My 2019 year in review
For most of my twenties, goal-setting season made me anxious. Yearly retrospectives unleashed my inner critic. There I was, looking at my previous 12-month plan through a magnifying glass, focusing on the parts that didn’t materialise. The goals I didn’t reach. The projects I’d started but never finished. Not anymore. As I reflect on 2019, one of the most defining years of my 27 years of life, it strikes me that I grew the most from experiences I couldn’t have anticipated.
This personal retrospective is a life update, and also a reminder to myself and my high-achiever friends to celebrate the unexpected lessons as much as the big achievements. It’s an invitation to consider the serendipity behind our personal growth, and to be kinder to ourselves as we enter a new decade.
🏠 Life: I stopped being a nomad
2019 marked the unexpected end of my nomadic journey. After spending my third winter training Muay Thai in Thailand and briefly passing by the UK to run the Product Leaders Weekend, I booked an impromptu flight to Lisbon in the spring.
A few months later, I was moving into my dream flat, a duplex with a view over the Tage. It signified a major plot twist in my digital nomad chapter; as I’d been preparing myself for another year of travels, the thought of living in Lisbon hadn’t even crossed my mind. Portugal wasn’t even on the map. But I’d immediately fallen in love with the city’s colourful tiles, the friendly residents, and vibrant neighbourhood life. And what made me want to stay was something different: I realised that two years of nomadism had turned me into a modern digital hermit. I missed having a tribe. A community of peers with similar aspirations and challenges. People who were not just passing by.
I missed having a tribe. A community of peers with similar aspirations and challenges. People who were not just passing by.
It hit me when I shared a flat with fellow remote workers and indie makers. I hadn’t lived or worked alongside peers for a very long time. I rediscovered the joys of making meaningful connections, having deep conversations and the feeling of being home. I made a decade-defining friend who showed me sides of myself I didn’t know existed. And so, surrounded by these incredible people who unequivocally understood and accepted me, a huge wave of gratitude hit me. I had found my tribe in Lisbon, and so, a few months in, I couldn’t possibly leave.
In retrospect, the lack of a concrete life plan entering 2019 is precisely what made the occurrence of serendipity possible. Planning is great, don’t get me wrong; but being heads-down, self-optimising every aspect of our lives reduces our exposure to fruitful discoveries. So one of my intentions entering 2020 is to maximise serendipity. And I invite you to make room for it too. Take a different route to work, talk to strangers, speak at an event, start your own community, go on a spontaneous adventure, say yes more. Today’s seemingly small and insignificant moments could open paths you hadn’t even considered.
🔎 Work: I lost and found my purpose
Reading my online bio, you’d learn that I left my “9–9 job” in London to work from anywhere in the world. As glamorous as this seems, it doesn’t tell you the full story: I felt in a career rut for most of my remote journey.
It’s true that JAM, a side project I launched in my first year as a product manager, grew into one of the most anticipated product conferences in Europe. By all accounts it was a success, selling out every year through word of mouth. And I’d been able to live comfortably from it since 2017. So why did I wait until early 2019 to focus on it full time? Why had I been chasing more freelance product gigs than I could count?
I asked myself these questions early 2019, and identified the main reasons while speaking at the Indie Hackers meetup in Barcelona, right before running a new JAM conference there:
I attributed the success of my business to luck –– Perhaps I did this because it started as a side project, and was never intended to become a business. Like a bad algorithm, I over-indexed luck over my own hard work. Discounting the impact of what I had built with my personality and passion, I was still out there looking for “more legitimate” jobs.
I had career FOMO –– Going all in with JAM could only mean one thing, or so I thought at the time: losing the fruits of the five years I’d spent building my product manager brand. I had the nagging feeling I’d be missing out on better alternatives. Experiencing time anxiety, I wanted to be on all fronts, without realising that lacking focus was hurting my progress.
I had an identity crisis –– What was holding me back was not purely path dependency, it was a lack of vision of who I wanted to be. Was I a product manager? A founder? An event organiser? A remote worker? All of the above? None of these titles felt right, and I periodically edited my Linkedin profile in an attempt to find the missing thread in my career. I was lacking a sense of purpose.
Like a bad algorithm, I over-indexed luck over my own hard work. Discounting the impact of what I had built with my personality and passion, I was still out there looking for “more legitimate” jobs.
As the year unfolded, my perspective started to change. In the midst of creating two new events and growing my team, I started to feel more confident about the path I was on. This was made possible by:
Letting go & looking ahead –– If I was to grow my business, I needed to let go of what was holding me back: being tied to the identity and career path I had previously envisioned. It wasn’t a failure. Or a break. It was just a career pivot. A different path, which didn’t negate my previous accomplishments. And I could always go back to product management if I ever wanted to. And just like the best startups or products around me, I needed a strong vision for myself to guide my actions. And so, following the first step of the Pivot Methot, I wrote down a vision statement in the present tense painting a picture of what success would look like a year from now.
Building on my strengths –– Looking back, it actually took me most of the year to articulate that personal vision. I had the first breakthrough when I started exploring what was already working. The first thread became clear: I was a curator. The success of JAM was a labour of love, not luck; and it was growing because I had been putting my heart and soul into sourcing impactful stories for the product community every year. Over the summer, I put my finger on another strength of mine while starting to mentor product managers in my network.
Identifying what was holding me back and what was already working helped me get unstuck and get clarity on where I was heading. I realised nothing felt more fulfilling to me than helping makers grow, pursue their career goals and reach their potential. As I helped my peers land well-deserved promotions, become location-independent, and generally move towards their own sense of purpose, I started feeling more deeply connected to mine.
