Annual Report 2021: 19 Books Read, 2 Books Written, 18% Investment Return, 114 Essays, 2 Newsletters, 235 Days of Training...
Welcome to the 2021 Annual Report of OMD Ventures. This is it. It was my first year of setting my foot down and telling myself I wanted to build a career the way I envisioned it. I didn’t hit it, yet. There were ups and downs—duh. I thought more might’ve happened and disappointment was a common feeling throughout the year. But that’s as much a product of my inability to celebrate the many small wins as well as learning to stay on my own path. This is a review of that journey. Thanks for being a part of it.
Highlights From 2021:
OMD Venture Community by December 31, 2021
OMD Newsletter Subscribers (Free): 302; 100% growth from March 2021
OMD Journal Subscribers (Premium): 7
OMD Ventures Total Page Views: 20k for 2021; 37% growth yr/yr
The Practice
Reading: 19 Books
Writing:
Essays: 114 Published
Book #1: ~110k words; in-process of the second draft
Book #2: ~65k words; the first draft fermenting
Investing:
Research on culture and people: 25 Published
Investment Return for 2021: 18%; 4-year CAGR of 24%
Powerlifting:
Training Days Logged: 235 Days; 64% of the year logged with training
The following report is split into the following segments:
Reading
Podcasting
Writing: Newsletter
Writing: Books
Investing
Powerlifting
The Year Ahead
Reading
I read 19 books in 2021. It was five short of the goal of 24—that’s two a month. It was a volatile year of reading where I crushed a long book like Dune in days while I struggled to read the simplest of memoirs.
In fact, it was a year where I quit a record number of books—particularly after reading more than 50% on many occasions. I quit both Marshall McLuhan books, paused Dave Egger’s biography as well as Werner Herzog’s—this was a surprise because I blew through it until I lost interest.
Learning to quit was the major theme of the year. I can’t stress how difficult this was before. The nature of setting goals like reading two books a month can lead to a good habit of making time to read. But it can result in the kind of list-ticking phenomenon that results in pushing for completion while forgoing learning. I’m referring to the kind of act where I’m reading words but not understanding any of it. We’ve all had those for assigned reading material in school.
The ideal balance would be to have the goal that pushes me to make time to read while making a system where the process of reading is always enjoyable because, well, reading is for the joy of learning and that doesn’t happen when it feels like a chore. In my experience, such forms of learning rarely stick and it’s really a waste of time in the long run.
Compared to other years, 2021 was the year I read the most number of novels since I picked up the habit again in 2014. The fact is, I didn’t read for much of university—except for the Hunger Games series. But that was to get close to the girl I’ve been together with for nine years now, so I guess that novel series was a good investment. The stories themselves were good too.
Five of the nineteen were novels. That’s not including the classics I started and quit like Frank Kafka’s The Trial, Gabriel Marquez’s Hundred Years’s of Solitude and other classics with authors like Jack Kerouac, Hunter S Thompson and Thoreau’s Walden. I know, I thought Walden was boring. But my stance is that I will pick up the book again when I’m ready. I’m just not ready to understand it yet.
This switch to finding and reading classics started becoming an idea once I decided I wanted to pursue a writing career. That also explains how four of the books I read were directly related to writing and becoming a writer. Before 2021, most of the books I read were non-fiction that revolved around business and psychology.
It was a fascinating mindset shift when I decided to be a writer. It was weird and I struggled with it. But what I learned from reading novels with the purpose of becoming a better writer was how truly great works of fiction had a way of showing more of the human condition than non-fiction did.
This shouldn’t be too surprising given how I spent my teenage years reading all kinds of novels about medieval history, norse mythology, Greco-Roman history and WWII. My bookshelves were filled with such books. But reading novels in 2021, it became very apparent that great novelists were able to tell the inconvenient truth with the guise of fiction.
In this way, the authors played out the kind of ecstatic truth that Werner Herzog talked about. These stories actually told more about the truth that we couldn’t see in non-fiction because people would say it lacked data or proof. But the human condition isn’t something to be anchored with stats or data.
