Hey friends

At the start of this year, instead of making a list of New Year’s resolutions, I carried out my first Past Year Review.

It’s a process recommended by virtual mentor, Tim Ferriss, whose been conducting Past Year Reviews for decades.

The concept is straight forward. Instead of making a list of nice to do resolutions which you give up on by the end of January, you review the activities and people that gave you the most joy in the past year.

Then you double down and spend more time on those activities and with those people in the current year.

Central to the Past Year Review is the Not-To-Do List.

*“The reason is simple: what you don’t do determines what you can do."
- Tim Ferriss

A Not-To-Do List helps you drill down on the essential things in your life, the things that really matter, and discard the non-essential.

Compiling a Not-To-Do List is also more effective than a To-Do-List in improving your performance.

I’ve been updating my Not-To-Do List during the course of the year and it has helped me systematically cut out a lot of unnecessary things that I was doing in my life, making things simpler and enabling me to focus on achieving my goals.

Enjoy your weekly dose of marginal gains!

🚀 Performance Hacks

Will Worrying Make You Better? (6min)

When we talk about worrying, it’s generally in the negative sense. Worrying creates stress. Too much stress and worrying creates overwhelm, which turns into anxiety.

What’s interesting about this post is how worrying is framed in the context of performance and productivity, through manufactured worrying. In small doses, worrying and stress can increase your productivity and improve performance.

Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (30min+)

This is a monster blog post which explores everything you need to know about learning to think and make better decisions in order to make fewer mistakes and get better results. I first started finding out about mental models after listening to Elon Musk’s biography where it describes how he has used First Principles Thinking to launch Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity.

📱 Tools + Tech

💻 App: Airr app. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I always find myself taking lots of notes. Then I found Airr - the podcast app that lets you highlight moments from podcast episodes. You can even request transcripts of each episode to help compile your notes. Awesome.

🎙️ Podcast: The Tim Ferriss Show feat. Mark Zuckerberg. Zucks talks about a wide range of topics including religion, fencing, learning languages, personal energy management, Web3.0 and the Metaverse. A fascinating podcast episode where with some interesting insights from one of the only remaining Unicorn founders turned CEO.

🐦 Tweet Thread: A 'High-Performance Mindset' In 11 Steps. Looking for some useful nuggets to develop a high performance mindset? You can't go wrong with the 11 steps in this thread.

❓How to: Interested in launching your own NFT and making Ps?! First you have to learn how to make your own NFT.

✍🏾 Quote of the Week

“There's no magical formula that'll tell you how you should build your morning routine or what specific habits you should adopt. Through the process of trial and error, though, you'll hit on a winning combination that gives you the same sturdy foundation these successful entrepreneurs enjoy.”

From 12 Morning Routines That Top Entrepreneurs Execute Daily by Sujan Patel. Resurfaced using Readwise.