Feliz ano novo de Lisboa

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2020 was the year that squelched bright stars like Kobe Bryant and Eddie Van Halen.
It was the year that killed high-fives, group hugs, music festivals & mosh pits.
A year that forced extroverts into uncomfortable waters of seclusion while simultaneously absolving introverts of any social pressures for being who they truly are.
A year that forced companies to wholeheartedly embrace remote work and acknowledge that productivity != butts in seats.
2020 stress tested society and revealed that the supply chain achilles heel of the US is... toilet paper
No matter where you ended up in 2020 things unfolded nothing like the way you imagined they would in 2019.

I personally learned a ton this year. Below is my biannual recap that delves into what I tried that worked, what didn’t and the distilled set of my learnings which may or may not be of use to you. If you’re in the middle of something important carry on and please set this email aside for reading when you have 10min to allot to it.

2020 by the numbers
Let's look at a high-level quantitative view of Sean's 2020:

Sleep / Health - 2020 is the first year for which I have a full set of biometric data on stats like body temperature, pulse & respiration rate, sleep quality, heart rate variability, sleep cycle lengths and all kinds of other data. I wear a device called the Oura Ring which records all this information daily and allows me to see trends and learn what helps and hurts me.
- Sleep Score: 74.5
- Readiness Score: 72.8
- Activity Score: 79.9
- Average HRV: 43ms
- Sleep Efficiency: 64.5
Screen time: for December I averaged 4hr5min/wk of screen time on mobile and 49hrs/wk on my laptop. It's interesting to see the fluctuations of how time is allocated week to week. I left Facebook and Instagram back in October and you would think screen time would fall as a result but in reality it just got re-allocated to Kindle, Lichess and Twitter.
Runs & workouts:
- Steps: avg 6489/day (interestingly Lisbon is 2x Bali because you take a scooter everywhere in Bali and you walk everywhere in Lisbon).
- Exceeded daily activity target: 96.9%
- Avg Daily Caloric Burn: 3274cal
- Avg Metabolic Equivalents: 1.7METs
- Runs last year: total 102 avg pace: 8:56 total distance: 280.7mi
Cognitive measures: I do the Lumosity app training each morning and now have a year's worth of data on cognitive performance. I finished with these stats in terms of percentile rank of their users:
- Cognitive Percentile: 98.1%
- Speed: 97.9%
- Memory: 96.3%
- Attention: 98.1%
- Flexibility: 97.8%
- Problem Solving: 79.4% (ouch)
- Math: 74.5% (double ouch - math has always been a weakness)
- Brilliant.org problems solved: 216
Language acquisition: I started using Duolingo on a daily basis in August when I returned to Lisbon in an attempt to learn Portuguese. Here are stats from that:
- Current streak: 122 days
- Progress: completed 68% mastered 46%
- Total words learned: 2028
- Total XP: 10,601
Books:
- Total books: 14
- Total pages: 3,553
- Avg book length: 253pg

