2021 Year In Review

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Despite 2021 being the second year our world is in a global pandemic, 2021 was a good year for me.

Here’s the tl;dr:

  • I’ve learned to balance being less attached to my career while continuing to make positive contributions to my org.

  • Climbing-wise, I finished my first outdoor V6 this year. But also had three finger injuries.

  • I fell in love.

  • I’ve been setting up the foundations to start my own independent consulting practice one day.

Heads up, this is a long read. I wanted to cover three big aspects of my life: work, climbing, and love. That might be at the expense of brevity, but I hope it’s interesting.

2021 Yearly Themes

I had two themes this year: beauty and patience. I wanted to practice observing the beauty in things. And being patient with myself and others.

I’m a big fan of Yearly Themes instead of New Year’s Resolutions. If you’re curious, check out CGP Grey’s video on this.

Previous Themes:

  • 2017: Self-Compassion

  • 2018: Contribution

  • 2019: Ownership

  • 2020: Ease & Self-Trust

Letting go of career as my identity

I love what I do. And I love the people I work with.

But since moving back to California in June 2019, the part of me that identifies with my career has been lessening. My career is no longer who I am.

I think this is a result of three things:

  1. Moving out of New York City (the first thing people ask you there is “what do you do?”)

  2. Becoming more focused on outdoor climbing

  3. Finding work-life balance after starting to work remote full-time when the pandemic started

I’m fortunate to be a part of garden3d’s four-day workweek cohort. Employees at our company can work four days a week instead of five in exchange for a 20% pay cut. We’re aiming to have everyone on a four-day workweek at full salaries by Q2 of 2022. 🤞🏽

Maximizing my impact at garden3d

My role has shifted into a Studio Coordinator Role for Manhattan Hydraulics, one of the three studios at garden3d. As a Studio Coordinator, I’m focused on the overall health and success of our studio.

Manhattan Hydraulics is truly a team that manages itself. We’re known to work autonomously. It’s to a point where other members in the company have asked me/us how they can bring this level of autonomy to their team! I’m very proud of that.

I’ve introduced practices to Manhattan Hydraulics. These practices help us make decisions in an equitable and inclusive way. One practice we do is decide as a team who fills open roles using a role attribution process. In traditional agencies, it’s typically one person’s job — a Program Manager or Studio Lead — to decide on who staffs what client project. At Manhattan Hydraulics, we decide as a team on who staffs what work. . We’ve adapted Samantha Slade’s “role attribution” process, which you can read about here. This practice has been a hit.

Outside of Hydraulics, I’ve been doing some work to help garden3d become a more equitable organization. I’ve:

  • Initiated (with Lucy-Jane and Hugh Francis) the change of making everyone’s salaries visible to everyone at the company.

  • Started a support group for folks who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color.

  • Brought in Gabe Wilson, a friend and facilitator I look up to, to work with us on power dynamics.

Everyone at garden3d cares about making it an equitable, egalitarian, and empowering place to work. I’m really fortunate to work at a place like this. I truly feel that my contributions and ideas as an organization designer are valued.

I still enjoy directly impacting client work, too:

  • Sanctuary and Hydraulics helped launch a new API Docs portal for Swell.

  • I’ve been mentoring Sam Taylor (who is a joy to work with) as he leads strategy on client projects.

  • I’m currently working with a payments processing company (that came in through XXIX) that I deeply admire.

Manhattan Hydraulics and XXIX are working together on client work for the first time. It’s a dope moment for both studios — what does it look like for two different studios to work together? How can we work as one design team? I’m excited to continue to shape this with Hydraulics and XXIX.

Okay. That’s enough work flexing. Let’s look at other areas of my life.

 

Climbing outdoors has become a huge part of me

I went climbing outdoors a ton this year. I’m super proud to have sent (finished) my first outdoor V6 — a level of difficulty that’s impressive considering that I started climbing outdoors in the fall of 2020. (For reference: the higher the V number is, the harder the problem. The hardest problems in the world are V16-V17).

On the flip side, I injured three finger pulleys within six months. While finger injuries are common, they shouldn’t be this common. There’s something in the way I train that causes this. My goal in 2022 is to have zero pulley strains and send my first outdoor V8.

Here was my climbing year by season:

In the winter, I send a problem that took me four weekends to get

February: I go to Moe’s Valley (St George, Utah) and Bishop (California) for the first time.

