Matt's 2021 Review: Wins, Results, Alignment, and Pivots for 2022

Hi everyone. My name is Matt Ragland and this is my 2021 annual review. Now this is going to be a mashup episode that's going out on my YouTube channel and also as the first episode in like 6 months on the Connect the Dots podcast feed. So if you're watching this on YouTube and you'd rather listen to it, or if you're listening to this on your podcast feed, you saw me pop up in your podcast player. You can also watch and see more of the visual B-roll highlight elements in the YouTube video. Before we get into the annual review, I want to tell you about the Productivity Power-Up, which is my 4-week live cohort course to help you have your most productive year ever. We go through each element of what I call the productivity flywheel, which is this idea that if you define your actions, If you manage your time, if you organize your ideas, and then you select the right tools for the job, you'll create this virtuous cycle of productivity by going through each of these 4 steps: action, time, ideas, and tools. And by doing that, you build confidence in everything that you need to do to take on a project or any new goal so that you can have a simple system for success that fits your lifestyle and the way that you like to work. If you're interested in learning about and even signing up for this cohort of the Productivity Power-Up, just go to productivitypowerup.com or follow the link in the description or the show notes below to learn more. To be honest, this video is for the super fans, for the people who are pretty invested in me, and I appreciate all of you because this is not going to be one of those super produced YouTube, lots of highlights and B-roll videos. There will be additional video clips that I play in here, but it's mostly going to be more like a podcast, more conversational. And to be honest, I made myself a promise towards the end of this year that I was going to put more videos on YouTube that were interesting to me, videos that I wanted to make. And so no matter how many views or comments this video gets or downloads from the podcast, this is a piece of content. This is a story that I want to tell for myself, to myself in the future. And this is something that you can apply to your own annual review. I did a more condensed video about annual reviews. A week ago, and I'll link to that below in the description or the show notes. It gives you a more concise way of thinking about your own annual review process. But the process that I'm following in this video is to go through the one that we've been going through on a weekly cadence for the entire year. And that is to follow the WRAP method to review your year. And If you haven't heard of the WRAP method before, again, there is a video for this. There's also a past podcast episode describing it, but what WRAP stands for is W-R-A-P, and those 4 letters stand for Wins, Results, Alignment, and Pivots. I have no long— no idea how long this is going to go. I'm going to be going through those 4 prompts and sharing them with you, and the simplest way that I did this is just to write down everything on a note card. Now, this also serves as a content outline for the video for the podcast itself, but even if this is all I was doing, it's better than not doing anything. And that's just one micro lesson that I want you to take out of this to take you into the new year, into 2022. Is doing a little bit of something that you're interested in is better than not doing anything at all. There's another micro lesson I think we can tack onto this, and that's the idea of the 10-rep rule or the 10-round rule, which is if you're interested in something, and this is a really great concept for starting a new habit in the new year, is if you're interested in something, you want to try something out, don't feel like you have to commit your entire life or your entire year to it. Do it 10 times, record 10 YouTube videos, write 10 essays, go to CrossFit 10 times, go for a run 10 times, whatever it is, do something 10 times just to get a feel for how you like it and then decide if you want to keep going. So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into my 2021 wrap annual review. I'm going to start by going over my wins for the year and a little bit of context for each one. My biggest win of the year personally was that I went all in on my business, on Matt Ragland, LLC. And that was really big for me emotionally from a confidence perspective, because I'd been doing this as a side hustle for a number of years, working at ConvertKit, working at Podia. And I had it in the back of my mind for a long time that I wanted to do this full-time. I wanted to be a full-time content creator, coach, consultant, create courses, cohort courses. And what I did finally was January 1st, 2021 was the first day of being full-time on my business. And we'll get more into like what were the results of making that decision, but to get to a place where I was actually doing it was a huge win for me because I had a lot of self-doubt in the years leading up to it. I, it took a lot for me to get over my fear, to get over my concern about would I be able to do this? Could I make enough money? Was I going to be more or less stressed? Getting over those mental hurdles was such a big win for me in 2021. The other win I had for 2021 was getting really deep into Brazilian jiu-jitsu, BJJ. And I started doing it a little bit in 2020, but it wasn't until this year that I really invested time into training and learning the practice and learning the methods behind BJJ. It's been interesting and really enlightening for me because I grew up playing sports and doing lots of active things, but I never did anything with combat and I never did anything that needed a high level of strategy and attention to detail in order to be successful. Like the line between success and failure is so thin in jiu-jitsu. And you could have said the same thing. I think like