2023 Resolutions: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/2023-resolutions

2023 Resolutions early update: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/2023resolutions-update

Long-standing tradition to keep myself motivated, how did I do this year?

1- Go to 10 Meetup.com events - F

I went to one! Hiking. All the ones I want to go to filled up almost instantly. I did meet a lot more people going to bike rides though so that replaced the meetup. Still I should have tried harder.

2- File My Own Corporate Taxes - A-

It took 75 hours and 23 phone calls. Let’s see how long it takes to file next year. The bulk of this time was to learn and set things up for easier management/tracking.
This will save me about 4000$ per year going forward. In case you’re wondering what value this brings to society: None.

3- Fly Somewhere - postponned

Was waiting on my dad/family to see if they’d want to go to Europe but health concerns made that impossible. Plan for next Feb-April:

4- Health Goals - C+

4a - Go to the doctor: Did that. Fixed a minor health issue. Wasn’t that bad. Didn’t do any baseline blood tests or went to the USA for this. Too expensive and inconvenient.

4b - Turbocharge supplements. Took NAC + L-Carnitine for half the year. Honestly didn’t notice a difference but the NAC tastes like ass and starts to smell like sulfur really fast for some reason which started to give me acid reflux. Still doing the fish oil, D3 and creatine.

4c - Recalibrate Nutrition. Cut back on berries and protein powder that’s about it. Picked 60 pounds of blackberries in the summer, that’s a lot of bags of berries from wal-mart. There’s an easy 500$ to get cutting back on this and replacing it with greek yogurt and bananas but… 500$… meh.

4d - Stretch/Yoga. I joined a hot yoga class and went 10 times. This was a mistake. Hot yoga is for old ladies. There was no socializing, getting stronger or real stretching. Expensive as well, like 25$ a class.

4e - Skincare. I did this for like half the year with 3 skincare products. Fuck I am lazy, it takes literally 5 seconds. I need to be better.

4f - Fix teeth. Decided against it in the end. The total cost would be about 15-16k, you have to wear braces for 2 years and then go through a very painful jaw surgery that involves months of recovery, meaning weeks off the bike eating through a straw. Then it takes another year or more for your face to get back to normal, if it ever does, as you can permanently lose feeling in some facial nerves. Basically it’s something you should do when you’re 18 or just not at all.

5- Fitness Goals - B

5a - Start leg day. You should do leg stuff to get better at cycling. I learned to deadlift and tried but it just hurt my back. If I incorporate this leg stuff again it would be part of an actual training plan.
5b - More bodybuilding. I was on it for about half the year. Made a little bit of progress in the last 2 years but it’s mostly maintenance and it’s starting to be too much when combined with the cycling.
5c - Increase LT to 360 watts. My PB back from 2021 was 350 ( outdoors ). This year I did 364. The downside is I was around 160 pounds this year but just 150 when I did 350. So that means my 2021 PR was 5.14 w/kg whereas this year I only did 5. The upside is I have more muscle mass it’s not just fat. If I just keep the watts but get back around to 150 pounds then it’d be almost 5.4 w/kg. I think that’s a solid target for 2024.

5d - Lose body fat.

6- Work Goals - B

Wanted to do 365 hours of work on the new game, did roughly half. The programming is taking longer than anticipated so there’s not much I can do or am motivated to do on it so I backed off. Progress screenshot:

7- Mini-Goals - B+

7a - Make photo albums. I mastered that one pretty quick. Made one for my 2022 and 2023 travels:

7b - Write 10 magic articles. Here you go:

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/mtg-post-covid

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/whats-my-card-worth

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/gradingmtg

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/alphavssp500

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/deconstructingalpha

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/comparingabu

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/deconstructingbu

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/abulastlook

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/4horsemen

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/revised

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/junkrl

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/rlsingles

https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/rlfoils

The TLDR of all this: Some ( very predictable ) categories of this collectible truly were much better investments than stocks, and by quite a lot and for quite a long time. This flies in the face of what people repeat constantly on The Reddits ( where braincells go to die ).

Should you buy this or any other collectible? Absolutely still no.
Did I learn anything doing this? Not that much other than how to make graphs in Excel.

7c - Get back to dating. Dated about a dozen different women in the summer/fall. Never went anywhere so I just kinda quit in November. Will try for a dozen more in 2024 and then probably call it quits.

7d - See a therapist. Looked into it a bit but frankly if you’re going to charge me 100-300$/hour you better actually be able to explain to me what value you bring, and quick. I’m just pretty skeptical of this profession in general.

7e - Secret project. I quit this.

OVERALL GRADE: YES

2024 resolutions here: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/2024-resolutions

2023 Resolution Results