Oh, such a beautiful day! That was 2023. What a year! What a year! We had quite a crazy year. Yeah, a lot of ups and downs. A lot of things we did. A lot of changes in our life. I'm really proud and happy where we ended up. I didn't imagine with starting this year that we would actually make it. We were looking to buy our own land and we had been going at it for months without finding anything we could afford or with our criteria and we felt like it was an impossible feat. At one point we were thinking of giving up around this time last year. And now, yeah, everything has changed so much. We think it's important to take a moment to reflect on your time, your life, what you're doing, if you're accomplishing what you want. If your goals maybe have changed, because that can also happen. You can set really hard goals for yourself and work really hard to achieve them and then realize when you get there that things have changed. You have changed, your life has changed, and that's no longer what you're looking for. So reflecting is a very important thing for us. At the end of a year we like to put goals and just set a vision for what we want to accomplish the next year, to guide us in all our actions. We don't really do resolutions but for us it is important to sit down and really think because you can get caught up in life. We're going to do the joint exercise of thinking about our year, reflecting, becoming really aware of everything that has happened, processing everything that has happened. And then we're going to go into our goals and vision for 2024. In case you're a person that enjoys doing this type of exercise or who could benefit from this type of exercise, how we do it, the structure of how we do it might be useful. So 2023, I think one of our main goals was finding our spot. We wanted to find land or a home or something that we could call ours. Our word for the year was "invest" and it's because we felt like we had put a lot of effort into saving up, we had put a lot of effort into dreaming of our future life but then our money was just waiting in the bank, losing value every single day and we weren't really doing anything because we were making that effort to one day live the life we wanted. So for 2023 we decided that the word was going to be "invest" and we meant monetarily of course; to use our money in investing in our future. But also with everything, with every decision around our work, around starting a YouTube channel, All efforts of 2023 were geared towards investing in the life we wanted to live. I think that's very good to emphasize that last part, that it was not so much a monetary investment but an investment in our future. An investment in a banker's sense. Yeah, it was an investment in our future and the future lifestyle we were trying to reach. Yeah, an investment in our ideals, an investment in ourselves basically. And I think we invested a lot. Yeah, we managed. Maybe we invested too much even. Till the point that we were broke for a little bit. We were broke and we've also kind of lost ourselves into the idea of the future and now we have to go back into the idea of the now. Finding that balance between always striving for that future lifestyle we want to reach but also enjoying the now, enjoying life here and not really working constantly towards the future. And doing things that bring us joy now that don't have to have a bigger meaning for our future. I think we've limited our investments a bit too much. And sometimes you just have to live and enjoy yourself. Another really big goal for me was the YouTube channel. I've wanted to try having a YouTube channel for forever. We created the channel itself I think in November of 2022 but we didn't post anything until February of 2023. We are learning a lot. Yeah, it's a stable learning curve. We have never done this before. We have made a lot of photos whilst we were traveling and we got better and better at it. But doing videos was a completely new thing, especially the editing part of it. And filming as well. And the filming as well, yeah. Just talking to the camera, it's quite an uncomfortable thing. It's a very creative endeavor and we are both very creative people and it's a lot of fun to put our creativity in here. It's been a lot of hard work and I think we're just proud that we finally took the leap and started. And now we want to continue and we want to see how it evolves. It doesn't mean that this will be our future. But it's fun to work on. Yeah, for now we're working on it and we're trying really hard. And now we have a home. That's also thanks to, of course, help in our environment. The idea for this year was to live in the countryside basically full time and be renovating and stuff. But it turned out that we couldn't really live here until we had all the permits. So in the summer of this year we were prepared to go traveling and then life changed again. We had to pivot. I like that word. I only think of friends. Pivot! We chose to pivot to achieve the goal of having a real home where we could live and always come back to. We always have wanted that base in life. We always wanted that base in the world where we could always come back to and that was related to climate crisis but also how we got hit by COVID particularly. And that we've never had a home, you and I. We've been together almost nine and a half years. And we've lived on our own