*Disclaimer, this post kind of got away from me but mostly because I’m really passionate about this topic. It’s by far the longest article of the year but I think an important one. During this holiday season I’m hoping things have slowed down for you, giving you time to reflect and time to read. I hope you take the time to read this post and leave some comments! What was your focus of 2022 or what will it be in 2023?

In the midst of the 2020 when the world was shutting down, like many of us, I had a lot of time to reflect and do some thinking about my life. What’s important to me, what do I value and what the heck do I do with my life with COVID and is there even a world beyond it? It was in April of 2020 that my wife inspired me to pick a word of the year, instead of picking new years resolutions that inevitably I wouldn’t follow. ‘A word of the year, hmmmm’ I said to myself but as I had plenty of time to marinate on the idea of doing so, I decided to give it a go. RESILIENT was my word of 2020. I resolved in the face of so much unknown that I would be RESILIENT in this storm and find a way through it. I repeated this tradition again in 2021 with my word(s) CONTENTLY THRIVING. I loved this exercise and have made it an annual tradition.

In 2021 I found myself spending a lot of time bouncing all over the place. I’m an ideas guy; I love tinkering and messing around with new hobbies and ideas. I got big into thinking about crypto (thankfully not investing!), real estate, and honestly a hundred other ideas. In my day job I work as a Solutions Engineer, and I help potential customers think through their problems and help them envision what a solution(s) could look like using our broad technology platform. I found myself doing this at home; seeing a problem, working to fix a problem. However when you are working to fix many problems at a time, you run the risk of not fixing any of them!

In 2022 I decided to experiment with a mindset that would allow me to focus on less, and my hypothesis was that by focusing on less, I would accomplish more. I wonder if you feel similarly, we live in a BUSY world. Even post(ish) COVID it feels, at least for me, like I’m back to running at 100% (arguably post COVID it feels like 110%!). Lots of people and things demanding my attention at: work, home, in my social life, in my religious life. So in 2022 I made FOCUS my word in an attempt to quiet some of the noise, give myself clarity on what I wanted to do and more importantly – what I shouldn’t be focused on. I figured these would be more of guidelines (a la Pirates of the Caribbean – not so much rules but guidelines) but that by making a conscious effort to focus, that I would see some real results.

How I decided to structure my focus

There are a lot of different ways to focus, a lot of different strategies. Some of the ones that I’ve heard in my own life (recently):

• Keep a daily, weekly, monthly plan of things to achieve
• Work for 50 mins, then take a 10 min break
• Define at most 5 things you want to accomplish with 3 sub tasks each and work on them

TBH I liked each of those but didn’t love them. Thinking further back, I heard a strategy a few years ago that always stuck with me, and for some reason that really resonated with me. The strategy is:

• Spend 80% of your time focusing on the things that sustain you
• Spend 15% on things that grow you
• Spend 5% on a moonshot idea

It’s incredibly simple, I love it. Most of us have a few things steady in our lives and those are the things that ‘bring home the bacon’. For many of us, this will be our full time job. Whether you’re self-employed or working for a large corporation, you likely have a job that brings home a paycheck. Although you may have a side hustle or other investments that are hopefully growing and providing some side income (if you’re like me you’re likely reinvesting it!), you rely on your full-time job. It’s like this for me; I am employed by a large software company as a Solutions Engineer to assist the sales team in selling the software. If I lost this job, I would be ok for a bit – I have an emergency fund and would quickly get to work finding a new one job, but I’m not in a position where I could retire tomorrow. I do have investments (stocks, real estate, etc) and although many of those provide dividends or rent checks, it’s not like I could maintain my standard of living (or even pay the mortgage!) with it. So, for the near future I will still require a job that brings home a substantial, steady paycheck.

So, I need to spend the bulk of my time focusing on this thing that sustains me.

Outside of my 9-5, I have side investments, like I previously mentioned. You likely do as well, inside and outside of a retirement plan that I trust you’re contributing 15% of each paycheck into. You are also likely working to grow and develop yourself; maybe you’re getting a masters’ degree or pursuing a professional certification. After your day job wraps, you likely have something that you spend your time and energy on. For me it’s this blog, it’s being a landlord, it’s trying to learn a bit of coding. Oh and of course being a dad, a husband and a friend! I think of these things as things that help me grow – I view them as investments where I spend my time and money in the hopes that in the long run they will pay dividends whether in the form of actual income streams, a promotion or raise at work, or just the chance to spend time with a partner, spouse, friends or being a good parent!

So, I decided that I would focus 15% of my time on solidly defined things that I believe will pay off in the long run.

