186 - Our 2023 year end review and 2024 preview!

Welcome back to our little podcasting corner of the Internet! We’re returning to your earballs with a year end review episode, recapping what went well and what didn’t go so well in 2023. Then, we’ll share what we’re looking forward to in 2024 and any changes you can expect to see with our podcast.

Show Notes

We absolutely LOVE doing year end reviews! You can read the written version of this one with a few accompanying photos over at https://wanderingaimfully.com/2023-review

If you’ve never done your own year end review, we love the simple format of answering these questions:

What went well in 2023?
What didn’t go well in 2023?
What did you not do on PURPOSE in 2023?
What are you looking forward to in 2024?
What is a defining word to help guide 2024?

Simple questions, but very effective and fun to look back on each year (we’ve been doing this since 2015! 😱)

Here are the links we mentioned (aff links):

☕️  Hario Switch Coffee Dripper - https://amzn.to/47pagYv
🎬  Screen Studio - https://bit.ly/jasonscreenstudio
💻  Arc Browser - https://bit.ly/jasonarc
💌  ConvertKit - https://convertkit.com/jason

***

💌 Want to get a weekly jolt of business inspiration and learn tactics and strategies that can help you increase profit, save time, and enjoy your work more? Sign up for our weekly email at wanderingaimfully.com/newsletter

✳️ Are you a freelancer looking to transition to digital products (selling online courses, etc)? Check out our free coaching session created just for you at wanderingaimfully.com

⚙️ Looking to create online courses with a platform that lets you customize everything? Give our course software a 14-day free trial at teachery.co

What is Growing Steady | Intentional Creative Business Podcast?

We’re Jason and Caroline Zook, a husband and wife team running two businesses together and trying to live out our version of a good life in the process. In this business podcast, we share with you our lessons learned about how to run a calm, sustainable business—one that is predictable, profitable AND peaceful. Join us every Thursday if you’re an online creator who wants to reach your goals without sacrificing your well-being in the process.

[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to What Is It All For? A podcast designed to help you grow your online business and pursue a spacious, satisfying life at the same time. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an un-boring business coaching program. Every week, we bring you advice and conversations to return you to your most intentional self and to help you examine every aspect of your life and business by asking, What Is It All For? Thanks for listening. And now let's get into the show.

[00:00:28] Jason: And I'm here, too.

[00:00:29] Caroline: Welcome back, everyone.

[00:00:31] Jason: Well, you went with a whisper. We have to have...

[00:00:36] Caroline: What do you mean?

[00:00:39] Jason: A good audio level of our audio.

[00:00:42] Caroline: To start?

[00:00:42] Jason: Yeah, because we go from the intro, and then if you do, like, a quiet voice...

[00:00:45] Caroline: Then what happens?

[00:00:45] Jason: Then someone's going to be like, oh, I got to turn the volume up because they didn't mix this well.

[00:00:48] Caroline: Okay.

[00:00:49] Jason: And then I start talking loudly.

[00:00:51] Caroline: Got it. Let's try it again.

[00:00:52] Jason: Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

[00:00:53] Caroline: Ready?

[00:00:53] Jason: Yeah.

[00:00:54] Caroline: Welcome back, everyone.

[00:00:55] Jason: Great level. So it definitely didn't confuse them. And that'll be edited perfectly. And by edited perfectly, I mean left exactly as it was because that is how we do the podcast around these parts.

[00:01:06] Caroline: That's right. Welcome back. Seriously.

[00:01:08] Jason: Welcome.

[00:01:09] Caroline: We are so excited to be in your earballs again, as Jason would say. And we missed you.

[00:01:14] Jason: It's been two months for us.

[00:01:16] Caroline: It's a long time to not podcast.

[00:01:18] Jason: Behind the curtain here. That's how long it has been since we have sat behind these microphones and recorded a podcast for you. But we've been recording for years.

[00:01:28] Caroline: It'll be such a smooth reentry. We won't be rusty at all.

[00:01:31] Jason: Yeah, exactly.

[00:01:32] Caroline: I'll be able to perfectly articulate my thoughts.

[00:01:34] Jason: It's like, think about the podcasters that you listen to all the time and how perfectly eloquent they are. That's us.

[00:01:39] Caroline: Think about the lack of talking we have done throughout the entire month of December. Do you think we're going to be able to form sentences?

[00:01:45] Jason: And November.

[00:01:47] Caroline: November, we traveled back to the US.

[00:01:48] Jason: You're just saying talking to other people.

[00:01:50] Caroline: Yeah, talking to other people.

[00:01:51] Jason: I see. Yeah. December, we had the quiet time.

[00:01:53] Caroline: December was quiet time. We barely talked to each other.

[00:01:56] Jason: No.

[00:01:56] Caroline: In November, just to get you caught up to speed, we went back to the United States. We currently live in Portugal, and we visited family and we did Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving. And we did lots of things.

[00:02:06] Jason: Yeah. A lot of family time, a lot of stuff. We were in Boston for a week too.

[00:02:09] Caroline: And then we came back in December, and it was officially the holiday season. We celebrate Christmas, secular Christmas. And so we did our tree and we did everything, and then we just didn't talk to each other.

[00:02:25] Jason: Can we talk about Christmas for a second here? I know it's over. And also, if you don't celebrate Christmas, don't want to single anybody out or say you have to do whatever, just. We celebrate secular Christmas. So just sharing. This was our first year buying a fake tree. So we embarked on that journey. We found an amazing one at a hardware store of all places here in Portugal. We went to, like, four different stores. We got a bunch of Decora. Soych.

[00:02:47] Caroline: Maybe.

[00:02:48] Jason: Yeah. Could be.

[00:02:49] Caroline: Plural.

[00:02:49] Jason: Decorations. Plural.

[00:02:50] Caroline: I think just decoration. Yeah.

[00:02:52] Jason: Decorasau. Decor, which I think we both had a lot of fun picking out, like, little things. We didn't get too much, but we got, like, just the right amount of stuff.

[00:03:01] Caroline: Enough.

[00:03:01] Jason: We did a bunch of little fun activities. We found the game Priorities, which I don't think we talked about on the podcast because I don't think we had done that. Very fun game. You can find it on Amazon. If you live in the States, you can find it in Target. That's actually where we found it when we were in the US. We made a Christmas version, which was just a blast.

[00:03:19] Caroline: Very fun.

[00:03:20] Jason: And then we did a Lego set. You got me a Lego set for Christmas.

[00:03:23] Caroline: I think we're Lego adults now.

[00:03:25] Jason: We have to be careful. We have to be careful.

[00:03:26] Caroline: We have to be careful.

[00:03:27] Jason: We might have a Lego room coming in our home, which might just be like our bedroom gets converted to a Lego room and we have a Lego bed we sleep in.

[00:03:34] Caroline: I always... It's not like I thought it was nerdy or anything. I just thought, like, really like adults. And then we were loosely into Lego Masters, the show, like a few years ago. And then for this Christmas, I wanted, I told Jason very specifically, I was fine for a low key Christmas, but I did, on Christmas day, want something joyful to look forward to, like a kid. Like, you know, that feeling of being able to put together a present on Christmas Day? I wanted that. And so I told him that. And so I just realized, if you expect your partner to read your mind and know what you need, don't do it.

[00:04:04] Jason: Don't do it.

[00:04:04] Caroline: So what did I do? I bought him the joy that I wanted.

[00:04:08] Jason: Exactly.

[00:04:08] Caroline: Which was a Lego set.

[00:04:09] Jason: You know you're an adult, like a middle aged adult when this is happening.

[00:04:12] Caroline: You service your own emotional needs by buying gifts for other people through yourself.

[00:04:16] Jason: Also life hack for us. So every year for the past couple of years, we've done this, where we bought each other a stocking full of gifts, and there was a budget. It was, like $100 or something like that. And it was just like, little things, like Burt's Bees lip balm.

[00:04:28] Caroline: I'll be honest. A stocking stocker? So fun.

[00:04:30] Jason: Stockings are great. They're so fun. There's lots of little things you get to open. So we had been doing this the past couple of years, but we had always been traveling for Christmas, and we just thought, this year, we're like, well, we don't need to buy a bunch of new stuff. We're back here. We want to have a low key.

[00:04:43] Caroline: We didn't need anything.

[00:04:43] Jason: Exactly. We didn't need anything before anyway. But this year, you had the idea of, let's both find ten items in the house that the other person already owns.

[00:04:52] Caroline: Shop for our stocking stuffers in our house.

[00:04:54] Jason: Wrap those items. But also, it can't be like, you can't wrap my laptop because I'm going to look at that every day. So it's got to be, like, kind of secretive.

[00:05:01] Caroline: A little bit secretive.

[00:05:01] Jason: So we both scavenged one day for, like, an hour, picking out ten items. I literally am going through our home with a tote, like, a little plastic tote, and I'm, like, picking out. I'm, like, looking at things in your little beauty counter that you have, and I'm like, ooh, does she use this lipstick? I don't know, but it's in the back, so I just grabbed it.

[00:05:19] Caroline: What were your favorite old new stocking stuffers that you got?

[00:05:23] Jason: Oh, my favorite old...

[00:05:24] Caroline: Because I can tell you what mine were immediately.

[00:05:25] Jason: Okay.

[00:05:26] Caroline: My two favorite stocking stuffers that I got that I previously owned was a travel size of my detangler, which I hadn't even popped open yet because I bought it when we were back in the States, and I forgot I bought it, and it was delightful to get it the second time around. And my favorite lip gloss.

[00:05:41] Jason: Yeah. Honestly, my favorite is one I wrapped for you, which is the portable phone battery, because your phone is perpetually in low power mode, and I can't stand it. So I just wanted to make sure you knew you had that so that you could always use it. So anyway, that was our fun Christmas. And then just to wrap up as New Year's came around.

