My birthday and The HEART Framework
Last year, just after my birthday, I was reflecting on my year and what I wanted to accomplish. I can be a bit ambitious and I knew that I wanted to make the most of the year. It felt monumental. I remember walking down the street thinking to myself, what did I want? Who did I want to be?
I like frameworks and I am definitely a systems thinker. I liked the idea of coming up with a structure for my year and how that could help me be successful. Part of this is because I knew that successful goals have projects that will actually lead to the outcome.
First, I prioritized what was important in my life. Then, I devised a framework through a classic rabbinic tool, gematria. Gematria is the numerology tradition in Judaism. Each letter corresponds to a number. First, single digits, then tens, then hundreds. Since I was turning 32, which corresponds to lev, לב, which means heart, I decided to call it The HEART Framework.
The HEART Framework
Each letter of the framework reflected a core element of what I wanted to work on that year. HEART refers to Health, Entrepreneurship, Atmosphere, Relationships, Thinking and mindset.
Each element had objectives, goals, and projects that would lead to the end result, improving my life and growing as a person.
For Health, I focused on all of the different kinds of health in my life: physical, mental, and spiritual. In particular, I wanted to improve my physical health, a specific objective, and I wanted to return to lose about 20 pounds by December, a specific goal, and I would do this by eating out less often and hiring a trainer. In this particular example, spoilers, I failed miserably. By the end of December 2020 (some 9 months later), I had gained five pounds instead of losing. That said, starting January 1st, I did take it on more seriously. Since then, I have had 10,000 steps per day and have already lost some of the pounds I gained since setting the objective. So, not exactly success, but definitely progress.
That is how I’m reflecting on this year, seeing the goals I set for myself last year, and checking on progress. I could not have known, only a few days after writing, crafting, and recording a video describing this whole thing (which you can find here and despite my possibly sour appearing disposition, I was really excited about the prospect) that the Covid Pandemic would change everything.
The pandemic was (and is) hard and I admittedly did not track or push these projects intentionally forward. However, this is the most powerful part:
The act of collecting, organizing, thinking, and planning my objectives, goals, and projects actually led to progress on almost everything.
For Entrepreneurship, I wanted to “grow a more solid foundation for my business”, which I formally had launched at the beginning of 2019, doing some consulting (I’ve updated this link to my current consulting work!) and projects on the side. One of the major goals for that objective was to launch an online course by December. Well, this past summer, I ran a beta test for my Clergy Productivity Course, having convinced eight friends to let me practice on them. It was a HUGE success and fully plan on launching it with Cohort 2 this upcoming summer.
So while I had entirely forgotten about the goal to launch a course, it was still in the back of my head, encouraging me.
For Atmosphere, which I defined broadly as my environment. Not just physical spaces, but my relationships to those spaces, how those spaces impacted me. For example, I wanted to “create an environment at home that is conducive to good work and living.” While I had never planned for it, my home office became the most used room in our apartment overnight. I had set out the goal of “clean out the office before Passover (desk mostly).” To work at the desk, it definitely couldn’t have piles of clothes on it. Well, the Pandemic was a gift in this case. I HAD to get it cleaned up so that I could continue to do my work. And while most of the clothes have gone away (but not all), they’re at least out of sight of the camera.
For Relationships, I thought about all the relationships in my life. I wanted to spend more quality time with my wife (always important) and “reconnect with friends who live out of town.” My goal was to have two dates a month with my wife and make a regular phone call every week. One of the projects I had devised, which also didn’t come to fruition, was to make a list of all the places in town we could go to on dates. I think I could have done better on this one. Even though there was a pandemic and we couldn’t go anywhere, I still think that I could have planned more special time for us both.
That being said, our relationship is better than ever having had wonderful experiences together. In this piece I wrote for the JTA, offering advice around the winter holidays, I shared how special my time with her has been.
While my wife and I were sitting outside during Sukkot, the Jewish harvest festival in the fall, we spent some time reflecting on the fact that we celebrated the major Jewish holidays during the pandemic.
On the one hand, we missed our friends and family at Passover, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We missed making memories around tables filled with food and wine. As a rabbi, I missed being with my congregants in person and helping them make meaning of the holidays.
On the other hand, my wife and I made a holiday cycle’s worth of memories just for the two of us. We created experiences that were more tailored and intentional than either of us had experienced in many years. By doing things differently, we got a chance to rethink our traditions.
We’ve shared a lot in this past year and we’ve grown closer.
In addition, I invested in my friends who live far away. This was important to me before the pandemic but increased in importance during. In fact, it wasn’t just me, this showed up throughout culture with people connecting over Zoom to friends and family far away. A few of us played Dungeons & Dragons together over the summer, taking on characters and solving puzzles. For anyone curious, I was an oversized Goliath gentleman named Eggak “Eggie” Rocksmasher. So rarely in life do I get to say, “smash…one is not enough” so this past summer was a delight.
