My 3 Takeways From 2024
Audio Transcript:
I don't know about you, but the end of the year is often a wild time of reflection for me. I think I share with you all—I try to. I typically have started my year on December 1st, you know, just conceptually. So I'm thinking ahead. By the time the clock turns to January, I've got some momentum. All of that.
This year, I used November 1st because it seemed to coincide really well with the fall and kind of reflection and all that. But I still can't avoid the level of reflection that happens at the end of the year. You know, we're on a calendar fiscal year. So the company is closing at this end of the year. It's a natural close to the year. The kids are off school—all those kinds of things. It's all kind of go right. We're on the calendar year.
Obviously, if you celebrate Christmas and all those things, you get these holidays in, and it can be a really wild time. And obviously, you've got lots of things—not just reflection. You have all of the stuff, right? If you are trying to close business and get it done, get things in before the end of the year, trying to get things together at work so you can be free for the holidays or to travel or whatever. If you've got kids, or maybe there's magic going on in the house with the Christmas holiday and all that comes with it.
A Year of Wins and Challenges
As I reflect back on this year, it's been a great year. It's a fantastic year. We celebrated our 20th anniversary at Mountain Leverage. We accomplished some really great things in the market. We started this podcast, which is cool. My family—my kids are doing some cool stuff and really thriving. And life is good in many ways.
So 2024, on the books, on the record, will be a fantastic year. But there are a lot of things I wanted to accomplish—from a business perspective, as well as personal and community perspectives—that I didn’t meet. And I get it. That’s the way goal setting works to a certain degree.
What did Lombardi say, right? You chase perfection and catch excellence along the way. That’s cool. I get it. But man, I set goals because the things on the other side of those goals are what I want. You know, not necessarily the goal itself—it’s what attaining that goal brings to you in your life or whatever.
Lessons from Reflection
In seeking to flourish, I missed a few things. And in this reflection period where I’m heading toward the end of the year, I’ve come, I think, to what maybe the top three things are. And I’ve got a long list of things I maybe could have done better, but I’ve got three things that I wanted to share with you.
The first one is I found myself, I think, in 2024—which ended up being the absolute fastest year on record. I realize as you age, each year is proportionately less of your overall life, so it might feel faster, but man, this one was really fast. And I think this was one of the reasons for that.
When I look at my day and how it’s run, I tend to think of myself as a deliberate worker. I want to focus on the work at hand, what’s important to me, and I want to run my day. However, I found in 2024, and certainly towards the latter half of that, I really got caught up in a lot of reactive work—work that was coming to me.
Some of you may say, “Well, that’s my entire life.” I get it. And some of us are in reactive roles in jobs and things, and that’s all well and fine, and that’s cool. But I guess just I was less deliberate. There’s planned work, there’s reactive work, and then, you know, there’s this other work. To have planned work, that means you have to have some planning time.
So I did a little more of riding the wave, and that’s okay. And a lot of us do that. And I’ve done that a lot through the years because some of the waves keep coming. I mean, they don’t slow down, and there’s always a wave to ride. But when I do that, it just goes by faster because I’m doing what someone or something or whatever force wants me to do as opposed to what I need.
That’s not saying I didn’t do a lot of deliberate work this year. I did. But when I look at the ratio of how much deliberate work and planned work I was doing versus how much reactive work—reactionary stuff that was just coming to me to handle or do or was served to me one way or the other—it’s not the ratio I want.
Taking Action
So I’m going to fix that. I’m already fixing it, and, you know, these fixes don’t come overnight. But I will fix that in 2025, where I want that ratio to be a lot higher. I don’t know—is it 80/20? Is it 70/30? I don’t know, but it needs to be a lot higher.
In my role and in different roles I’ve had through the years, maybe a little more reactive work was okay. Maybe 50/50 is okay. Or even the opposite side of that, 40/60 or something. I’m not sure. But I know in my role today as a founder and as a father and as a friend in my community, I need to be much more proactive, deliberate, planned work as opposed to being reactive and being driven by something else.
Years ago, a couple decades ago actually, I had implemented a system—Getting Things Done. That’s a popular task management system. There are lots of other methods out there. I’ve read Deep Work over the years and found that to be really insightful in terms of how to manage your schedule.
Again, everybody’s job roles in life are different, so some of these things may apply or not apply to you. And that’s okay. But I’m going to dust off some of those methods and principles that I’ve used through the years. Essentialism is another great book that focuses on what’s the important thing. The One Thing. I mean, there are so many books I could roll through them.