[00:05:59] Caroline: Now, wait, before you go to New Year's, did you want to tell everyone what we did on Christmas Eve because we started a new tradition?

[00:06:05] Jason: Oh, sure. Yeah. Okay. This is great. Okay, so Christmas Eve this year falls on a Sunday, and I very much enjoy...

[00:06:14] Caroline: Last year, really, as you're listening to this.

[00:06:16] Jason: Last year. Yes. In 2023. And it doesn't happen again. Christmas or Christmas Eve falling on a Sunday for four years, I think I heard. But anyway, it falls on a Sunday. I love American football. I am in two fantasy football leagues with a group of kind of like business friends. And then like long time ago friends, like 30 years ago friends, which is crazy to say. Not quite 30, 25 years. And I love red zone. Like, red zone is like just my favorite way of watching football. A lot of people hate it because it's so fast paced and you're not getting anything. I love it.

[00:06:45] Caroline: There's so much happening.

[00:06:45] Jason: It is just like since the day it came out, I have just enjoyed watching.

[00:06:48] Caroline: Why don't I like red zone? You don't have enough time to get invested in the story.

[00:06:52] Jason: Yeah, you don't get enough. What's his mom doing?

[00:06:56] Caroline: The underdog. I don't have enough time to get invested.

[00:06:58] Jason: I love it. Get the story out of here. Give me the action. This couldn't be a better illustration of our relationship and who we are as people. But anyway, as the Sunday is coming up, you were kind of putting together this little plan for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. You created these cute little itineraries for us, and it was very lovely, and I didn't give you enough credit for it, but it was very fun and you did a great job. You even did the little Canva layouts. Of course, we're so extra. We don't have kids yet, so we have time for these. So anyway, I'm looking at this itinerary and I'm like, this is the fantasy football playoffs weekend. It's also like the weekend before playoffs. Teams are making it into the playoffs. I'm like, it's actually kind of like the most fun weekend to watch a football. Hours of football.

[00:07:38] Caroline: And you brought this to me and it went over super well.

[00:07:40] Jason: And I really tried to bring it up as like, hey, I don't have to do this, but I'm looking at this itinerary of two days and all of it is the stuff that you want to do. Is there any chance we could just toggle in this one thing I want to do for 3 hours on Sunday night?

[00:07:53] Caroline: 3 hours?

[00:07:54] Jason: Well, yeah, but that was...

[00:07:55] Caroline: Six hours.

[00:07:56] Jason: Well, you didn't have to participate after the 09:00 p.m. hour because the football starts at 06:00 p.m. here in Europe.

[00:08:01] Caroline: Six to 09:00 p.m.

[00:08:02] Jason: Yeah.

[00:08:02] Caroline: Well, you lobbed it up to me and I want everyone to know that in the moment, as he's saying the words, it's like doing the thing where it's like slow motion is happening. And I'm like, Caroline, receive this bid, this emotional bid. You need to receive this well. This is a person telling you, the person you love the most in the world, telling you what they want for Christmas.

[00:08:20] Jason: It was the only thing I asked for.

[00:08:21] Caroline: It was the only thing you asked for. What I'm hearing is I love football more than spending time with you.

[00:08:27] Jason: We had, like, literal 48 hours of itinerary planned. I just wanted 3 hours.

[00:08:32] Caroline: And I was like, wow, so you want to get a divorce?

[00:08:35] Jason: So selfish.

[00:08:36] Caroline: So super selfish. And so then I gathered myself, I was very good at communicating my emotions. I said, I'm going to hear this request. I'm letting you know this is how I'm feeling.

[00:08:46] Jason: You put the knife down.

[00:08:47] Caroline: Yeah, I did put the knife down.

[00:08:49] Jason: Yeah. Just kidding.

[00:08:51] Caroline: And then I was like, okay, let me think on it. And then I went downstairs, I got on my Peloton bike. I was, like, sweating it out. I was like, you know what?

[00:08:54] Jason: First of all, it's not a Peloton bike. We're not bougie. We're not bougie.

[00:08:54] Caroline: A Feloton.

[00:08:54] Jason: It's a Faleton because it's fake.

[00:08:54] Caroline: Like a fallacy. I got my Faleton and I'm like, listen, it's called compromise. How can we reframe this? I'm the queen of reframing.

[00:09:12] Jason: Great. You do great.

[00:09:12] Caroline: How can I get reinvested? And so I decide I'm going to turn it into a game. So once I come up with the clever name, then I'm fully bought in.

[00:09:24] Jason: For sure.

[00:09:24] Caroline: So I come up with the name Rudolph the red zone reindeer. I think I'm the most clever person in the world. And I text that to you immediately. What was your reaction when you got that text? Were you like, yeah, she's bought in.

[00:09:35] Jason: I was like, I get 3 hours. I get three of the 48 hours. Here we go.

[00:09:39] Caroline: You're like, what a turnaround.

[00:09:40] Jason: No, I was like, also, this seems kind of fun.

[00:09:42] Caroline: It is fun.

[00:09:43] Jason: Like, I'm curious where this is going to go.

[00:09:44] Caroline: So in case anybody out there wants to do it. And it is Rudolph the red zone reindeer. And I made bingo cards.

[00:09:51] Jason: You made bingo cards.

[00:09:51] Caroline: I made bingo cards, again, using Canva. Thank you so much, Canva. Not sponsored by Canva, this episode. And basically what we did was we together came up with a list of things that would happen in the games.

[00:10:03] Jason: Yeah. So this is where I brought my, like, I watch football all the time, so I know the announcers always say stupid things like execute, always said when you're watching it. Back shoulder pass.

[00:10:13] Caroline: My favorite was ill advised play.

[00:10:15] Jason: Ill advised throw.

[00:10:16] Caroline: Ill advised throw.

[00:10:16] Jason: Ill advised throw.

[00:10:17] Caroline: So we did things like that, things the announcer would say, like things that would happen in the game, like...

[00:10:21] Jason: A fumble, interception.

[00:10:23] Caroline: Pick six, whatever. Then we did Christmas items because I mistakenly thought that they were going to pan to Christmas.

[00:10:29] Jason: Which when you watch red zone, they don't do a lot of filler time because they're currently switching to games. So when you would normally watch a game and it's like, about to go to commercial, they pan to the crowd and you see a guy in a Santa suit. You don't really get that on red zone, but it was funny because you had these little space.

[00:10:42] Caroline: It turns out those were the hardest ones.

[00:10:43] Jason: It was like a reindeer, a candy cane. So we started playing this. It was very fun.

[00:10:48] Caroline: And also a key part of this is our words are different.

[00:10:50] Jason: Yes.

[00:10:51] Caroline: So basically we did it so that we had the equal amount of...

[00:10:54] Jason: We could do a whole...

[00:10:55] Caroline: A whole thing. Anyway.

[00:10:56] Jason: YouTube video breaking down...

[00:10:57] Caroline: You can tell how excited I am about this. Queen of reframing. I got into it and it turned out to be so fun.

[00:11:03] Jason: Yes.

[00:11:04] Caroline: I've never cared about football more.

[00:11:06] Jason: Also. So one of the things that we had on there was like an exposed shoulder pad or a helmet came off on the play and we're like, is the shoulder pad off? We're like, oh, no, it's on the side. It's got to be over the top. We had these little rules.

[00:11:19] Caroline: It turns out hot cocoa, again, was not nowhere to be found because we had no filler time. So every time you'd pan to the side and a guy would be like, getting Gatorade, I'd be like, is there hot cocoa?

[00:11:28] Jason: Is that hot cocoa?

[00:11:29] Caroline: Is it hot cocoa?

[00:11:29] Jason: I don't see any steam coming off that cup, but that might be hot cocoa.

[00:11:32] Caroline: That was a pretty popular bit for the night.

[00:11:33] Jason: It made it very fun. We showed it to friends. I showed it to my fantasy football group. Everyone's basically reply is, this is great. You should create this.

[00:11:43] Caroline: If I just leave our businesses behind and start to create Rudolph the red zone reindeer.

[00:11:46] Jason: But it's only a one time a year business, so we really got...

[00:11:49] Caroline: Our fourth quarter is going to be huge.

[00:11:52] Jason: So literally next year you might hear from us that we have this small Etsy side project where we sell these branded Rudolph the red zone reindeer cards.

[00:11:59] Caroline: Yeah. I'm about to trademark it so don't even think about it.

[00:12:01] Jason: Yeah, it was very, very fun. You did a great job. That wrapped up our holidays. For new year's, we basically did nothing. I thought we were going to do an activity. You said activity season was over. We had done enough things.

[00:12:12] Caroline: You were like, hey, do you want it? And I was like, I think I'm done with activities.

[00:12:14] Jason: Yeah.

[00:12:15] Caroline: And you're like, okay.

[00:12:16] Jason: And it was time to just get into work stuff again because we basically had taken two months to end the year where everything was super chill. We had a coaching session in both months, but everything else going on was just very low key, not doing a lot.

[00:12:28] Caroline: And we will get into business stuff, plans for the year, excitement. But since we were off all of December, we did want to just cleanly wrap up the year, do a reflection episode. We know everybody else has moved on to 2024, but this is going to be our year in review. We don't like to go with the crowds.

[00:12:45] Jason: Yeah.

[00:12:45] Caroline: And we just wanted to reflect back on this year.

