This year, I turned 30.
My biggest ‘theme’ was more intentionality about the way I live my life. I spend a lot of time thinking about how life is short and how I’m going to die some day. I promise I don’t mean this in a morbid way, but I want to live a life where I feel like I pushed myself to my limits, while being happy along the way.
In other words, I want to experience extraordinary things because I know one day there will be nothing left to experience.
Health
Physical
I have about five more years before my fitness levels reaches its ‘peak’, and I want to push my body to my natural limits.
This year, my personal trainer Alish, a former bodybuilder from Bulgaria, helped me to make more progress on my weightlifting goals than I ever have.
I preach personal training to most people I speak to who are serious about fitness. I know that many people think: ‘I could just do this on my own’, but for me, I couldn’t otherwise achieve this progress. Knowing that I have two to three personal training sessions a week and the conversations I have around it means weightlifting stays at the top of my mind. Most importantly, a personal trainer can push me in a way I can’t push myself. I don’t get to let my mind govern how much I can lift.
What I’ve loved doing is setting ambitious targets every six months and then filming those lifts for accountability. You can watch the most recent one below (links to Instagram).
Current stats:
Bench: 100kgx1
Squat: 120kgx3
Deadlift: 130kgx6
December 2025 Target:
Bench: 120kgx1
Squat: 150kgx3
Deadlift: 160kgx6
The only major blocker I can see that will prevent me from my goals in 2025 is my nutrition (aka eating more). I’m currently at 72kg and want to bulk to 77kg.

Mental
I used to love Twitter. I discovered it late (2020) and was shocked by the ability to read the thoughts of the people I admired. Today I see it as mostly a net negative. It’s addictive and favours short-form entertaining content. I almost always feel worse for mindlessly scrolling, rather than being present in the real world.
In the last week, I’ve had luck using Screen Time to set a limit for 30 minutes a day and sticking to it. Instead, I pick up a book or listen to a podcast.
I’ve made a lot of progress reading in the last year. I know it makes me happy. Plus, I can see how reading influences my thoughts and I want my diet to come from books rather than hot takes on social media. I’m very bullish on the idea that people who have experienced success in life never stopped voraciously learning new things.
Given my theme of the year, it’s perhaps unsurprising that my favourite book was Die With Zero. It aligns closely with how I feel about the shortness of time, the concept of the deferred life plan (don’t wait to retirement to do the things you want to do), and helped me to work through insecurities I had about spending money without feeling guilty.
The book also helped me to justify my favourite trip this year. My girlfriend and I spent one night in Nairobi before taking a small plane to the Masai Mara. We saw most of the Big Five - lions (up insanely close), rhinos, many elephants and buffalos – as well as cheetahs, warthogs, giraffes, hippos, impalas and hyenas. They are beautiful, and I look back so fondly at the experience traversing the plains in a safari vehicle while experiencing these animals in their natural habitat.
I won’t share the video (it’s too graphic), but my best experience was seeing four lions hunt down a buffalo, followed by hyenas scaring the lions off and eating the buffalo alive. This was awful and sad to watch, but I’m glad I was able to witness something as natural as this.
Finally, we were very lucky to experience an unbelievable level of hospitality. We stayed with &Beyond, a private camp, where we woke up to views of the Mara and impala by our front door.
My goal for 2025 is to invest in the things that give me joy. I find it quite easy to notice the things that give the most happiness, like the gym, writing, reading, and learning new things. What I want to get better at is being more intentional about investing in these things. For example, I want to book a trip for myself once every quarter to read and write.
Work
Business
I saw the most success in work this year. I think this is partly an age thing: more time running a business has made it easier to know where to spend my time, what to worry about, and what not to worry about.
It was my goal last year to take more risks. It was very helpful to write about this and to tell people because it kept it top of my mind. I don’t want to run my business as if I had unlimited time: I want to run it as if time is finite and so I make the decisions that have the most impact.
I’m proud of how close I was to the finances of our business this year, which has long been a goal of mine. Our accountants now update our bookkeeping weekly rather than monthly, I have a whiteboard in my office where I manually write up the numbers, and I review the profit and loss statement at least once a week. We’re broadly looking at a 25% jump in revenue and double the profitability this financial year.
My financial goal with TCLA is to get to £1m ARR and £500k/year profitability in the next five years, which feels like a pretty reasonable target looking at our track record. I know now that the next jump in revenue will need to come from taking a leap by investing in new projects rather than continuing to doing what we’re doing. This is one of the big drivers behind why I’m learning to code. TCLA now has a huge distribution network. I now want to be in a position to build the things to solve the problems in this space.
My biggest highlights this year include:
Working in person with the team. I used to have an office when we worked remotely. We since moved to working in person in WeWork. With a bigger team in September, we then moved to a 7 person office in WeWork. My favourite moments have been seeing the team all together in person. It’s really special to me to see how dedicated the team is to helping each other and how talented they are.
Writing our first two books. These are baby books. It really came from the fact that I was teaching these classes at TCLA, which gave me a fun opportunity to dive deep into loans, equity capital markets, and M&A. I love to write, and I loved the experience putting my thoughts down on paper.
Building genuine partnerships with law firms. I really like the law firms we work with, and it makes me happy to work with people I like. I realise that I get a lot of meaning where I feel we can actually have an impact, rather than chasing a goal for the sake of it.
Being featured in The Sunday Times. This is a pure vanity metric, but it made my mum really happy.
Launching our new projects, including our law firm directory, our promo video, and filming with law firms. This was our first taster in building things that didn’t currently exist – and it really fast-tracked my learning.
What I want to get better at for 2025:
‘Cabin in the woods’
I am lucky that when I need to focus, I can do so for long periods at a time, without distraction. I want to get better at applying this focus to a singular goal that has a high impact and is only something that makes sense for me to do.
To get there, I need to get better at saying no to most things that are somewhat good but not a stepchange, hiring more people to manage the day to day of TCLA, cancelling unnecessary meetings in favour of more impactful, less frequent meetings, and being able to create the conditions to fully focus without interruption.
Work smarter, not harder
I have become a lot better at not measuring my work by time spent but outcomes, but I have a long way to go on this point. Put simply, it’s far better for me to spend two fully-focussed hours on the most important challenge I am facing than eight hours doing administrative work that gives me a short term feedback loop.
This requires a lot more intentionality. It’s like going to the gym and convincing myself I should skip a leg workout because I’m tired and I have more fun doing chest. I have to override my comfortability and make sure I’m only focussing on the most important task at the start of my day.
Learning
Quick highlights here:
I made limited progress on my journey to learning maths, which has now been somewhat overtaken by my desire to learn to code, but we’re playing long term games here and it’s still something I want to do.
I did another round of Ultraspeaking, this time on the Creator Cohort, where I was shocked to join a session with people whose work I have been reading for years.
I still haven’t hacked the daily journaling. This is a goal for 2025.
Social
About five years ago, I remember telling my friends that if I broke my life down into work, relationships and fitness, I’m very good at two of the three at any one moment.
I have a lot of internal work to do here: I love being by myself, almost too much, and I have to actively work to fight against this comfort. This is especially true when I get a lot of happiness from my friendships.
In 2025, I want to:
Be more intentional about making the effort with friends and people I meet that I think I would get along with + letting myself enjoy it
Be more willing to share stuff about myself
Get help for the things I struggle with socially (especially large groups)
Be generous about how I gift my family as this makes me happy
If you made it this far, thank you 🙏. Feel free to drop me a quick response with any thoughts and Happy 2025!
Jaysen