played pretty high level high school football in Florida and played lacrosse in college. But for me, the way that I played and the kind of player that I was, was lots of like big explosive motions. And so attention to detail was of course important, but not in the same way that like With jiu-jitsu, it's thinking about if I put my thumb here instead of here, then I'm going to lose the grip. And if I lose the grip, I'm going to lose the position. I'm going to lose the position. I could lose the match just because of where my thumb is. And that, when I first started, would have sounded like hyperbole, but it's so true as I've gotten more and more into the sport and other parts of my life and especially my business of thinking about What is the equivalent of like changing the headline to make something more desirable or more interesting for you? What is something about a thumbnail? Like, could I— is like the way that I like title something or where I put the pen in a YouTube thumbnail, could that be the difference? Now you can drive yourself crazy with perfectionism when it comes to the creative output of that strategy, but it has— jiu-jitsu has definitely made me think about like those finer details a lot more than I ever had before. Another win that I didn't even write down, it just came to me, was I hosted a weekend retreat for a men's group that I had put together in the Ozark National Forest of Arkansas. Now, some of you may know that I live in Nashville, Tennessee, but I put together a group going over— we went on this huge hike and we talked about the 4 archetypes of male development. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. And there's a whole, like, tangent I could go on with that, but it's something that I used to do when I worked at a boys' summer camp many, you know, many moons ago. It's been like 8 years since I did that work. But to get back into it, start working with men again and talking about, like, what's going on in their lives and how these different archetypes of men show up in our work, show up in our relationships, our marriages, with our kids, in our personal lives. To actually start doing that again and working with some teens in like their development at such a critical age going into college. That was something that was a huge win for me, just to be able to do it again felt really good. Another win I had in 2021 was to start therapy. I didn't grow up thinking that therapy was a thing that normal people did. I didn't necessarily think it was bad, but I thought it was for people who were really bad off or really like busted up or broken on something. And definitely have seen that that's not the case, while also realizing that there are parts of myself that I had and still continue to ignore that are pretty busted up and broken. The way that I talk to myself, the way that I think, I, you know, think about success and motivation and the way that I engage and am present or not present with people. Those are all parts of my personality and way of looking at the world that were fundamentally broken. And it took therapy and a group of men, again, men's work, that I had been meeting with regularly. Shout out to the Soul Games community. To help me see like all the ways that I thought, oh, I'm, I'm doing fine. Like, you know, other people, that's for other people. And realizing that there are things that were broken and busted up inside of me and starting therapy has been a really huge win, even though it has been really hard, just learning things about myself that I had Effectively ignored for years. My last big win of 2021 was to create and produce over 200 pieces of unique content. That includes YouTube videos, Connect the Dots podcast, email newsletters, pieces of micro content written for Twitter or for courses or for LinkedIn or on Instagram. It has been my most productive year ever from a production creation standpoint. And that part has felt really cool. It's something that I've always wanted to be consistent on the publishing of content. And I definitely hit that goal this year in, in a couple of ways. And that feels like a really big win to me. Now let's talk about the results of 2021. Now, some people have asked, just as a quick sidebar, some people have asked, aren't results and wins the same thing? Well, not necessarily. The results are looking at what did I intend to do this year or this past quarter, this past week? What were the results of the goals that I set, of the intentions that I had? And when I look at the goals that I set at the beginning of 2021, to be honest, I hit about half of them. But there's a couple of important lessons that I want to share with you on this. And the most important one is if you look at a goal that you didn't quite hit, one of the things that I want you to do to reframe your success or failure on that goal is to look at the percentage of completion that you had towards that goal. So for example, even though I talked about 200 pieces of content, the majority of that was audio. And writing and course materials. I had a goal, a process goal of creating a YouTube video every week in 2021. And I did not hit that. But if I look at it, then I can see that about 70-ish percent of the weeks I did produce a new YouTube video. So instead of looking at it and say like, nah, once I missed a week, the year was a failure. I can reframe that and look at it and say like, okay, 70%, that's pretty, that's pretty solid, especially as different things changed as the year went on, which is another reason that I advocate for not setting that many annual goals. I'm more of an intentions and themes guy because that's something that you can carry through the year no matter what your goals are. And instead of setting annual goals, I tend to set quarterly goals. If something is going to take longer than a quarter, then I start to stack those quarters on top of each other to create that, you know, big goal that might take me an entire year to get done. So with that