Welcome to The Yearly Review!

<aside> 🚀 Thanks for downloading The Yearly Review: 1 Simple Exercise, 10 Reflection Steps, And A Game Plan To Maximize Your Personal Growth.

If you aren’t familiar with who we are, our names are Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole—and we are the creators of Ship 30 for 30, a cohort-based writing program that helps people start writing online.

To date, we have helped 10,000+ people start their Digital Writing journeys (and at the time of our writing this we are gearing up for our largest cohort of the year: January, 2024!)

Now, here’s why we wrote The Yearly Review:

Every year, we spend from Thanksgiving to Christmas immersing ourselves in a deliberate reflection process (and we’ve been doing this for years).

Specifically, we reflect on:

• Things we did well over the past year (wins & accomplishments)
• Things we did not-so-well over the past year (mistakes & anti-accomplishments)
• Meaningful milestones & memorable events throughout the year that shaped us
• Realizations, lessons, and takeaways we want to keep front-of-mind going into next year
• An 80/20 analysis on what led to the “most good” outcomes of the year, and what led to the “most bad” outcomes of the year
• And finally, what we want to take with us into next year & what we want to leave behind

As writers, we then take all our reflections and start publishing them as content.

Why?

Because chances are, if we learned a hard lesson, then someone else would probably benefit from learning from our mistakes, experiences, or takeaways—and we believe that’s the best part about writing on the Internet. We all get to learn from each other.

Here’s what publishing a “reflection” as content looks like: My 5 Biggest Takeaways From 2023

We hope The Yearly Review gives you a similar structure to follow:

This is the reflection process that works for us.

But we encourage you to find ways to make it your own! Follow it step by step, or use it as inspiration to create a process for yourself. Either way, we firmly believe the best way to spend the last few weeks of the year is to give yourself a hard look in the mirror and be honest:

• What went well this past year?
• What didn’t?
• Where are there opportunities to improve?
• How do you plan on holding yourself accountable?

Do this for 10+ years, and the compounding personal growth will astound you.

Wishing you the very best in 2024!

Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole

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Download The Yearly Review

<aside> 📌 To make it easy for you to actually use this guide, we are making it available in 3 different formats:

• To download The Yearly Review as a PDF, click here.
• To download The Yearly Review as a Google Doc, click here.
• To download The Yearly Review as a Notion doc, click on the Duplicate button on the top right corner of this page. </aside>

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Inspiration Credit

We love learning from other creators & personal development innovators, and want to give credit to a handful of the people who inspired us to create this Yearly Review.

• *Steve Schlafman: Creator of The Ultimate Annual Review (highly recommend using as a complement to this guide!)*
• *Dr. Anthony Gustin: Creator of the Gustin Annual Review*
• *Janine Sickmeyer: Creator of Annual Planning Workbook*
• *David Perell: Periodic writer of Annual Reviews (highly recommend reading!)*
• *James Clear: Periodic writer of Annual Reviews (also highly recommend reading!)*

A couple quick “best practices” before we dive in:

1. This reflection is not meant to be done in one sitting. When we did this review for ourselves, we blocked off 1-2 hours per “step” so we could give it our full attention.
2. Feel free to mix, match, combine, remove, and make this review process your own. The Yearly Review is meant to be both 1) a template you can follow exactly and 2) an “outline” you can pull from when creating your own Yearly Review process.
3. We copied our own life areas into this document (health, wealth, relationships, experiences, & business). Feel free to change things around to better align with the way you bucket your life!