2024 review, in numbers and thoughts

More than 20 days have passed since the beginning of the year. I tried finding some time to write this, but I also am writing about a lof of other stuff which I will discuss later in the post.

Looking back at my 2024, I wouldn’t know how to assess if the year was good or bad. I only know it after reading my 2023 review, and I can say that overall it’s been a great year, but in practice I didn’t reach a lot of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year.

Let’s go with some data.

Build

I said that this was

last thing I wanna do, for two very different reasons: first, for work, I think I’m pretty good at building a business by now, so I don’t need to put more effort into it; second, for my life and family, we’re more oriented towards relaxing than building, at least for 2024. Who knows, but at least that’s what we think now.

And of course, life gives you weird chances to make more. Over the year, I re-discovered my passion for the Pokémon franchise, especially about trading cards. I started researching how the market grew, what was up in the moment, and found a wild market with passionate hobbyists, speculators and collectors alike. I started following some YouTube channels, and I really grew fond of the hobby again. I dug up my old cards (that are now worth something) and began buying booster packs again. I also started a TikTok channel where I unbox packs and document my Pokémon-related life, and I’m really enjoying it, especially because I don’t expect this to be my main job, and that’s where the fun lies.

But since I’m a business nerd, I also like to make money for the sake of it, so I thought of collecting, playing but also trading these cards, finding new ones that could be worth more over time. Looking for cards on eBay or other online marketplace is the kind of rabbit hole I like to find myself into. It reminds me of the days when I could just do whatever I wanted because I had no responsibilities, I was just a kid finding new things on the internet.

So, for 2025 I set myself to build a Pokémon TCG money-making hobby. More on how in the ‘Money’ section below.

I also have bigger business goals for Routescan, but that’s not the core of this review. I will do better and I have the rigfht tools to do it.

Money

In 2024, our family portfolio (which includes crypto, stocks, valuable trading cards and company equity) increased exactly by 50%, and we didn’t really paid attention to saving that much. I’m happy that we outperformed the S&P 500 by almost 100% (the index having gained 23% in 2024). Furthermore, we reached our financial goal of saving at least 30% of our income before paying ourselves. We saved, in fact, 33.4% of our income, and we’re very very happy about it, because we did it by not sacrificing anything valuable for us. We traveled a lot, bought what we wanted, spent the money to stay better and live a happy life.

What I’m most happy about is that I and we, as a family, set up some investments that will pay off over the next 5-10 years, and that are calculated risky bets that, if they pay off, will likely 10x our wealth.

For 2025 we’re well structured to increase our wealth from our current investments, so I will be focused on creating new revenue streams: BnB hosting and cards trading.

For the first, I set myself to complete the renovation works in my parents’ house, and to start going there at least a month this year, to properly set up a future rental property.

For the second, I found joy in cultivating the hobby of trading Pokémon cards again, after I did it back when I was very little. Now, my desire is to be happy about the hobby, enjoying it, and making some money out of it just for the sake of it. Specifically, I’d like to:

• grow a 15,000€ worth of cards’ portfolio
• generate 10,000€ in gross revenue

I believe these are very easy and reachable objectives (for example, I already got some 5,000€ worth of cards already), but I don’t really want to make this my main job: I’d only like it to be a hobby that gets me some nice extra money here and there.

Sharing

At the beginning of the year, I wrote that

I plan to write a few more articles in 2024 and make more or less the same amount of talks. This could be my plateau, I don’t think I want and like to do more than this.

I did not. I did way over that. I wrote and talked a lot:

• 1 article on jaack.me
• Started a new notes blog and wrote 17 posts, with decent consistency over the year
• Started a fitness-focused diary, and wrote 4 entries
• Started a newsletter about apps on my devices called Homescreen on Paragraph and wrote the first 2 entries (now at 5)
• Joined 9 between talks, panels and podcasts either online or IRL

I really can’t say much else, I’m doing really good for what I hoped, so I guess I’ll just keep doing it the same way I did it last year.

Reading

Book Tracker, the new app I’m using to track books I read, tells me that I read 14 books out of the 15 I set as a goal for 2024. I didn’t read many books, but I read a lot of articles and researches, and I don’t track those anymore because I changed my reading workflow, now using Reader by Readwise.

And I don’t plan on tracking what I read anymore, except books, because in the age of AI agents and artificially created news, it’s important for me to be able to know less, but be sure that’s real. Even if what’s real and not real is so hard to distinguish anymore .

I will try and ready more books, because I think I found a good system to go through them:

• for the short ones (less than 250 pages), I will read it, either on paper or in digital
• for the long ones (every other), I will buy the audiobook or listen to it on Storytel or Audible while driving, riding a train or in a flight
• for the long ones that don’t have an audiobook, I will simply abandon it and try again after a while to check if the audiobook has been released

This is the only way I tested that has been working effectively for the past 4 months or so. I can easily read short books on a long flight or during a lazy Sunday, but when I try to read long books, I almost always find myself pausing and resuming reading only when I think I’ll have enough time to either read a full chapter or a few, just to keep the momentum going. I read so many books over months, if not years, because of this. And I don’t know how much of those books I truly understood and learned.