bit of context, I'm just going to roll through my stated 2021 goals. The first one was to run 3 rounds of the Productivity Power-Up. Check. Did that. Uh, number 2 was to rewrite all of my email onboarding sequences. Check did that. In fact, if you go to the newsletter link that's in the description or in the show notes, you can actually go and select which basically free email course you want to go through to learn more about how to pick your most productive path. Number 3 was to redesign my website. Did that. You can check out mattreiglin.com. Number 4, this was the first one that I didn't, like, literally didn't do anything for. And that is to do a Kickstarter for a, like, actual physical journal that you could purchase from me. I didn't do anything with that, so that goal was just, you could call it a failure. I just didn't do anything with it. The others that I am going into more of the how much of the goal did I complete are things like I wanted to do weekly email, weekly video, weekly podcast. And weekly email was actually really good for me. It was probably about a 90% completion rate. The video is more like 70% completion. That's because video for me does take 10 to 12 hours per video. And for an email, that only takes me a couple of hours. The other one that I did really great for the first half of the year, and then not at all for the second half of the year, was the Connect the Dots podcast. So I'd give myself a 50% on that one. And I couldn't really give you a reason for it. I wanted to start getting some guests on there. I never booked any guests. And so I just kind of wanted to focus more on the YouTube channel and the newsletter instead. Two other goals that I didn't hit. One was a big miss is I had a stated goal of getting 50 coaching clients for the year. Now that doesn't mean 50 at a time, but 50 clients that I did more than one coaching session with, and I wanted to book 50 throughout the year. So basically about 12 or 13 per quarter that I would be working with. And I think I ended up around like 10 to 15. So a huge miss on that. And there are lots of reasons for it that I don't need to get into. This kind of goes into something I'll talk about with the alignment and then to some of the pivots. But I did a couple of outreaches for new coaching clients. They didn't go as well as I had hoped. What I perceived at that time, that failure to impact my mindset and my belief in myself more than I should have. And so I pulled way back from it. And that's a lesson that I can apply to the second launch of the, the second cohort of the Productivity Power-Up that I had. I had this idea in my head that they would just keep building. So I would have like 30 people in cohort 1, then 50 people in cohort 2, and then 75, 80 people in cohort 3. And then I'd be going to this one like, heck yeah, let's get 100 people in the Productivity Power Hour. And it's been more kind of stable at kind of that 30-ish range. And even like the third one had like 15 people in it. And so I am learning a lot about the process still for any of you that are getting into this., you know, content creation, course creation market, just know from my experience that a lot of times it will look a lot more like peaks and valleys than this always going up kind of story that you often see from some of your favorite creators. I hope that I'm one of your favorite creators, and I hope that one of the reasons for that is because I want to tell you, be pretty transparent on how I'm building things and what the results are. So the results of Um, wanting to get 50 coaching clients, about, you know, 30% of the way there. I wanted to get about 150 people in the Productivity Power-Up, about halfway there. And the other piece from a numbers, from a revenue perspective that those directly impacted was my goal revenue-wise was to replace my Podia salary that I had last year. And I got about 75% of the way there, which is, is fine. And most people would look at it as a success. Remember, I'm in therapy, I'm thinking a lot about how I define success and progress. But what I was thinking about with like this revenue goal that I had is overall, it was a pretty solid success. Like we're doing, we're doing fine, but we're not doing as great as I had hoped for, as like I was trying to manifest before. And that kind of messed with me a lot more, again, a lot more than it should have. And that's something that I'm, again, trying to work on in therapy and thinking about how I think through success and consistency and learning from the ups and the downs of the entrepreneurial journey. And there's another point about that in the pivots that we'll talk about as well. That's a result that, in retrospect, I definitely should have been happier about, should currently be happier about than I am. I thought it would be a little further along by this time this year. And so again, the last thing I would say is that I've definitely been really hard on myself when it comes to those failures and is very natural for a lot of people. I'm much harder on myself in the failures than I am happy with myself and proud of myself in the successes. Again, something that has been a recurring theme in therapy for me. But one other lesson that I want to draw from this that we talk about a lot, and this is something that I'm continuing to try and do a good job of myself is thinking about reporter versus judge. So as you go through your own annual review process, think about, am I looking at this as a reporter saying, okay, here were Matt's, I'm reporting on these were Matt's goals at the beginning of 2021. Here are the results. Okay. That's a reporter. That's a reporter perspective versus like judge. Hmm. Well, Matt. It looks like, uh, you're a complete failure in the coaching clients that you wanted to get and in your total revenue. So really sucks to be you and you never should have made this decision. And that sounds, you know, coming back to just being me, that sounds like I'm taking it a