My Most Important New Years Resolution

I’ve been so ready to throw 2020 out like Uncle Phil did Jazzy Jeff from his home.

Each year, I try to make resolutions for the next. For some, it’s a frivolous exercise but for me, it provides an opportunity to reflect.

I think I’ve come up with my most important resolutions yet.

In 2021, I’m going to start tracking my predictions. I’m going to be explicit about WHAT I think is going to happen and WHY I think it will.

I’ve created a spreadsheet to start keeping track of these.

Some predictions are just for fun. Others are going to inform my investment strategy. The point of this exercise is three-fold.

1. It forces me to be explicit about what I think will happen and the evidence I have to back it up. This is going to make me a better analyst and force me to not just predict from the gut.
2. This exercise is putting Ray Dalio’s Principles into action. It’s making decision making visible. It forces me to evaluate my decision making against outcomes and not just\the persuasiveness of argument.
3. I’m tracking the probability of how likely I think a decision is to come true. Anything with above 80% means I have strong conviction. Anything from 50-79% means that I have medium conviction. Anything less than 50% means I have weak conviction that it will come to pass. I’m doing this because when I review these predictions I want to see what came to pass that I felt sure on versus those that I had weak conviction on.

This is going to be a strong practice for me moving forward since this will force me to  document my ability to analyze and predict future outcomes. My hope is that this process will help me better understand how to evaluate long-term outcomes.