More than any of that, it felt good to invest in relationships, close and far away.
While I don’t know if it is true what Jim Rohn said, “You’re the average of the five people you spend most of your time with,” but I do think it is important to surround yourself with people who care for you, encourage you, and see you as a whole person.
So, while I didn’t plan as many dates as I wanted, I loved our one-on-one seder in more ways than I thought possible.
One of the other objectives was to “spend more time with family.” This year was hard but also so special for me and my family. My brother and his husband added two adorable new members to our family and the time I’ve gotten to spend with them has been profound. I’m closer than ever with my family, investing more time, energy, and video chats.
Lastly, for Thinking and mindsets, I had some broad objectives, namely “develop mental representations” and “read more books.” Mental representations is a concept I learned from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. In it, the authors say:
The most important lesson they gleaned from their teachers is the ability to improve on their own. As part of their training, their teachers helped them develop mental representations that they could use to monitor their own performances, figure out what needs improving, and come up with ways to realize that improvement. These mental representations, which they are constantly sharpening and augmenting, are what guides them toward greatness.
To grow, we develop increasingly sophisticated mental representations, models, and frameworks that allow us to better understand what is happening to and around us.
Said more succinctly:
What sets expert performers apart from everyone else is the quality and quantity of their mental representations.
I said earlier in this piece that I can be a bit ambitious, and I meant it.
So, I read a lot this year. A lot. According to my Goodreads list in 2020, I read 61 books in 2020, overtaking my goal of 35 by 74%. I’ve read 10 books so far in 2021 and I read 12 books before my birthday last year. So during my 32nd year, I read a total of 59 books. Not too shabby. Now, let’s be clear, most of them are science fiction novels, which I loved, but still, lots of reading.
For the books that weren’t science fiction, I read: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, as mentioned before, The Art of Gathering, Leading Change, How to Be an Antiracist, Tiago Forte’s series of books, Ray Dalio’s Principles. (You can get most of those books by clicking here.) I started a few, like Max Kadushin’s The Rabbinic Mind, but didn’t finish. (It is really thick and extremely dense. I wrote about it a bit on this Sukkot-themed piece.)
Each of them expanded my thinking and allowed me to grow my mental representations.
Tiago Forte‘s work, in particular, has had a profound impact on me personally this year, his writing along with his online course, Building a Second Brain. I finished his latest book, Ways of Knowing on my birthday itself, just a few days ago and he wrote this about responsibility and knowledge: (in two separate chapters):
You can’t choose the concepts you learned as a child. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what experiences you expose yourself to, which shapes the concepts that ultimately drive your actions. Responsibility, in this view, is about making deliberate choices to change your concepts…
But information only becomes knowledge – something personal, embodied, grounded – when we put it to use.
This key truth is timeless. Learning and action are interconnected. For the rabbis it is also a bit of a paradox, but that is part of the beauty too. We have this concept called Torah lishmah, learning for its own sake. That “learning” has inherent value all on its own regardless of what is done with it. This is such a powerful concept, inspiring thousands to sit, hours on end, every day, soaking up knowledge because it has intrinsic value.
And yet, the rabbis say on Kiddushin 40b:
And there already was an incident in which Rabbi Tarfon and the Elders were reclining in the loft of the house of Nit’za in Lod, when this question was asked of them: Is study greater or is action greater? Rabbi Tarfon answered and said: Action is greater. Rabbi Akiva answered and said: Study is greater. Everyone answered and said: Study is greater, as study leads to action.
Knowledge and learning can, and should, lead to something.
So, with this in mind, what have I learned?
I was more intentional this year than ever before, more thoughtful about my actions and my choices. I looked for opportunities to grow and I took them.
I made progress on my goals, even if it was just a little bit, and I’m proud of it. My goals could have been more specific and my projects more useful and thought through, but all in all, I made progress on almost everything I wanted.
Having a framework made all of this possible and constructing new ones, for the many areas in my life, is something I will seriously be considering.
Where is this leading?
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to sit down again and ask myself those central questions: What do I want? Who do I want to be?
I might keep this HEART Framework, or perhaps, come up with something new. Either way, as I reflect on this past year, one essential quality emerges: I’m profoundly grateful.
Grateful to those who supported me when I was struggling during the Pandemic, when I faced challenging moments, and when I was experiencing the same days over and over again was overwhelming.
Grateful to those who encouraged me when I started sentences like, “I have this crazy idea,” when I outlined books they were never going to read, and when there were mountains of challenges ahead of me.
Grateful to those who saw potential in me, who treated me with kindness, and who waved from a distance (instead of hugs, you know, because of the pandemic).
Grateful to those who pushed me to be better, who expected more from me, and who held me to a high standard.
And so, in the end, as I reflect on everything I’ve done, all the work I accomplished, all of the growth, I look back on the year and feel, more than anything else, grateful.