“It costs nothing to dream but everything not to” is a sign that my brother-in-law and his wife hung in their house. Ironically they both retired early and are now sailing around the world full-time on a sailboat. (They sent us a Christmas picture from sunny Panama this year). As mentioned in my initial section, I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer and it’s doing too much dreaming that I felt held me back form achieving as much as I could have. I have, to date, toyed around with: 2 different news website ideas, planned out a board game, a candle company, a tacky tourist gift, a healthcare record sharing app, a credit card website, a crypto website and that’s just what I can list off the top of my head!

I knew that I couldn’t give up my dreaming so I decided to allow myself to spend 5% of my time working on a ‘moonshot’.  

I started this word of the year mostly in my personal life, I was unsure if I could make it happen or not in my professional life (spoiler alert it can). This framework really resonated with me so I decided to give it a go!

What was my focus and how would I measure success?

After ringing in the New Year on our couch playing some Jack-in-the-Box games virtually with friends (it was COVIDesque time afterall), we headed up with some neighbors to a mountain cabin retreat for a few days. In between chasing kids around and roasting marshmallows, I had some down time to do some reflecting. What would I want to focus on in 2022? I had a ton of ideas and enjoyed the time and the space to let them marinate. After plenty of marinating, here is what I came up with, and I wrote this down on a piece of paper that I referenced many times throughout the year. Remember that this was in my personal life, so if you don’t see ‘keep my job and get paid’ you’ll know why.

For my sustain focus, I wanted to focus on my blog. I’ve been running YoungMoneyFinance for nearly 10 years now, and I’ve had hundreds of articles with all sorts of personal finance topics. I also run this as a business, and accept sponsored links. I earn enough to pay the hosting fees (which I’ve jokingly heard means I’ve made it BIG in the blogging world) and some mad money, which I spend on things like takeout, travel and other random fun things that pop up. In 2020 and 2021 I felt like I lost a bit of focus (see what I did there with that word choice) on the blog and wanted 2022 to be more engaged and pumping out quality articles. So, I made YoungMoneyFinance my sustain focus.

SUSTAIN GOAL: Pour into YoungMoneyFinance and keep the side income flowing.

For my grow focus, a lot of my investing right now is in the stock market, and for as good of a stock picker I think I am, I’ve actually learned that I’m not a great picker and for the past few years have kept 95% of my investment money in index (or target date in my retirement) funds. Suffice to say my investment strategy is boring and it doesn’t take that much of my time. My other big focus is real estate. Mrs. Money and I had a good experience being landlords 2018-2021 but decided to sell our primary residence turned rental house in 2021 to avoid some taxes (legally of course). We ended up selling it in August of 2021 (hilarious story you should ask me about next time you see me—how I saved $30 on a bank wire fee and sent Mrs. Money to the bank to deposit that large check). We decided to give it a month or two and then we wanted to get back into being landlords. Things were slow at first and in January of 2022 we were still warming up our search.

I low key had talked about a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) of getting 2 rental houses and so decided that in 2022 I would make getting 2 rental houses our focus. I knew that was a pretty lofty goal especially with how crazy the rental market is but as Wayne Gretzky – Michael Scott said, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” so I decided to make it a goal with the hope of at least getting 1.

GROW GOAL: Buy 2 rental houses.

Finally, I came to the time to pick my ‘dreaming’ category. I really wanted to limit myself to only one dream in 2022. As mentioned in the past I had not been focused in my personal pursuits and spent a lot of time bouncing around noodling on way too many ideas. The thing about a dream idea is that it probably won’t come to fruition, but my hypothesis was that it definitely wouldn’t become reality if I was not actually focused on it and dedicated real time to it. I realized that most of my dreaming was just essentially daydreaming, and that I wasn’t actually making any progress around any of it. So, with FOCUS as my word of 2022, I decided to just pick one.

In 2022 my ‘moonshot’ idea was (and I’m dead serious about this) carbon sequestration using seaweed. Yes, my moonshot idea for 2022 (or actually ‘earthshot’ as I decided to call it’) was trying to help reduce global warming using seaweed. The idea came from an article my brother had sent me, talking about “Blue Carbon”. He sent me the article over the summer of 2021 and I periodically would spend time thinking about it. In 2022 rather than just thinking about it, I decided to make it a focus area for me. I had no knowledge or background in seaweed or oceans or carbon sequestration but I decided to spend time learning about it. I would research, I would learn, I would reach out to people about it. Even if nothing came of it, I figured it would be a good exercise for me to actually make progress on something vs. just daydreaming about it.

MOONSHOT GOAL: Carbon sequestration using seaweed.