It’s a qualitative condition. But in a world that wants objectivity, certainty, and a desire for black or white, such subjectivity doesn’t play too well. This translates to a view that non-fiction might be closer to fiction because authors are obsessed with making a point—no matter how flawed and inconclusive their data is—and want to look like an expert on the subject. Novelists don’t have this pressure and there is greater honesty with what they write because they won’t be judged as an expert.
It’s like how the court jesters were looked upon as the real truth-tellers in medieval times because people didn’t need to take them so seriously. They were no different from the startup comedians of our time like Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr who would tell the inconvenient truth in the wrapper of a joke. But great novels are harder to read than non-fiction. I think there’s a level of maturity required for them and I hope to be ready to take more on in the new year.
Podcasting
This did not go as planned. I planned to launch a new podcast by the Summer of 2021. Late spring focused on recording seven episodes for a new podcast. It would’ve been the third one I made.
I wanted to make a podcast where I would have 2-hour conversations with people to learn about what they did and the culture within the city they worked at. These were some episodes I recorded: a Muay Thai pro in Thailand, an art gallery operator in Singapore, an architect in Vancouver.
Each conversation was fascinating. But the project ceased to become a priority. It was a combination of other projects taking priority but also not wanting to “mess up” the episodes given this would be my third attempt at building a podcast.
Despite technology making it easy to start podcasts and my experience building two, starting a new podcast isn’t a joke. I wanted to do it right. So, I opted to not do it if I wasn’t going to do it well.
In the latter half of 2021, I had the idea of making the podcast the evolution of Accounted For, my first podcast. I liked the name and what I was making was what I intended Accounted For to be in the beginning.
When I started Accounted For, I told myself I was in it for the long haul and focused on making something I would be proud of. I was proud of the interviews I did.
Some guests genuinely tickled my curiosity and I wanted to dig into how they ended up going on a weird career journey. But I also had guests I reached out to because of their public profile to grow the podcast through the fame of my guests. It was no different from all the big podcasts interviewing the same 100 “experts.”
I created Accounted For because I wanted to give a voice to the 99% that were not covered by the popular media. I was looking for what to do next with my life and I wanted to find it in a world not dominated by bells and whistles. I wanted to explore what people who didn’t do the prestigious 1% of jobs did and what the founders of non-VC-backed companies did. I wanted to explore the stories of the 99% of people who didn’t get the media attention. Yet, I saw Accounted For gravitate towards the 1% focus and it stopped being fun.
I was dealing with the marketing people at large tech companies. They asked for my download numbers, reach and audience clout, etc. These were all fair questions. But I looked myself in the mirror, asked myself what the hell I was doing because I didn’t want to interview people who only wanted to talk on big shows because they were special. I didn’t want to make a podcast with them to begin with. But I found myself sucked into the game while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life.
So, I thought about rebooting Accounted For. I wanted to rekindle that idea. Now I’m laying out the plans in 2022 to reboot it with these new episodes. I’m still afraid of how I’ll make the time. I can barely keep up with writing a book and doing two newsletters a week. My social life doesn’t exist and if I didn’t live with my girlfriend I don’t know if I would even be able to see her once a week. But, it is what it is. These are the decisions I make and I’ll try to make the best decisions I can with the goals and facts I have.
Writing: Newsletter
I published 297 essays as of December 31, 2021. The first essay was published in May of 2016. Then I wrote a couple more the December the year after. Then I started writing regularly in March of 2018.
I moved to Substack in March of 2021. Long-time subscribers will know I was on Mailchimp before. I wanted to have the option of building premium newsletters and Substack was the ready-made solution I was looking for.
Newsletters made a lot of noise in 2020 and this opened my mind to the possibility that someone could make a living off of it. I knew there were a handful of people like Ben Thompson and Benedict Evans doing it but I never gave it serious thought. But 2021 was also the year I decided to pursue writing as a career and I thought why not?
Free Tuesday Newsletter
I had been writing the OMD newsletter since the inception of the website around April of 2018. It was a monthly endeavour until it became a weekly one and finally a daily one in early 2021.
I wrote daily for about three months until it became no longer tenable. Simply put, I wasn’t happy with what I was putting out. It was similar to when I was podcasting daily with OMD Daily. That too was about a three-month venture until I wasn’t able to put out work I was proud of. But the desire to write remained.