for perhaps one year of those nine years. And it's really great now being here and having our own house. Even though it requires a lot of work, the house needs a lot of renovation and it took us a while to get settled in the place to a level that we're comfortable and prepared for whatever comes our way this winter. But it feels good. It feels really nice. Winter? What winter? So we achieved the home. We achieved the YouTube channel. We achieved the land. To achieve all of that, we had to leave behind the goal of traveling. We love traveling. I mean, our YouTube channel is quite young so you haven't seen us in that facet of life. But for us it's very important and it's something that we always hope to do in the future to be able to combine both a lifestyle of traveling and a lifestyle of having a home home and slow living. It's a weird combination but that's our unique combination. So we had to give up on that aspect. And I think we were not fully realistic about how quickly we'd be able to settle. We kind of just thought, oh, we find land and then everything will materialize. And now we realize that it will take a very long time before we're able to have a proper functioning garden and to.. veggie garden, I mean, and to have a dog. And that stuff takes time, at least for us. Those were goals that were also on there. And I think it's good to embrace that as well. I've been thinking about that quite a bit. Is that here, I especially, and I talked about it before, really need to just adapt, embrace the fact that you don't need to constantly be doing stuff. It doesn't need to be done. It's like you just see all those things that you would like to do. I think it's really important that realizing that it's not a need because if not, you get into this mentality of constantly feeling like you're behind. When we were looking for a place, it was very frustrating to not find a place as quickly as we hoped. So then we thought, oh, we have to put all this work and only dedicate ourselves to finding a spot. And when we find a spot, we'll feel good and we'll start living life. And then we found a spot and then you're like, now you have to clean everything. And now you have to cut everything. Prepare for winter. Yeah, prepare for winter. And then the year passes and there's very few moments where you've taken the time to just have fun, relax, play, do things just for the sake of having fun. That's it. And I know you really enjoy doing things like cutting trees and stuff, but it is also important to do things outside our land, also with each other. It is important to realize that the emphasis of need is actually quite relative. And we get to determine that for ourselves. That's the joy of our life that we get to determine when things happen and how they happen. Yeah. And it's also something we want to do. We want to determine how we live life and don't be confined by all the things that need to happen. It doesn't really make sense to put more confinements on ourselves if we try to escape that. We'll explain this more when we go into how we want to set our goals for 2024. But one of the things we do or two of the things that we always do is set a word for the year that we want to guide our year. We set one word that is joined. So as we said, for 2023, it was invest. If we feel like we need also a personal word, then we think of our own words for what we need ourselves. And then we create a vision board where we put photos of things that we just dream the next year would look like. So that's the extent of our goals. We don't really set resolutions. And the word is very useful in the sense that when you have big decisions or where you find yourself a bit lost, you kind of have lost perspective, you go back to your word and why you chose the word. And it helps you kind of put everything into a context. So for us, invest was a really critical word in the sense that when we felt like we were wasting time with YouTube, for example, when you start, you are doing so much work. Because it really takes a lot of time and you're learning everything. So you take 10 times more time than a person that is good at making videos. And it looks 10 times worse. And it looks 10 times worse. So it's very easy to get down upon yourself and be like, why am I doing this? Or you get a hate comment and it just breaks you. And it's very easy to think, okay, then there's no point to this. Why am I doing this? Let's just stop. But because the word was invest, we knew that we needed to go through all that hard work to someday be able to make better videos that we were more proud of and that more people would enjoy. So every time we felt down about it, we would be like, okay, but we're investing in this ideal future and it made us go forward. Also, when you're at a crossroads and you don't know what decision to make, then you see how to go forward. When we had to decide whether we were going to go travel or embrace this possibility of getting a home here, invest was a really important element because we felt like we were investing in having a base for the future and that traveling could happen in another moment. Whereas this opportunity wouldn't come in another moment. The biggest learning for me this year was to enjoy the process. Just doing things and enjoying that you're doing them. I had to learn that a lot with the editing part. You have a certain image of the videos you