7 Life-Changing Things I Learned in 2020
2020 was a hard year for everyone. Siege was “lucky” to only have ~20% of our revenue disappear during the height of the crisis.
That this was the worst thing that happened to me this year is something I feel grateful for. That revenue came back to Siege and the company is now at all-time highs. I know many small businesses can’t say that and many people have lost friends and loved ones during this pandemic.
All things considered, I feel quite lucky.
Looking back, despite that stress, 2020 was a year of growth. When I think about what I learned this year that fundamentally changed the way I live my day to day life, the list is numerous. I thought it might be useful to recap that in case any of these lessons are new to others.
1. Monitoring Blood Sugar Reveals Insights
I don’t have Diabetes, or pre-Diabetes. That said, I came across a potential angel investment in Nutrisense this year, a tool that monitors your blood glucose levels+offers personalized recommendations from a nutritionist and loved the traction/potential upside of the product.
As it turns out, over-the-counter blood glucose monitoring is a relatively new thing. Anyone can now get this data and monitor how their body responds to different foods.
I care about my health and actively look for unique ways to improve it. So, I decided as part of my investment that I’d try the product, not necessarily expecting I’d find any insights.
Turns out, I did. I try to fast once per week for 24 hours. In using Nutrisense, I found that I was immediately aggressively spiking my glucose levels after the fast. This maintained throughout the night, and hurt my sleep.
In speaking to my nutritionist on the tool, she recommended breaking my fast with a small amount of protein or good fats — not carbs and a huge meal like I had been doing.
Turns out this made a major difference, and after doing so I was able to stabilize my blood glucose afterward.
Additionally, I had been breaking my fast at 7PM. This late window led to a spike that bled into my sleep. We agreed moving up the breaking of the fast would make it less likely the elevated levels would prolong and impact my sleep quality. I changed the window by two hours and my sleep got better.
It was interesting to find generally that late eating was hurting my sleep, especially when that eating contained significant sugar. This seems obvious in retrospect, but was an “a ha” insight because it showed that things that don’t necessarily scream at you can still hurt you.
I’ve never felt that what I eat really impacts my sleep. My wife has this problem and has to be especially considerate about when and what she eats. That said, these same best practices still impact me, even if not at the same degree.
Because they didn’t shout at me, I let them impact me and randomly woke up not knowing why I had a bad night’s sleep with consistency. Now I know. I’m biased, but I plan to continue to use Nutrisense as it has shown other unique ways to maintain blood glucose levels such as going for a short walk pre or post-eating.
Although I’m not diabetic, in wearing the CGM you do become newly self-aware of how foods can impact how you feel on an hour to hour basis. As I’ll talk through later, this may also have impact on longevity, so seems like something worth caring about actively.
2. Fitness Game Mechanics Work (For Me)
I started using Strava in 2020, and have been getting a lot of value from the product.
Strava tracks your runs and bike rides and gives you data on pacing, your overall fitness, and how you compare to others.
This is a simple and inexpensive tool, but I found it quite valuable for motivating me to actually get out and exercise. And when I did, push myself harder.
As you can see on the above graph, knowing my pacing on past runs motivated me to try and beat them. It’s not fun seeing you’re getting slower, or more out of shape. Due to Strava, I felt continuously motivated to be faster, hit a PR, and personally improve.
Additionally, Strava is good for making it obvious how much you’re working out, and how your overall fitness trend is pacing. Here’s the desktop calendar view of my workouts (mobile is better, but posting as a reference).
Many thanks to Strava, I was able to consistently exercise 4 days/week, hit several PRs, improve my VO2 Max, and drop my resting heart rate in 2020.
3. “Hire the Best Person” is Not the Correct Mindset
The Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 revealed a plainly clear insight about our team at Siege Media — we do not have enough diversity on-staff.
I had talked frequently about this pre-2020 and that it was a concern with our hiring team and senior leadership. More than 70% of our team in 2019 was female. This psychologically felt counterbalancing.
It wasn’t.
I clearly did not do enough before this year. I learned we had weaknesses from an inclusivity standpoint. That is, we could hire diverse team members, but they would often feel excluded, which would lead to churn and leave us back at square one with a less-diverse staff.
Additionally, simply hiring the best person is not the right mindset for a team to have, especially one like ours that is predominantly white. We have to be proactive to rebalance these ratios, as they compound over time.
If you’re diverse, do you want to join an all-white team, or a diverse one? People look at team pages and ask if they belong. The more these problems persist, the more they realize they don’t, and your team becomes less diverse due to less application volume. Then that lack of diversity means that diverse team members that do join, won’t feel welcome and will churn as well.
The numbers snowball and now your team is almost entirely white, even if you felt like you did the right thing.
As Ibram Kendi stated in his book, there isn’t a thing as racist or not racist. There is only racist or anti-racist. Every decision you make is actively holding up one of those two themes.
Today, we are proactively pursuing diversity and being anti-racist. Making statements on our website. Posting on diverse job boards. Holding ourselves accountable. We also started a culture committee to make sure Siege had the inclusivity to make all types of diversity feel more welcome here.
I’m proud to say we’re making strides. We’re more diverse and inclusive today than we were in March. But we’re still not where we want to be.
I do feel that another year of hard work in this area, will be more likely to have us in a place we’re proud of at EOY 2021.
4. Sustainability is Up Next
I found Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire off Financial Time’s Best Business Books of 2020.
The book blew me away, and made me realize just how important the sustainability movement will be in future years.
Effectively, the thesis of the book is that we are now at a threshold moment where the businesses that do good for the world, will also deliver the best returns for shareholders.