📝 Habits: I massively failed at one thing
Entering 2019, I wanted to write more so I had set the very attainable goal of publishing one article every month. Easy, or so I thought.
I failed massively. Not because I didn’t have the time, or ran out of topics to write about. I failed at building a habit of writing. This is ironic for a disciplined gym goer like myself. In the gym, I know results take time, and require progressive overload. In 2019, I actually worked out an average of 3 times a week, as my habit tracker shows. A lot of these workouts sucked, but the simple fact I showed up and did my best reaffirmed the single best predictor of a successful habit: identity.
With my writing, I would try to pull ‘one big lift’ every now and then: writing a piece from start to finish. Hating almost every sentence I’d produce, I’d eventually give up, making the next lift even harder.
Focusing on the outcome instead of the habit of writing was my first mistake. The second was that I was trying to do too much at the same time: going from idea to finished draft in one unbroken sprint. In her great piece ‘Writing is Thinking’, Steph Smith explains that her writing process relies on decoupling ‘passive’ and ‘active’ states. The first one is about researching and generating ideas; the latter is all about creating. This inspired me to shift my approach to writing. Instead of trying to brute-force creativity, I could embrace times of disorganised ideation, knowing I would focus on connecting the dots later.
That realisation was helpful, but didn’t solve another fundamental problem I was facing. Inspiration rarely strikes when you want it to; so how could I keep track of my wild ideas and discoveries? How could I make sure they’d be there when I needed them? Browsing my newsletter subscriptions one morning, I came across the solution I had been looking for: ‘Building a Second Brain’. A blueprint for capturing and organising all your ideas, insights and discoveries into a centralised repository. Like your very own curated Internet, it’s a place you can safely navigate and tap into whenever you’re in creation mode. Halfway through Tiago Forte’s course, I realised how building my second brain would serve as the foundation for creating more moving forward.
Speaking of brains, the last defining moment of my 2019 went even deeper into mental space.
🧠 Mind: I hacked my brain
For most of my life, I’ve struggled with attention problems, impulsivity, and restlessness. I resented myself for not being able to go from A to B without considering all letters of the alphabet simultaneously. Early in my career, I quit great jobs and fell into depression multiple times, experiencing the symptoms of a disorder I didn’t know I had at the time: ADHD.
The past decade, with the rise of smartphones, social media and the (many) likes, we’ve all experienced a fragmentation of our attention. When you have ADHD, internal and external stimuli flood your brain and make it even harder to focus. If we were to use analogies, we’d say ADHD is like having 10 different TV channels blasting in your mind at any given time; or a computer with low RAM.
For a more textbook definition: ADHD is a dysregulation of your executive system: the brain’s control center, home of important cognitive skills like attention and working memory. Dr Russell Barkley explains that the executive system has a limited fuel tank. Whenever you use one of its cognitive skills by holding information in your working memory, or making any type of decision, you empty the tank. I learned that as someone with ADHD, my tank empties faster than most people. And when I’m out of fuel, things get overwhelming.
It’s not all bad, and if properly managed, the ADHD brain actually has many upsides and might even heighten creativity. In Driven to Distraction, Edward Hallowell and John Ratey explain:
“The very uncertainty with which people with ADHD react to most stimuli allows for these messages to metamorphose before they solidify in the mind. This tendency to get confused or to confuse things, so often regarded as a chief bedevilment of the ADHD brain — can enhance creativity most advantageously”.
2019 is the year I took the (grey) matter into my own hands. I wanted to understand my brain’s inner workings to find the conditions under which I could make ADHD work in my favour. So I spent months dissecting the latest neuroscience research and experimenting with myself in an attempt to regain control over my attention.
12 months and countless experiments later, I haven’t found all the answers, but I’m certainly in a much better place than ever. Some of the strategies that worked for me include:
- Planning moments for play. Instead of fighting my interest-based nervous system, I decided to embrace it. Every day, I block off time for unstructured work. I give myself permission to wander and follow whatever I feel like learning or doing that day. These “engineered” moments for exploration often lead to great discoveries, which I log in my second brain. (It was actually during one of these morning explorations that I found Tiago Forte’s organisational method, which changed my habits for the better.)
- Making the ‘what’ and ‘why’ visible. I rely on Post-it notes and automated messages to remind myself of what it is I’m doing at any given time. I’ve also found that making the outcome of a project visible, by pinning it to the top of the document I’m working on, helps me stay focused on the task at hand.
- Exercising first thing in the morning. I now realise why I recently developed a love for extreme sports: research recently confirmed that physical exercise improves attention in people with ADHD. I used to work out primarily in the evening, missing out on its benefits for my brain. Switching my schedule around has had a dramatic impact on my productivity.
Whether or not you struggle with attention problems, I invite you to experiment with yourself. There’s no single productivity book or framework that will give you all the answers. Your brain is unique. Find out what set of habits and systems work for you.
Looking ahead
There’s a lot I want to do in 2020, including taking JAM to new heights, developing a writing habit, and speaking Portuguese fluently. Beyond specific goals, my intention is to amplify my impact by continuing to build on my strengths. I’ll use my one-year vision as the pin on the map, the ideal destination, a place where I can use my hybrid role as a curator and mentor to help thousands of makers grow their career. I know there will be twists and turns, and the paths I have outlined today might not be the ones I end up taking. And that’s ok, because I now have a sense of where I’m going.
I wish you a year full of self-awareness, serendipity, and success. ❤
— Mathilde
