Annual Review 2024

2024 Annual Review Table of Contents

Every Annual Review that I publish on this blog contains 4 parts:

1. What were my victories?
2. What could have gone better?
3. How many New Year’s Resolutions did I keep?
4. What are my resolutions for next year?

To see all of my annual reviews, click here.

To use my workbook to create your own Annual Review, click here.

Part 1 – What were my victories of 2024?

2024 was a year full of victories, as well as some tough knocks. Nothing that kept me down, though – the challenges this year helped contribute to my growth and expansion, and the victories were big ones.

Moved to Christchurch

As much as I love nature and the outdoors, in the Huntress Clan, we are city people. We’ve lived way out in the jungles of Costa Rica for years at a time, but if you had to put us somewhere we would reliably thrive, it’s a city. Christchurch is the second-largest city in New Zealand, and after rebuilding from the earthquakes more than a decade ago, this is a city on the upswing.

We loved Oamaru, the tiny town where we lived for the previous 3.5 years, but our kids are in their teens now. They want to develop their own networks of friends, and they are of an age to date. The local slang for their options in Oamaru is ‘bogans in the wop-wops.’ We moved 3 hours north, and now we live close to a huge university, and an airport, and there are large international communities here.

Christchurch has long been known as very conservative and white and insular, but after the earthquakes, immigrants rebuilt the city, and many of them stayed. We have more in common with immigrants from other cultures than we do with local kiwis, and being in a community that is so internationally diverse is very rewarding for all of us.

Unpacked the Storage Unit after 13 years

When we first left Portland in 2011, we packed up all the family heirlooms and art pieces and books we could not take with us around the world. Once we knew for sure we were settling in New Zealand permanently, we had to go through the mammoth project of shipping the storage unit across the Pacific Ocean.

This was one of my New Year’s Resolutions from 2022, and it took me an extra year to do it, but we finally got it started last year. It took six months for the shipment to arrive. When it did, we finally had all of our stuff in one place.

You can watch me counting all the boxes of books, or opening one of the boxes, or trying on the shirts.

20th Wedding Anniversary

One of the precious heirlooms that came over the ocean was our wedding chest, filled with memorabilia from our wedding day. We reopened the wedding chest on our 20th wedding anniversary, and had a great date celebrating our love for each other.

My family is the most important part of my life, and my wife is the shining star we all revolve around. She makes an incredible household, and she is an amazing partner in my life. Celebrating two decades with. my best friend was a huge victory this year.

Recorded Audiobook of Marketing Yourself

I nearly forgot this victory entirely (which is why I love using my Annual Review Workbook so much – it helps me sweep up all the victories I overlooked).

I published the print book for Marketing Yourself 18 months prior, and had the ebook ready shortly after, but I dragged my feet on the audiobook. Which is stupid, because 40% of book sales nowadays go through Audible. It’s one of those creative perfectionist projects where I knew I would get to it when it bothered me enough that it was still undone. It bothered me enough this year.

I already had a great microphone in my home recording studio, so I just needed to schedule the time and get it done. I’m happy with how it turned out.

Traveled to Australia twice, for business and for pleasure

The first time I went to Australia this year, I went to the Gold Coast for a Sunshine Trip in the darkest days of winter. Sunshine heals me like nothing else can, and Oamaru is very cold in the wintertime. (Nothing over the horizon until Antarctica!) By taking this sunshine getaway, I was able to fortify my immune system, and prevent a relapse of my autoimmune disorder.

The second time, I went to Sydney for the largest crypto conference in the Southern Hemisphere. Not only did I network with lots of people working in web3, I also moderated a panel for Protocol Theory, called ‘Making Web3 Meaningful for Real-World Users.’ I got to talk with four other super-sharp marketers about the cutting-edge of customer relationships, and any chance I can get onstage makes me happy.

Played a juggledrum at a music festival with my band

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a band – meeting for rehearsals, working on a set list, performing at a live gig. The Oamaru Music Club met every Friday for a few hours to jam, and they liked my weird percussion flair. Late last year, I had mastered keeping a beat with bounce juggling, but I needed lots of hours of practice to develop different riffs, and to be able to switch between them and improvise. Spending months on learning a new instrument, and getting good enough to perform with a band, was an unexpected win that gave me a lot of creative fulfillment.

Part 2 – What could have gone better?

Trading for profit instead of experience

If I could, I would be a full-time crypto trader. It suits me the best – my temperament, my skills, my interests, and my ambition. But I’ve been unable to make it reliably profitable. To this day, my most profitable trades have been the simplest – buy this thing, hold it, don’t touch it for a long time. As much as I want to beat that simple strategy, so far, my trading is a consistent financial loss.

Failure is the fastest way to learn, so I’ve been getting a lot of experience, but that hasn’t translated into profit. So I keep studying, and keep trying.

Taking a stand on fluoride

This year I publicly challenged the Director-General of Health to a public debate on water fluoridation. The reason we left Oamaru was because she mandated the addition of fluoride to the water supply. They don’t fluoridate in Christchurch, so we moved.

I suffered an overdose of fluoride when I was a child, and ingesting this toxic waste byproduct causes me medical harm. If my doctor ordered me to take a medication, I would ask them questions about it, and expect some answers. I asked the Ministry of Health to answer these five evidence-based questions:

https://5fluoridequestions.nz/

After an OIA request, they claimed they were under no obligation to answer questions about the medication they were forcing me to take. I have been unable to get any medical professional in New Zealand to answer these questions.

I led a protest march to city hall over this issue. We had hundreds of people carrying signs and demanding for their right to bodily autonomy. It was a wonderful example of democratic protest.

Our movement was vindicated by the recent ruling from Judge Chen, in the US District Court of Northern California, which found after seven years of listening to expert testimony from both sides that water fluoridation presented an ‘unreasonable risk’ and ordered the EPA to implement its own toxicity guidelines.