Chronological highlights

Picking up from my last update in Bali... I lived all of July in Bali with my buddy Trevor from Remote Year at his place. I left Bali on Aug 6th returning to Lisbon because I have a quota to meet living a certain number of days each year in Portugal in order to retain my residency here. Bali was an amazing place to be and somewhere to which I will definitely return one day but Lisbon is home and I am happy to be back.
Upon returning to Lisbon one of the first things I did was to reach out to my friend Andre who runs things for the Startup Lisboa startup incubator. They're recognized as one of the premiere organizations to work with if you're building a startup in Portugal and I've been a mentor with them for the past two years. I pitched them on the idea of making me an in-house Entrepreneur in Residence (which is just a fancy way of saying a more active & accessible mentor for them). We did a pilot in October with me working closely with 10 of their companies and it went well. We formalized that relationship in November and I've been meeting regularly with their startups to provide them guidance and input to help with their respective ventures. This is unpaid work but it's hugely fulfilling to be able to short circuit their trial & error and accelerate their progress. I'm now actually looking at doing my first angel investment in one of their startups which makes a unique eSkateboard.
In September I got hooked up with the entrepreneur behind this product via an intro from my friend and old boss Josh Strebel of Pagely. I set out to test this idea of commission-only sales consulting to see if that model is truly viable. There's an appealing simplicity working on your own terms as a mercenary and taking a cut of what you're able to create for others. Long story short, I tested a bunch of outreach and learned that his current product is too cheap to justify my methods for making B2C sales. B2B however is looking promising and he's in process of launching the next iteration of his technology which should make the opportunity vastly bigger. I'm excited to resume our engagement in early 2021 on that new product.
In October I moved into an awesome penthouse apartment that a friend had discovered and took over her place as she left and returned to Bali. To save the place from being given to four French guys I plunked down on a 6mo lease to lock it up and turn it into essentially a coliving space. Ironically the night I was hosting a Jefferson Dinner on the topic of the toxicity of social media and what we can do to mitigate the negative mental effects, this happened.
After that experience plus watching a few documentaries on the ill effects of social media I decided to quietly pull the plug and withdraw from Facebook and Instagram. I recently wrote this post which summarizes all the logic for doing so and can vouch that it's overall a net win for mental well being albeit I feel a bit out of the loop on the lives of many friends.
In October I bought an electric guitar and built out a mini studio in my apartment. This is the first time since leaving the States five years ago that I've had an electric guitar and a proper recording setup - it's great to be playing and tinkering again. I've taken a couple music theory courses via Udemy (which is pretty amazing - for $12 you can learn what they cover in a college semester course in most places). My vision is to use this Ableton software to do something unique that I've seen nobody do in terms of live improv performance combining live guitar/vocals with remixed mashed up pop culture songs mixed over a consistent beat. One of my goals is to get that to some level of fruition this year and play resident somewhere in Lisbon once restaurant and music venues open back up.
Around Thanksgiving I gave this talk for the participants of Startup Lisboa's "Start to Table" program. This is my approach for helping startups discover and track their primary/secondary metrics early on to help them make better forward progress.
Last month I gave this talk at a Digital Nomads Storytellers event for a room of about 70 people. It was the 10min story of when I summited Mt. Cotopaxi (the world's largest active volcano at 19,347') and how I fell off and survived.
I've spent a fair amount of time lately studying the space known as "DeFi" or "decentralized finance." Unless you're an ostrich you have probably heard that cryptocurrency space is en fuego right now with Bitcoin at an all-time-high teetering on $30k. Aside from treating crypto as a speculative asset class there are actually interesting capabilities it enables. If you're interested in learning more about DeFi I highly recommend subscribing to this podcast.
People have asked me "so what's the status on Charity Makeover?" CM is a lifelong labor of love but two things became apparent after Covid: a) I needed to put my own oxygen mask on first in terms of putting my income on rails and b) the group event model needed to change. Big group events are out for the time being but all-virtual events are also not the right approach (nobody wants to spend their weekend on a long zoom call when they're on zoom calls for their employer all week). I also believe that hitching the wagon of the effort to supporting charities exclusively is a mistake. It paints us in a corner unnecessarily. I've been reformulating the next iteration for this effort and while I'm not quite ready to unveil the v2 at this point, suffice it to say I've addressed both of these deficiencies in the new model and what will emerge from this next version solves both the dependency on charities as well as the broken event format. I'm really excited to unveil what I'm calling the "Problemattic platform" hopefully in the next few weeks as I launch the beta version of the new app and website.

