Continuing the tradition from 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018, here’s my reflection on 2023. (Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links for some of the products I mention and/or recommend.)

Work

2023 was the first full year that I wasn’t an employee of a company since 2007. (I worked for other agencies from 2007–2012, and then I was a salaried employee of my agency SuperFriendly from 2012–2022. Dan Mall Teaches is an LLC, so I’m now a sole proprietor for the first time, not an employee.) My big work goal for 2023 was to transition fully away from selling my time, but I wasn’t able to do that. Still, I’m very grateful to the small list of clients who trusted me to help them this past year: Peloton, The New York Times, NSMBL, Supernova, Figma, Zeplin/Omlet, and The Valoram Group.

As someone who has only worked at agencies or run his own, the in-house position grass is constantly greener. Combined with drastically changing my business and a looming recession, that field is downright emerald. I have a running alert on LinkedIn for jobs I might be suited for. From the end of 2022 to now, I’ve participated in 3 interview processes:

1. I talked to a team I had done contract work with about coming on board full-time. I found the interview process so confusing that, in one of my five interviews with the team there, I stopped to ask one of my interviewers why they asked me a specific question and how the answer would affect their evaluation of me. They said it was on their sheet of things to ask me and they weren’t sure why. I got an offer from their head of product, which I countered. Their response? “The base you’re asking for is higher than anyone else at the company. CEO, CFO, CTO. You’re asking for more salary than what they make. There is no way I can make that happen.”
2. I was contacted by a principal designer who had followed my work for years. There was a job opening to be their manager, and they wanted to see if I was interested. We talked, and I agreed to go through the interview process. I didn’t hear anything more for weeks, and this designer got back in touch to let me know that the company already filled the position with someone who never talked to anyone on the team. I got a message from the principal designer a few months later for some advice about finding a new job.
3. I was contacted by a lone designer at a new, well-funded startup to be their head of design to help grow the design team. I interviewed with the co-founder for 30 minutes, and they talked about their background and the company for 20 minutes. Three weeks later, I saw that one of my connections started a new job as their head of design. Eight weeks later, I received an automated message that said, “While we really appreciate your interest, we recently hired for the role you applied for, so we won't be proceeding with your application at this time.”

I’ve heard many stories of others who have had much worse job-hunting experiences than I have, but even my small sample size has turned me off to the idea that there’s a place out there that would value me as much as I would value them. I think I’ll keep my professional destiny in my own hands for now.

Mentorship, advising, and coaching

In last year’s Year in Review post, I mentioned wanting to explore how I could make mentoring, advising, and coaching part of my year.

I experimented with this in two ways. First, I did medium-term mentorship with 2 people this year:

1. A Principal Designer who wanted to learn how to be a better leader (met monthly for 6 months)
2. A UX Product Design Manager who wanted to learn how to thrive as a manager (met monthly for 3 months)

I loved every second of working with them. Both are super sharp and hungry to learn and improve. The strategies we formed together allowed me to bring my experience and creativity to the table.

But both were paying for these sessions personally and could only afford so much, despite seeing tremendous value in it.

I also opened up a week at the end of the year where people could book a paid hour with me to talk about anything they wanted to. A few people did this; they all said it was helpful, but I didn’t feel like I was delivering enough value for what they were paying.

So far, I can’t find a business model in personal mentorship or coaching that works with my opportunity cost. Until I do, I think it’ll have to be charity work in my free time (of which I currently have very little).

The team coaching has been a bit more fruitful. I worked with three different companies this year to coach their teams in either design systems, process, or leadership. For two of the teams, I had standing sessions twice a week; for the other team, I met with them once a week.

I saw a lot of positive change here. But with all three engagements, I ran into the same problems:

• I could be more helpful but am limited by my scope
• Talking only goes so far. If the team doesn’t take action on what we discuss, we eventually start revisiting the same topics over and over and it starts to feel repetitive and not worthwhile.

I know I have a lot to offer here, but I think I need to figure out a viable business model before pursuing these options further.