March: I send Jones’n (V4) after four straight weekends of working it. My first major project (project = climbing problem that takes you multiple days to complete).

 
 

In the spring, I send more projects

In April:

May:

  • Convinced that I want to invest in outdoor climbing, I buy a truck.

  • I project and send Electric Lady (V5) at Black Mountain, California.

 
 

My climbing partner Joe, my dog Vanilla, and me at Black Mountain. Photo captured and edited by Kayla Palisoc.

 

Build out a bed and curtains in the truck bed. My crash pads fit nicely under. :)

 

In the summer, I get injured, recover, and refocus

June: I get my first A2 pulley sprain on my left middle finger. I take a break from climbing outdoors. Bboy season picked up in SoCal, so I focused on bboying.

July: I rehab. Diligently.

August: I’m back to climbing at full strength.

 
 

In the fall, I send my first outdoor V6, but get injured twice more!

September: I go to Bishop with my climbing partners Joe Gallardo and Nico Cerami. We project Seven Spanish Angels.

October: I injure my finger pulley on my right middle finger from overtraining at the gym. I recover for three weeks, then get back on Seven Spanish Angels like a lunatic.

November, I piece together two V6’s: Pink Lady at Moe’s Valley and Moon Drops at Black Mountain (with my partner Nico). I feel very close to sending my first V6.

December: I send Pink Lady, my first outdoor V6. Woo!

 
 

But then two days later, I injure my A4 pulley on Moon Drops. Boo.

 

When you realize you injured yourself for the third time in six months.

 

I overtrain, put in 15-25 attempts on a project per day, and don’t warm up enough. My resolve to finish projects is very strong. This is my greatest strength and also my biggest detriment: it’s gotten me to send V5s and V6s and gotten me injured three times.

I’m currently using this holiday break to take a true break from projecting hard. Elite climbers take breaks and use seasons to create a cadence around their performance. You’re not supposed to be trying to achieve maximum performance every day. You’re supposed to have seasons and take breaks. I won’t get better at climbing if I don’t know how to rest. So next year, I want to build in breaks in my climbing cadence, almost in the same way I take PTO for work.

You need partners if you want to get better!

I tend to work on hard things alone. But if I want to get better at climbing, I can’t work alone all the time. I need to have partners I can trust.

I’ve had a partner there with me on every big project I had this year:

  • Jones’n - my brother Kevin

  • Serengeti - my friend John Chung

  • Electric Lady - my friend Joe Gallardo

  • Seven Spanish Angels - Joe and Nico

  • Pink Lady - my brother Kevin and my niece Emma

  • Moon Drops - Nico

Climbing truly is a team sport. In 2022, I want to continue to unlearn my tendency to go at things alone and work on projects with people I care about and trust.

Speaking of partners, let’s look at what love looked like for me this year.

 

Love, open relationships vs monogamy, and communication

I fell in love this year. And it’s been going really well.

My last serious relationship lasted a little over four years. We ended things in June 2020, when we both were moving out of New York during the height of the pandemic. Since then, I’ve been unpacking what I can learn from my past relationship and what I want to do differently in my next one. Therapy helps.

I wasn’t really looking for a relationship. And then I met Kayla.

 
 

I met Kayla in May 2021, 11 months after my previous relationship. We met on a camping trip at Black Mountain, one of my favorite places. We found that we liked each other.

Kayla is all the things I like in a partner. She’s funny, yet thoughtful. Flexible yet intentional. Rather than taking the traditional path towards a career, she paved her own path. And like me, she views life as a series of experiments.

Luckily, I also happened to contain all the qualities she likes in a partner, too. So in September, we started a relationship.

 
 

Here’s the spicy part. We actually started our relationship as an open relationship. Which meant that having physical relations with others was okay. This was my first time exploring an open relationship — I wanted to see if this was something that I liked. The more I learned about it, the more I realized that society hasn’t challenged the assumptions behind monogamy for thousands of years. We assume that the key to a happy life is to find someone and spend the rest of our life with them. Why has this been the default for thousands of years? Are there other versions of love that are worth acknowledging?

In theory, it was fascinating. But in practice, it was work. More than I thought. Communicating with others that I’m in an open relationship. Dealing with my feelings of anger and jealousy. While I see that the inner and outer work of being in an open relationship is valuable, I don’t currently have capacity to give that work the attention it deserves. At least maybe not yet.

