2014 Retrospective

2014 was a pretty crazy year.

Aren't they all?

It's certainly a year that had multiple lessons for me, and I'll do my best to communicate them here.

1. Simplify

Two of the books I was drawn to were about simplifying your life and business.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown and The One Thing.

Both of these books enraptured me.  Once I saw them, I knew I was supposed to read them.  And I'm committed to making changes in those directions this year (2015.)  I still find it a struggle to let go of options, but I'm getting better.  I feel much more alive and in control when I'm streamlined.

In fact, this year, I've been doing my yearly planning a bit differently.

I created a one-sheet weekly worksheet to keep me on track (in life not just business.)

I did a training on that here.

And I went into the cloud on my Mindmaps, and have a main project mindmap on MindMeister.  I think this is really helpful, because when I have meetings with my team, I can use it to keep me focussed and aware of all the spinning plates I'm responsible for.

I also started using Kanan boards with Trello.  I have dabbled with this in the past, but seem to have a new excitement for it now.

I basically have 3 main boards.

Projects

Learning Challenges

Promos scheduled by week

2. One of the big highlights of the year for me was DS Domination.  I made over $110,000 in income from DS Domination with very little work.  It kind of grew by itself and looking back, I wish I had put a little more focus on this income stream.  I had regularly been on the leaderboards and in the last couple of months of 2014, I finally dropped off the top 15 for overall volume in the entire company.

I'm looking to step back up there this year.

I made almost 180k with Michael Somerville in my GoFunnels project, which has seen its share of technical hurdles.  We have had to deal with credit card fraud, and forced commission injections – which has been a nightmare.  And we uncovered a hidden underbelly to the internet marketing world that has hit multiple companies in our industry and crippled the Freedom Fighters Network, which incidentally had been copying some of our ideas in GoFunnels.

NOTE: I am no longer working with Michael Somerville.  He turned out to be unethical and stole money from me.  You can read about how that went down on my post where I explain why I am no longer working with Michael Somerville.

3. Networking and the long game

I didn't spend enough time networking.  I know that I need to play the long game, but because other reasons, I got pulled into doing un-strategic, short-term income plays.  I'm not doing that this year.

I feel very strongly that there has to be a purpose for what I do.  Jabbing about the same stuff all the time has no interest for me.

And in the last 3 months of the year, I made a major health change and lost 30 pounds.

I went from weighing about 195 with a BMI of

down to 165 with a BMI of

A consequence of this is that I need some new belt holes in my belt (even the new one I bought in the summer) and all of my pants are too big.  I also changed from wearing large shirts down to usually a medium.  I know, I know.  You're not going to stand for me complaining.  And I'm not.

I feel great.  But it took discipline and a clear gameplan.

By the way, I lost all that weight without exercise.  I just changed what I ate.

That is revolutionary, but it's really the way to lose weight.  The weight loss industry has other ideas – which involve selling you products.