[00:12:47] Jason: Also, we have a written version of this. You can find a link to it in the show notes for this if you want to read it. We have been writing these reviews, I have personally been writing these reviews since 2015, which is almost coming up on ten years, which is kind of wild. Give all the credit to Paul Jarvis, my buddy, who, he was doing this before I was. Before I'd even heard about it as a thing, but just love this format. So here's what we're going to go over in this episode. What went well last year? What didn't go well last year? We have that as 2024. Let's change 2023. What we didn't do on purpose in 2023. And then what's our preview of 2024? What are we focusing on? And then our words for the year? So that's the format of this. I think we're going to go kind of quick because we've already spent 15 minutes talking about Christmas activities and Rudolph the red zone reindeer took so much time, but it did deserve it. It was very fun, and we barely got to tell anybody about it. And it's one of those things that you came up with, and I'm just like, this needs a YouTube video. People need to be able to do this.

[00:13:41] Caroline: Thank you, babe.

[00:13:43] Jason: All right, you want to kick us off here with what went well?

[00:13:45] Caroline: Okay, so at the top here, what went well? Just, we're not going to bury the lead. We had maybe the best year ever. For us.

[00:13:53] Jason: Which is very confusing because, if you look at it from the outside, someone looking at our lives are like, guys, how was 2022 not the best year? You traveled to ten countries, you saw all these amazing things, you created more memories than you could ever have wanted.

[00:14:05] Caroline: And that's why the best is such a subjective thing.

[00:14:08] Jason: But I think overall, when you're asking for the type of people that we are and the things that we love, I thoroughly enjoyed checking off the bucket list in my life of going to a Michelin star restaurant in every country we visited in 2022, which, again, was only ten countries. But that was amazing. I'll never probably do it again.

[00:14:25] Caroline: Oh, 2022 was amazing, but if you're talking about, like you said, what year was the most aligned with who we are in our natural state of being and had the right amount of. Just what I wrote down here is 2023 was a year of contentment for us. It was really a year of gratitude, of slowing down, of rebuilding a life. It was the beginning of a new chapter. We got to sort of reassemble our relationship. Not in a way where it was like, falling apart, but 2022 really shook it up in a way.

[00:14:58] Jason: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it was so many challenges. It was so many uncomfortable moments. It was so many new things we had to experience. I mean, we're literally around, like, ten different languages, essentially, in the year, and that's very difficult. I mean, it's very difficult when your natural state isn't we love traveling. We travel all the time. It's like we went from one to two trips per year to literally traveling every single day for ten months straight.

[00:15:21] Caroline: Yeah. So 2023 was really for us about slowing down, putting down roots in a new place. And we just spent, I think, our time really well on the things that we wanted to spend time on. So it was a lot of getting our health back together after being sort of, like, disrupted of travel.

[00:15:37] Jason: Incredibly difficult to work out when you're packing your bag every four days.

[00:15:40] Caroline: Yeah. So you and I worked out almost every day of the entire year, which felt like a big win, and we made friends. So you've heard us all year talk about our neighbors on this podcast. We really put down roots in this neighborhood, and we love our neighborhood. We have friends beyond just our small town. We went to the beach every single week. We just enjoyed living here.

[00:16:02] Jason: Yeah, I think if you want to hear more about the Portugal stuff, go back an episode or two, I think. Was it last episode, the final episode?

[00:16:09] Caroline: Yeah, two episodes. Because enough was our...

[00:16:11] Jason: Anyway, scroll back through our episode library, like, two episodes ago from this one, and we did a full episode about our life in Portugal in the one year, so you can hear more about that. But I think the biggest thing for me and why it's easy to say, like, this year is kind of like the best year we've had in our lives yet, is the combination of coming off of a year of travel, being in comfort every day, and not having those challenges. It makes you realize, like, okay, I'm not the type of person who wants adventure every day of my life. Having our businesses be at a predictable, really WAIM is at a very predictable place. And we've got a really good system for that. We've got a great community. We have this podcast, we have our newsletter. Things are just really humming along. It's taken us five years to get there, and we've talked about that in many episodes. And then I think, like you said, just our relationship kind of coming back together and having a place that felt like we had enough friends, we had enough things to do to have some little moments and memories, and none of it felt... It felt challenging, but it didn't feel as challenging as I maybe thought it would be moving to a new country.

[00:17:07] Caroline: Completely. I wrote down here, my word for 2023 was capable. I think I mentioned this maybe at the top of the year, but after completely breaking myself down in 2019 with just the worst rock bottom for me that I've ever hit, this is with my anxiety and just my health in general, year by year, then being hit with the pandemic right after that, I had to sort of rebuild myself, and 2022 was really putting that to the test. But it pushed me in a way where I started. I mean, I think I finally, at the end of 22, started feeling like, wow, my anxiety levels on a daily basis are much lower. I can't believe what I was able to accomplish this year. And so I went into 2023 going, I want to prove to myself, like, almost rebrand my identity in a way to myself. I used to have this picture of myself as a hypersensitive, anxiety ridden person, and I still take all the best parts of that identity. I'm still a sensitive person. I'm a deep feeler. But I wanted to challenge this notion that I would just crumble under challenges or curveballs or uncertainty. And I think I really proved that to myself this year. And just like, starting to drive again and navigating a place where I don't know the language and I just don't experience the self doubt that I did or the crippling anxiety that I did before. So that's a huge one for me.

[00:18:26] Jason: Yeah. Let's jump down to health because I think it kind of dovetails perfectly here. So I would say 2023, very solid year for our health. As you mentioned, good, consistent exercise. We got into a good rhythm of good health, eating wise. We don't eat out a ton, but even when we do, just the portion sizes here are so much smaller. So it even feels like I couldn't remember really one meal that we had here in Portugal that I left the restaurant being like, oh, I overdid it. It's very rare that that happens here. And I think it just adds to our overall health that even when we do go out and splurge on, like, a meal, it still doesn't feel like it does.

[00:19:02] Caroline: One thing that I just realized, as you were saying that about food and stuff, too, this change happened so gradually that I didn't even notice it. But I remembered at the beginning of the year, so a change that we made in the middle of the year was we stopped buying alcohol to drink at home. And so we still have a couple of things on hand for a special occasion or whatever, but I used to buy a bottle of wine, and some days during the week, we would have a glass of wine in the evening and stuff. And I just didn't love the way that I felt when I woke up. I still love drinking.

[00:19:31] Jason: Oh, we love wine.

[00:19:32] Caroline: I still love a glass of wine. I still love a cocktail when go out. But I just thought to myself, what would happen if I stopped buying it for the house? And it was such an easy transition because I think we had already cut way back. And the impact that that has had on my health in terms of feeling more energized. And then it also feels special when we go out and I do have a cocktail. I was describing this to a friend. The best way I can describe it is it feels additive. It doesn't feel like I'm using alcohol to numb anything or remove anything. It feels like I'm using it as, like, a social enjoyment mechanism. And for me, that works. I totally understand everyone has a unique relationship to alcohol, but in case you're someone who's been thinking about cutting back, that was a really easy way for us to cut back tremendously. Was just stop buying it at the store.

[00:20:18] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Those three euro bottles of wine, though, in Europe, it's amazing.

[00:20:22] Caroline: Yeah, I think that's why we probably started out, because I was like, every bottle of wine is €4. I'm going to get it. It's delicious.

[00:20:28] Jason: Yeah. Cool. Let's pivot over to work. So we did a couple of experiments this year that we would say went well. So the first one at the beginning of the year was the Behind the Build series. So this is where we kind of just wanted to do like a weird different thing where we did kind of a day watch us build a thing, and we just basically rebuilt our homepage and then lead magnet for the homepage. So that was a fun project that we experimented with. We did kind of a pay what you want model. Didn't make very much money, but that wasn't really the point of it. It was just kind of like, have fun. Then we also did the Calm Business Encyclopedia, which that is a huge project that we undertook, finished, and not even listed on here was our WAIM dashboard, which we redid our entire WAIM dashboard.

[00:21:11] Caroline: Well, you have that in what didn't go well in 2023.

[00:21:13] Jason: It also did go well.

[00:21:14] Caroline: We got it done.

[00:21:14] Jason: It exists. I think it's a huge improvement over what we had before.

[00:21:19] Caroline: Totally.

[00:21:19] Jason: And then probably our biggest surprise of the year was WAIM of Stones.

[00:21:23] Caroline: Definitely.

[00:21:23] Jason: So WAIM of Stones, if you haven't heard us talk about it before, it is our community accountability game within our Wandering Aimfully Unlimited program. This is for our members only in Slack. And we kind of just created this on a whim. I had been doing these what I called Momentum Monday Check-ins through Slack for a couple years, and this was directly one on one with community numbers. But it was just taking up too much of my time.

[00:21:42] Caroline: It was taking two days of your week every week, and that was just too much time.

[00:21:46] Jason: And so we were like, well, what's a way that we could do this that still has some accountability, but kind of brings everybody together? And so we both came up with this.

[00:21:52] Caroline: Yeah, we Rudolph the red zone reindeered it.

[00:21:54] Jason: Yeah, it was great. And so this game basically became this monthly check in system in Slack. Every week, people would check in. You would earn a WAIM-finity stone. It was just this little digital stone. And it just became this fun thing where you created these game boards. And over the year, we had 200 and I think 15 WAIMers play the entire year. Our highest month had 101 people play. We had a virtual pizza party to celebrate that 100 people played. And people have said in the community it's the best accountability system they've ever been a part of. They actually stuck with it. They got things done.

[00:22:25] Caroline: I also give you so much credit, your weekly Slack messages that you put a lot of love into. You keep the game alive. You keep it fun and it just, to me, WAIM of Stones is such a perfect example from this year of do something a little weird. Like really, whatever you're doing in your business, if it's lost it's luster or you need to make it more efficient or you need to do it, you need to switch it up, really think outside of the box and ask yourself, how can I make this fun? How could I do it differently than people are doing it? And let me just try it and experiment with it. And it is one of the huge surprises that came out of the year is I don't know any other online business community that does a themed game for accountability. And that's really fun.