What has worked well

EIR position: volunteering for Startup Lisboa was a great decision and has put me in touch with some amazing local entrepreneurs in Lisbon.
Getting back into TM: In college my roommate Avery was a practitioner of something called Transcendental Meditation. It sounded hoaky and woo but he is an incredible human being and always spoke highly of it. This year in Bali I read a few books like Autobiography of a Yogi and Surrender Experiment and long story short, I decided to get back into TM. I had learned it 20 years ago but it never stuck. Breath-based meditation via the Headspace App years later would bring meditation back into my life and I decided to experiment again with TM as a different flavor of meditation now that I had the gist of it. Jury is still out but it's definitely a different experience I would describe as the feeling of twice daily scuba diving from the turbulent ocean surface of active thought into the still waters of nothingness at the ocean's floor.
Meal prep: Being back in Lisbon I have access to a kitchen again and have been cooking more, albeit weirdly than most would. I like to cut up a bunch of veggies and freeze them in bags then use them in soups, omelettes and stir fry's. I do this with fruits as well and make smoothies and pseudo-icecream snacks this way. It's likely the analytical efficiency-focused engineer in me but the idea of cooking from scratch each time seems so wasteful and it's so much more satisfying to prepare once then be able to just throw it on the stove or in the blender and have it ready each time. This has worked really well and I'm in the best shape of my life.
Nocode for app building: I talked about this a bunch in my last update but this continues to be something I believe will absolutely revolutionize software in the coming years. It's democratizing app creation such that people with no programming experience but with very specific domain expertise can create consumer and enterprise apps and create/capture value that was otherwise locked away. I have my chips on a tool called Adalo as being the lead horse for platforms that enable anyone to build an app. It's what I'm using to create the Problemattic application and of everything I've tried it has the most promise in the space. No matter what you currently do I think anyone could benefit from gaining some proficiency with nocode tools as at the very least you'll be able to create custom tools that help you do your job better but in best case scenario you might also build something that helps others and becomes a source of side income.
Curcumin for joint pain: In October I was suffering from weird inexplicable joint pain in my shoulders. Nothing had changed in my diet or workout routine but I felt like I had the shoulders of an 80yr-old and couldn't lift my arms above my head. I saw some holistic docs locally, tried acupuncture, applied kinesiology, stretches... nothing worked. I reached out to my friend Rick, author of Hope Never Dies and asked for his input. He recommended that I start taking curcumin (turmeric) daily. I added a teaspoon of that + black pepper into my smoothies and the joint pain disappeared in two weeks. I admittedly don't understand the science of it but apparently turmeric has anti-inflammatory properties. Whatever the mechanism I highly recommend anyone suffering from joint pain try incorporating curcumin in your diet. I changed nothing else about my diet nor workout routine during this time and it's now been a few months without any joint pain so a fairly impressive result.
Epsom salt baths for sleep: I have long struggled with sleep (not so much falling asleep but staying asleep). Having tried literally every known approach to improving sleep quality I serendipitously stumbled into one back in October that has proven very effective. My roommate at the time wanted to try a sensory deprivation float tank and through a random podcast I learned of one in Lisbon. We both did it and that night I logged the best sleep of the past year. On a hunch that it wasn't the sensory deprivation itself but rather the vehicle (the magnesium from the epsom salts) that was the active ingredient in this, I bought a 25kg bag and began testing this theory taking weekly Sunday night epsom salt baths at home. It's proven to be really great for sleep and what's interesting is sleep seems to be elastic in the sense that now that I've reset it and gotten it on track, I seem to retain the sleep quality independent of the magnesium when that's removed. If you struggle with sleep I recommend investigating epsom salt baths.
Mouth taping for sleep: I read this book on the importance of proper breathing in October after hearing the author's episode on Joe Rogan podcast and of all the interesting takeaways from that book, the one that was most immediately useful was the weird-sounding practice of mouth taping. You put a postage-sized piece of scotch tape on your mouth at night to keep your lips closed while you sleep. It sounds dangerous but it's actually just loosely holding your lips together and you can still breath out of the sides of your mouth if some apnea event occurs while you're sleeping. I tried it and found that I had less wakefulness at night as a result. I've heard anecdotally from a few people when I mention this practice that they have experienced similar results. This is one of those shockingly simple remedies like the Breathe Rite strips for stenting your nose that has such a massive improvement on quality of life, I can't believe this isn't more widely talked about.
Airpods for hands-free navigation: I'm giving these special mention here because they proved to be so indispensable in Bali where the main mode of transport is a scooter and you can't safely look at your phone for navigation. Bluetooth ear buds were the game-changer that allowed me to enter a destination and then just follow the audible navigation prompts to get there while safely keeping hands and attention on the scooter at all times. There are no Apple Stores in Bali and I was afraid that losing my airpods would cripple my navigational ability. Fortunately that never happened. Prior to Asia I was terrified of 2-wheeled vehicles but the reality is that it's the primary mode of transport there and they're crucial for getting around in most places, especially Bali. If you drive a scooter or motorcycle please for your safety and that of others invest in a set of these bluetooth-based ear buds and leave your phone in your pocket while driving.
TAoL framework for productivity: I suspended new episodes of the Nomad Podcast once Covid hit because it didn't really seem appropriate to continue promoting nomadic travel during this time and my focus was elsewhere. Fortunately my last episode was with Arthur Worsley of the then Faster2Master program (now rebranded as "The Art of Living"). Through his program I learned a very useful productivity system that I continue to use today, albeit in a modified form. If you know David Allen's "Getting Things Done" this basically builds on the tactical aspects of that and bridges the strategic divide to link everything via visions, outcomes, action plans, and tasks so there's a clear lineage of how everything you do fits together and feeds like tributaries in a river to support your highest purpose. There is a lot more to the system than that but if you're investigating a productivity framework to use I recommend checking out his podcast episode on my show and then looking at his program here.
Weekly FaceTime with Mom/Dad: This time last year I was in Koh Tao Thailand on the beach writing this year-end summary and I made the resolution to talk with my parents once per week for all of 2020. That would be one of the only goals last year that I hit with 100% accuracy. It has been really great chatting with my folks every Sunday this past year and I plan to keep this tradition going as long as possible.
TRX and running for exercise: TRX in place of going to the gym continues to be the best thing exercise-wise that happened to me. I owe this to my friends Chris Peloquin and Rob Price who on Remote Year got me into doing regular TRX workouts. This is a suspension training system and their sales has understandably gone bananas during the pandemic. If you're making New Year's resolutions on the exercise front, look into TRX and get the TRX Force app to guide you through workouts complete with video tutorials of each movement. I've been a runner for over 10 years now and I use the vibram funky-looking glove shoes. They make runs much more interesting and give you the feel of connection with the ground which, as silly as it sounds, keeps me doing it. I averaged exercising 5x/wk this past year between runs and TRX.
Gratitude journal for well being: I started this in 2019 and have kept up with it nearly every day this past year. It's a pretty simple 1min task to add to your morning routine that makes you acknowledge little things to be thankful for. That practice as simple as it sounds seems to have a ripple effect when you do it in the morning and primes you with the "glass half full" lens. Friends have raved about this app for getting into journaling are probably more sophisticated ways of doing it but I just jot down the first three things that come to mind each morning after I've internalized and sat with the full feeling of being grateful for each. There are all kinds of health benefits to incorporating some form of regular gratitude practice into your routine. This post from Tony Robbins has a good summary on some of those benefits. It's a high-yield, simple activity that's a no-brainer to add.