little far. I can promise you that mentally when the critic is on, when the judge is on in my brain, That is what I've just done is putting it mildly. So it's important to frame our perspective as best we can as a reporter, especially maybe even leading into compassion as a reporter. I'll talk about more. I'll talk more about that in a second versus this judge, this critic that's just going to just hammer in yourself for things. They didn't go the way that you wanted them to. I want to say this next part with the caveat. That the people that I worked with at ConvertKit and Podia and the bosses that I had and the founders of those companies, shout out to Nathan and Spencer, they are some of the best people that I've ever worked with in my entire life. So I want to say that because there were times at both of those jobs that I got so frustrated with what I was or wasn't doing in my role, that this is something that continued to propel me into wanting to do my own thing because like I wanted to do something that just didn't fit into the product strategy. And that's, again, I'm not saying that that's good or bad. That's just how I felt in the moment. And I decided to take a level of responsibility for how I wanted to do things so far that I ended up, you know, quitting ConvertKit to go to Podia. And then I basically could have I did the same thing at Podia. And so I was like, well, I can't go to another company because this is just something that I do, which is, you know, kind of want to do something on my own. And so I decided to go all the way and really do something completely on my own. And when I stripped away those, not even quite sure how to describe it, when I stripped away the other external reasons that I could get upset, like maybe it was like, oh, well, my boss doesn't let me do this, or I don't have the resources to do that. When there was none of that left because it was just me, I'll talk more about that in a second, then there was no one else to blame but me. I had brief moments where I'd be like, ah, you know, the launch didn't go well. I worked really hard and it just, you know, didn't go the way that I wanted it to. And I'd be like, The people don't understand. And so I was trying to like blame other people, but then like that lasted literally seconds and I was like, no, I'm the one at fault. I, and so going back into this self-critic mode, this judgment mode of like, you didn't understand the customer well enough. You didn't do enough research. You didn't define the strategy. You didn't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I was just like hammering myself with criticism of why it didn't go well. I do have the benefit of a wonderful wife that's been incredibly supportive, and I have other friends and a community of entrepreneurs around me. Shout out to my creative mastermind group. There's— I know if I go through all the names, one, you as the listener and the viewer won't find it interesting, and two, I might forget someone and I would feel absolutely dreadful if that happened. But so I had a lot of support still. From an emotional standpoint and people that I could turn to and say, why, why isn't this working? Can you give me some feedback on this course or the sales pages, this video or this thumbnail? I had resources for that. But when ultimately the revenue wasn't what I wanted it to be, when I wasn't getting the number of students to the courses that I wanted to, or YouTube growth had plateaued, which, you know, this year it has, then I was just left with a lot of self-criticism and judgment. And that is something that when it also led to making less money, that was something that from an emotional health standpoint, I had never had to deal with before, hadn't had to deal with in a number of years because I'd had good jobs with good pay. And even if my, like, little side hustle course didn't do the way I wanted to, no problem. Money's still coming in from the company. And gosh, that was, that was tough to not have. And then reconnecting that back to the self-criticism part was really challenging. Okay, so far we're about halfway through this, a little more than halfway. Just strap in, folks. If you want to watch this on 1.5 or listen on double speed, more power to you. Let's keep rocking. Because again, this is just as much as it is for future Matt to look back on. And yes, I do look back and read, listen. And watch these things that I make. And so have fun hanging out with me. The third element of the RAP method is alignment. Now, if you watch this really, this kind of RAP method really early on the first videos, I first talked about this as like aspirations, and I realized that aspirations were a bit too much like results, yada, yada, yada. And so now I think of the A as alignment. And it's very simply asking myself, is the person that I am, is the way that I'm going about my work in the world align with the type of person that I want to be with my intentions, with my themes? You can also think of it as like, okay, the things that I actually ended up doing, do they align with what I say my goals want to be, my goals need to be, my goals are? Took a minute for me to get there. And you can look at this a couple of ways as well and say like, okay, do— is the work that I'm doing aligned with the goals that I have? And if not, are the goals that I have still the right ones? And so again, this is why I usually don't advocate for big annual goals, big yearly goals, is because things can— these days things can change so rapidly. It's much easier to think about how can I break a goal into more manageable chunks. That take— for projects that take me 6 to 12 weeks to complete so that I can start to stack my goal in pieces in these like mini projects or sub-goals so that as I assemble them all together over the span of a year, I will have had a really productive year reaching some really big goals. Again, as a little, as a little pitch for the Power-Up, this is something that is at the