[00:23:04] Jason: It's also a perfect example of an unmarketable thing. You can't even really explain it to someone. I'm like, it's an accountability game. It's in Slack. And we made up these game boards and like what? Why? And then when you're in there and you're actually doing it, everybody loves it.

[00:23:18] Caroline: Right.

[00:23:18] Jason: And so it just kind of became this really fun thing. So we are doing it again for our members in 2024 with a new theme, which...

[00:23:24] Caroline: New theme.

[00:23:25] Jason: We're excited to put out there and we'll help everybody reach their goals every month and just kind of be accountable. And also it brings the Slack community kind of to life. So I think that's a very positive thing that went well. Do you want to talk about revenue for WAIM?

[00:23:39] Caroline: Yeah, it's funny that we don't even mention this as the first thing, but this was our highest revenue year for WAIM. And despite the fact that our web traffic and email subscriber growth is still declining, which is just incredible to me, that really speaks to the fact that we've now hit this word of mouth threshold. I feel like after five years in business, I really believe that the more we pour into our members, the more they want to tell their audiences about it. And I think that just doing things differently and being kind of that membership community that is not about hustling and about hyper growth, but about balancing a good life in the process, there isn't that much of that out there. And so I think people, the word gets out and so it attracts the type of people who do want to grow slowly and grow steadily, and it just continues to show us that we're doing something right.

[00:24:33] Jason: Yeah. And I think it's a perfect example too, of we had, I mean, four times, five times the amount of web traffic when we first started Wandering Aimfully, we combined our businesses, but both of our websites were bringing in a more generic traffic base off of a couple of articles that were more generic, not really tied to our core audience of client based business owners trying to transition to digital products. And as we just kind of let those posts die, if you will, our traffic has really just become still a good amount of general people who maybe don't care about that, but we have honed in that we're a place for those people. And so now, with lower sign ups and lower traffic, it's the right people. And it's a good example of that where you have a business and you're like, oh, well, I'm getting 500 new email subscribers a month. That's great. But if they don't buy your stuff, it doesn't matter. You're filling an email list of people who are never going to buy from you. It'd be better to get 50 who are very interested in what you're selling. And if five of those buy every month and your product is priced well, then you can run a sustainable business. And that's really what we've found. Our goal this year was 300 new WAIMers added. And I didn't even realize that was the goal that we set until I looked at this. We had 310. Very good on us to hit our high goal this past year. And a huge shout out to all of our WAIMers who help promote WAIM. Because again, like you said, word of mouth is the best way people find out about WAIM.

[00:25:54] Caroline: I would like to submit a short caveat and side tangent.

[00:25:58] Jason: Okay, fantastic.

[00:25:59] Caroline: Which is I think I'm witnessing within myself right now. It makes me kind of uncomfortable sometimes to talk about things that go really well. So it's hard for me to talk about, okay, it's the best year of revenue this year, or it's hard for me to talk about, this is one of the most content years of our lives, because I know how many people out there are struggling, how many people are struggling to build their businesses, how many people are still struggling for that next client, or making their bills, or going through a health crisis, or a lonely stretch of time or breakups, all these things. And I just want to take a moment to say I know that, and I don't ever want to make it seem like we are oblivious to that. That being said, something that I want to do with Wandering Aimfully is to be a voice for not only sharing the hard things in life, but also sharing the good things. It's like you go back a few years and you can go to the podcast episodes where we talk about when I couldn't work for six months and when you and I had the hardest year of our marriage because we were navigating health stuff together and that was really hard. But I want to share that and I want to share the good and I want to normalize that for everyone, where if you're having a good year, I don't want you to feel bashful about having gratitude for that and acknowledging that. And I want you to be able to live in that joy. If you had the worst year, I don't want you to feel bashful about or ashamed of saying this didn't go to plan. This really knocked me down. I'm in a bad place. I think we should all feel comfortable enough to share the authentic breadth of human emotion. So anyway, that's my quick side tangent, because, I don't know, it makes me feel weird when I'm like, we had this great year, and I know that's not true for everyone, but I want to feel confident enough to share when it's good and when it's bad.

[00:27:47] Jason: I think it's also just as the years go on, when we're past the thickest part of the pandemic, like, obviously Covid-19 is going to exist in our lives forever moving forward. But there was a time when none of us left the house. I think part of this, getting through these years is kind of readjusting back to a time when you're like, oh, I can be happy for the majority of what happened this year, there's always going to be things that are difficult. We're going to have ups and downs just like everybody else. But I do think it's good to also soak in these moments. And that's what I think we've tried to do is just be really grateful because a couple of years ago, this is not even possible and you didn't even know if it was going to be possible again.

[00:28:26] Caroline: And I think the way that our brains work, years of your life could go by. Like, you might look back at this year. Maybe you're one of those people who's like it was just kind of a meh year. It wasn't a bad one. It wasn't a good one. But I wonder how much of that is not making the decision to really soak up all the goodness of this year. Like, I don't want to go through years of my life where 20 years from now I look back and I think to myself, wow, that was actually one of the best years of my life. I just didn't have gratitude enough in the moment to acknowledge it. And so I think that's a little bit of what we're doing here as well, is just we've cultivated this practice of gratitude and mindfulness that sometimes having the best year of your life is as simple as deciding that it was a really great year.

[00:29:08] Jason: Yeah. Even if it was simple.

[00:29:09] Caroline: Even if it was simple.

[00:29:10] Jason: You weren't traveling around. All right, last item here in the what went well, I added this in the 24th hour, which was just I love these types of things. So what was the best life purchase you made this year, and what was the best business purchase or one that you've already had that just made the biggest impact for you?

[00:29:27] Caroline: Right.

[00:29:27] Jason: So for you, ma'am.

[00:29:29] Caroline: Okay, I'll start. I know this is, like, a little bit of a not inexpensive one, but it is the true answer, which is for life. Buying the Faleton.

[00:29:39] Jason: The Faleton.

[00:29:40] Caroline: And putting it in our bonus room. Having a method of exercise that I don't loathe at our house is, to me, the life hack because even though we go to a little gym that's walking distance, and I still go there with you to lift weights and everything, even though I'm trying something different this year, but having that bike to be able to, even on the days when I didn't want to work out, go, Caroline, all you got to do is sit on the bike for ten minutes. And inevitably, I get on the bike for ten minutes, I do a ride, I want to go longer, or I put on a thing, and I ride for 30 minutes. Like, even on the days where I wasn't really giving it my all, something is better than nothing. And for me, it's all about keeping up the daily habit. And so that was the convenience of having it downstairs.

[00:30:24] Jason: For sure. And also, it was very affordable when you compare it.

[00:30:27] Caroline: Compare it to a Peloton.

[00:30:28] Jason: Yeah, exactly. All right, so that's for your life.

[00:30:31] Caroline: What's your life?

[00:30:32] Jason: Oh, we're jumping back and forth. Okay. Wow. I was trying to think about this. I thought the obvious answer would be something in baking because about my sourdough game. I got a really solid recipe. Been baking cookies. I only had two bad batches of cookies the entire year.

[00:30:46] Caroline: Wow, congrats.

[00:30:46] Jason: Thank you so much. No big deal. I'm about to get in some pretzels, which is going to be fun. But the number one thing for me, I realized is the Hario Switch. So for all my coffee nerds out there, this is my choice. It is a little pour over device, and it's got a little switch as it talks about where it opens and closes the filter to let the coffee through. I found an amazing Hario Switch recipe that I absolutely love, and I've been making it, like, literally almost every day since I bought this thing for myself.

[00:31:12] Caroline: I had a very poignant moment of gratitude this morning where I thought to myself, you make my coffee every morning.

[00:31:19] Jason: And I don't do it in like a Mr. Coffee brewer.

[00:31:22] Caroline: I just want you to know.

[00:31:22] Jason: I'm Mr. Coffee brewer and I'm hand pouring the coffee.

[00:31:25] Caroline: Here in this public forum, I just wanted to acknowledge you.

[00:31:28] Jason: I'm grinding the beans.

[00:31:28] Caroline: Thank you.

[00:31:29] Jason: Every morning, measured perfectly, the right temperature of water.

[00:31:32] Caroline: You really do grind my beans, don't you?

[00:31:35] Jason: Oh, yeah, I do. So anyway, the Hario Switch, we'll leave a link directly to that in the description if you want to check it out. If you're a coffee nerd, if you like making pour over coffee, I would highly recommend trying it. Maybe I'll also remember to include the recipe that I like. It's a little bit finicky of a recipe, but it literally takes like three minutes. But you kind of got to be hands on for the three minutes. There's a lot going on, but it makes a delicious cup of coffee almost every time with every type of bean.

[00:31:58] Caroline: Amazing.

[00:31:58] Jason: That's my life thing. All right, what's your business?

[00:32:00] Caroline: Okay, my business thing, I think we've actually been using this for two years now, but it's just the one that came to my mind. This is a subscription to the website Icons8.com.

[00:32:10] Jason: Nice.

[00:32:11] Caroline: And as someone who makes this year especially, or 2023 especially, a ton of Keynote presentations, a ton of design assets and things. This is a website. I mean, they do different things, but the main subscription that I pay for is for icons. It is an icon library of all these different styles. Let me tell you what's great about it, though. It's only like, I think, $8 a month. But you can search any icon and then they have one style that you can just choose. So I have a style that I use for all of the coaching presentations and the library is just endless.

[00:32:43] Jason: Cool.

[00:32:43] Caroline: And then what's cool is let's say I search like computer or I search like revenue or whatever. You click into the icon and you can recolor it right there so I can add our brand colors, recolor the icon and then download it either as a pretty large size PNG or an SVG. So a vector file. And it's just like really helped my workflow. If you're someone who uses icons on a regular basis, if you want to create presentations, if you want to create social media assets and you want consistent icons, rather than just buying one set, finding out that you don't have enough. Anyway, I just like it.