I found out about this ruling on my way out of town, packed up with the last load in the moving van. With RFK on his way to HHS in the US, and the Surgeon General of Florida now openly calling water fluoridation ‘public health malpractice,’ it won’t be long before fluoride follows the toxic heavy metal lead into obsolescence. (Lead was not removed from New Zealand products until 1996, some twenty years after other countries had banned it.)

Here is the testimony I gave this year to my local district council:

Content creation

I’ve stopped sending my newsletter recently, and I’ve stopped publishing on this blog. Most of my social media accounts are dormant. Partially it’s because I’ve been burned out, and partially it’s because I’ve felt ineffective.

I used to love writing and posting and publishing, because I got good at it early. I’ve been blogging for decades now, and I always tried to set a good example for how others should show up and publish. On social media, I cultivated good conversations in comment threads, and my posts had lots of likes and views.

But eventually I felt too manipulated. The popular channels were discouraging certain uses of their platform, and encouraging others. I found that if I modified how I posted, to post the way they wanted me to post, I could keep my visibility; but if I posted the way I wanted to, then I would be functionally silenced.

(Posting about fluoride is an easy way to get on the bad side of the censors, too.)

I found myself creating content for free so it could be ignored. I lost my passion for it. Plus, I was too focused on being highly produced. I have all these fancy video tricks, so every short video was a big production, with lots of flash that got seen by nobody.

When I look through the posts I’ve made this year, there’s not many that were deeply meaningful to me, or something I really wanted to write. I’ve stopped writing about things I’m passionate about, and now that I’m not getting the reach, I’ve run out of ambition to keep writing. I used to publish every week on this website, but my most recent post in November was about how AI contributed to this deterioration in my enthusiasm for creating content. I’m still making great content for clients, when it’s someone else’s dime, but when it’s free and its for me, I don’t have the fire for it that I used to.

I have a lot of topics I have been keeping quiet about for a long time – why I started going back to church this year, what I learned from running away from home as a young boy, how fractured your identity becomes after you change it – and I’m considering shifting into some of these topics next year. I don’t know if I will publish them here, or keep them private, but next year I’m going to go exploring for what made me love writing so much, whatever it was I lost. I need to go find it again.

Anyways, here’s what I published this year on my blog:

Part 3 – How many New Year’s Resolutions did I keep?

Resolution Kept

Some Success

Resolution Not Kept

Read a list of gratitudes upon waking.

Fail.

I couldn’t get the mechanics of this one right. It required a gratitude log by my bed, and another habit of recording gratitudes every evening, or some other gratitude-based practice that fed into this one. Another lesson in how the best resolution is the simplest habit.

I had other similar habits I picked up throughout the year, like reading a list of empowering questions in the morning (I kept these by my bed), and keeping a list of visualization touchstones by the bed for me to dream about before I drifted off. This resolution was well-intentioned, but wasn’t thought out very well.

Family Game Night

Some success.

For most of the year, we had a solid game night. Every week we rotated, and someone else would get to pick the game. We also had a Family Movie Night, and the same person who picked the game that week got to pick the movie, and we would all watch it together. This was a great way for us to introduce each other to movies that were meaningful to us.

After we moved, we didn’t get Family Game Night going again, but we did have it solid for more than half the year.

Dance with Johanna 3x / week

Fail.

Even though it’s easy, it’s still hard. We don’t have to travel to a dance studio 3 times a week; anytime we want, we can open an iPad and play a dance routine from our past that we know and love, anytime it’s convenient. But life as a parent is busy, and we ended up spending so much time walking dogs together, we didn’t need to set aside this extra cardio period.

Our two big dogs are aggravating to walk together, because the white one bites the brown one in the face out of excitement, constantly. So we walk one together, and then the other together, every morning and every evening. Having 4 dog walks per day gives us the exercise this resolution would have given us, and it also gives us time to chat and converse, so I’m happier than if I had kept this resolution.

Start a local Improv Games Night

Success.

This was one of those goals that I set my heart on and stuck with it until it was done. It was great to use my theatrical skills, and the Oamaru Repertory Theatre is surprisingly well-provisioned, for being such a small town. The only problem: there’s not a lot of actors.

I had a big vision that this improv class would coalesce a local theatrical community. We’d keep doing improv, and expand to short plays, and one day, I’d direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream. All the fairies would be steampunk, and it would roll in local culture with Shakespeare.

But there just aren’t a lot of people in Oamaru. Another reason why we left. Those who were at the improv and monologue workshops I taught really enjoyed them (there were 8 altogether), and my kids got a lot of joy from spending time onstage with their dad, but it demonstrated us what Oamaru is really capable of, on the theatrical front, and they just lack the number of people.

Journal yesterday’s trades

Some success.

I didn’t do this every day, but I found I was better at keeping a journaling habit when it wasn’t forced on a topic. Journaling every trade became tedious, if I entered and exited a couple dozen trades in a day. But if I journaled how I was feeling, and what I think about my performance, and what the dashboards are telling me, I was more likely to stick to the habit.

Record health symptoms daily

Success.

I dropped this habit during the move, but I picked it up again a few weeks ago. It is a harder habit for me to keep when my health is doing fine, but when I have issues with my digestion, I start looking to my records to see if I can glean a cause. “What gets measured gets managed” – Jim Rohn.

2 win, 2 fails, 2 partials

A good spread on the resolutions this year (related post: Why Breaking New Year’s Resolutions Is Good For You). I had completely forgotten what some of these were until the other day, which is one of the reasons I publish them on my blog every year. I’ll be making some more New Year’s Resolutions tomorrow, and this year I’m going to focus on the simple habit at the beginning of an action, and resolve to do that small habit.