath Becomes Air, Tuesdays with Morrie, and Modern Man in Search of a Soul). A part of me wishes I could say ‘four’ because the biography on Churchill is a 1,000-page beast where by most normal ’book standards’ it’s worth 4-5 books. But this ain’t a competition of hitting numbers. I have to remind myself this.

I’ve genuinely enjoyed each book I read the past month and each has really left me thinking more….introspectively speaking. Maybe this is a sign I’m improving on my ability to select good books?

Meditating hasn’t been a daily exercise but I would say I’ve meditated 30% of the days in the month. Each session lasting 45 minutes in the morning. In the hopes of improving this, I finally got a physical calendar so I can cross off each day I meditate for December.

Looking ahead at December.
The big habit on becoming ‘wise’ will be the daily meditation. Hope the calendar trick works and we get to more than 10 days this month.

Until I get to lift heavy again, the daily practice to not lose as much strength will be to have dynamic training sessions daily. This might be a Tabata session with bodyweight exercises or a ‘grease the groove’ throughout the day with dynamic pull-ups/push-ups supersets. That’s for being healthy.

For wealth, researching a company a week would be fitting for the investing side. For the career side, I think the most crucial thing is making a decision on whether I will pursue additional schooling (gathering information on various masters/doctoral programs in psychology) or if I will pursue the path of learning via experience through more projects. This will require further emails to schools and people doing what I want to do and it’s not to get the answer but help me make a decision with minimal regrets.