[00:33:18] Jason: Cool. That's a good one.

[00:33:19] Caroline: Every single time I use it I'm like, this is worth $8 a month.

[00:33:22] Jason: I always love it when you show me the coaching presentations. I'm like, look at all these custom icons we have. These are amazing. So it's fun. I was told that I was not allowed for my business purchase to mention Screen Studio as the number one business purchase that I made. Screen Studio that I love, which is a screen recording application that is just fantastic. It's called Screen Studio.

[00:33:42] Caroline: I just realized you probably have only mentioned it twice.

[00:33:45] Jason: On the podcast.

[00:33:45] Caroline: But you say it to me all the time.

[00:33:47] Jason: Because it's awesome. I love it. If you record little screen recordings, I know so many of you listeners use something like Loom, and if you use it just like Loom, just to show a video to a friend, that's fine. But if you're recording like demo videos or you're trying to walk through something especially for Teachery.

[00:34:00] Caroline: That you're going to put up for lots of people.

[00:34:02] Jason: It's super helpful because it does like this auto zoom feature.

[00:34:05] Caroline: Screen Studio is super helpful.

[00:34:06] Jason: Screen Studio does this. So I really love it. It's not that expensive, especially for a video editing application. What used to take me, what would be like a six hour edit in Final Cut Pro I can do in Screen Studio in like 20 minutes. No joke. And it's not using like AI to do it. It's still a video editor, but wow, is it fantastic. So I'm not allowed to mention Screen Studio.

[00:34:24] Caroline: That's not it.

[00:34:24] Jason: Link in the description of this podcast episode, if you want to click through and buy it with our affiliate link, you can do that. Screen Studio. I am going to mention because I can't mention.

[00:34:32] Caroline: You can't mention.

[00:34:32] Jason: Screen Studio.

[00:34:33] Caroline: Correct.

[00:34:34] Jason: Is Arc Browser.

[00:34:34] Caroline: Arc Browser, yep.

[00:34:35] Jason: So I'm pretty sure Arc Browser came out this past year. And this is a browser built by or built on the chromium thing. So it's a chrome browser, but they kind of changed the way that you think about using a browser. And instead of like a horizontal bookmark.

[00:34:50] Caroline: I do want credit. I did show this to you.

[00:34:52] Jason: You did show this to me. Instead of like a horizontal bookmarks bar, like we're all used to, or with folders or whatever, it does it on the side with tabs. And so you can have multiple spaces or what they call them. So, like, I have a space for just like my morning routine stuff, which is really just like, it's YouTube, it's my Google calendar. And then I think I have just this calm screen that's just like a gradient that's just nothing. So if I'm listening to a podcast or whatever, I just have nothing on screen. Then I have the WAIM space, which is all the things I use in WAIM, like all the go to bookmarks that I use. Then I have the Teachery space, and then I just have like a random space, which is like... Or I look at like ESPN or whatever, and then I have a cooking space, which is like all my recipes. But I just love... to people who love design and love thoughtful little interactions, you can change the backgrounds, and you can change the colors of things, you can brand little things, and it just makes it a much more enjoyable experience. I'm not a huge keep a lot of tabs open person, so I didn't like that about this when I first started. But the way they do it makes me feel like I don't have 57 tabs open, and I can't tell where I am in my browser.

[00:35:57] Caroline: As someone who does keep a lot of tabs open, I love it for that. And then also the feature that I love is anything that's not a pinned tab. Pinned, meaning it will stay up. It disappears after 24 hours. And I love that because every day you start new and you can... remember for those of us who are tab lovers, you can always go back to your history, you can always find the tab, but it's just like it's tab bankruptcy every day. And I like that because it keeps it clean. And I love the spaces feature. The only thing I don't love about it sometimes, which you can fix, is when you have the sidebar open. Most websites, especially if you're on a laptop, are not built for the screen resolution of such a narrow window. But you can hide the sidebar, which goes full width, and it's fine.

[00:36:43] Jason: Yeah. All right, so those are our picks. Again, we'll leave some links in the show notes if you care about those. Let's transition to what didn't go well, and let's talk about that.

[00:36:54] Caroline: Okay.

[00:36:55] Jason: First thing that's on here, I'll just mention, is my bum knee. So for those of you who have not heard the knee saga, I had two ACL tears, one on each knee, back in the 2007, 2008 years playing basketball. I'm a bigger person. I carry a good amount of weight and muscle on my body, and I think my knees are just not built to handle that. And this year we got into paddle, which is really fun. It's a little...

[00:37:17] Caroline: Short lived, but, yeah, we did get very into it.

[00:37:19] Jason: Three weeks.

[00:37:20] Caroline: Three weeks.

[00:37:20] Jason: And I come to find out I had some really strong knee soreness. And I'm a person who doesn't complain a lot about pain, and this was really bad. Went and got an MRI. I tore my ACL again. I basically have, like, no meniscuses left. It's not... menisci? Maybe it's not good. Basically, the doctor, when we went and saw him, he was like, hey, man, this is not a good knee.

[00:37:42] Caroline: Not a good knee.

[00:37:43] Jason: And so I'm going to have to have a little arthroscopic surgery just to clean some stuff up. But I will say in the past couple of months, I've been extremely diligent about strengthening my legs and working on it. I still have pain every single day. That's not going to go away because it's basically just arthritis at this point. But I'm building more strength so I can actually be more mobile and I don't feel as bad. But that has been kind of like, what didn't go well in 2023 is that my ailing body is starting to catch up with me. So if I can get a robot knee, I'll take it.

[00:38:08] Caroline: Those bodies, they really are not built to last.

[00:38:10] Jason: They fall apart. Okay, so that's my only little thing there. You want to talk about travel burnout?

[00:38:16] Caroline: I wrote what didn't go well, but it was just like, I really thought we were going to explore more of Portugal this year or go to different places in Europe. But turns out I wrote, is travel burnout a thing? I think we just went so hard on travel in 2022. See earlier in the episode. That we just wanted to stay home, and we love it here so much here being like our home, that we would check in every month and be like, want to plan a trip? Want to plan a trip? And it would just eventually be like, no. So we did plan to do more travel, and we just decided not to. We didn't want to.

[00:38:48] Jason: Yeah. And I think I had this realization. I told you about that one day where I was like, man, if you would ask anybody, don't you want to do a full year of travel to be like, yes, that's a dream. But then when you do it, it's like the classic thing. It's like, for us, it's just too much. You get to the end of it, and you're like, that was amazing. We are so fortunate we were able to do that.

[00:39:09] Caroline: So glad we did.

[00:39:09] Jason: It was too much. And it's like, if you could have just done six months of it with longer breaks, it probably would have been a better overall year. We wouldn't have had travel burn at the end. But you just don't know. We always talk about the hot stove moment. It's like, that was the hot stove where we just, like, we touched too much travel, and it caused a year of not wanting to travel. But that's okay. It's not a big deal.

[00:39:26] Caroline: Well, and that's the funny thing about just the concept of enough is sometimes you don't know what enough is until you hit too much.

[00:39:32] Jason: Exactly. It's like when you're eating peanut butter M&M's, you're. You have one handful.

[00:39:36] Caroline: A bag? That's too much.

[00:39:38] Jason: And then you have a second handful, and you're like, my hands are a little too big to have two handfuls of these peanut butter M&M's.

[00:39:43] Caroline: And I learned that.

[00:39:44] Jason: Also, peanut butter M&M's? Number one on the candy.

[00:39:46] Caroline: Delicious.

[00:39:46] Jason: All right, the WAIM dashboard project, we mentioned this in the good category because I'm so happy that we have this project, and it is out there for our members. It is a much better experience going through life.

[00:39:56] Caroline: I'm really proud of it.

[00:39:57] Jason: Saving things. You did an unbelievable job completely redesigning basically what is an entire application, a web application.

[00:40:03] Caroline: Thank you.

[00:40:04] Jason: But it took so much longer than we wanted. It cost a little bit more than we wanted. And it's just the classic thing of, like, when you're building something custom like that and you're really trying to execute. There's your Rudolph the red zone reindeer bingo. Execute a vision for something that doesn't really exist, but you want it to exist in the way that you do. It's just difficult. I do not think in the years that we've been doing this now it is literally impossible for that type of project to go smoothly. It's going to be rocky and bumpy. You're going to have to give things up that you don't want to. And that's a little bit of a bummer that that's how that project kind of ended.

[00:40:38] Caroline: Yeah. And we went into this project even being like, okay, the first dashboard didn't go well, so let's learn from that. And so we did intense documentation. When I say intense documentation, I mean meticulous documentation. But what you realize is a developer is coming in, they're not in your business day to day. So even when they're reading a meticulously documented thing about the functionality that you want, they don't really know the why behind that. And so it's hard for them to foresee how all the pieces connect together. And so project scope and things like that, scope creep and things like that just happen near the end of the project. And to be truthful, this is just with any person that is working on a project for a long period of time, you can tell there's a point in the project where they have lost interest in it as well.

[00:41:26] Jason: Because it's gone over the time. And we really tried to do just from experience in working with developers, we tried to really hedge our bets at the beginning of this, we tried to say...

[00:41:33] Caroline: Even he said all the right things. Right. He said, here are the milestones. If I don't do it by x date, you don't have to pay me. Well, that's good and, well, until it comes to that and we go to ourselves, are we really not going to?

[00:41:43] Jason: Yeah, we have a three quarters finished dashboard that our members can't use and doesn't function like it has to be finished.

[00:41:47] Caroline: Exactly.

[00:41:48] Jason: So anyway, it didn't go extremely well. It did get finished. We are very proud of it. Now our members enjoy it.