core of the class and how we can learn how to be productive. In these 6 to 12 week sprints. So anyway, back to my alignment for this year. And I've talked, this will be a shorter section. I always say that and I'm never really sure once I get going, but going solo taught me a lot about parts of myself that I had ignored for years. I hadn't been making as much money. I, this was actually late, right before July 4th. And I was on my way to a backpacking trip. I was doing like with that, with the men's work. And I got an email from Stripe and says, your funds are on their way. And normally at the beginning of the year, that was a very happy email. I was like, hey, hey, hey, you're doing great. Nice work, Matt. You made the right decision. And this email came through and it said, your Stripe funds are on their way. And I was literally like at a rest stop on my way there. And I was already stressed out about going. I already like had the feeling I knew I wasn't making enough money. I was like, you can't go. Off the grid for a week. This is dumb. You can't do this. I was like, no, no, no, I'm going to go. I told, I told the leader that I was going to be there. I'm not going. I'm not going to bail. I'm not a bailer. You say a lot of things about Matt. Matt's not a bailer. But I got that email and I opened it up and it was like $35. And that was for the whole month of June. And I just crumpled. At that rest area on I-40 going from Tennessee to North Carolina. And I was like, what am I doing? What have I done? Burning cash, savings, 2 kids. I was just like, so, you know, 2 kids, I'm supposed to be the provider. And I just thought I've made the worst decision. How could, how could I have done this? How could I have And that was all something, you know, the way that I thought about myself, the way that I thought about success, the way that I thought about being an entrepreneur, about being creative, about marketing, about money, it was all just kind of falling down around me. And that was something that I had been able to ignore for years because I had never had myself on the line. That much and had gotten that close to the edge and even gone over the edge a little bit. And the only thing that I had to do, we had some buffer, buffer that I didn't want to touch, but you know, did. And through continuing to put myself out there through trying some other products and services by doing a lot more services and consulting instead of passive products and courses in the second half of the year. The year ended up pretty solid and that, that moment, besides just kind of literally being in the middle of the year, was really interesting in retrospect. I was really frustrated in the moment. I was really down and critical of myself in the moment, but when I had more space and I kind of breathed through it and journaled on it a little bit, I realized that I didn't think that I had made the wrong decision. I was ready to be done at Podia just like at the time I was ready to be done at ConvertKit. And I value my autonomy and my ownership at a really, at a really high price, obviously. And so it was a good lesson for me to realize that I was aligned with the kind of person that I wanted to be and the kind of work that I wanted to do. I just hadn't found, found my Tennessee coming out. I just hadn't found the right strategy or container for it. And now in the second half of the year, I've committed myself to finding the right container, the right marketing, the right strategy, the right messaging, and the right partners and collaborators to bring those ideas to life and not doing it all by myself. But it was really interesting in retrospect to pass through that moment of, oh no, we're running out of money. I just made $35 for the month. Damn. Did I make a huge mistake? Do I need to start, you know, calling up my contacts right away trying to get another job? Maybe I can go back to Podia. Maybe I can go back to ConvertKit. Maybe I can find something else and like, you know, get back on that, that sweet, sweet every 2 weeks payment plan. It's dishonest to say that I pulled myself out of it. But I decided that wasn't aligned with who I wanted to be and what my goals were and who I really felt I was and am. And it's been still a challenging second half of the year., but I do feel very aligned still with the kind of work that I want to do, the kind of people that I want to do it with, and how important it is to me to stay on this path that I'm on right now. I've talked about therapy a lot, and I'll just say that if you are having— if anything that I have said resonates with you in the place that you're at, you know, no matter what kind of work that you're doing, I want you to know that it's Totally cool. I am very brave, in fact, to reach out for help and professional help. Like, it's great to have a supportive spouse and family, but there's something about talking to a therapist, a trained professional, that, you know, is like, you're talking about the very definition of an observer, of a reporter. There is no buy-in from them. You're talking to a loved one, talking to a spouse, as understanding as they can be. There's still like an element of like, they are very invested in your decisions and your mental state. And at the end of having even a deep conversation, it's like, well, shit, the dishes still need to be done. Let's get the dishes done. And talking to a licensed, you know, professional therapist, that's not going to be like, oh yeah, you know, at the end of our 50-minute session, be like, hey, Matt, don't forget the dishes need to be done. It's just been such a game changer for me. And so I highly recommend it. I'll also say the book that he recommended to me that has been a source of comfort for me this year is called Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff. I'll put a link to it in the description in the show notes. Highly recommend checking it out. I mentioned it in the email newsletter a couple of weeks of what, as a