Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

It is the last week of 2021 and what a strange year it has been.

The last two years of the pandemic have been challenging for everyone, but especially the past year has been filled with general frustration.

There were also many successes, and despite 2021 being a strange and especially tough year, I know so many people that became wiser, healthier, and wealthier because of it, many of you readers included.

In this last issue of 2021, we are going to take a brief look back at a few of my own accomplishments and failures and then we are going to spend most of our time looking forward at my plan for 2022.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🦉 Wise Owl Tip(s) of The Week: Setting and Keeping Goals for 2022

A quick reflection on 2021

Looking back on 2021 I realize that it was far more successful than I thought it was. This is one of those reasons why tracking your progress is important because our minds can misremember things and tend to focus on the negative memories instead of the positive.

These were some of the minor goals I had last year that I felt would lead to financial success.

Get my fantasy fiction focused YouTube channel monetized: ✅ - Complete

I actually completed this goal in the last week or two. I knew it would be a struggle to get google to actually monetize my fantasy fiction YouTube channel, but they eventually did. It just took a lot longer than I expected.

Win large poker tournaments and build a larger poker bankroll: ✅ - Complete

Oddly enough, I won my first online poker tournament way back in April. Since then my poker bankroll has increased by about $1,000, but most of that increase did not come from Tournaments, it came from playing online cash games. This was a huge surprise for me because I never realized how profitable of a cash game player I already was.

I have a massive 2022 objective related to Poker earnings because of this revelation.

Stream poker, crypto/finance discussions, etc on Twitch - ❌

I did not start streaming on Twitch this year. I did set up my twitch stream as well as study poker quite a bit, but I never got quite good enough to feel comfortable streaming. I also haven't worked out a repetitive enough weekly schedule to make this work consistently.

Finish and publish the fantasy fiction novel I am currently writing ❌

This is probably my greatest failure of all. I've wanted to write and publish fiction for almost all of my adult life. I did write in 2021, but it was nowhere near enough. I have a different approach to this goal in 2022 that I expect will work better for me.

Get lucky and watch Crypto go so wild the interest/staking returns alone replace my salary ✅❌

Well, this one was both a success and a failure. It was a success in that ETH more than tripled in value in 2021.

It was a "failure" in that I did not replace my salary on staking returns alone. Honestly, the way this goal was written was terrible because even if my salary was replaced by staking returns, I wouldn't be able to use them. That won't happen until late 2022 or 2023.

2022 Mission and Objectives

As I've stated a few times in the past few weeks, I will be using a system called OKRs to track my own goals in 2022. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a flexible way of creating goals and milestones.

Traditionally I am a much bigger fan of creating routines and systems to improve myself rather than just setting goals. OKRs allow me to put those routines and habits within the context of long-term goals. This helps me stay focused and makes tracking progress easier.

Here is a quick breakdown of what the rest of this newsletter will cover

1. My 2022 Mission
2. The three main objectives that will accomplish this mission
3. The Key Results that will accomplish each objective

My 2022 Mission:

"Focus on What You Truly Care About"

I tend to have a lot of ideas, start a lot of projects, and split my focus in too many different ways.

In 2021 I solidified the three areas I am most consistently passionate about and am going to focus on fulfillment in those areas.

My 2022 Objectives

1. Achieve and maintain a body fat percentage of 15%
2. Build Poker Bankroll to $30,000
3. Write 30 chapters in my fantasy fiction book(s)
4. Publish 53 youtube videos about fantasy fiction

These objectives will not be easy to complete, and they aren't supposed to be easy. Your objectives need to push you outside of your comfort zone a bit. Just like in Universities in the United States, if you can accomplish 70% of each objective, you pass.

The Key Results to Accomplish These Objectives

Key results can be harder to write than objectives are, but each objective should have at least 3 key results associated with it. Key results need to be measurable milestones that, if completed, will directly advance the objective.

Key results should also describe outcomes, not activities.

You can also make Key Results for each quarter of the year, which is what I will be doing since my Objectives are for the entire year of 2022.

Objective 1 - Achieve and maintain a body fat percentage of 15%

Q1 Key results:

• Go to a fitness class 25 times (roughly 2x per week)
• Walk 10 miles a week
• Record my weight/body fat % in my Noom app 5x a week

Objective 2 - Build Poker Bankroll to $30,000

Q1 Key results:

• Play 10 hours of cash games per week
• Reach the $5,000 bankroll mark by April 1
• Complete the advanced cash games course by April 1

Objective 3 - Write 30 chapters in my Fantasy Fiction book

Q1 Key results:

• Write 5 chapters by April 1
• Write 10,000 new words by April 1
• Share new chapters with accountability partners every Monday morning

Objective 4 - Publish 53 YouTube Videos

Q1 Key results:

• Publish 10 videos by April 1
• Build a backlog of 30 video ideas by April 1
• Create a list of the top 15 fantasy authors I would like to interview by April 1 (I intend to do most of these interviews in the second half of the year)

These are my OKRs for the first quarter of 2022 and where I will be putting most of my energy outside of my job and family.

Since I am using OKRs, this newsletter will be where I share my progress throughout the year!

What are some of your goals for 2022?

💹End of Year Crypto Reminder:

The world moves in cycles, and one cycle that often repeats itself is the hyper-wealthy making moves at the end of every year to minimize their tax burden.

Every year like clockwork we see stocks, bonds, index funds, and the crypto market take a dip right before the end of the year as wealthy investors move their money around in an attempt to either consolidate their gains or to seal in their losses so they can deduct them from their taxes.

For investors likes us, it is always a good time to buy since the market tends to rebound quickly in January of each year.

Ethereum Stats:

Total ETH burned - 1.3 Million ETH (or $4.88+ billion!!)

ETH burned in the last week - 52,000 ETH !!!! 😱

Avg ETH burn per minute (all-time) - 6.15 ETH/min

My favorite website for watching the ETH 🔥 is ultrasound.money.

Quote/Meme of the week:

Happy New Year and have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4.5% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.25% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.