How to Maximize What You Love by Minimizing What You Hate

2020 was a very strange year for all of us. A year where we had to reinvent ourselves and slow down. Slow down to think, slow down to reprioritize. Slow down to recharge.

For me it was a year I learnt a lot about me and what fuels me for a 10x performance.

I learnt how to shoot my own videos (poorly), edit them (poorly-times-2), build better financial models, build products (that make money) faster and how to build a bigger audience that matters to me. I even had a freaking 1 hour interview with Ice-T:

The bad(?) thing is that I acquired some skills that I DEFINITELY didn't want. More on that later.

Last year I posted an article about how to find the things that you love. This year I collected more metrics and I came closer to the things that make my day better. Maybe some of these findings can be applied to your life.

Lords of Summer

One of the reasons that I moved to Los Angeles is because it is summer all year long. I love the sport of the Gods but this summer I was also involved in a huge humanitarian project where I architected and coded a whole system from scratch.

And I freaking loved it.

I really missed writing code and building products that just work instead of making sure I don't upset the SEC. Yes, having your own wealth management company and managing millions using algorithms might sound exciting but after a while it is soul crushing.

And that put me in an interesting situation:

Being the CEO of the best Wealth Management company in the planet is an amazing ego booster. It is a social status that is higher than "a guy writing code and building stuff".

But it seems that it just is "not fun" for me. I definitely plan to fix this this year by "making investing fun again".

Things I love:

1. Building products
2. Helping people
3. Surfing

Things I hate:

1. Highly regulated areas that you cannot innovate fast
2. Helping only wealthy people
   

Weekend Warriors

My mood this year was way better than last year (this is also because I am a positive person in general and to my support network - I love you all btw) but there is a distinguishable uptick on Saturdays.

Saturdays are my "project" days. The days where I get to build small experiments to try ideas. Experiments that I have zero expectations that will ever get any traction but I've seen a couple of them getting a couple of thousand of followers. This blog is also one of these experiments by the way. It is also the days where I meet with friends and we barbecue in the backyard.

Fridays were my "meeting" days. I used to pack all my meetings on a Friday. Now I dedicate 3 hours *per week in meetings that I won't learn something new or have an insane fun time. I plan to bring this down to 30 minutes per week by outsourcing everything to my (kickass) EA.

Things I love:

1. No expectation experiments
2. Spending more time with friends

Things I hate:

1. Meetings
   

If it is not a HELL YEAH, it is a HELL NO

This year I started focusing more on "life design" (I'll post more about life design in the following weeks).

Life design helps you build your day, week, month and year in a way that creates a perfect flow for you. It usually requires you to reprioritize your whole belief system but the main gist is if you are not ecstatic about something, you shouldn't do it. This new navigational framework is making ripples on the rest of my life as old milestones (like raising money for my company or even selling it) become swamps that will slow you down.

The core lies in finding the things that you are madly in love with and center your life around them while avoiding the things that you hate. Definitively not as easy as it sounds.

It needs you to be true to yourself, crash your ego and reevaluate your whole day/week/month/year/life.

It is one of these things that start as a whisper and end up as a roar

Here is an example:

Someone sends you an email for a meeting. Because you are polite, you respond and have the 30m meeting that goes nowhere.

This is definitely not a HELL YEAH.

Nowadays, I am not checking email (sometimes for a week) and then on new emails if it is not a hell yeah, I might not even respond. I know, it sounds like an asshole move and I ALWAYS tried to respond to everyone in the past but this is not aligned with my current life design.

Guard your time and control your calendar else someone else will control your life.

I hope I convinced you to spend at least 10 minutes and write down the things that you love and the things that you hate. It is the only step to become better.

Also published on: https://jon.io/maximize-what-you-love-minimize-what-you-hate