[00:41:54] Caroline: It works.

[00:41:54] Jason: It works very well. It's a lot easier for us to update a lot of different things in it. So very happy to have it.

[00:41:59] Caroline: Yeah. And we'll just carry those lessons forward to the next time.

[00:42:02] Jason: I went back to our 2022 review and I pulled out this line that we wrote, which is, we think 2023 is the year Teachery makes its biggest jump since it was created back in 2013. No, that didn't happen. So we really wanted to focus on Teachery this past year. We did some focus, but we really only spent time working on the product as the only thing that's been focused on for years. So that didn't go well. We are very excited that we were able to launch themes as a part of Teachery. We launched course hubs as a part of Teachery. I think that there were a lot of infrastructure things that we kind of shored up that have been lingering kind of technical debt for years. There's always going to be those to fix. But I think that there's a lot of change coming for Teachery this year. And I believe us when we say it this time around, but we just looking back...

[00:42:55] Caroline: We think 2024 is the year Teachery makes its biggest jump since it was created back in 2013.

[00:43:00] Jason: Yeah, this is the year.

[00:43:01] Caroline: This is the year, babe.

[00:43:02] Jason: This is the year. So, yeah. You can't prioritize something last and expect to make strides with it.

[00:43:07] Caroline: Yeah. The one thing I wanted to say about this is it's kind of funny now looking back that we wrote that, that we think it's going to be the biggest jump because our approach was Teachery Fridays. This is what we decided. We were like we're going to do... because WAIM still takes... We were kind of still getting a process with WAIM. We were getting back into things after travel full time. So we said Teachery Fridays. We're going to work on WAIM Monday to Thursday, and then on Fridays we're going to dedicate a whole day to Teachery. And we thought that was going to get us the biggest jump.

[00:43:35] Jason: Yeah, but you got to think, like, that's adding in 52 days of working on Teachery in a year.

[00:43:40] Caroline: From zero.

[00:43:41] Jason: Previously, it was zero.

[00:43:42] Caroline: Okay.

[00:43:42] Jason: So it's zero to 52 is a million percent increase.

[00:43:45] Caroline: Yeah. So now what we're going to try is to flip that. So the priority is we start the week with Teachery. Basically, Monday through Thursday is going to be mostly Teachery. We will record the podcast still on Tuesdays and then Fridays will be when we do WAIM because now WAIM is totally streamlined. And of course I say like, Fridays is WAIM, but we're obviously helping our members throughout the week and still very present. It's just you don't need a ton of attention and focus to growing WAIM. Right. It's sort of on a trajectory.

[00:44:17] Jason: Yeah. We have figured out WAIM, so we know what works. We know the monthly coaching, we know the emails, we know putting the different products in front of people through the library, the WAIM of Stones game. That is a well-oiled machine at this point. And we're just going to keep running that machine. We're not going to abandon it. It's not going to get less time. It's just our bulk of our time is going to get to prioritize Teachery.

[00:44:36] Caroline: I think our biggest challenge and what we need to learn from 2023 is, I think, part of what happened, why Teachery didn't get the attention it deserves is because when you encounter resistance, you're always going to fall back on the thing that feels more natural and easy to you. And so growing Teachery is so much more resistance because it's starting back at the beginning. We don't know what works yet. It's just like the boulder has not budged at all, and so there's no momentum there. So when we are trying to think about what we want to do for business, if you go to the WAIM pasture, it's just like blue skies and anything goes and we feel like we know what we're doing and all the ideas are coming. Why would I go there rather than the dark, scary, cavernous canyon of Teachery? I'm going to go to the bright pastures because I know it and it's easy. And for you, listening to this, maybe design versus marketing, right? Like the bright pasture is design. And so when you encounter a thing of what am I going to work on today? You're not going to go to the big, scary canyon of marketing that you're uncomfortable doing it. You don't know how to write sales emails. You don't want to make content and put yourself out there. I'm just going to go redesign my website for the 12th time, right? Shots fired. But I've been there, and that's what we did with WAIM and Teachery this year. And so I think our biggest challenge of 2024 is going to be to boldly walk into that canyon of uncertainty with Teachery and to just do the harder thing and to grow it and to just be more comfortable with that uncertainty.

[00:45:59] Jason: All right, we'll talk more about that in a few minutes here. Let's pivot over to what we didn't do this year on purpose.

[00:46:06] Caroline: I added this section because part of Wandering Aimfully is we always talk about enough and not growing just for growth's sake. And a lot of times I forget to mention the decisions that we make to intentionally not do things. The money we leave on the table and not enough people talk about that. People talk about what went well and what they grew and the decisions they made, but not the decisions they made to not do something. So this is a new section.

[00:46:33] Jason: We already talked about scaling back on travel. So it was very purposeful that we did not travel really that much at all. We still have not been back on social media specifically, really Instagram. And this has just been the best decision ever, really, for our mental health because we don't feel like we're stuck in the rat race of creating content. And what's going to stand out? Oh, we're pivoting to reels. And what's next? What do we have to be doing? And I think that if you're early on in business, social media is obviously a thing that is probably important to get traction. But we do still believe there's a different way to do that. And I think we've been proof that you don't have to be on social media to grow a business. And I would say that this purposeful decision is a great thing that we continue not to do.

[00:47:13] Caroline: Yeah, it's like, what did I tell you yesterday? I couldn't find my phone last night when it started to get dark, and I was like, where's my phone? I realized I had left it in my purse after we went to lunch, and I was like, you know that you've broken the addiction to your phone and social media when you can lose it for 4 hours and that can happen. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we had such a good 2023, full of gratitude, full of contentment, and I was on social media the least of any year of my life. I don't think that those two things are not related. I think every time I go back in, because I do have, like, a little personal Instagram still that I use, it has 40 followers. It's just for...

[00:47:51] Jason: Friends and family.

[00:47:52] Caroline: Friends and family to follow along with our life in Portugal. And I am glad I did that because it still keeps me connected to some friends that I probably wouldn't just text out of the blue, but I don't have the addiction of being on there. So I only probably post the story once a week or whatever, and that has been a really good boundary for me. And just, I continue to even December when I'm on my phone a little bit more because I'm not working as much. I would find myself in reels for even just a few minutes and going like, oh, my God. The way that it reignites the comparison in your mind, or I was telling you, I'm getting fed all this parenting content now, and I'm like, being a parent in this era of social media has to be exhausting. Don't do this, do this, don't do this, do this. These activities. Screen time. No screen time. Gentle parenting. Not gentle parenting. It's just too much.

[00:48:43] Jason: Yeah. So anyway, that was a good one that we continued not to do. The other one when we started this year, in 2023, when we started the year, we had planned to do too many launches with Wandering Aimfully. So we were going to...

[00:48:56] Caroline: Because it's kind of hard to tell. Mini launches, as in M-I-N-I?

[00:48:59] Jason: Yeah, mini.

[00:49:00] Caroline: When you said too many launches, it sounded like T-O-O-M-A-N-Y.

[00:49:04] Jason: Number two. Mini, as in small. Launches, as in selling things. We had planned to do two of those throughout the year. And Behind the Build live was kind of like our first getting into maybe what one of those would be. And we really just decided after doing that, this is not worth the time and effort and even the added revenue that we think it probably would have brought to our business, it wouldn't have been worth the stress and it wouldn't have been worth the time. So let's just continue to focus on WAIM. We have our two enrollment periods throughout the year. Let's just do that. That will be enough. And we will make more revenue this year doing those than we have in previous years. So that's good enough. And we don't...

[00:49:38] Caroline: Yeah. And I think this happens when you do run a predictable business, is you get a little bit of an itch to experiment, to try something different. You go, we've been selling the same thing for so long. Do we want to try something different? And, yeah, you try that. And you go, oh, actually, I remember why I simplified my business down to just one thing, because I know this really well. And sometimes you got to go outside of that sort of constraint in order to, like we said, sometimes you have got to go too much in order to pull back. And this was one of those things.

[00:50:04] Jason: And I think it's a good example of, even when you're running a predictable business, that can be a little bit boring, if you will, because you don't have the new challenge, you don't have new things. You really have to push back against the idea of, like, well, what if I just made a new thing and sold it and it would just be fun. It's like, no, do the predictable thing because this is why you set this up, so that it would be easier for you.

[00:50:24] Caroline: Totally.

[00:50:24] Jason: And then we were going to do a Black Friday surprise, not a sale. We were actually going to do giving something away for free. But as we got closer to that, as we knew we were traveling back to the States during that time, we were like, this is setting us up for a ton of extra work for what reason?

[00:50:41] Caroline: It was a great idea, and it's still something I would love to do in the future. But for the place we were in at the time we just had to cut it.

[00:50:47] Jason: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things that it's all well and good when you set these plans at the beginning of the year, but you just don't know where the year is going to go. So it's always good to reevaluate as you're going through. Like, do I still want to do this thing? Because previous me said that this would be a good idea, but current me is like, this is not a good idea. I'm not going to do this.

[00:51:04] Caroline: We fall into this trap sometimes ourselves where we go, but we have to do the Black Friday email. You're like, what boss told you you had to do that? Oh, it was me.

[00:51:10] Jason: It was previous me who was in this Notion document.

[00:51:15] Caroline: Tell me nobody else knows about this except for just in my head and I'm trying to hold myself to a standard that only exists in my mind. It's absurd.

[00:51:23] Jason: Yeah. All right, so those are the things we didn't do. Now let's finish up here with our 2024 preview. What is next? What are we focusing on this year?

[00:51:32] Caroline: Actually, 2024 is going to be the year where Teachery makes its biggest jump since it was created back in 2013.

