Reviewing my word for 2023 – Real

At the start of 2023, I set a one-word intention for the year.

Real.

Be real.
Being realistic.

Why I chose this word:

I chose this because that’s one of the biggest hard truths I realised last year. I tend to be a dreamer. I have too many ideas and narratives of how things should be. I think these ideals had hindered more than help, especially when it came to progress on my indie products. I’ve leaned too much to the idealism end. A healthy, hearty dose of reality is in order. A better balance between reality and ideals. I wrote about how having a small bet mindset is about being a healthy, realist skeptic. Perhaps this attitude can be extended beyond my indie solopreneur career but also to life itself.

I want to be honest and true to what reality proves.
I aspire to be even more genuine and authentic to how things really are.
I crave to be original and pure not compared others but to my heart.
I desire to make accurate decisions based on validation via reality. Ideals have a place—for intrinsic motivation and for driving action—after the separate decision is made based on reality. It’s not about waiting for 100% certainty in outcome before action, but 100% certainty that I’m acting based on reality than biases, even if what reality showed me is at best hints.

And how being real means nothing left to remove:

And to be the realest of a real human being, remove so much that there’s nothing left to remove.

No more fascades.
No more masks.
No more lies.

Acts of omission > acts of commission

Elimination > addition

And how did this aspiration and intention pan out in 2023?

I think I did well practising it:

• In Jan, realising that in my 30s I wanted to build a unicorn startup, but now in my 40s I’m happy to be a stubborn cockroach. Roaches eat better, because it eats everything and doesn’t need much to be full.
• Starting Side Project Weekends in Apr to be accountable to Lifeloggers and myself, that I got to face the fact that I got to go at Lifelog in a different way than in the past.
• Facing some hard truths from my 2022 indie revenue in Apr when I was doing my taxes. That my total revenue for the year before, and it felt really sucky to see a meagre $6200. That’s right, not per month. $6300 was the entire year’s revenue. That was pretty hard to face, but had to be done.
• In Jun, accepting that shipping slow as an indie parent is now my season. Embracing the idea that “tall trees grow slow”, and acknowledging how my ambitions is not some mega tech startup but a friendly neighbourhood convenience store, a digital konbini, or like handmade organic jam from a farmer’s market.
• Another hard truth I faced in Jul, about my Carrd plugins, about how it might have limited growth potential (due to small market, lack of moat, etc) despite having spent months pushing for growth. I made the hard choice to stop pushing for growth for my Carrd plugin and decided I need to keep it steady state for now and explore new products. Otherwise I might end up digging in one spot with low chance of higher returns.
• And the toughest one for the year: Realising I was in financial trouble in Sep, after some unexpected changes to the gig pipeline. My cash runway is at a tail end now. I didn’t get new gigs to cover up the deficiency. I even started applying for jobs, but alas, the job market is tough now, with recession and all. Things are still pretty bleak. A project scheduled for Jan 2024 might help tide things through a bit longer, but my current means of making a living is fundamentally broken. That is something I desperately need to fix. Since Sep! Which gets me to my next real moment…
• I can’t spend all my time on temporary stop-gap measures, but I decided to start a shipping streak on Github in Nov to work on longer term solutions. I need to ship new products, try new ways to earn money, to cover up the drying well that is my consulting.

Wrapping up, the amazing thing about this one-word for the year exercise is how I didn’t consciously remind myself of the word for the whole year, yet it got done. I set it in Jan, and only in Dec right now did I start looking back at it. Yet, that very first big intention, big commit to being real and realistic, helped shape how I went about my year. Really goes to show the power of intentions. It’s not always some vain intellectual game that people do at the start of the year but never follow through. If you set it right—with the right mindset and spirit—it could very well get done right.

Next: Thinking up my word for 2024!