career – Harrison Hansford

The Yearly Review

I’ve talked previously about the power of the weekly review, looking back at your week and seeing how it was. Today I did my yearly review, looking back on my goals for the year and grading myself on how I went. I would also reflect on the goals and justify to myself the grade I got. This was a really enjoyable experience. I blocked out 2 hours in my afternoon and just reflected on my year.

I realised that I actually have had a great year, I have grown so much as a person, which is one of my biggest indicators of success. I also realised what the gaps in my focus have been.

The reason I think that everyone should be doing this or something similar is that it allows you to realise what you have achieved or haven’t achieved. This can be lost in the moment when you’re only reflecting day to day or even week to week. I believe that examining your life is crucial to being successful and growing as a person.

Why are you working so hard?

This is a question I’ve always dismissed because I was studying and wasn’t really working. Recently this has changed since I’ve been on placement almost full time. I’m now, for the first time, spending the vast majority of my time working. I’ve also seen the time I spend doing things like going to the gym, spending time helping around the house and importantly sleeping has all decreased, which I’m not happy about. This has made me really consider what I want my future work life to look like, as you saw in my previous post about not working full time.

I think this is a question which people don’t ask themselves enough. The most common answer is, I’m sure, to earn a lot of money and then be able to retire (whatever that means) and travel, or do whatever it is they enjoy. This answer is flawed, in many ways, but it’s also a trap. You’re unlikely to just replicate your desires now, in 20, 30 or 40 years time, whenever it is, you’re values will change and you wont be able to re-coup those lost years working your ass off. An extreme example of the converse of this is to always be semi-retired, working remotely or earning money through passive income, living in a place with very low costs. Tim Ferriss shows that this isn’t as difficult as it sounds, that you can live well for 20-30k per year in a lower income country like Vietnam or Brazil. This is an extreme example, but an interesting idea. What if you weren’t deferring your life for this amazing period we call retirement but lived doing whatever it is you truly love doing, every day.

The other option, and in my opinion the ideal option is that you love doing your job every day AND it pays very well, so you can afford to go part time as soon as possible. This is something I don’t want to assume will happen because I think it’s so rare and don’t want to just jump on the corporate hamster wheel seeking this.

I’m yet to really figure out what it is that I really want to be doing, I’m not sure I ever will. My heuristic for making life decisions is, what will I enjoy most in the short term, its fared me well so far. Despite this, I feel as though I’m getting drawn more and more to what I think I should do rather than what I want to do. I have no answers, other than to continue asking myself the question “do I really enjoy what I’m doing?” The way I help myself answer that is asking if I’d do it for free, and so far, I have been doing it for free and the answer is still yes.

My biggest worry is convincing myself I like what I’m doing and not spending time doing the things I love and I think this should be the worry of most people. So why are you working so hard, and is that really the path you want to continue going down?

Stress and Anxiety: Don’t Suffer Twice

This week, I listened to a great podcast about mindfulness and anxiety from Sam Harris and Tim Ferris. Whilst writing my weekly review I realised I experienced some stressful situations in the short, medium and long term which the podcast helped me control, with varying degrees of success. If you just want to see the techniques I use, jump to here

Short Term Stress

I had a very difficult exam (my final one for university!) which seemed to be designed to push you for time. I had roughly 30mins to go, with 30 marks unfinished (out of a 100 mark, 2hr exam), all long responses and I noticed myself getting frazzled and spending time thinking about how I was not going to finish, and flipping between questions.

After about 30 seconds of fueling the fire of anxiety, I identified my stress and thought, “it doesn’t matter how many questions I’ve got to go, I just need to keep powering through them and finish them the best I can,” and that’s exactly what I did. I put this ability to identify and put aside my stress down to my meditation, which I poorly adhere to but have still seen the benefits, this being one.

Medium Term Stress

My medium term stress was having a busy week ahead with Friday, Saturday and Sunday being full of work, and a lot of research to do. The way I managed this stress was ensuring I had a to do list of the essential pieces I needed to have finished, and just worked hard to get them finished by thursday so on the days I was working I was able to switch off afterwards so it still felt like I had a weekend; worked a charm.

Writing the tasks down and blocking out time in my calendar has been a great way to show me how much I really do need to get done because the worry about having a lot of work to do is always worse than the actual work.

Long Term Stress

My long term stress is more about the career I want to pursue, I am coming to the end of my degree and have several options but unsure which one to take. I’m still figuring out how best to approach this, but I currently have two heuristics:

Which path will be more fun to do
Which path has the most options afterwards

So far this led me to choose my degree (Exercise Physiology is more fun than Engineering) my jobs and the research projects I’ve been involved in as well. It is working out pretty well so far.