want to create and you can just not do it because you just don't have the knowledge. But slowly, over time, learning this little facet and just not focusing on the end goal. Same counts for working on the finca. I don't know anything about living in the countryside. I didn't know how to make a proper fire. I didn't know how the solar panels were working and you just need to enjoy learning all those aspects. I'm really forcing myself to just enjoy the learning aspect, the learning process of it. My biggest lesson is actually quite different. It's that you can achieve a lot of things you wanted and that you envisioned for your life and you can still not be in a good place. And that is hard to imagine. I think it's very easy to project how happy and perfect everything will be when you achieve what you want. And then we got a lot of our objectives ticked and I still struggled. And then I felt very guilty for struggling and very guilty for still having bad mental health days. Very guilty for not being as happy as I thought I would be. What I meant to say is that even in your dream life, you're going to face a lot of struggles and difficulties. And yeah, life just has its ups and downs, as cliche as it sounds. But when you're in a situation that you always dreamt of being in, you can feel guilty when you're going through the hard moments. And that's not really the point. The reality is that, yeah, things will be hard and you are allowed to struggle even if you're at the point you've always dreamt of. I'm learning to accept that you can dream of something and you can want to achieve something and you can get there and still struggle. That's the reality. I think a lot of people have that. Anyway, these were our reflections for 2023 and now we're going to look forward to 2024. Do you know what your word of the year is going to be? Not yet. Now I have a couple, but I am not fully convinced yet. We'll talk through it all. We just spent a couple of days talking to each other about all our goals and dreams for the coming year. Also thinking, of course, personally, what we want. And with that, we create a digital vision board to kind of put a visual representation to what we've been talking about. And then we also choose a word of the year that helps guide us. For those of you that like to set goals and think about the coming year, we hope that this is useful for you. But it might not be the exact way you want to explore your goal setting. What matters is just being intentional about it. Yeah, for us, at least, it's very important to take this moment to reflect that we have a clear perspective of where we want our life to go. We've chosen six categories that we have used in the past as well. And we've used it now to make a more detailed breakdown of what we want for the year 2024. And we've done this separately. Each of us have gone through the six categories and then now we're going to talk about it. Yeah, so the six categories are personal, wale&me / career, financial, which for us is a completely separate part from career, because we think it's super important to not define your financial situation only on your career. No, and also that your career is not defined by your financial situation. So we are investing a lot in creating this channel and working on Wale&me, even though it is not a financial path for us. No, exactly. For now, we don't earn any money from this, but it is important as a career that we are building. But then we do have, of course, financial goals because we cannot live of air. No. Home is number four. That's quite self-explanatory, I think. Then fun, and that could be all kinds of things, travel, going on dates, eating out, hobbies. And then the last one is relationships, and the relationships is both our relationship, so you and me, but also the relationships with other people. So family, friends, community, even. And now we're going to discuss a little bit what your thoughts were and what my thoughts were. Okay, so shall we start with personal? You read yours first? We won't be including everything in the video because some things we do want to keep to ourselves. But we will show you little snippets here and there of our goals. Okay, so first one is, for me, learn new skills. I put three items: off-grid, countryside and construction, because for me, those are the most daunting ones. So it's a very strong personal goal of mine. Learning, for me, is a very important part of my everyday life. Be less anxious about the future. For me, a big theme is, of course, health, both physical and mental. I want to exercise regularly, be more fit. I want to feel free, and I want to increase my confidence. Okay, now career. And for us, career right now is Wale&me. When we started Wale&me, we gave ourselves a year of trying it out. Now we're almost a year in. What are your thoughts? For me, the goal is to continue growing Wale&me. We, of course, need to get better at filming and editing, but I want to gain those skills, get better. Part of that is getting new gear because our gear is quite limited. So hopefully by the end of the year, we've earned some money with Wale&me and we can reinvest it. And then I put as a goal to meet peers. YouTube can feel quite lonely in the sense that you start a channel and you work on it, but no one around you has ever done that. And no one understands the work behind doing this type of work. Let