This will be 2020
I find it hard to set goals for 2020 or even in general. But if I have to name 2020, I think 2020 will be the year of scale. What I mean by that is that past years I have been building a foundation, a structure. I hope in 2020 to build on that. Being able to create even more content, reach more people, help more people, help more businesses. I find it tough and also somewhat unnecessary to say I am going to do X, Y times. It is a great way to hold yourself accountable and to push yourself, but if you surround yourself with the right people, you may not need it. You will automatically continue to work hard, because you do not want to fall behind. It is the same as when you want to go to the gym, it is way easier to say: "nah, not today. I will go tomorrow", when you are alone. But if you go with a partner, you will push yourself to go because you don't want to let your partner down. Holding each other accountable, doing things together, is actually also way more powerful. I basically have that scenario all the time with the community that we are building.
Missing satisfaction
That being said, a returning theme over the past years and even now seems to be missing satisfaction in poker. I see many people asking themselves why they play poker and not many are actually able to really tell. I don't blame them. Think it is fair to say that we mostly only enjoy the winning sessions, the losing ones we try to forget or accept. Even when you crush the game, you will still have more often a losing session than a winning one. That is interesting, we do something that we hope we enjoy but more often than not we don't actually enjoy it. At least, there will always be a side note with a losing session. So for many it is more what comes with it, the freedom of being your own boss for example. For me it is more than that, as everything that I currently do has been build around poker. The streams and content in general have been great lately, but even when that is the case, I find it tough to enjoy that when the poker grind itself hasn't been going well. Should I completely disregard poker in those cases? That's unrealistic, I am also too competitive for that. Instead we have to try to accept those bad days as part of the equation, but that is not always easy. Especially when things around poker, may not go as great either. So I think that is going continue to be a theme. I am not really sure if there is a fix. Other than getting better at accepting those bad days. It has been one of the reasons why I stream in the morning's now, as it allows me to create content and be productive at night, so I still have something to feel good about myself that day when the grind has been poor.
One of my focuses in 2020 will be, just as many of you, friends and family. 2019 was already better than 2018 in that regard, but would like to scale that even more. We are building such a special community and think we should utilize that even more. Many of you guys want to be more social in 2020, so why not do so together?! So I hope to do a few more meet-ups this year and hopefully another dedicated DW trip. Few of you asked whether that will be Lex Live 3, I am not sure. Last year I didn't really have a Summer holiday, so may take one this year. I really enjoyed Curacao in 2018, so maybe go back this year? We will see, but either way I hope to spend at least 1 night out with friends a month. Tomorrow I am going out for dinner and some drinks and in February I would love to do a meet-up for my Birthday and celebrate together.
Business related
So as poker doesn't always give me the satisfaction and as it may not be around for forever, I spend lot of energy in building things around poker. This has helped me creating stability. In 2020 I hope to expand on this framework. In November I put Ace on the payroll and this has so far been going really well. Currently we are creating lot of content for Raise Your Edge and myself, but as you may know I am always super ambitious. A lot of my ideas and thoughts have been getting confirmed in practice, so I think it's fair to say I can also be to great benefit to other companies. So I hope to get a few more clients, which I think is more a case of whether I really want to compared to whether I am able to. It's comforting to know that whatever obstacle there might be, I will overcome it. If I don't know something, I will learn it. If I can't do something, I will find someone who can. So the coming time I will be figuring out what I really want and in meantime continue moving forward.
Then the stream. I hope that we can continue to keep up the numbers we have been reaching the past 1.5 month. It is awesome to see the engagement in Discord and I hope you find a lot of value in that. I have some ideas that I think can work really well content wise, like the handreviews. Also happy that I have been able to create so many highlight videos over the past months, planning to keep that up and create at least one a week. Now you probably expect me to give you some numbers again in terms of followers and subs.. so here we go:
Instagram 15K -> Ambitious!
Twitter 2.5K -> Been pretty engaging lately, who knows!
Facebook 1K -> Who even still uses it, other than for knowing when someones birthday is?
Youtube 3K -> Still think it should be more but.. growth has been super slow.
Twitch 20K -> If stream stays as active as it has been lately, may reach it.
Twitch Subcount -> Hope to reach 300, would be sick if we do.
Aiming pretty high here I think, but it's just for fun. Can't really influence it, just planning to put tons of content out that I enjoy and we will see how it does.Anyway, that's what 2020 will be for me, basically more of what I was already doing.