It’s the end of 2024, and I failed myself this year. I didn’t honour my intentions, and I know you’ve felt like me before.

Private moments, secret desires.

How do you deal with disappointment?

What do you feel when you’ve failed yourself?

To summarise my situation in brief: this year is my first year, in over twelve years, since I set a New Year’s Resolution in January which I hadn’t at least moderately materialised in the twelve months to December.

Objectively speaking, and hopefully without any sense of sentiment or exaggeration, this is my first year of failing on my terms, according to my single, hyper-specific intention to make significant, measurable, and quantifiable progress with filming my online school curriculum.

I’ve spent five years researching 700+ psychology books, I’ve re-read 180+ of them, and I’ve already organised the very best of these books into a finely curated, thirty-module, full-stack psychological curriculum as my New Years Ritual for 2024.

The most important energy of the year, not drinking or partying or being asleep, that’s where I was and how I’ve chosen to anchor the crossover from sunset to sunrise every year since 2019.

220 curriculum videos that I wanted to film, but I haven’t filmed a single video this year.

Not one video.

None.

It’s hard sharing these words, and I’m not going to expand on all the complex reasons why this hasn’t happened, but my failure has taught me a significant lesson - it’s reminded me of something which I often remind my clients:

You won’t grow upwards all the time.

Sometimes you grow downwards.

It’s not always about branches and fruits.

Sometimes it’s a year of rocks and roots.

True words: they feel like melancholic medicine.

This year I built my home on the rocks.

It’s been an underground year.

A year of back-end, unseen self-organisation and entrepreneurial preparation. I wanted and expected a year of quantifiable, upwards expansion - another season of branches and fruits - but I’ve truthfully faced a variety of personal and professional hardships which forced me to slow down.

If you’ve been following my channel for a while, you might challenge my complaints and politely remind me that my channel has doubled this year - yes, I’ve been growing very well on YouTube, but I don’t measure my contribution via fleeting numbers on YouTube.

In terms of data, YouTube sent me an interesting email this week: they were keen to celebrate that I’ve grown 45,000 subscribers since December 2023; 1,400,000 views, 70 videos published, and 5000 comments across the channel in 2024 alone.

I even learned how to livestream this year, and I’ve been enjoying our weekly community walks in the woods, so please don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for the growth on YouTube, but I didn’t make the true progress I wanted this year because my only intention - my single, monolithic intention which I anchored and amplified from sunset to sunrise when I worked through the dark of New Years Eve - was to make significant filming progress with my online curriculum, to turn the last five years of research into something much more beautiful and meaningful than the sporadic, algorithm-optimised teachings in my public YouTube persona.

It sounds neurotic re-reading my own words, and maybe I’ve gone insane from reading too many books, but I’m very serious about my intentions and this hurts me.

My intention is the hope of my heart, and my will to move the world was moved by the world this year instead.

Life got in the way this Spring and Summer, and I spent Autumn recovering from the challenges of balancing many aspects of the inner and outer world simultaneously.

I have grown this year in many beautiful ways, but it’s not the fruits of filming my online curriculum, and nobody would know how I really felt on the inside unless I found the courage to share this socially-taboo confession with you today.

Last week I put up a poll asking how satisfied people were with their progress in 2024, and I couldn’t vote that I was very satisfied.

I could barely vote that I was satisfied, but I did.

“Oh no, he’s successful but not in the ways Jordan wanted - boohoo.”

I’m aware of the tone of this post, and I know it will be impossible to convey the full nuance of my sincere disappointment in a couple hundred words, but I share my inner world with you in commiseration with the ways that you’ve let yourself down this year.

The private losses, the personal failures.

The vices, the apathy - the addictions.

I see you, and I am you.

I usually end these posts with an uplifting sentence or otherwise articulate an arousal of poetic purpose to give you a sense of hope and momentum, but you’re going to forget these words within an instant of scrolling your YouTube feed and I can’t fake my enthusiasm for the pathetic and predictable desecration of collective consciousness in the minutes that follow this sentence.

Today is Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, and I find myself shivering from the spit I’ve dribbled on my soul; my dreams are saliva, consecrated with affirmation, sanctified with sincere and enthusiastic language, and yet I am bleeding through my slack-jawed mouth.

Crooked posture, flicking thumb.

This hand, these eyes.

The same stupid state.

Yet another moment with the screen.

Forgetting what you’ve seen.

There goes your year.

Where did you go?

Jordan