Kayla also didn’t love how much work it took to be in an open relationship. We aligned on the fact that we both want to commit to a single partner. So, we changed our relationship to a good ole monogamous relationship on October 15th. We joke that every 15th of the month is Monogamy Day.

What I am appreciative of was how much communication that took. Being in a healthy relationship, open or not, takes communication. Listening to your needs, listening to your partner’s, and working together to meet both. I’m proud of how well Kayla and I communicate. I’m trying to be better at communicating my own feelings: an area I want to get better at after my previous relationship.

 

Setting up the foundation for my future consulting practice

I aspire to have a full-time independent consulting practice someday.

I’m not looking to make the shift right now. I enjoy my full-time work. And the steady income supports my outdoor climbing lifestyle.

But I’ve been returning to this thought often. What if I ran my own consulting practice someday?

I want the majority of my workweek to be focused on helping product organizations work in more focused, intentional, and healthier ways. I’m wondering if my own practice can help me get there.

As a product manager, I can positively impact the way a team works. But I always come up against systemic challenges that live at the organizational level:

  • The org has >30 priorities.

  • The strategy isn’t clear.

  • 50 people are working on the same initiative, while other initiatives only have 2-3 people.

  • There isn’t alignment across functions.

  • The org ships faster than it learns, rather than learns faster than it ships.

I’ve learned how to tackle these systemic challenges through my prior work at The Ready. I want to take my experience there, along with what I’ve learned working in product, and help product organizations work in better ways.

I’ve done a few things to set up the foundation for my own practice:

  • Worked with 2061 world on how they can help their clients reimagine their processes that are in the way of shipping good designs

  • Ran two Facilitation Workshops through Index (Thank you Index!)

  • Scheduled a paid talk with Upstatement next month (Thank you Upstatement!)

All three of those opportunities have either directly or loosely come from garden3d. I’m thankful.

And of course, I’m still publishing The Overlap every two weeks. This year, I published 22 editions. And as of this writing, we’re at 808 subscribers and a handful of devout readers. Readers have consistently said they love this newsletter. I even got a nice note from Michael Bungay Stainer, the author of the Coaching Habit.

 
 

While I’m not entirely sure what I want to do with The Overlap in the future (should I start publishing exclusive editions for paid subscribers?), I’m sure that I should keep this going.

 

2022: Year of Decide

My theme for next year is decide.

I’ll admit. “Year of decide” doesn’t roll off the tongue. But I want to work on being more decisive. I tend to spend an inordinate amount of headspace on the most trivial decisions: what color shirt I should buy, what restaurant my partner and I should eat at, should I buy those Sony headphones or repair my broken Beats.

I naturally like to analyze and think things through. But I use this analytical tendency of mine on the lowest stakes decisions. I want to make low-stakes decisions quickly so that I can maximize my attention towards more high-stakes decisions (Should I move in with my partner? Should I project this 15-foot bouldering problem?).

Ironically, this is what I coach teams on:

  • For reversible decisions, make them quickly

  • For irreversible decisions, think them through collaboratively

So, in 2022, I’ll practice what I preach.

Open questions for 2022

Borrowing a page from Tiago Forte here. Some questions that I’m holding as I think about the next year:

  • Given that I enjoy living a life outside, how can I better align my finances to support this lifestyle? What must I learn to say no to?

  • What would it take for me to live a life on the road while working remotely?

  • How might I live a nomadic lifestyle yet still have a routine? What routines can I practice regardless of where I am in the world?

  • How can Manhattan Hydraulics be a catalyst for winning new and interesting work for garden3d?

  • How much of garden3d’s capacity should be focused on emergent/inventive work (e.g., web3, social impact) vs work we’ve done in the past that we’re good at?

  • What decisions do I want to spend my time and attention on? What decisions can I just move quickly on?

  • What does an injury-free climbing year look like?

  • What’s the balance between climbing outdoors and being in a committed relationship? When should both overlap? When should both be separate spaces?

There’s a lot more I can reflect on: family, friends, relationships, and being off Instagram for yet another year. But I’ll leave this post as is.

I’ve always enjoyed using this time of year to reflect and look ahead. I plan to do a deeper reflection (through these questions). I encourage you to do the same!

P.S. Read any other annual reviews you liked? Add it to this arena channel.