You can never know whether the decisions you make are the right ones, so by choosing a path which has the most options and will be fun in the short term removes a lot of the stress around making significant live decisions. Tim Ferriss’ fear setting exercise is also really useful for life-altering decisions as well.

Strategies to Stress Less

It’s not that I don’t stress, I do, but I’ve really learned over the past few years how to better manage my stress so that it doesn’t distract me from what is important.

For short term, in the moment stress, like in an exam, you have to understand your stress, allowing it to be put away and ignored so you can deal with the problem at hand. Mindfulness Meditation (with Sam Harris’ ‘Waking Up’ app) has helped in identifying this stress, allowing you to not be consumed by it.

For medium term, stress about the coming days or weeks, writing a list and scheduling your time in a calendar helps to make you realise that the stressor is probably not as time consuming as it seems, and by blocking out time for it, Steve Jobs’ ‘Imaginary time’ comes in and with a pressing enough deadline, clearly set out in a calendar and a list, you can achieve almost anything. What happens when your tasks aren’t time bound is called Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” so block off the time you need and have no more, trust me, you’ll finish it.

Finally long term stress. Making life decisions suck, you can never be sure of what result your decision will have, but there are ways to ensure you enjoy it. Choose something that you’ll enjoy doing, the worst thing that happens is you enjoy yourself, then do something else. Choose something which doesn’t close doors, or even opens them, nobody knows what they want to be doing in 5 or 10 years, so don’t limit yourself with your choices.

Finally, the main takeaway from this post should be that the object of your stress will never be as bad as what you think it will be, so don’t suffer twice by stressing about it. Just saying ‘don’t stress’ doesn’t help so I’ve given some thoughts on how I manage my stress so I’m not wasting my energy on my ruminations.

I’d love to know what you do to manage your stress and any techniques which have worked for you, leave a comment down below and get in touch if you’d like to chat through your stresses with me!

Get in touch to have a chat with me

Committing to Passive Income

Just finished watching Ali Abdaal’s video on youtube about his salary as a doctor and youtuber and it has really triggered me off to really start committing some time to developing some sources of passive income. A pact I made to myself years ago as a teenager was that my ‘day job’ was never going to by my sole source of income, because as Ali mentioned, you are then choosing to be doing what you do and are never forced to do it, leading to you enjoying it a lot more.

I have delved into the world of content creation previously, I’ve created viral Tik Tok videos for March On, a charity focusing on spinal cord injuries (@march_on_aus). More recently I’ve also started a podcast by myself essentially for my other work, Running Science, a running store in Sydney (runningscience.com.au/podcast) . The goal of the podcast is to make running more accessible to the general public, as well as making it seem more inclusive than it does currently in Australia.

My biggest goal in life is to get people healthier, by exercising more. I want to do this through research but also health promotion. My dream ‘day job’ is to work with the UN or WHO to increase physical activity on a global scale. How I plan to achieve this is by doing a PhD and being an excellent researcher. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t want this to be my primary source of income so what do I do? Currently I’m doing a lot of 1:1, Time:money work and I want to move away from that.

Below I’m going to list my ideas and how I can start actioning them:

EP Network – A friend from Uni and I saw a deficiency in how well known exercise physiologists are, so we decided to create a youtube channel to a) inform the world about what we do through educational videos, and b) help inform individuals about how easy exercise can be and how significant the benefits are.
- ACTION: Currently we have been writing down scripts in Lockdown with evidence, as soon as we are out we have to start bulk filming these base video’s.
Instagram Page – I have previously been against using my personal instagram page for promotion, but I’m using it less for communicating with friends and more for just putting pretty pictures up currently. This is an opportunity to start growing and audience and building a personal brand which is incredibly important.
- ACTION: slowly start sharing more and more of my own content on there, from the podcast, March On instagram and EP Network.
Writing – Writing is a passion of mine, I really enjoy it and love the idea of writing, I’m beginning to practise it more and more and hopefully get better and better. This could lead to me writing a book one day, continuing to write blog posts about my life and my work, and how that can provide value to people.
- ACTION: Write consistent blog posts (1 per week), research how to spread blog posts and how this can grow.

This has been a good piece to write, I find by writing this in a public domain, I’m more likely to take these actions seriously and use them more going forward. I’m going to stick to these and see where it can take me.