alone that you do it in the first place. Yeah, so you have to really believe in yourself and just take a risk. It's very daunting. It's embarrassing at times. I mean, it's not easy. And I think for us it would be very useful to meet other people that do this, to be able to talk about all these experiences that we have, that we have no one to share them with, and to see how other people deal with this. That's one thing that's really nice about Warner and I, is that we complement each other quite well. So when working on Wale&Me, on the channel, we have very separate roles in a way. And it all plays to our own strengths. Yeah, it's not only with Wale&Me. We've worked together before in other things, and we are good at it. Yeah, we tend to complement each other. If we set our minds to it and not fight each other, because we have very strong personalities. Yeah, it works quite well. Okay, financial. Basically, it all goes into the bubble of increasing financial freedom, right? Start having an income, because right now we don't, and we're living off our savings, and that's not sustainable long-term. A huge priority is to get an income that covers at least our living expenses, and then obviously it would be really nice to start saving up again. I think that's a good goal, because we need to figure that out. Okay, home. It's a bit easier for us, probably. Start a really good basis of compost. I think that's important for multiple things, but then also create the garden beds and start the orchard. Okay, a very similar thing, so renovate the top floor of the cabana, build a studio greenhouse. I put "be comfortably off-grid" in the sense that I'm not comfortable with the solar panels, I'm not comfortable with the gas system, I'm not comfortable with the water. So as all three, we're not reaching our goals at the moment. I would just not want to sit here in a day like it is today, thinking this light is using 6 watts. How long is it going to last? That's crazy. I don't want to have that. That's a very good one. I like that one. Get furniture and interior to our taste. I mean, it would be nice to not sit on garden chairs in our livingroom. Okay, fun. So I put at least one date, special activity together. At least one, but I think two should be the focus. I'm gonna put it. Two? Babe, we do zero now. I think that's a joint responsibility. We've been together a very long time and we've noticed that we fall easily into the trap. Of logistics. Yeah, because we spend a lot of time together, we think that's enough. But it really isn't. You have to spend quality time, intentional time together, where you are just focusing on giving each other love and attention and having fun. And we've kind of fallen behind in that area and our relationship has struggled because of it. If you expect life to happen once you finish your to-dos, you're never going to get to that point. No, so it's good for us to step out of that, take our time for just enjoyment and each other. I put adventure sports because I have always really enjoyed doing adventure things with you. Via Ferrata, mountain biking and stuff. I know for you it's less fun, but I still want to do all those things. I'll be part of my quality time with you, giving you sports that you like doing. I'll join. So I started off with travel and I put a lot of exclamation marks behind travel. Because I think travel slash adventure is something we've really missed this past year. We felt like we were giving up a big aspect of what is important to us. And I'm really suffering the consequences of that, so I really need to prioritize travel. Eating and cooking has always been an important part of our relationship and now we're stuck. There's one vegan place. Yeah, eating out here is not really a possibility. But I put eat out, like anytime we go somewhere where there is nice places to try, I would like to try them. Of course we need to have more financial freedom for that because we've also cut that element out because we're saving. Yeah, so maybe cook more diverse makes more sense. Yeah, yours makes more sense. I was just taking the lazy approach.. I put help animals because that's a very important thing. Well, quality time with animals is very important for me and for us. I think we both love it a lot. Reading a lot for the past three years, it has been a crucial element in my life. And then the last one, that's relationships. Relationships. Having a healthy relationship with you is a very important thing. For us, when we're not doing well, our life feels much harder. Yes, it's just not fun. You're the core of my life. We spend all our life together, we live in the middle of nowhere. We don't have a big community, we don't have a lot of support. So if we're not doing good, life just becomes much, much lonelier and much harder. Relationships take a lot of work. And relationships are just a full-time job that you constantly need to work on. I put take time to connect. And I meant not only with you, but connect with others, connect with yourself. I think it's important, intentional time to connect. Then be a good host. I think now we have a home. It's the first time we ever can have people here. For me, it's very important to make this environment a very welcoming, warm, just kind environment for people to come. It would be nice if people come here, if they want to come here to decompress. That would be really