Where I've fallen short

30x500 For the second time now I've had a false start with that course. The goal was to complete it and do the work of implementing an infoproduct which would produce enough passive recurring revenue to fund living expenses last year. It's an incredible amount of work to follow their program and in the end I stuck with it faithfully for a few months but then fell off the wagon getting more interested in the EIR stuff for Startup Lisboa. It did lead me to write a bunch of valuable posts on Grid7, one of which went viral trending on Hacker News. I wholly endorse their program as it gives you a tested framework for building an infoproduct you know will sell on Day 1 of launching but I'm this prodigal student for them now that has tried twice both times with failure to launch. I may at some point return to their program but for now I'm executing on the Problemmattic vision, the active investor path for SL and my music project.
CM growth: Charity Makeover definitely did not advance as far as I had hoped last year but given the circumstances the pandemic may have actually been a blessing in disguise forcing the evolution of that effort into a more decentralized, scaleable model. Hopefully I will have some interesting news on this front to report six months from now in the next update.
Regular music performances: I had hoped to be resident somewhere by now with my Merge.Global music initiative but alas music venues really aren't a thing right now and I still haven't mastered the tech and music theory to the point where I can do what I'm envisioning yet. Likewise hopefully restrictions have lifted a bit by summer and I will have made progress on this axis by then.

