Did You Know This Secret? How to Review the Year 2024 Properly

AVAlexander Volchek

This is often a fashionable subject that everyone is discussing. Now that we have social media, everyone posts a review of their year. They want to take stock and share it. And when a person reviews the year that way, they begin elevating particular events within it and, in effect, wiping out everything that happened before and everything still ahead. That perspective on reviewing the year completely changes the whole picture of your own perception. Hello, everyone! My name is Alexander Volchek. My channel is about scaling as a person, personal growth, and scaling your business and professional work. Today we are going to discuss a very important subject that everyone brings up in December, at the end of the year, and at the beginning of the new one: taking stock. How important is it to review your year? How significant is it for each of us in laying the foundation for development, scaling, and moving forward in the new year? Have you thought not about how to review your year, but about why you should review it? And about how important the question ‘Why?’ is here? Be sure to watch this video to the end. You will learn not only why you should review your year, but what, specifically, to do and how this practice will truly change your life in terms of real development and scaling.

Once again, when we ask how to review the year, it is very important first to begin exploring the question ‘Why?’ for ourselves. You need to work through that question individually, for yourself, and find your own answer. The ‘why’ can be completely different for each person. Someone wants to review the year to get the positive emotional feeling that they had a great year. Someone wants to review it and post the result on social media, to show that their events had some significance. Someone wants to review the year to understand whether they did everything properly, whether they managed to carry out the plans they had made or not. Someone wants to review the year so they can plan the next one: ‘I have taken stock, and that lets me plan the year ahead.’ In other words, each person will have a completely different ‘why.’ That is the fundamental basis. When we approach planning the new year, for example, we also need to determine why we are doing it, how we will work with that foundation, and what we want to learn from it. People often go through life taking a great many actions without being aware of their causes and consequences.

Why, specifically, does a person bring about a particular event? Why do they take a particular action? Why do they make certain plans or a particular purchase, or start a project? They do not fully understand why. Even if we take something as concrete as business, in 90% of cases—probably even more, perhaps 95%—people do not fully understand their own goal, why they are doing business. So when someone reviews their year, it is often a fashionable subject everyone is discussing. We have social media now—Instagram, for example. Everyone posts their year in review. Everyone wants to take stock and share it. Now, as we go further with reviewing the year, we have established why. Imagine: I have done this many times, a great many times, and the ‘why’ has varied. Sometimes I did it because I was given that assignment at a training course. Sometimes I did it because I wanted my own reflection on the year ending and to plan the new one. It gave me a basis for making a plan. Sometimes I wanted to compare things with what I had been doing a year earlier.

Did it actually match the way I am living now, or not? Sometimes I wanted to single out important events. This is where I suggest looking at how to understand what to write in a year-end review and what to include. I have been exploring this over the past few weeks. I can say it is an amazing state: when I began looking at what had happened this year, I realized I could talk for hours, probably days, about those events, and the list would not end. I realize it is the first part of December as I record this video, and there is still so much time ahead. That feeling of ‘so much time ahead’ is so good that I do not feel I have lost eleven months. Very often, when people review the year, they want to use their identification of important events to enter a state of feeling that their year was successful, that it was a good year, that it was not as bad as before, or not the same as every other year. And when someone takes stock that way, they begin elevating particular events within the year and, in effect, wiping out everything that happened before and everything still ahead.

Let me explain. For me, these three weeks of December still ahead have no less force, weight, or standing than the eleven months and one week that have passed. In essence, there is no difference in the importance of events behind us and ahead of us. When we describe events, it is very important to notice how we single them out—what was important. Was it important that this year I began living in a new place and settled into it as my home? Three of my four children started at new schools, and they are very good schools. Was it important that I spent what was probably a tremendous amount of time with my children and my wife—an enormous amount, in terms of time, the number of things we did, and how full it all was? Or was it important that I live in America and my mother came to visit me for the second time this year? Or that friends stayed with me several times, for a few weeks or a month, or that my sister visited several times and I also saw her in New York? Or was it important that I have new businesses—that I started several new businesses with new partnerships, and those relationships went through all kinds of circumstances?

Was it important that there are new clients? Was it important that I recorded more than fifty YouTube videos during the year? Or that I spent a whole month with the children while my wife was in Minsk? I was alone with them for an entire month and had a unique experience that is almost impossible to have when Polina is always nearby and you cannot be on your own with them for that long. That we traveled to another region together, that we lived in a tent together for several days? Or was it important that, when my friend visited, we traveled in the mountains together? Or how many new things I learned about technological development in the world, how many projects we discussed involving AI, machine learning—all of artificial intelligence? Or was it important that I launched a new podcast about technology news and insights from Silicon Valley, and we made thirty-five episodes? Or that I started gardening and planted hundreds of plants—by now, I think, thousands of bulbs, flowers, and seeds—in all sorts of areas, and did a tremendous amount with my own hands: built several playgrounds, set up an area for a pool, put down new flooring?