couple of weeks ago as well. And I'll link to that. I'll link to that in the description and show notes as well. Okay, the final part of the wrap review is P for pivots. And the pivots are things that I either want to do differently or, you know, just want to keep on keeping on, which is not a pivot, it's just progressing, I guess you could say. But for pivots, things that I want to do a little differently, one thing that I'm doing very differently is I'm going to start working with a partner and collaborator, someone that I used to work with at ConvertKit. His name is Darrell Vesterfeldt. And we're running a company slash agency together that helps creators create courses that convert. Still kind of workshopping the title, but we work with, you know, big YouTubers, authors, podcasters, bringing their ideas to life in courses. And we do marketing, we do copywriting, we do video production, we do all the things that help make the course great and make a lot of money. So that's one of the big things that I'll be doing is something that I started doing more of towards the latter half, the second half of 2021, and certainly draws on a lot of the experience, expertise, and contacts that I already have working at ConvertKit and Podia over the last 6 years. I want to be really clear that I'm still going to be very active on YouTube and bringing the podcast back and writing. And part of the reason that I'll be able to do that is because The partnership and the collaboration that I'm forming with Daryl and the company that we're building is I'm going to have more people to help me do the thing. It takes me a lot of time to edit. And so I have an editor that I'm going to be working with. I'm going to be having more people that can help me put the pieces together and try it instead of trying to be the do-everything Superman that I came into the year expecting I could be. And that is, you know, one other really big pivot is I'm pivoting away from just being a one-person show or a one-and-a-half-person show because I did have a part-time assistant, shout out to William and Abhi for helping on some things. But that is something that also became a way that I judged myself and criticized myself. And it was a lot for me to handle. And so I'm going to be pivoting away from feeling like and acting like I have to do it all in order for everything to keep moving. And so what that will allow me to do is to be more focused on creating content and content that, you know, all aligns, content that aligns with messaging, with the story, working with some other great people is something that I'm really excited about doing in 2022. So that is a wrap on my wrap review for 2021. And if I can connect the dots, you know, no pun intended, between ending 2021 and setting a clear intention and theme for 2022, it's that I want to be brave enough and confident enough to keep doing things that I know I enjoy and matter to me and not being caught up in fear or worry of like, Oh, you got it. That criticizing voice, like, oh, you can't, you can't take time to go work out. You can't take time to do this because there's stuff you got to do and you're falling behind and you're not making it. I can't tell you how to bring it back to myself. I can't tell you how many times that has been the loop that plays into my head. Like, you can't do that thing that you enjoy. You have to do this other thing that you still kind of enjoy, but right now you have to do it because you're stressed and you're afraid. I'm going to say no to that voice, that inner critic, as much as I can, while still acknowledging that inner critic and not, not just hating on it or trying to get it to go away, but just acknowledging that it's there, but that it's not in charge anymore. Ooh, what a breakthrough if I can, if I can remember that, if I could actually do it. That's my intention. My theme for this year is to concentrate on who I am and who I am becoming instead of just what I do. One of the downsides that I've realized about talking about productivity as much as I do is that you almost become a character of the thing that you're talking about. And so anytime I wasn't being productive, the what, what I was doing, didn't feel productive, then I felt like I was like failing or I wasn't doing it right. And instead, something that I've been, I've been focusing on more in December and want to make my theme, making my theme for 2022 for the new year is just to focus on, you know, who am I? Who am I? Who am I being? Who am I becoming? Instead of just what am I doing? That's a tough, that's a tough way to go through life. So I know we've talked so much about productivity on this channel, on this podcast, but one of the themes that I'll be exploring going into the new year is who are you becoming based on what you are doing? And do those things align? And are you okay when you're not doing anything productive? Because I'm getting better at that. There's been a, it's been a long time since I felt like those two parts of me were living in harmony. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Connect the Dots. Thank you so much for watching the video version of this. It's a long one. And I appreciate your eyeballs. That feels weird to say, but Yeah, if you're watching towards the end of this, I'm sure, I'm sure you'll get it or you'll feel okay with it. Thanks so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I'm excited to go into 2022 with you. Sign up for information about the Productivity Power-Up in the description of the show notes and just, you know, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to the YouTube channel, rate, review, you know, ring the bell, do all the, do all the subscriber things and also say, hey, on Twitter or Instagram. I'm just @MattRagland on both of those social media channels. And if you're here, like, especially at the end of all this, uh, thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for watching again, and I'll see you in the new year.