A lot of those ideas are still floating in my head, and I guess I believed I was doing them. But when I reflect on my actual work operations, I realize I’m not following some of the tenets that I believe are important. So I’m going to double down on some of those. I may reread some of those books, but I own those tenets in my core at this point, and I think I just need to be deliberate about making sure I’m executing them.
I’ve revamped my whole schedule in terms of calendaring, and I’m going to try to be disciplined and stick to that. I won’t be 100% sure how it goes—I don’t build any system or project thinking I’ll get there perfectly. But the notion of just being more deliberate about my time—when I wake up in the morning, I’m not jumping on email, I’m not jumping on social media or anything else.
I’m going directly to where my mind wants to take me in that moment. I’m looking and planning my day and doing things. I’m creating a couple of moments throughout the week where I can sit down and grab the reactive work that’s come in, all the noise that’s come in, and pull that together. I’ll plan that out and then deliberately work on it when it works best for me.
Again, there’s going to be reactive work. I’ll handle it. It’s fine. But I think that’s an important piece to why this year went so fast for me and why maybe I didn’t achieve some of the goals I wanted to achieve.
Being Your Best Self
The next thing is more esoteric. I don’t know where I read it—maybe multiple places over the years—but it finally hit me. There’s nothing new under the sun, right? It’s always been out there. But this notion of who I am and recognizing, telling myself, “I am that person.”
I think I am the person who is working deliberately. I am the person who drives my own day. It’s planned work. Where I’m going is not about control—lots of people direct your day, and I get it. That’s cool. But in terms of my focus, of course I’m that person. But guess what? I wasn’t being that person as often as I wanted.
Then I realized why. What was it? It came down to this: attention to detail. The smallest things you do, the smallest actions, bringing your best self to everything you do—that echoes throughout your entire life. When I look at it, I realize I haven’t been the best Alex I could be in everything I’m doing.
I get it. We can’t always be 100%, on, and awesome all the time. But we can sure try, and we can sure make that a priority. When we fall short, we can look at it and say, “That’s not like me.”
The Power of Small Actions
How I saw that was through a simple thing. Again, I read this years ago. It’s a notion of saying, “That’s like me.” When there’s a moment to do something and I don’t, it’s silly. You can mock me, I get it. But if I’m walking through the house and there’s something on the floor that needs to be picked up, and I walk over it—that’s not like me.
If I pick it up, throw it away, or put it away, I can say, “That’s like me.” That’s a super small example, but put that in every instance. Whether you’re at work and something needs to be done, somebody needs a hand, an action needs to be taken, a call needs to be made—that’s like me.
Just like with this planned work versus reactive work—it’s not like me to let reactive work drive my day. I’m driving my day. I’m that guy. The phrase of doing these things and thinking to myself, “That’s like me,” has been transformative.
Flourishing Through Abundance
The last thing I’ll share is this: for me to flourish, I have to flourish from a place of abundance. It’s so easy, as this year went on, to slip into a mindset of scarcity. Whether it’s time, resources, or opportunities, scarcity can creep in.
Life is inherently abundant. There are opportunities everywhere. Maybe not exactly what you want or in the way you want, but they’re there. Hard work is part of abundance. You apply energy in a focused way, and great things happen.
For me, a mindset of abundance is magic. On the other hand, a mindset of scarcity is toxic. Toward the end of this year, I noticed myself leaning into scarcity, and that is so unlike me. That mindset veered me off some of the paths I was on and impacted my goals.
Closing Reflections
With that said, I urge you to find the abundance in your world. I hope you’re already there because that’s magic. Regardless of the situation, there’s always an opportunity to find abundance. Always.
As the year rounds out and we look to the Christmas holiday, I have so much to be grateful for. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, but I’m grateful for each of you listening. There’s a lot of good in the world if you choose to see it.
For those celebrating the holidays, I hope they’re fantastic and magical. For those who aren’t, I hope you take time to enjoy yourself, your family, and loved ones. Wherever you are, I truly hope you are flourishing.
Alex Reneman is the founder of Mountain Leverage and Unleash Tygart and host of Flourishing w/ Alex Reneman. For 20+ years he has worked as CEO of Mountain Leverage, honing the concept of flourishing and experimenting with it in the business. In July of 2024, he decided to begin to share this idea with others, which led to his podcast, social content, and the plans for other initiatives in the future.
