2021 – Past Year Review 🎆

Inspired by Tim Feriss' "Past Year Review" I'm trying to take a look back at 2021, to see what I did achieve and look for improvement opportunities. I've categorised my areas of focus into five:

Home (Furutoppen – our property where we are building our home)
Personal
Career
Health
Finance

Home

The greatest change last year was that my girlfriend and I moved into our small cabin on our large porperty at Nesodden in Norway. We are going to build our new home in a year or so, but for now we are living on 22m2, without running water or a proper toilet. Because of this, and a longer commute, I intentionally had fewer resolutions last year, and wanted to give myself some slack, since I knew life would be a bit different. In march we have managed to live here for a year, carrying all our water from our neighbour, traveling 1,5 hours to do our laundry and doing our dishes outside in the dark, cold, rain or snow, together with many other challenges. Managing this was maybe the biggest achievement of 2021. But don't get it wrong, we love living here! 💚

Personal

On a personal level, things slipped up a bit more than ususal. Because our living conditions got a bit tougher, it was important to celebrate and have some extra "kos" in our lives. That means relaxing by watching TV and movies together, eating nice meals, drinking wine, having some extra snacks and soda, and even some occasional cigarettes. After almost a year of this, you start to see your willpower weaken, and it get's even more difficult to resist temptations like this. Screen time also increased a lot as a result of this. My book reading habits got completely destroyed, both because of increased screen time and because I had difficulty finding books I really wanted to read. In the end I only managed to finish 4 out of my goal of 20 books.

Career

Mist, my company, once again increased its profits from last year. From 783 880kr to 807 470kr (before expenses and taxes). The increase was largely due to my first consultancy gig. I've previously been skeptical doing the consultancy thing, and preferred working on projects that I can complete by myself from start to finish. I think it's mainly because I enjoy the freedom to decide how and when to work, and as soon as you join an existing team, it's suddenly not much different from working a regular 9 to 5 job. But it turned out to be a really great experience; learning to work in a team, getting to try out new things, and working with some really great people!

Health

There was (almost) zero organised exercise last year, and a mediocre focus and eating healthy. Mainly because of the new living conditions, as explained above. But still I think we got more exercise than we have had in many many years. Our property has a pretty steep climb where we carry a lot of stuff, including water, we walk/bike quite a distance the days we commute to work (instead of home office) and we live 1-2 minutes away from the water, so during the summer we've been swimming as much as possible. During our summer break we went to Lofoten in Norway, where we were hiking almost every day. So all in all, I think I did good, just not any regular organised exercise. The only thing I'm sad about is that I didn't get to go skateboarding even one single day last year.

Finance

I can't say anything else than last year went unexpectedly well with regards to finance. I've been investing regularly in crypto since early 2017, but in February and March I started to learn about NFTs. Especially after listening to one podcast episode I was very intrigued about this weird new thing, and started to mint a few projects here and there to learn and test things out. One of them I just put up for sale for a ridiculous price. Then I forgot about it. Few months later, during the "summer of jpegs", while sitting on the toilet, I got a text from a friend asking me if I still had this particular piece. I checked, and I saw someone had bought it. 🤯 The rest of the year I spent trying to figure out how to reinvest the gains and diversify further; doing so almost doubling it. I wanted to diversify into less volatile funds and stocks, but it wasn't the best time to exit out of crypto (now it's even worse), so I'm still holding a lot of it. I also partook in two emissions for two Norwegians companies I believe in. Revir, a highly curated outdoors shop with the best expertise. And Villbrygg, which creates amazing fermented non-alcoholic beverages. The Chia blockchain also launched its mainnet 19. march 2021, and I created a farming rig that I had running on it from the first day. As of now the investments in this rig is at a loss, but I really believe Chia is the future, so I'm not too worried. It just needs time to grow. I will definitely write more about Chia in later posts.