At the end of every “Year in Review” mega-post, I compile a list of all the major Life Lessons I’ve learned that year. A couple years ago, I started the tradition of separating this into a separate post from the main 2023 Year In Review post.
In compiling these lessons, I noticed they fell into 3 major categories. I have grouped them accordingly:
- Love & Relationships
- Success & Happiness
- Health & Well-Being
Feel free to skip to the sections most interesting or relevant to you. Or just go through them all if you’re feeling in the mood.
Love & Relationships
Don’t give any of your energy to people who don’t respect your time and energy – A big lesson I have to keep relearning is to stop giving my energy and attention to people who lack basic integrity. This includes people who flake on plans, say one thing but do another, and are terrible at responding to messages especially in the context of necessary communication for organizing events. As much as I want the people I care about to have integrity, there will be people who flake on you and disrespect your time because they don’t have a handle on managing their own time and priorities. Moreover, I have to remind myself to give them compassion, yet don’t give them space in my heart. You can freely walk out of my life until you sort out your own, and I won’t stop you.
The biggest red flag in people is inconsistency – During the past year, one of the best pieces of dating or relationship advice is this: be on the lookout for inconsistencies. When they say one thing and do another. Or say you’re important and then change their mind. When they act one way in public, but another way in private, or another way on social media. This goes hand in hand with letting go of fake and flakey people. If you act nice in person, but then talk bad about me behind my back, or pretend like I don’t exist on social media, then I’m going to assume that your intentions are not genuine.
This inconsistency litmus test is especially true for someone you’re interested in dating. When I hear about these romantic interests of my friends, and hear about how they’re inconsistent, I see through all the B.S. for what it really is. They are emotionally manipulating my friend because of their own insecurities. Unfortunately, I know this firsthand because I was also that person in a past life, which allows me to see through it when I hear about it.
Stop trying to find love in broken people. You cannot fix others, only they can fix themselves – I don’t know why this seems to be hard to grasp for people. But the number of times I hear “he’s so sweet but (insert red flag here)”. Girl, you need to move on. You should have left long ago. It’s disrespectful to yourself to try and find love in someone who cannot even love themselves. In fact, your toxic trait is thinking you can fix someone and make them better. Your job is to make sure you are 100% happy and fulfilled on your own. Unless you are the parent of a child, you are not responsible for someone else’s problems.
You attract the energy you put out – In context, you attract the kind of partner you are. If you are needy, insecure, and looking for someone else to make you happy, that’s the type of person you will find. But if you are independent, self-sufficient, and fueled by generosity and abundance, that’s the type of person you’ll gravitate toward. Therefore, you need to have the ability to be completely happy alone, while you’re single, before thinking about being a part of someone else’s life. If you think a relationship will solve your unhappiness, you’re dead wrong.
If someone is asking you to change for them, run in the opposite direction – Unfortunately, this is very common by red flag people who are good at emotionally manipulating others. When someone asks you to change for their preferences, they don’t truly love you for who you are. In essence, this is just the first hoop in a series of hoops they’ll make you jump through in order for you to get hooked on getting their approval. It’s a difficult trap to see when you’re attracted to someone. But it’s very important to ask yourself: are they encouraging me to change so that I’ll be a better person, or do they want me to change to make them happy? Anyone who truly loves you will support the type of person YOU want to become, not the person THEY want you to become.
The best friends you’ll ever have are ones who will keep you accountable and call you out on your BS – If you want a better life with more happiness, success, and fulfillment, surround yourself with people who will give you the honest truth. People who will keep you accountable for your words and actions. People who will tell you you’re fucking up and give their perspective on what’s going on in reality. They’ll serve as your mirror to help you see your blind spots but also support you in making your own decisions. Friends who coddle you and enable you to make stupid decisions that aren’t in your best interest aren’t your real friends. Drop those people immediately.
The most effective form of leadership is helping to develop more leaders and create increased ownership in the organization – As a leader, understanding this will be a HUGE unlock to any organization. As someone who develops team culture and improves team performance professionally, the least effective thing you can do as a leader is become a micromanager and bottleneck your team’s efficiency. Delegating responsibility and encouraging younger leaders to make decisions is the best way to improve learning, speed, and engagement in any team. The true measure of success for any team, in my opinion, is how effectively can it run without any single individual. The redundancy of roles, knowledge transfer processes, and robustness in a system are what makes it truly “antifragile”.
Affirm others as much as you can. You never know how much it means to them – This is something I realized when I had both a boxing coach and a standup comedy coach this year. At different points, they affirmed me on my journey. They essentially told me that they believed in me and I had a lot of potential. This gave me so much emotional drive and motivation to keep going. And I realize that I want to become the type of person who does this for others to help them along their journies.
Success & Happiness
If it’s not a “Fuck Yes” then it’s a “No.” – This is the biggest productivity hack that I’ve tried to live by this past year (and every year since I learned it). But if you want to keep yourself sane while also accomplishing your meaningful goals, you have to strengthen your ability to say “no” to things that aren’t a clear “yes” to you and your goals. I’ve seen firsthand so many friends get burnt out because they feel compelled to say “yes” because they THINK this activity is important to them. Or worse than that, they’re only saying yes because they’re trying to people-please. People-pleasing is one of the most toxic traits you can have because it’s essentially manipulation. You’re only acting a certain way because you think you need to do it for people to like you. They should already either like you or not, it shouldn’t depend on what you do for them. It doesn’t serve you or them to do something that depletes your time and energy away from things that truly matter to you. Doing the things that matter most allows you to be the best person to your loved ones.
Always be prepared to be called onstage – Metaphorically speaking, this just means be prepared. The “luckiest” people in the world are the ones who are ready for the opportunity before the door even opens. I learned this when I was called up to do an open mic very last minute with hardly any prep time. I was freaking out until I realized I had a backlog of jokes I had written previously. My preparedness saved me and even garnered me the respect of my instructor.
Every desire you have is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get it. – Choose your desires wisely, and only have one main desire at a time. In all other areas in your life, choose contentment, peace, and happiness. This was a profound idea for me that I learned from the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. This book also has a ton of nuggets of wisdom that I highly recommend. But this one was my top favorite.
Fulfillment comes with struggle. Things you fight for and work towards make it more satisfying – We naturally don’t appreciate things that come easy to us. Which always astounds me when people turn the other way as soon as they come across an ounce of discomfort or challenge. Almost everything we want in life is on the other side of something difficult. Lean into those things and go through the struggle. You’ll come out a stronger person and be more happy with the results.
Health & Well-Being
Our bodies are meant to move. If you want to be healthy, reframe movement as something you prioritize – This was something I learned from a few really insightful books The Comfort Crisis and Built To Move. Because of these books, I was inspired to start and maintain my 10k step goal each day since July. To me, this as been the biggest health unlock for me. Physically, I’ve never felt better. But mentally, I now enjoy any opportunity to move and walk. Each step is filled with gratitude because I realize being able to walk on my own while I still can is such a gift.
Thank you 2023 for all the Lessons Learned
Like every year, this one had its ups and down. But each difficulty we overcome is an opportunity to grow better for the challenges ahead. I’m grateful for the lessons and excited to become even wiser by next year.
Cheers!
Marlo Yonocruz 
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