Also, (I don’t make it count but it’s related) I started reading mangas, and that is also reading, fun reading!

For 2025, with this system, I should be able to complete at least 15 books this year, and maybe shoot for 20-25.

Travel

2024 was maybe my most prolific year in terms of travel. I had 36 flights, fliying to 13 countries in 5 world regions: Europe (6 countries), Asia (3), North America(2), Middle East (1) and South America (1).

I visited Los Angeles, Austin, Cancun and Buenos Aires for the first time, and I flew business for the first time and then some. Of the total 18 trips I took this year, 7 were for leisure and the rest for work. I didn’t meet my goal of taking not more than 7 work trips, but I satisfied my goal of at least 4 leisure ones.

For 2025, I feel I got everything in order already: we’re gonna take on 4-5 leisure trips and I’m gonna travel about 7-8 times for work. Some leisure and work travels will be combined, as we will fly (me and my wife) to my work trip destinations a few days to a week before to take our personal vacations.

And I know how many trips I’m expecting to take on this year because the strict goal I set myself for is to plan 90% of work and leisure trips by February 28th, to save on flights and hotels and to avoid thinking about it during the year.

Relax

Last year, I wrote:

for 2024, my goal is to be consistent and spend more time with my wife, family and friends and having great experiences with them.

I feel I reached the goal: the relationship with my wife has grown stronger, and we spent more time with family and friends, altough we still feel we can do more, especially with friends.

Me and my wife found hobbies to share with another, and in general more things to do together, but we also learned how to respected each other’s boundaries and simply be on our own when we feel like it.

I plan on doing more of this, simply. Relaxed, actually.

Health

Staying healthy is the single most important objective I worked on in the past two years: in 2024 I solved a lot of my health issues, as I described in my fitness-focused diary, which I’ll simply quote:

During 2024, I solved many of my health issues: I had intestinal issues, and after many medical visits and a lot of tests, I found a new diet that helps me stay fit and healthy with no big effort. I found out that I suffer from IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the best diet I can take is a **low fodmap** diet. I downloaded an app called Fodmap4All that’s simply a low fodmap dictionary: I input the type of food that I want to eat, and it tells me if I can eat that how much I want, if I can eat but just a little bit, or if it’s bad for my stomach. I also got a few moles removed after I got a few visits with the dermatologist. And I found a way to grow my nails stronger over time, so that I don’t bite them and make them bad. I solved a lot of health issues, but I still have a few ones to go: first, I need to check my right knee and understand why it hurts every now and then. Then, I need to work on my muscle stretches, so that I feel more flexible and… ‘young’. While I do have plans for every other goal, I do not have plans on how to stretch more. I need to find ways to fit that in my routine, but I feel that it’s still too early. There’s one last thing that I worked on and that I’m satisfied with: my mental health. I had over 20 meetings with my psychologist throughout the year and they really helped me understand a lot about myself. I want to keep a frequency of one meeting every 3 weeks for 2025, while I try and achieve big and different things that I will talk about more in other places.

In my 2023 review, I also mentioned how water intake was my biggest failure: less than 2 liters per day. I took the steps I outlined, i.e.

buy a bigger, 1-liter bottle to use at home so that in order to drink what I have to, I only have to refill the water twice or three times per day, instead of 4 to 5 times like I do now, using a 620 ml bottle. This seems like a weird thing to do, but it helps me remove some friction from the ‘drink’ activity - my wife bought a 2-liter water bottle, and she just drinks one bottle per day at least, but it’s too big of a leap for me, so I’ll ‘only’ jump to the 1-liter bottle.

Since the process is stronger than the goal, I even stopped tracking: now that I have a 920ml bottle and a 620 ml one, I know that it’s sufficient for me to drink 2 big bottles every day when I don’t train, and add the full small bottle when I train.

In order for the to follow this process, I have the big bottle physically very near to my right hand on my desk when I’m at home, and when I train I always bring the smaller bottle and make myself simply drink the full bottle by the time I’m back home, meaning that as soon as I’m near home, I know that my bottle needs to be empty, otherwise I’m not good to myself.

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According to my Day One journal, which I don’t use anymore because I switched to the Apple-native Journal app, I worked and lived towards the goals with this priority:

• Money: 229 days vs. 216 in 2023
• Stay healthy: 193 days vs. 177
• Relax: 148 days vs. 143
• Travel: 109 days vs. 83
• Read: 59 days vs. 83
• Build: 43 days vs. 29
• Share: 30 days vs. 26

Following all considerations I made in the review, this is my updates goal list:

• Build
• Stay healthy
• Relax
• Travel
• Share
• Make money
• Read

The goals are not the end, it’s just a means to review the process and make it better every year. And I feel like I’m starting to master it!

Buy me a coffee @ home