[00:51:39] Jason: Great job. Great job. We're using that quote again, in case you couldn't tell. Yeah. So we are going to flip the switch here. We've got a little bit of housekeeping stuff in the month of January to kind of like get ourselves ready to switch over to working on Teachery more than WAIM, which we'll talk about one of those in a second. But essentially the idea for us is four days of the week we're going to focus on Teachery work. We're still going to be doing the WAIM stuff, as we mentioned, but the bulk of the work is Teachery, and then Friday is more WAIM stuff. We already actually have a couple of things that we want to do with WAIM. Like we want to experiment with a new home page, but a very simplified kind of email capture page. We have some shoring up of some automations and things to clean up, but instead of doing those, as we would put them as the priority first, because WAIM has always been the priority, Teachery is going to be the priority. Those then move to Fridays and we'll see how they go.

[00:52:23] Caroline: And part of the journey, the fun way that Teachery, our software platform, interacts with WAIM, our coaching community, is we are taking all of our WAIMers along for the ride this year as we try to grow Teachery. So we're going back to the beginning to follow our un-boring business roadmap. That's the framework that we teach inside of our coaching program, WAIM Unlimited. We're going to be using that in order to apply that to a software business. And most people inside of WAIM Unlimited don't have software businesses. But the point we're trying to make is this idea of experimentation, this idea of steady content, this idea of marketing bridges is transferable to any online business. So you're going to be able to watch us in real time do that. We're going to share some of those insights here on the podcast and we hope that it will also be a little bit more of a relatable thing for those of you who might be more towards that part of your journey where you're still trying to figure out what works in your business. Well, great. Now we're going to be able to share with you the Teachery side of what we work on, which is we have not figured out what works in that business yet... Well, to a degree.

[00:53:27] Jason: Yeah. One of the biggest decisions, and this one really just popped up.

[00:53:31] Caroline: Took us by surprise.

[00:53:32] Jason: A couple of weeks. I will give you credit, you have been kind of...

[00:53:35] Caroline: Harping on it.

[00:53:36] Jason: Itching at this for a while, like a little bit of like a scratch. You've been just kind of like scritching at.

[00:53:40] Caroline: Pawn scritching.

[00:53:41] Jason: Yeah. And I've just been like, no, our feet are in cement here, let's not do this. We're going to switch our email provider from Drip to ConvertKit. Now, many of you listening to this might already be ConvertKit users because you know that it's really a good email platform for the online creators. And honestly, it's the one that we have recommended to people to join. We basically never recommend Drip, ever. And we kind of, I'm not going to say we got swindled into using Drip, but we got convinced into using Drip a couple of years ago when we paid a consultant to teach us how to do this super fancy automation to try and automated sell things and customize. It was just way too much. But then we kind of just got stuck into using Drip and it worked. And I will say that there's nothing to complain about because we have continued to make the majority of our revenue through email marketing, and Drip serviced us very well for that. But I think in 2024, what we're realizing is we are using a platform that is not built for our type of business.

[00:54:36] Caroline: And then we started noticing every time they come out with new features in Drip, it gets further and further away from the type of business we run. So all the features are really built with this ecommerce business owner in mind. And so there's dashboards and graphs and things that we don't need to use. I don't need to know... you could argue...

[00:54:55] Jason: Abandoned carts.

[00:54:56] Caroline: The lifetime value of... It's like, I can track that myself. And so the more and more we thought about it, we're just like, is that a bad idea? It's never going to be easier to switch than it is today.

[00:55:08] Jason: Also, we give Nathan Barry so much credit because I've been friends with him for years and watched ConvertKit grow, and I think he has done such a good job of building this platform for people like us.

[00:55:17] Caroline: Totally.

[00:55:17] Jason: It's kind of one of those things where it's like we almost waited long enough for the platform to be suited for what we need. And the funny thing is, I used ConvertKit. I think you also used ConvertKit.

[00:55:27] Caroline: We both were at one point.

[00:55:28] Jason: Back in 2015, 2016. So it's interesting to come back and see like, oh, there's a ton of new stuff that's perfectly suited for us.

[00:55:35] Caroline: And going back to what we said before, there's a theme emerging here. We almost needed to do all the fancy automation stuff to realize what was and wasn't important, right? You need to try some of those things sometimes just to be able to know for your own business. This is too much complexity for not enough return. The irony is that the consultant that we... There's no shade to that person. I'm so glad that was money well spent at the time. They moved back to ConvertKit as well in 2019, too. And so it's like, the funny part is that we just...

[00:56:05] Jason: It was an experiment, I would say. It didn't fail or succeed. It was just something that we learned. The one thing I am excited about is Nathan set me up with ConvertKit.com/Jason six years ago. I still have it. You can still go to, it's a very old photo of me talking at some conference. And so we'll get to use that more because now we get to talk about ConvertKit. And there are just some really awesome features that ConvertKit has now of, like built in growth mechanisms.

[00:56:30] Caroline: Recommendations, et cetera.

[00:56:31] Jason: Excited to learn more about those. All right, next item on here.

[00:56:34] Caroline: Not sponsored. In 2024, we're going to continue to take our Portuguese lessons. Auz the Portuguese. Torojas cemanas, every week. And how did I say? Unosu objectivu.

[00:56:51] Jason: Our objective.

[00:56:52] Caroline: Para termino anu.

[00:56:55] Jason: For the end of the year.

[00:56:55] Caroline: End of the year.

[00:56:55] Jason: This is me translating your...

[00:57:06] Caroline: Falar now. Portuguese.

[00:57:09] Jason: So only speak Portuguese in our lessons every week with our instructor. That's our goal. Not necessarily to be able to speak to people out in the wild, because even, like, last week, we had a two minute audio to listen to and to listen to. It took us 45 minutes to understand 90% of what was said.

[00:57:26] Caroline: But to be fair, it took us 45 minutes to translate word for word.

[00:57:30] Jason: Like, we knew that Miguel went to Porto and we knew casa de musica. Yeah, there was a lot that we pulled out.

[00:57:37] Caroline: But to actually be able to understand word for word, it took us 45 minutes. So that got us a good laugh. But, yeah, again, our goal with Portuguese is to continue to do how we do everything. Slow and steady.

[00:57:50] Jason: Exactly.

[00:57:50] Caroline: Consistent, not intense.

[00:57:52] Jason: And this was really like, I think I have the biggest push on this is when we opted to say that we wanted to learn language here because if we're going to live here, we should learn language. That's the least that we can do. I did not want it to feel like homework and I didn't want it to feel like, oh, I got to go two times a week, I got to work on this an hour a day. I will very quickly hate it and then I will never do it again. This way, you found an amazing professor. We love hanging. We're probably going to hang out with her in person this year. It just has been so much fun.

[00:58:19] Caroline: Every lesson. She found out early on that we like games and so she basically does games.

[00:58:23] Jason: And I think it's fun for her. She gets to go in Canva and use a whole bunch of random stuff. Shout out to Canva this year.

[00:58:27] Caroline: It's amazing. And, yeah, that's it. Slow and steady. And I'm amazed at what we've been able to learn again, very slowly, but it builds and before you know it, you look back and you go, wow, I can read in Portuguese. That's cool.

[00:58:42] Jason: And then we've got maybe a little bit of travel this year.

[00:58:46] Caroline: We got a couple of things on the docket, but we'll see.

[00:58:48] Jason: A couple of small things.

[00:58:49] Caroline: We'll see.

[00:58:50] Jason: A couple in Portugal, maybe a couple out of Portugal. We will see. Right now, they're just tentatives.

[00:58:54] Caroline: Tentatives.

[00:58:55] Jason: We're going to see if we've got the little burnout. I mean, you know, we know how to pack a suitcase.

[00:58:59] Caroline: Well, it was helpful to rip off the band aid going back to the States for Thanksgiving because for me personally, like, getting back on a plane after you and be like, okay, it's not my favorite activity still. But I do not have the anxiety levels I used to have, and I would be willing to do that, especially if it's not 7 hours, if it's just 1 hour to go to a different country here in Europe, I would be happy to do that.

[00:59:22] Jason: All right, last two bullet points and then our words for the year.

[00:59:24] Caroline: Okay.

[00:59:25] Jason: So the last two bullet points here. Number one, we are going to continue to chip away at our new enough number. We set this new enough number in 2021.

[00:59:35] Caroline: I've been telling you. I think we need to call it our gravy number.

[00:59:38] Jason: Okay, sure. Yeah. So we hit our first enough number, which was $33,000 a month in recurring revenue for our business.

[00:59:46] Caroline: And when I think about that number, I go, yeah, that is Enough.

[00:59:48] Jason: Absolutely.

[00:59:49] Caroline: Right now, we live our enough life. It feels like, as we described last year is a perfect example of that, of we love where we live. We don't feel the stress of financial pressure anymore. That doesn't...

[01:00:02] Jason: I do feel the stress of buying that stand mixer as I mentioned.

[01:00:06] Caroline: I would say the things that are out in the ether that, to me, we would still have enough money, but it's like taking care of ailing parents and, like, children.

[01:00:14] Jason: Yeah. So what, you're talking about the gravy number. So this is the new number that we set in 2021. Full disclosure, I think that number was like, I think we said it was like 56,000 monthly recurring. And we share that number not to gloat, but to just say, like, this is the number that we've defined in showing you that, hopefully you define your number. And so it'll probably start with your monthly minimum number, which is where the first place you start of, just, like, getting everything in your ducks in a row. Then you graduate kind of to the enough number, which is how do I get my business making enough money that I feel like I'm living...

[01:00:42] Caroline: I live a good life. I can travel, I can save.

[01:00:45] Jason: Then once you kind of reach that mountaintop, the next one is the gravy number, which is just, this will happen in a couple of years. And there's no fast paced to try to get to this number.