Relume

One unique experience I had this year was being invited to the Relume Design League challenge, where two designers go head-to-head to design a landing page in 30 minutes. I hadn’t participated in something like this since FullCodePress, an event in New Zealand to build a full website for a charity in 24 hours. I’m pleased to say that I advanced to the finals but was ultimately defeated by the great Joseph Berry.

Design System University

In last year’s Year in Review, I mentioned a goal of “launching a secret project I’ve been working on for a while.” I had been working on a way to consolidate all of my design system offerings into one place. That place turned out to be Design System University, which I launched in June.

I’ve never been a mainstream designer; I’ve always tried to make my style unique. Still, though, I’m constantly envious of designers whose personal style just happens to be trendy. I could never bring myself to adopt Swiss typography and strict grid systems unless a specific project called for it. Fortunately, Design System University gave me just the excuse I’ve been looking for to play with those kinds of elements in its identity in a way that feels appropriate. This is just a smattering of the early stuff; I have a lot more in store here that I’m eager to play with in 2024.

I initially launched DSU as a combination of courses and community. It was two separate offerings:

1. A $79/month paid community that offered weekly discussion prompts, monthly working sessions, and admission to a monthly guest speaker event
2. Self-paced courses ranging from $9 to $499 that could be purchased on a one-off basis (with a 15% discount for community members)

Even in the 6 short months that DSU has been live, I’ve learned a lot about what’s resonating for my audience. I had hoped that the weekly prompts would inspire folks to share their stories; instead, they were empty every week. Despite having incredible guest speakers and highly requested working session topics, attendance dwindled.

I wondered if it was because the industry is generally less interested in design systems as a topic anymore. I tested that hypothesis by trying out a few free events with the same amount of marketing I had put into the DSU events. Hundreds of people registered with a pretty high percentage turnout. (I’m proud of these events and will likely host more in 2024.)

I learned some new lessons through these experiments:

1. The industry is still very interested in design systems. My offer is wrong.
2. Community management is a skill that I’m really bad at and have little interest in improving.

I shut down the community after 4 months and am repositioning DSU as something a lot closer to my original vision that I had somehow lost sight of along the way: teaching my design system curriculum through self-paced and live courses. I’m hoping that offering will be a lot simpler and much more accessible to more people.

One of the things that has led me in this direction—and one of my favorite work experiences all year—was teaching the inaugural live cohort of my Design System in 90 Days program. Once a week for 12 weeks, I met with a group of 30 people from organizations like The Obama Foundation, ConvertKit, BOK Financial, Scholastic, Texas A&M, Handshake, and more to do a deep dive with them on their design systems. I love this kind of deep teaching and the opportunity to get specific with students in the individual challenges they’re facing. I know the cohort has been transformative for all the students who put the effort in to make the most of it.

The only downside to this cohort is that it was much less lucrative than I wanted/needed it to be. I think I marketed it poorly and ended up giving away a lot of discounted seats, so that’s something I’ll be working on in 2024 as I plan to run this again at least once or twice. I have a few ideas as to how it can be valuable and affordable for all kinds of students as well as profitable for me.

All-in-all, lots of changes are on the way for DSU in early 2024.

Dribbble

In last year‘s review, I mentioned being excited about launching a course with my friends at Dribbble. That course was called “Scaling Design Systems,” and it was the most comprehensive video course I’ve made to date: more than 10 hours of video teaching over 81 different modules, paced to release over 8 weeks. It launched in February 2023 and was met with great reception. Unfortunately, it was short-lived as Dribbble shifted its education business away from longer-form content, so my course was only live for about 8-9 months and came down in October 2023.

In early 2024, I’ll be re-releasing this course under the Design System University banner. It was pricey before: ranging from $1,499 to $1,999. I want more people to learn about design systems and I can afford to release it at a lower pricepoint myself as I don’t have a lot of overhead, so look for this course to be priced around $199 with purchasing power parity enabled too.

I wrote a book

After two long years of writing, I finally got to hold a copy of my book Design That Scales in my hands! I’ve written two other books before, but because the first one was an e-book and the second one was self-published, this one still felt like checking a new item off my bucket list.

I’ve gotten a few requests and seen a few independent instances of book clubs forming around this book, so that’s something I’m gonna look into a bit more for 2024.