Here’s an excerpt:
“Business has not only the power and the duty to play a huge role in transforming the world but also strong economic incentives to do so. A mere decade ago, the idea that business could help save the world seemed completely crazy. Now, it’s not only plausible but also absolutely necessary.”
We have reached an intersection where a significant portion of the population now cares enough about sustainability and equality that not making this part of your decision-making process, is actively bringing down your company.
Not only is this ethically obviously the right thing to do, but it is now also the moment that it will start costing you business not doing so.
Transparently, in many ways I have operated like I did with our diversity numbers as I have with sustainability. I don’t think I’m a bad person, I’m not actively pouring oil in the ocean — that’s enough.
It’s not. This book, the birth of my son and David Sinclair’s book I’ll discuss shortly flipped the switch for me. What kind of world are we building for the future generations? As things are pacing, what kind of world are we building for our older selves?
While I’m not naive enough to think our content is saving the world, I do think we can contribute strongly to it. We have almost 90 people at Siege. We can influence decision making that makes a dent, and reverberates with those around us.
We can also make decisions about what kind of businesses we support. As is the thought process of the book, I’ve realized in looking back at clients we decide to work with, that undoubtedly the people that qualify as doing good for their teams and planet are also the ones that long-term are most likely to win at SEO or are already doing so.
Given this, we’ve pledged to move forward with only helping businesses with positive Environmental Social Governance (ESG) metrics.
Here’s a quick recap of those and what might impact them:
Most public companies these days have available versions of these metrics, or how they are working to improve them.
Medium to large-sized private businesses don’t always, so it’ll be up to Siege to qualitatively and quantitatively decide what makes up an ESG-positive business. I’m confident we can do a good job.
Additionally, we plan to pledge our money and investments towards ESG-positive funds, reinvesting our positive growth in those that support the world’s sustainability.
As one example, I recently made a personal investment in Hive Brands, a marketplace for good. We plan to shift all office snack/supply related spending to Hive once we’re back in office.
This book made me realize that this movement is up next. It’s already getting louder, but I see potential for a trigger event to accelerate the adoption curve in the next few years.
It’s time for all of us to step up to support it as soon as we can.
5. Non-Alcoholic Beer Was a Game Changer
This feels so small coming off the above few ideas, but nonetheless drinking more non-alcoholic beer in 2020 made a major difference for me. I discovered Athletic Brewing, whose Run Wild IPA is actually really good.
With a now six-month old, every small decision you make contributes to bad sleep. A hangover is not an option.
I averaged slightly over one drink/day during 2020 given the many stressful events of the year, but Athletic made life a lot easier when I felt like a beer, but probably shouldn’t have one if I care about a good night’s rest.
I consistently swapped any nightcap I craved with a non-alcoholic beer instead, and because of it felt a lot more rested most days. I did not have a hangover in 2020.
Additionally, most of the beers are 50 to 70 calories, so there’s also the positive benefit of it being a lower calorie option as compared to calorie-dense beer or glass of whiskey.
On Twitter, the all-or-nothing movement is loud. Giving up alcohol gets celebrated. Great respect to those people, but I think the “moderation” movement is one that should get some recognition as well and I can thank Athletic Brewing for partially helping me achieve that this year.
6. A New Focus on Longevity
As I’m now 35 and have occasionally been told I look older than I am, mortality has started to come into focus.
I discovered David Sinclair’s book “Lifespan: Why We Age — And Why We Don’t Have To” and it ignited a renewed focus on wanting to live longer, and make the positive life changes that contribute towards doing so.
I won’t give life extension advice here as I’m not qualified to do so, but thought it might be useful to share the recap page of what David’s personal practice is. He’s 52, but looks 40.
Interestingly, some of the themes of David’s book circle back to blood glucose levels and supplements that support those, in addition to sustainability (less meat consumption). He also supports HIIT training, which Strava makes easy to measure and maintain.
I highly recommend following David for new research on longevity.
As you might be able to tell from this post, there are some common threads here. We had a son in 2020. I want to live longer for him and I want to help support making the world better for him as well.
7. Aggressive Goal-Seeking is Not the Path
In 2020, we canceled all team reviews. We did not want to compound the stress of this year with even more stress.
Historically, we had done quarterly reviews at Siege. It has become increasingly clear that this leads to high stress for our team, both through their own evaluation and also for the additional forms they have to fill out once every three months.
I’ve always appreciated and pushed for these goals and a heavy feedback culture at Siege, but I’m starting to realize that positive progress and frequent check-ins might be more useful than continually measuring ourselves every quarter.
In general, work should not be a place people experience high stress. Life has given them enough of that in 2020. I realized these reviews contributed to that stress, and because of that we are shifting to twice a year reviews instead of 4x/year in 2021.
From a personal standpoint, I will likely do the same. I’ve always been of the mind that it is the process, not the destination that fuels enjoyment and happiness. Pointing in a direction is useful, but over-focusing on that may be counterproductive to stress and happiness levels on a longer timeline.
What’s Next for 2021?
Despite an up and down year, it was overall a good one for me personally and for Siege as a company.
We’re now almost 90 people. My son Ronin was born in June (my wife and I weren’t going to leave the house anyway). My dog Goldie learned she is cancer-free after getting notice of having only six months to live in mid-2020.
My goal for Siege is the same as it has been for eight 1/2 years. Grow and be personally challenged by the growth. In turn, make the company a great place to work for the people that spend a part of their life with us.
Hopefully we can continue doing that for another 12 months.