[01:00:54] Caroline: And the reason I call it a gravy number is because we talked about this in our enough episode. It's a very kind of complex topic because it's like, I think, our human brains. I want to wake up and still have a goal every day. I find that that adds value to my life, pursuing a goal. I don't always want that goal to be monetarily driven. And so I always want to find this place of balance between growing and working towards something, but also reminding myself that I have everything I need already. And what's the word I'm looking for? It sounds antithetical, like, it sounds... There's a word I'm looking for that I can't find. It sounds like those two things are in opposition, but I think that they can actually coexist in one complex human story. Like I said, getting back into the podcast is hard.

[01:01:45] Jason: I wanted to mention in that 2021 number when we set it, our goal was by 2023, we would get to the 40k monthly recurring revenue number. We just got close that it was like 37k was our average number for the year. So I like that just showing that we're not necessarily always knocking it out of the park with these number goals, but we're getting kind of close. And maybe that's just a relatable thing for you and whatever the numbers are for your business and your life, not hitting them doesn't mean you're not successful. It just means that. Okay, cool. I'm on the path. I'm doing what I can do to make this happen. I'm also living a balanced life. That's what matters most.

[01:02:18] Caroline: Totally.

[01:02:19] Jason: And then the last bullet point here before our words of the year is, what are we doing with this podcast this year?

[01:02:25] Caroline: What are we doing with this pod?

[01:02:25] Jason: What are we doing?

[01:02:27] Caroline: We're going to continue to...

[01:02:28] Jason: Grow our listenership into the 30s. We might get to 40.

[01:02:31] Caroline: We might get to 40 listeners this year.

[01:02:33] Jason: Maybe. That's our running joke.

[01:02:35] Caroline: It's our running joke.

[01:02:35] Jason: Yeah.

[01:02:35] Caroline: We know there's more than 40 of you who listen. We could see a little change in the pod.

[01:02:43] Jason: We mentioned this in our last episode of the year, which was like, maybe the podcast name will change.

[01:02:48] Caroline: Could change.

[01:02:49] Jason: Yeah.

[01:02:50] Caroline: Don't be upset.

[01:02:51] Jason: I don't think the format of the podcast is going to change. This is the thing that we just 100% are not fully set on yet. But I think we always want the podcast to feel like a conversation with friends.

[01:03:00] Caroline: Exactly.

[01:03:01] Jason: So what we don't want to do is turn the show into, like, a highly segmented, like, all right, you're listening to the show about this, and now we do this.

[01:03:07] Caroline: Here's what you're learning.

[01:03:07] Jason: To this.

[01:03:08] Caroline: We've tried that before, and it just never felt like the reason we love the podcast and the reason I like listening to podcasts is just to get a window into someone else's business, how they're navigating challenges week after week, somebody who hopefully aligns with the way that you want to grow your business, which is in a calm way, in a sustainable way, in a way that doesn't make you sacrifice your health, your well being. And so we just want to continue to make it very conversational and to share our journey with you. There are other places where you can get our more educational content, which is the newsletter or our coaching sessions.

[01:03:43] Jason: I do want to let you know that I have personally decided this is not for our family. This is just for me. I'm on board with the podcasting page website thing that you're working on.

[01:03:52] Caroline: Cool.

[01:03:52] Jason: I want to do it. I just think, like...

[01:03:55] Caroline: That marinated overnight.

[01:03:56] Jason: Yeah. Our podcast needs to have a little bit of a better home, and our podcast host has, like, a website thing, but it's not that great. And then we've been kind of, like, manufacturing our own transcript and replay pages through our website, which is also not that great. And so we're going to have a podcasting home with a service that builds you a podcasting home page and episodes. And that will be up here very soon, and you'll be able to have a much better experience. If you want to go through the archives, if you want to read the transcript, we'll start doing transcripts with timestamps.

[01:04:22] Caroline: Did you know we do transcripts of every episode?

[01:04:25] Jason: Are you asking me?

[01:04:26] Caroline: No. That person listening.

[01:04:27] Jason: Yeah. So I think what we'll start to do is just maybe mention these things more as we transition to that service, and then we can just tell people like, hey, if you want the transcript with timestamps, you can go over here. You can check it out. If you want to look at our archives, it's easier to find, you know.

[01:04:40] Caroline: Be a fun episode to do because we are deep in the efficiency and simplification trenches right now. That's what Jason was referring to when he was like, we need to shore up the foundation of WAIM before we can move fully into Teachery, like, we did an audit. Our coaching session in November was all about simplification, and we did our own exercises from that coaching session, and there were quite a few processes that we just realized could be a lot more efficient. It would be fun to do an entire episode of the specific things that we did in our business to be like, hey, we were doing this thing in this very cumbersome way for, like, three years, and here's what we finally did to make it better.

[01:05:14] Jason: Exactly.

[01:05:15] Caroline: And so if you're interested in that.

[01:05:16] Jason: Also, I think we're going to have some good processes using certain apps that we can kind of help people through to be like, okay, this is how we do this. Then we put it into this, then it goes into this, and it's a pretty smooth experience. And I know some people are already using some of those things, but... All right, wrapping it up here. Final things. What is your word for 2024? We always like to pick a word that kind of frames the year.

[01:05:37] Caroline: As I said, my word last year was capable, and I thought about it all year. I love the whole idea of a word or a theme. This one for 2024. I thought about a lot of different things, and I landed on this, and it's a weird one. It's a combo word. I made it up. But my theme for 2024 is going to be micro momentum. I wanted a word to capture something. The momentum part about taking action about, because I've noticed something that I'm experiencing with, especially as I think about Teachery, is I want to think my way to ease. I want to think my way to the perfect thing, and I just am like, if I've learned anything about business, that's not how you get ahead in business. You get ahead in business by experimenting, by taking action before you're ready.

[01:06:21] Jason: That's procrastination.

[01:06:22] Caroline: Figure it out. Yeah, it's procrastination. I'm so good at that. And so I wanted a word that captured action. I believe deeply in this idea of momentum and just, like, stacking things on top of each other until the outcome is so much greater than what you put into the system. And then I added micro to it, because something I'm really experimenting with this year is not getting overwhelmed, not by thinking so big picture. I have a tendency to do that. How do all the pieces fit together? How can I perfectly orchestrate this from afar? It's like I want to zoom way down. I want to just focus on the day. What's one thing that I want to get done today? To create some micro momentum. And this whole idea of systems, not goals, that James Clear talks about is like, how can I just do the micro action that will eventually add up to the whole year? So micro momentum, that is my word for the year.

[01:07:14] Jason: Have you thought about starting a Substack called Carol Does Stuff? And you can just chronicle your action taking through a Substack?.

[01:07:21] Caroline: Have you thought about starting a Substack called...?

[01:07:26] Jason: Go ahead?

[01:07:26] Caroline: Unmade Vibrant?

[01:07:28] Jason: Made...

[01:07:30] Caroline: Dull?

[01:07:30] Jason: Dull, yeah. And where it's just like, I'm just bored. Anyway, I'm excited about that for you. For me, my word is a made up word. And normally it's a word that exists, but this is something we came up with in a meeting earlier this year, and it's revenuns.

[01:07:43] Caroline: Revenuns.

[01:07:43] Jason: Now, the idea of revenuns is it's revenue plus fun, but it goes both ways. So it's like if we're focusing on revenue, which we are with Teachery, for the first time, trying to grow Teachery's revenue, I just want it to be fun because growing revenue of a business can be very stressful. It can really weigh you down when things aren't working.

[01:08:02] Caroline: You can also fall back into boring things that everyone's doing.

[01:08:05] Jason: So it's like, I just want to have fun. Like all the other online course platforms are doing the boring, stupid stuff that I just don't love to do in business. I don't want to do that. I want to have fun.

[01:08:14] Caroline: I want to do that.

[01:08:15] Jason: I want to do that. So we're going to have fun. But the counter of that is if we're doing something thing fun, especially for Teachery, it has to be tied to revenue in some way. So what is the outcome? It can't just be like some zany, stupid Jason idea that doesn't do anything. So revenuns is my word. As we're focusing on things, I want to keep it fun. This is probably the thing that I try to always bring to everything that we do anyway. But this year, as we get into the weeds of this, I just want to remind myself, we've had this phrase that especially when we were going through the visa process here moment in Portugal, which was whenever it got difficult, we would just pause and go, Donkey Kong country.

[01:08:47] Caroline: That's like our safe word for this is a game.

[01:08:50] Jason: Yeah, we're getting a little too tense about this. It doesn't have to be like this. Remember how fun Donkey Kong country is? You get in the little cart, you're driving through, you're jumping balloons. It's fun. It's silly. So revenuns is going to be that thing for me that I think I bring up often in this, both for myself but also for us when we're like in the moment. So maybe for you. There's something like that that you need when you're on your journey this year. And we'd love to hear from you all. If this episode got you inspired to write your own review, I'll leave a link to the article version of this if you want to read it, if it was just a lot and you want to go back and kind of read through it, or if you want to use it as a format to write your own year in review. And you can feel free to send that to us because we love reading those, [e-mail].

[01:09:31] Caroline: And if you listened all the way to the end of this episode, thank you so much. This was the not the worst reentry, but a little tongue tied at times.

[01:09:39] Jason: No, come on. It was...

[01:09:40] Caroline: A little rusty.

[01:09:41] Jason: No, it's fine. It's like, get back in the gym. Like, we're going to be sore tomorrow from this podcast.

[01:09:44] Caroline: Definitely.

[01:09:44] Jason: But we were still able to do it. We knew how to do the bicep curls of podcasting.

[01:09:48] Caroline: Yeah.

[01:09:49] Jason: That's what people say about us. They do the bicep curls of podcasting.

[01:09:53] Caroline: That's them.

[01:09:54] Jason: All right, everybody, we'll see you in the next episode. Take care. Happy New Year. Bye.