An evolving professional identity

One day this past year, I woke up and nonchalantly decided, “I’m not going to build websites anymore.” It wasn’t a big revelation or anything; just a brewing sentiment over the last few years, which is partially why I wondered aloud if web design still matters.

Though the decision was made casually, it feels heavy. My professional identity over the last 2 decades can be overgeneralized as “web designer/developer,” and I still make websites by hand to this day (for example, writing this very post in a code editor in Markdown). I’m more than proficient in design tools like Figma and Photoshop and programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But these things—especially the coding side—have been bringing me less and less joy over the past few years… and often frustration too. Combined with the rise of no-code and low-code tools, my desire to build websites by writing code myself is at an all-time low. Every website I’ve made this year is built on either Webflow or Framer, and I see that trend only increasing for me.

Following up on a goal I had last year of doing less of what I don’t like doing and more of what I like doing, I’ve been on a journey to discover exactly what those things are. In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks calls it the “Genius Zone:”

Your genius zone is where your creativity flows freely. In your zone of genius, you are actively pursuing the things that offer you fulfillment and satisfaction.

In Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell calls it the “Production Quadrant” (I like calling it my “Prosperity Quadrant” instead). His definition is simple: “makes you lots of money; lights you up.”

The Genius Zone and Prosperity Quadrant are both alternatives to Hendricks’ Excellence and Competence Zones and Martell’s Replacement Quadrant. They all mean the same thing: things you’re good at or even great at that might even make you a lot of money but drain your energy. It seems like an obvious statement, but it was eye-opening for me to learn about. Web design is my Excellence Zone, but it’s not my Genius Zone. I’m only now realizing that those two can be separate things.

Two other impactful things happened this year that also encouraged me in this direction:

I took Shawn Blanc’s excellent Focus Like a Boss course this year, and it certainly did not disappoint. Shawn’s teaching showed me how to drive my work from my personal values, not just business metrics. I realized I had unknowingly been keeping the two separate, and his course was exactly the push I needed to make them converge a bit more.

I also had the chance to join the NYC mastermind group of Rachel Rodgers’s and Nathan Barry’s Billion Dollar Creator podcast roadshow. One of the big takeaways from this event was to figure out how to direct attention to the highest ROI possible. I was unknowingly following the typical creator playbook: make content for designers, because I’m a designer. While there’s nothing wrong with that, that’s probably not the highest ROI I could get for the attention I can attract. This was the push I needed to start something my wife and I had talked about for a while: Great Job! (More on that below.)

This push converged with something else that had already been organically happening in my work: I was designing less and writing more. My time tracking software tells me that I spent the exact number of hours this year writing as I had designing—207 hours each, to be exact. That tracks (heh) with where I’ve seen the most compounding growth this year: on my newsletter. I sent a newsletter out religiously every week for over a year now; I don’t think I did anything else professionally with this amount of discipline. Fittingly, I’ve seen my newsletter subscribers grow from an initial list of about 2,000 that I never emailed to a current list size of over 37,000 subscribers—incredible results for just one year. To put it in perspective for me, it took me 16 years on Twitter to grow to an audience of over 42,000.

I’m slowly embracing the idea that I’m not just a designer, or even primarily a designer. I guess I’m a writer too.

Great Job!

Em and I had been noodling on the idea of sharing more about our parenting tips and tricks publicly, and we finally made it happen this year. We launched Great Job! in September to help parents & caregivers design their own handbook for raising amazing kids. We started by sharing articles and small snippets of content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram to see what resonated where.

The big thing that’s getting the most attention is our podcast. In last year’s review, I mentioned that podcasting was something I might get back into this year, but I didn’t have a particular angle on it. Luckily, Em did. We’re getting a lot of great feedback on our episodes and this is likely something we’ll put even more effort into in 2024. (Subscribe on Spotify and YouTube.)

And that‘s just the tip of the iceberg. We have so many plans for Great Job! in 2024 that I can’t quite talk about yet, but this might be the thing I’m most excited to work on in 2024.