So what, ultimately, is important? Or was it every day when I went outside and saw this view? This is the view from a window in my home. What is important? Is this view important every day? Or is it living through difficult moments in terms of your inner state, reflection, judgments and evaluations, your own state, practices and development—living through many difficulties and tasks, including work? I had an interesting moment of reflection a few days ago when I was discussing this with a group. I have a group where I run V100, about human development. It is ongoing; you can join and leave. It is very inexpensive—you can read about it. There are currently seventy-plus participants. I was leading a session, and we were talking about reviewing the year. There were flowers on the table. I was looking at those flowers and realizing how important it is to feel and sense the space around you. Sensing that space brings much more importance than the events I have listed. In essence, everything in life becomes unimportant and important at the same time. That means the very concept of importance does not exist.

I am giving you these examples not to recite a list of my own, but to help you understand that there is a perspective from which, when taking stock—

A perspective from which, when reviewing the year, you can try to treat events equally, without singling out certain moments and elevating them above the rest. Honestly, sincerely, I cannot name something that is supremely important. I have four children, so there were at least four years in which a child was born, right? People would always ask, ‘What good thing happened to you this year?’ Of course, you would remember that your child was born. But the point is that the year before, you knew the child was going to be born. Your wife became pregnant, and you could say that was important too. Or is every year important as your child develops and you observe that development every day, their state every day, experiencing how they change and what happens with them? Or is your own day important? So what is important here? Why am I describing these events this way? Because, for me, each minute of the day and this particular moment, as I record a YouTube video, brings the same state as other events do. Of course, at some moments I may feel emotionally better and at others emotionally worse. But fundamentally, I do not separate these events from one another.

This brings an incredible fullness and freedom to life. It makes life very rich. When you experience events this way, the concept of losing something simply does not exist. There is no situation in which you are afraid of losing an emotion, a state, or an energy, or of getting your fill of something. I just read a post in which someone described what another person had told them—I will leave out the names—that people who make money often eventually get used to living with that money. There is a scientific concept for that, right? A person has become accustomed to having a certain amount of money. In essence, that applies to everything. You get used to having children, a wife, five couches, and begin making distinctions: the money is not important, the couches are not important, but this other thing is. The point is how to make everything continually bring a sense of observing life. How do we move from asking what is important or unimportant to asking how my phone, the new couch I assembled here—I practically broke all my fingers doing it—the view I can see right now, the video I am recording, or the interview I conducted this morning with a candidate for sales director on one of my projects can all do that?

How can each of these events bring interest into life? Notice: not how to come up with events that will make life interesting, but how to make the events that happen bring interest regardless. By ‘interest,’ I mean that all these events bring real life, because this is real life. These are the events of your own life—your life and the quality of your life. This is not a question of social events. It is a question of how you experience what is happening around you, how you experience each day, even if it is the same, even if nothing changes, even if every day repeats, even if every day is lived with trauma, loss, and sadness, even if every day seems to bring nothing new. This perspective on reviewing the year completely changes the whole picture of your own perception. Then you may not actually need a year-end review at all. Instead, you can establish this state for yourself—a new state in which the next year unfolds, first and foremost, with an understanding that each day of your life is what needs your attention. Each day.

Without singling out certain events as important or unimportant. You can do that separately for analysis, to understand causes and consequences, to draw conclusions, even to plan something, set goals, or discuss your strategy. But at the foundation, hold the state in which every moment of life is interesting. What is behind you is wonderful. What is happening now is wonderful—it is life. And what will happen over the remaining weeks of this year is wonderful too. It is no less than the eleven months that have passed, and no more. It is simply life. The main thing to remember and hear is that each person personally determines this state of the sequence of events, including whether particular events are important or unimportant. Each person determines it for themselves, and the aspects are different for everyone. Try to hear yourself, rather than what is often broadcast around you. Only you can make yourself feel every moment of your life as real life. There is a very good video on my channel about a practice in which you can take certain actions for seven days—actions for very deep observation. Seven days this week, seven days next week, seven days after that, and on and on, continuously.

Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It is a very powerful practice. Watch that video on my channel; it gives you a strong charge and a way forward. You are on Alexander Volchek’s channel, about scaling as a person—real scaling as a person. What leads to true development in absolutely every area: personal development, family, professional life, business, and relationships with people. Until next time!