I resumed my weekly writing schedule—whether it was to endure my narcissism or a belief I was writing something of value I’ll leave that judgment up to you. I believed in both, depending on the time of day.
The free newsletter evolved when I moved to Substack. I freed it from the specificity of topic to specificity of origin. It was going to incorporate various things I found worth writing about from movies, books, research to random thoughts and musings. That’s how the three categories in the Tuesday newsletter came to be. I’m happy to report I didn’t miss a single week of publishing for this newsletter.
Premium Newsletter
The premium newsletter was launched in June 2021. It was under development for about three months. I had been collecting ideas for something like this over the years. I attempted to give the idea light multiple times but couldn't get over the technical difficulty of premium subscriptions—among other matters of confidence in the self.
Even after launching the premium newsletter, it went through an evolution a few months afterward. I wanted to call it Ironvesting in the beginning—you’ll even see this tag in some URLs in the old samples. I wanted to combine my love for powerlifting and investing. But I backed out of it because the original idea was about writing research articles for both topics. I wasn’t as interested in digging into the research of strength training as much as I enjoyed the empirical process of training whilst documenting and experimenting.
So, the premium newsletter started with a singular focus on researching public companies in the manner I found fascinating: looking at people and culture. But this too hit a snag. There was a reason I didn’t want to work at an investment fund and one of those reasons was not wanting to write research reports on companies every day. Does this trend sound familiar?
Just like the free newsletter, I reverted the specificity from topic back to origin—me as the writer. That’s how the newsletter evolved to OMD Journal. I wanted to make it a documentation of my practice of investing, powerlifting and writing.
The research into companies didn’t change but the evolution allowed me to add articles on powerlifting. This gave me time to spend longer on the investing articles but also forced me to reflect every month on my development as a lifter. Finally, the annual report was going to be the cadence by which I could explore my development as a writer and that’s what you are reading now. At the least, it makes me approach OMD Ventures as a business supported by stakeholders (i.e. you my readers).
Now, as far as numbers go, the newsletter venture is not a sustainable business, yet. If you aren’t impressed with my subscriber numbers, how do you think I feel as someone who is faced with this reality every day?
I would be lying to you if I didn’t go through periods of agony every now and then—more frequent than I’d like—where I would look at the repository of near 300 essays and wonder if people actually read it. I know there are pageview numbers but it’s still something I can't seem to wrap my head around without defaulting to pessimism.
I know I shouldn’t concern myself with things I can’t control. I know that. I know the focus should be on continuously writing work I am proud of. But dammit if I don’t have the Einstein quote ring in my head every now and then:
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” - Albert Einstein
I know every essay I write will never be the same as the old one. The nature of writing is not like science in its purpose for running experiments to achieve specific, objective, and quantifiable results. Writing is much messier and there can be no formula that can be applied to all. I’m sure I’ll come up with a kind of system for myself but this system, I think, will only be applicable to my own production function then have any commercial viability.
What I could control were my writing and publishing. I was able to complete this task and that’s been a win in its own way. To even gather seven individuals who trusted me to deliver was also something to be very grateful for. I’m also not discounting all those who entrust me with their attention for the free newsletter as well. I periodically check the open rates on my newsletter and seeing an average open rate of 40% has been very uplifting. Given the average open rate for most newsletters floats near 10%, I’m glad to have an engaged group of supporters.
However, for me to continue building OMD Ventures and write more, I need to make this a sustainable business that I can make a living off of. I have no idea how the process for the books will go. I work on them daily but I didn’t start with a book deal so I’m aware of the lottery-like nature of trying to get published.
I’m not going to bank on that and that’s what the newsletter is aimed to alleviate and be the engine for the entire venture. Now, this might change as the venture evolves every month but it’s the vision I have in my head today.
Finding ways to introduce OMD Journal to more subscribers with similar interests will be one thing but I’m also going to introduce a Patreon for the supporters who prefer my free content over the premium one. Though the origin of both newsletters is the same, the focus is different and I can understand there might be a different audience for both, I don’t know what is right or wrong. I’ll let the market decide over a number of years and I hope to have my answer then. Until that time, I can’t do anything but to sit my butt down and write, write and write. They say the good shit sticks so let’s see what sticks.