Speaking

As has been my trend for the last few years, I’ve been doing fewer conference talks and workshops:

• I did a few private design system talks and training for Reason One, Amazon, The Obama Foundation, Celonis, and the Navy Federal Credit Union.
• I did public talks about design systems at conferences like Config and DSW Day.
• I taught design system workshops at conferences like RenderATL and the DesignOps Summit and for companies like Dribbble.

That said, instead of talking at people, I’ve enjoyed talking to and with them more:

• I appeared on a few webinars for Zeplin/Omlet.
• I talked to the SuperHi community about job hunting.
• I did AMAs with the Useful School, UI Prep, and Design Better communities.
• I appeared on the Fractional, PodRocket, Rosenfeld Review, Content Strategy Insights, and d.MBA podcasts.

I also have 10 more podcast appearances scheduled for January and February of 2024.

Videos & photos

This past year, I took 20,722 photos, which is 45% less than the 37,476 photos I took in 2022. This is notable because, for the previous few years, my photo quantity had been growing by 29% each year. I think there are 3 explanations for this:

1. I traveled less this year than I have in previous years, especially internationally. I usually bring my camera with me on trips, which is where I shoot the majority of my photos. Fewer trips, fewer photos.
2. More creative work this year. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my photography has ramped up in the last few years as I’ve been creating less at work. In the last few years that I ran SuperFriendly, I was mostly involved in running teams and learning how to be a CEO, so I wasn’t very involved in the work itself. After shutting down SuperFriendly last year, I’ve been doing a lot more creating this year, from big things like projects for clients to small things like Instagram and Twitter posts.
3. Lower quantity but higher quality. I got back into photography more seriously about 7 years ago, and I think I’m finally starting to see my work get better. Over the last few years, I can think of 3 separate occasions when I actively believed that I shot a perfect photo.

Here are a few of my favorite shots I took in 2023:

Reporting back on some photography-related predictions from last year:

• I thought I might pick up a macro lens due to the increase in food and portrait photography. Though I look at the Canon RF 100mm f/2.8 about once a month, I realized that I’m very content with my Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM.
• I did get the 50mm f/1.8 for my second camera (Sony Alpha a6400) to get a different focal length for shooting a second angle of video. It’s come in very handy for the Great Job! podcast.
• Because my Canon EOS R has a 1.8x crop when shooting 4k, I picked up a cheap Canon RF 16mm f/2.8 STM lens to give me a wider angle option. I thought I’d use it only for shooting video, but it’s become one of my favorite lenses to shoot photos with too, especially for food photography.

I also finally posted an update to my webcam setup after a few years. I’m glad I have an updated, canonical place to link people to when they ask about my setup.

This website

More evidence that I’m officially a writer: I posted 42 articles to this site in 2023, which is 75% more than I did in 2022 (only 24 articles).

I had a goal to make this site my second brain, but I quickly realized that’s both difficult and inappropriate. I’ve grown very content with using Obsidian as my private second brain over the last year, so I feel the need to scratch that itch a bit less.

I’ve also realized that this site is a longstanding asset of mine. I’ve had it for 18 years, and it gets its fair share of regular traffic. I like to think of it as a personal playground where I can experiment with things, but the truth is that it’s a place where I write to or I don’t. It’s been a weblog for the majority of its life. I’m learning that I have other channels for that, and this site can be more for both me and others who want to learn from me.

In 2024, I’m commiting to recognizing it as an important part of my business. With that lens, it’s clear that I do a poor job here of directing people to content that could be valuable to them. So, I’ll be:

• Refining my branding and positioning to be clearer
• Tightening up the information architecture and content strategy
• Hiring a team to take over the production of the site

Watch this space.

Other content channels

In 2023, I experimented much more heavily with other content channels to see how I could engage with people differently.

My Twitter account @danmall has grown pretty steadily over the last year. That doesn’t feel surprising, as I’m already in the habit of tweeting at least once a day and posting a thread or two each week.

The new thing I’ve started this year is taking LinkedIn seriously, which has mostly meant posting everything I post to Twitter on my LinkedIn too. My analytics tell me that I have almost 2.3M impressions, which is up 920% from last year. I enjoy the public and private conversations I have with people on LinkedIn; I’ll keep this up in 2024.