How it all went

A big drum roll please…honestly I am thrilled with how this experiment turned out. I achieved great success with my sustain and grow goals and although I’m not actively a seaweed famer on the ocean saving the earth, I learned a lot about it and had fun while doing so. FOCUS is almost more about saying ‘no’ to things than it is saying ‘yes’ to things. By saying ‘no’ more often, I carved out the time and the space to say ‘yes’ to what I had pre-decided to focus on. It was truthfully a challenge, many nights I lay awake in bed with my mind trying to wander to things not seaweed, many free afternoons were temptingly trying to be spent on things other than real estate and I would struggle to focus on writing quality articles for my blog. It was much harder than I had expected!

My greatest success was actually sticking with my word of the year. I believe that the progress I made focused was greater than the progress I would have made unfocused. “So that’s cool Ben bravo you actually stopped daydreaming but what did you actually accomplish? Otherwise this was just a silly exercise”. I’m glad you asked!

For my sustain goal, YoungMoneyFinance has made it another year (10 in January!) and I was able to put out quality articles throughout the year. I had some nice hits around “How to Invest in Index Funds”, “How I’m handling inflation”, “The sky is falling 2022” and “Why I’m only a little freaking out”. I appreciated the time and the space (that I got by saying ‘no’) to focus on learning more about personal finance myself and then sharing it with my readers. I also kept up with the sponsored posts and finished the year decently consistent to years past. What was nice about FOCUS was that the work felt like less of a chore; this is what I wanted to be spending my time on and I had less distractions in my life (by choice) so I didn’t feel as stressed on YoungMoneyFinance!

For my grow goal, it was quite a slough but I’m pleased to report that we currently have 1.5 rentals! As you may be aware, real estate was HOT in 2020-2022. Suddenly with the world locked down and unsure, people became very sure that they wanted a bigger house and they were willing to pay for it. If you were looking to sell a house during this time you likely did quite well. Multiple offers, multiple offers within hours of listing, multiple offers over asking price, waiving any and all contingencies, writing personal notes; things were pretty crazy! So late 2021 / early 2022 was not an ideal time to try to buy a house, much less an investment property. We were competing against people looking for a primary residence and they were often willing to pay up to get that primary residence compared to what we were willing to pay for. It was competitive!

As this was a focus for me in 2022, I devoted time and effort to it. We had an amazing real estate agent who provided insights, a watchful eye and a willingness to show us tons of houses! It became a routine. Thursday afternoon I would do a search of Zillow for new listings in our area. I developed a criteria for what I was looking for in terms of the size of the house and the price we were comfortable(ish) with. We’d email our realtor Thursday night who on Friday would try to make appointments to see the houses. First thing Saturday we’d look at 1-3 houses (kids in tow!). Depending on what we liked (if any) we would proceed to make an offer on Sunday. Then on Monday or Tuesday we’d hear the rejection! I knew it would be a tough run, but we were committed to not overpaying. Overpaying meant messing with the numbers which meant risking our investment, which just didn’t make sense for us to do.

I actually developed a spreadsheet to track everything. This gave me a good sense of what houses were going for, what houses were renting for so that we could better make offers if we liked the house, also giving us confidence that we could rent it out. It actually took us until early May (Cinco de Mayo actually!) to find the one. I figure we looked at probably 100 houses, put offers on 20, were under contract 5 times, and got 1 house! It was a lot of work! But once again, having said ‘no’ to other things in my life gave me the focus to stay the course. It’s a happy ending (so far) as we found the one, bought it early May, did some work and got it rented mid June!

The second rental property, if you recall I said we got 1.5 is actually a funny story (aren’t they all in hindsight?). We all had our COVID purchase (i.e. a big(ish) thing we bought during COVID that we kind-of look back and chuckle at) and ours was a tiny house lot in rural Tennessee. Tiny houses seemed to be all the rage during COVID. There was just something about open air, space, and the ability to get away with nothing but what you needed. (Or was it just me?) Well early COVID we met some neighbors that mentioned owning a tiny house lot in rural TN and immediately I thought that was the coolest. A few months later they invited us to stay a few days in the community with them, over New Years 2021. We had an AMAZING trip and just fell in love with the community. It’s just over 2 hours away, it’s got great hiking, beautiful scenery, plenty to do with the little ones and we just loved the tiny house cabin. Fast forward a few months and we learned that our neighbors’ neighbor in the tiny house community were selling their lot. Mrs. Money and I started corresponding with the sellers and we made an all cash offer. Mrs. Money did some amazing negotiating and we got the lot at what we felt was a decent price. We ended up buying the lot sight unseen, all cash, in an all-remote (remember it was COVID era) transaction. Since then we’ve seen the lot and it’s a good one! However due to #supplychainissues and #inflation, we’re currently in line to build the actual cabin itself!