Focus for 2021

Sustainable via passive recurring revenue: This remains a goal hopefully for achievement in 2021. Between Relay Cache + ideally buying some real estate this year + yield instruments in the DeFI space I'm angling to ideally have all living expenses covered via recurring revenue by end of 2021. I was lucky this year with some investments but the real mark of true freedom is when luck is no longer a factor and it's instead a machine that predictably spins off cash in any investment climate. That's the main goal for 2021.
First angel investment: I've mentored a number of startups but I'm now fortunately in a position to also put some skin in the game and eyeing my first angel investment in Portugal. If you're doing angel investing yourself and keen to see the deals I'm vetting, get in touch and I'll loop you in with pitch decks of the companies I'm working with.
Problemattic: launching v1 of Problemattic and slotting it in as the platform underlying Charity Makeover will command about 20% of my focus in 2021. My goal is to establish a clearinghouse of world problems that roll up under the UN's 17 SDG's. These are problems which governments and companies either can't or won't solve. We all have a piece of the puzzle with skills we've each uniquely acquired through a lifetime of experiences. My thesis is that there are latent contributions in the knowledge workers of the world which can be leveraged if only we have a compelling, low-friction, high-transparency way to channel those into solving the problems that people care most about. Charity Makeover will continue to serve as the public-facing PR arm of this effort for problems which we are attacking via supporting nonprofits already working on them. Decoupling and building Problemattic as teh underlying fabric that powers CM and other projects like it will allow me to pivot to being problem-centric while also enabling hyper-local micro collaborations distributed in a way I could not organize on my own. I'm very excited about this project and hopeful with the partner I'm currently in discussions who solves a key piece.
Optimal health: I've been lucky to find a great groove of diet and exercise and to have been largely injury & illness-free this past year. I hope to continue that trend in 2021 and add to it a goal of regaining some flexibility by incorporating pilates & yoga in my workout regimen.
Deepen TM practice: TM like the gratitude journaling is a simple practice that seems to have a lot of benefits for well being. I'm interested to see how that practice deepens this year.
Krav Maga P2 proficiency: I haven't trained in Krav Maga since living in Mexico City but I'm intending to resume that training this year in Lisbon once gyms are open again. I have the modest goal of becoming a P2-level practitioner in that self defense system. I find Lisbon to be an incredibly safe city but being versed in basic self defense fighting system is a really beneficial skill to add to your belt. My friend Aaron Dragushan said once "I no longer fear human conflict" - so simple yet incredibly powerful to confident to handle any conflict situation. This is a 2021 goal.
Proficient with Leiftech board & kitesurfing: I know it sounds like from these emails that all I do is work but this is just what I end up writing about because it's the aspects that I think can be useful to others. Hobby-wise I'm hoping to master the sports of kite surfing and the art of riding the Leiftech eSkateboard in Lisbon in 2021. I finally last year got comfortable riding upwind in kite surfing which is an amazing unlock for that sport because it means you can go anywhere. It's like being able to tack into the wind in sailing - the world is then your oyster and you can literally go anywhere on the map as long as there's wind. This summer I'm looking to hopefully spend some of my Selina passport days in a seaside town of either Peniche or Milfontes in Portugal and kite and ride every day.
Merge.Global resident somewhere in Lisbon: With any luck I should have at least a basic level of competency with Ableton and music theory by the next update and hopefully be performing resident somewhere in Lisbon with my vision for Merge.global - my music project. Stay tuned for updates on that front.

Conclusion
If you've read this far, as always thank you for taking an interest in my weird nerdy expat life. I feel very fortunate in so many ways and my hope is to pay it forward with some of these initiatives in 2021. I wish you the best of luck in your own personal and professional activities. If we've not chatted in awhile I love hearing what people are up to who read this. Drop me a line and fill me in on your 2020 and what you're fired up about heading into 2021. And if you have any questions on anything from this email don't hesitate to ask. Cheers to a prosperous and hopefully more social / less-socially-distanced existence in 2021.

-Sean