In theory, posting to my Threads account @danmallteaches should be as easy as posting to Twitter and LinkedIn. But I forget to post there. I really want to like it.

I started my Instagram channel @danmallteaches just over a year ago with 0 followers, and I’m amazed at how quickly I’ve gotten to over 4k followers. The downside is that Instagram content still feels more time-consuming for me to make. I don’t have a good system for this yet, so I’m going to try to figure out a good system for batch-creating and posting in 2024 to see if this is something I’ll stick with.

The growth of my YouTube channel has been pretty surprising to me. I post there sporadically when I have something. I have no system. I don’t do a good job of the best practices around titles and thumbnails and algorithms. And yet, I have almost 3,600 subscribers, almost as much as my Instagram account. Still, the effort to be good at YouTube feels the highest to me: writing scripts, setting up, shooting, and editing all take me a lot of time since I’m not great at any of them, and I’m not sure it’s worth investing here to outsource this work. I’m not yet sure where YouTube fits into my overall marketing strategy, so we’ll see if anything specific changes in 2024.

I tried posting to my TikTok account @danmallteaches for a little while, but I don’t think I get it. My engagement is pretty low, and I don’t use TikTok at all otherwise, so I think I’m going to officially give this up.

Some benchmarks to try and hit for 2024:

• Get to 100k followers on Twitter
• Get to 100k followers on LinkedIn
• Get to 100k subscribers to my newsletter
• Get to 50k followers on Instagram

Family & Home

As seems to be my trend for the last year or two, the older my kids get and the closer Em and I get, the less apt I am to share about what we do publicly. I like that we have things that we privately enjoy together. So, I’ll share a few small things here, but not much.

Sidda’s 12 and Charlie’s 10. It’s an exciting challenge to find the equilibrium between treating them like babies and treating them like adults. But when we all get it right together, it’s pretty fun. They’re both in a season of being really into theater and plays. Sidda’s been taking a dive class with a friend, and Charlie’s been doing gymnastics again. We’ll see how long they want to stick with those. We’ve talked about martial arts as a new potential activity for the next season of life. Music and drawing also seem to be on the rise for both of them.

For a little over a year, a big focus for Em and me has been tightening up our family finances. It started when we were preparing for me to shut down SuperFriendly not knowing where our income would be coming from. That meant reducing as many of our fixed expenses as we could, which we did well with for a while. The big wrench this year was realizing that the variable part of our mortgage interest rate kicked in. As first-time homeowners, we didn’t know what that meant, but we sure are finding out now. We have some major hopes and plans for 2024 to create more financial flexibility for our family.

One Hail Mary attempt to change our situation was fantasizing about selling all our stuff and moving somewhere cheap and warm where we could live on a beach. I had committed in my head that, if we needed less money, I could work less and homeschool my kids. After all, if Dan Mall Teaches strangers on the internet, why couldn’t Dan Mall Teach some algebra and language arts to his kiddos? To my surprise, my kids were into the idea too, which I initially thought would be a tough sell. So, to beta test the idea, we spent spring break in a small town in Mexico in a modest Airbnb apartment to get a taste of what that kind of life would be like. My family hated it. From small things like not being able to drink the tap water and the shower having a stale smell to the bigger realizations that making friends would be tough and there wasn’t a lot that was familiar here, we quickly got the sense that this plan wasn’t for us, at least not right now. (Glad we tested it instead of diving right in.) On the bright side, the extreme reality check allowed us to walk it back and find some smaller ways to dial in what we want our life together to look like right now.

That doesn’t mean that we’re penny-pinching everywhere. For Em’s birthday in 2023, we splurged with some friends on the Disney VIP Tour (the same ones the celebrities do). We had a personal tour guide who drove us from park to park, walked us through all the secret backlot shortcuts, and even had a personalized Starbucks order waiting for us when we needed a pick-me-up. We ended up doing 10 rides across 4 theme parks all in one day, which is way more rides than anyone should do in that timeframe. We all were thoroughly queasy and exhausted by the end of the day and had dinner in EPCOT’s France pavilion watching fireworks over the water.