So we didn’t get 2 rentals in 2022 but we got 1 real rental and 1 that will hopefully turn into 1 in 2023!

For my moonshot (er, earthshot) goal, as mentioned I’m not currently farming seaweed to sequester carbon in the ocean but I am actually really happy with how it turned out. I approached seaweed with a beginners mind. I started off learning all that I could about it. How does seaweed grow? How does seaweed capture carbon? Who is doing this today, and what are the trends in the industry? I found an online course that I started taking (Greenwave Ocean Farming). I learned all about how to farm seaweed! I also signed up for email listservs (Phyconomy). One Friday night (when Mrs. Money was out and I had put the kids down), I even watched a 1.5 hour webinar from the Monaco Ocean Week on their Seaweed Day. I found old friends in my personal network that were tangentially involved with oceans or seaweed and reconnected with them. What was really cool is how FOCUS helped me not only spend my time JUST daydreaming about seaweed but also spending time learning and developing a plan.

One of the nice things about FOCUS meant I wasn’t just dreaming – focus meant I was moving towards making it happen. I am at the stage of my life were I realize that unfortunately I am not superman and I cannot truly do anything. So when I focus on something, I focus on things that I actually can make happen. I grew up on the coast of North Carolina where I am only a degree or two of separation from charter boat captains. Charter boat captains who spend a lot of time on the ocean but not necessarily all the time they would like. They do not always have bookings, probably for more of the year than they actually do have them. What if, I wondered, would the charter boat captains with mates and crew with time on their hands be interested in being on the ocean more and making money? What if they didn’t need to farm the seaweed and just plant it? There was a theory around just growing the seaweed just to sink it – and there’s a company in Maine called Running Tide (where I ironically have family nearby!) doing just that! I wondered was I onto something?

Ultimately my hypothesis proved untrue – prevailing thought around seaweed was that it’s probably best not to flood the ocean floor with seaweed left to die in hopes that the carbon stays there. There’s too much unknown about the effects and the thinking is that seaweed can actually be useful on land vs. sinking. I’m in no real position to become a seaweed farmer, my line of thinking was that establishing a network of fishing boats that didn’t have to farm just plant was something I could accomplish. I kind of came to a point where I realized that I couldn’t realistically pursue this any further. It’s a bit sad to come to that realization (I guess never say never) but I actually view it as an acceptable outcome!

Seaweed was my earthshot where I tried to only spend 5% of my time, energy and thinking. I didn’t come into 2022 expecting this to go far, but I did want to spend my time and energy trying. I learned a lot, reconnected with old friends and gave it a shot! This is the second time in this article where I’ve mentioned Michael Scott (err Wayne Gretsky) saying you “miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. I shot my shot and missed, but I’m still glad that I tried!

Why I’m keeping this around in 2023 (and maybe forever)

Back to my title of this post; “how setting the word FOCUS as my word of the year changed my life”; I truly believe this! I mentioned how I started this only in my personal life, but actually about half way through 2022 I applied this to my professional life. I appreciate the autonomy I have in my role, and gave thought to where I spent my time and energy. At work we talk a lot about ‘tuning out the noise’, ‘developing good habits’ and ‘being smart with your time’. Conveniently all of those are byproducts of focusing, which I already was very focused on doing. I had a great framework in place and was able to easily translate that into things I needed to: sustain at work, grow at work and moonshot at work. I’ve had a great year professionally and owe it a lot to my practice of focus!

In summary, I also achieved a lot of success personally. My blog continues to be sustainable, we got 1.5 rental houses and I had fun exploring a moonshot idea! Focus gave me the time and the space to focus on what was most important to me and gave me permission to ignore the distractions. In 2023 I expect the noise and distractions to continue, and I expect my time and energy to be limited. I plan to continue this word in 2023 with sustaining the blog (and our current rental), growing our real estate portfolio by building a tiny house (that’ll be fun!) and I’m still a bit TBD on my moonshot. I’m low key thinking of a book (eek quite the undertaking) and have a few other ideas I’m noodling on. I’ve got a few more days before 2023 hits to actually decide on something!

Thank you for reading this post! I’ll admit it got a bit lengthy but I can get fired up when I’m talking about something that I’m passionate about and honestly FOCUS has been so good to me that I love sharing it with others! I’d encourage you to consider making FOCUS your word of 2023 or at least adopting a framework that will allow you to focus; whether in your personal or professional life. You’ve got limited time and energy to spend, don’t spend it on the distractions and noise that won’t help you long term in life, figure out what’s important to you and spend your time and effort there!