Regarding my extended family, I’m grateful to have had the chance to work with both my dad and my brother this year. They both willingly jumped in without hesitation to help me with stuff I was struggling with this year, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to repay the favor through what I do well. I named, branded, and built the site for my dad’s new consulting company, 3¢ Accounting. And I helped put up a new landing page for my brother’s crew at The Valoram Group. I’d like to do more for my mom as she enters a new phase of her retirement, but we haven’t quite figured out the right balance that respects each others’ needs and boundaries. I’d like to try and figure this out in 2024.

Health, wellness, and self-care

In 2024, I’ll turn 40.

I’ve been trying to get better at celebrating over the last few years. I was trying to get a table at Noma for my 40th—especially as they’ll be closing for good in 2024—but the season booked up within seconds as soon as reservations opened. I’m still looking for something equivalently special.

I’ve also never stated my age publicly until now. I built my first website in 1998, when I was 14 years old, in 8th grade. I got my first design internship job in 2004 when I was 20. I started early in this industry. For a long time, I was some version of “the whiz kid” at work. While that comes with advantages, it also has its drawbacks. When every other director at a company had a company credit card, I felt I didn’t get one because “why would we give a 25-year-old a company credit card?” I think I’ve been denied deserved raises because my boss couldn’t quite get over paying that amount of money to a 27-year-old. In the same way that I think my race always affected my opportunities, I think my age played a similar role. I can’t hide my race, but I could hide my age, so I did for a long time. Going gray early probably helped me always seem a bit older than I was.

But now, I’m turning the corner where I’m probably going to be considered too old for some things. And I’m deciding to finally not care about that.

I’ve never really had a skincare routine before. I moisturize my hands and arms often because 1) I wash my hands a lot and 2) I’m brown and get ashy all the time. But I recently got a free sample of an eye serum, which reminded me that it’s probably time to at least wash my prone-to-be-oily face at night with a cleanser and not just water. 2024 can be the start of a skincare routine for me.

Basketball is officially a regular part of my life. I played 55 times in 2023. It’s not quite every week, but some weeks, I play twice depending on which group I play with. I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in my skills over the last year. I still have off nights, but generally, most teams I play on can count on me to score a significant share of my team’s points, facilitate a good chunk of the offense, and make some smart defensive plays every game. I saw a post earlier this year where Isaiah Thomas’ son said to him, “Be aggressive; have fun.” That’s been a mantra I repeat to myself every time I go play basketball. For most of my life, I’ve been smaller and weaker than most people I played against, so I tended to play small. Over the last few years, I’ve started to accept that, while I’m slower now, I’m also stronger and can take contact better, so I have to remind myself that being aggressive is a new tool in my arsenal that I didn’t have before.

I’m still not very flexible though and I don’t have much core strength anymore, something that I’d like to improve in 2024. I signed up for this Science of Stretching program (thank you, Instagram ad) and am committed to devoting at least 15 minutes a day to improving my flexibility. I’m also going to try a 15-minute/day BetterMe workout to see if it’s something I can stick with. Hopefully, this isn’t just a January thing like the rest of the world.

I still drink a lot of soda.

Last year, I threw up for the first time in 10 years. This year, I threw up once again, this time during a fall foliage photography trip to the Adirondacks. I hate throwing up. A goal wish for 2024 is to not throw up.

I think I’ll do Invisalign (or some equivalent aligner) in 2024.

I finally got the tattoo I wanted to celebrate my decade of running SuperFriendly. I waited a year to get one from Mike Ski at True Hand Society, and I’m so glad I did. I only had a concept in mind but nothing specific, so I was nervous to see what Mike could think up. As soon as I saw his initial drawing, I breathed a big sigh of relief. I’ll probably add to this over the next year to eventually cover my entire forearm, and this is a great base.

On the mental health front, I continued to work with a therapist and coach at the beginning of the year. In February, she gave me an assignment to do and said I should work on it in earnest and we should meet again after I was finished and had a chance to breathe. I assumed it would take a few weeks or a month or two at most. It’s been almost a year. I’m very ready to start working with her again. Hopefully, she’s not too busy to take me on as a client again 🤞🏽

Books

In 2023, I read or attempted to read:

1. The Perfect Day Formula, by Craig Ballantyne (abandoned)
2. The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy (abandoned)
3. The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss ★★★★☆
4. One Million Followers, by Brendan Kane (abandoned)
5. The Forever Transaction, by Robbie Kellman Baxter ★★★☆☆
6. Be Our Guest, by Walt Disney Company ★★★☆☆
7. Just Keep Buying, by Nick Maggiulli (abandoned)
8. Go Back to Where You Came From, by Wajahat Ali ★★★★☆
9. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King ★★★★★
10. Superman: Up in the Sky, by Tom King ★★★☆☆
11. The World’s Worst Assistant, by Sona Movsesian (abandoned)
12. True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Abraham Riesman (abandoned)
13. How to Speak Money, by John Lanchester (abandoned)
14. Hangry: A Startup Journey, by Mike Evans ★★★★☆
15. No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, by Sarah Frier ★★★☆☆
16. Continuous Discovery Habits, by Teresa Torres ★★★☆☆
17. The One World Schoolhouse, by Salman Khan ★★★☆☆
18. The Ultimate Sales Letter, by Dan S. Kennedy ★★☆☆☆
19. The Pocket Guide to High Ticket Selling, by Dan Henry ★★★★☆
20. Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford (abandoned)
21. Buy Back Your Time, by Dan Martell ★★★★★
22. Oversubscribed, by Daniel Priestley ★★★★★
23. We Should All Be Millionaires, by Rachel Rodgers ★★★★★
24. Your World Class Assistant, by Michal Hyatt ★★★☆☆
25. 24 Assets, by Daniel Priestley ★★★★★
26. This is Personal, by Brennan Dunn (currently reading)
27. $100M Leads, by Alex Hormozi (currently reading)

Travel

Reversing the trend from the last few years since COVID-19 began, travel this year was about half professional and half personal.

1. Playa del Carmen, Mexico
2. Los Angeles, CA
3. Brooklyn, NY
4. Puerto Morelos, Mexico
5. Atlanta, GA (twice)
6. San Francisco, CA
7. The Adirondacks, NY
8. Orlando, FL

The sole pairs

I only bought two pairs of sneakers this past year:

1. Air Jordan 1 Zoom CMFT 2 x Teyana Taylor
2. Air Jordan 1 Mid “Bred Toe”

I planned to buy the Bred Toes last year, and the Teyana Taylor’s were an impulse buy.

The only other pair I’d like is the Air Jordan 1 Retro High Utility 'Stash.' Otherwise, I’m pretty content with the collection I have, and will probably even get rid of some this year.

I’ve been playing basketball all year in the Nike KD Trey 5 X. I’ve always played in high tops so this is the first year I’ve played in mids, and I like them. I was a little worried about it after a bad ankle sprain a few years ago, but they’ve been great so far, and I like how lightweight they are. They’re getting a bit worn out now, so I’ll probably try a different pair of mids soon.

Miscellany

• My beard has noticeably more gray in it than last year.
• I’m honored to have an article published on the Figma blog: Dan Mall’s 10 principles for a worthy design career.
• I asked for 2 things for Christmas this year: new undershirts and socks. I’m particularly happy with my new sock strategy: I threw out all of my old socks and got 12 pairs each of CSG No-Show socks and Nike Training Crew socks. No more matching woes; just grab 2 and go. The last piece is to pick up 12 pairs of good dress socks. I’m deciding between Uniqlo Colorful Socks and Bombas Marl Calf Socks.
• I ate at some great new restaurants this year: Cry Baby Pasta, Fork, Zapote, Din Tai Fung, The Chicken or the Egg, Tupelo Honey, Oxalis, Peninsula, Pelicanos, Playa Jaguar, Atera, Southern Belle, Thirsty Dice, Carlucci’s Waterfront, Burma Love, yakiniQ, Sorrel, Laser Wolf, Estrella, The Pickled Pig, Noon Mark Diner.

2024

I was never really one to pick a word as my theme of the year, but seeing how well it worked for my wife, I decided to try it for 2024. The word I’m picking is: stretching + strengthening. Ok, I know that’s two words, but I feel like they go together as one idea.

Wishing you a wonderful start to 2024!

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