nice if we are the spot for that. Cool, we're very in line. I mean, that's one of our strengths, I think, as a couple, that we may differ in many things, but we want the same things out of life. And we've changed our goals and objectives in life very often, but somehow they've always aligned. So we have like a very clear path. We know what we want. And we can support each other to get there. So now we have created our goals for the next year, and we've put them in the right categories. We're going to have a look at the vision board, which is basically a creative extension of those categories. Yeah, it's a visual representation of whatever you've decided is important for you that coming year. It gives us some motivation, aesthetic motivation to make our goals a reality. We've been working on it for a little bit, just compiling images that visually represent everything we want to achieve. And that kind of gave us that vibe that we're looking for. And we thought we would show you the vision board and also talk through the different images. We didn't want to make it with you because it takes a while. So let's start with Wale&Me. The goal for this year or the next year is to get to 10,000 subscribers and to create 50 videos. Is that a good idea? I don't know. Maybe that's a bit too ambitious. I would maybe put it to 45. Because if we do 50 videos, we only get two weeks holiday. So if we really commit it, we can do 50. No, let's put 45. And then there are some images around our home. One is to have a beautiful kitchen. I think we're going to be able to get that done this year. A cozy living room. That's something you really are looking forward to. Yeah, because then you get to enjoy even the gray days. I think it's very important for us to create this very comfortable environment. And then having beautiful greenhouse. That is maybe a bit too ambitious for next year, but we're going to keep it in there anyway, just knowing that things can change and that we maybe have much more time than we think we have now. So these three images represent obviously our base here, the base we're building. And I think the kitchen is especially a good image for the renovations we hope to do because we want to lighten up and brighten up the space, make it very comfortable, very functional for us, but then also highlight the beauty that's already here. So for example, the stone wall is a good representation of the base that we're working on and then what we want to bring. Also related to the home, we have the outside space, the greenhouse we've kind of talked about, but also here is an image of an orchard. And that's because on our own land that is separate to this cabin, the land we bought, we want to really make sure to start building that future base. And one of the very important elements for us is creating our own food, growing our own food. An orchard is a good thing to start building really early on because trees take a very long time to grow and settle and give fruit. So that is partly the representation. And then also to do with trees, we want to give back to the area we're in. We want to contribute to rewilding in some way. Of course, we have a very small limited piece of land, but we want to create as much of a safe space for biodiversity in it as possible. And that's something that we want to build now so that it can grow over the years. - And the next stuff is travel. We have two images included. One is of the countryside of China because it's a country that we really want to go to. And the second one is of a train going to the countryside and that shows for us travel, but also the adventure. We love traveling in public transport and just traveling like locals is just one of the things we most adore. - Yeah, it brings us a lot of joy and peace. So these two images really represent our goals in terms of fun and adventure that we hope to accomplish. China specifically, we were going to try travel there in October of 2023 and we changed our plans. So perhaps we make it a reality this next year. That would be really nice. - Let's try. - I would love that. - And the next three images are related to quality time. - Enjoying life, creating relationships. - Connecting. - Connecting, taking care of each other and enjoying the things we like to do. So we have included here a little picnic setup to represent the quality time we want to dedicate to each other, to building our relationship and making sure that it's healthy and strong. We also wanted to include the element of community. This image concretely has been one that we've had saved for a very long time. It was one of our guiding images when we were looking for our home, our spot, because we really wanted to create a space where we could have loved ones come and really thrive there together. We just really like that image. It feels so cozy and cute. And the final one is food. We just like eating. It's more than just showing a variety of food. It's being able to spend quality time with each other. It's nourishing ourselves, it's paying attention to what we eat. And it's also part of the traveling and discovering aspects. - New food, yeah. - Yeah, when we travel, it's one of the main things we like to enjoy. So this is our vision board. And looking at it, yeah, I think it's very cozy. It's nice to look at it. It's visually appealing. And it makes me excited for what is to come. Let's hope that a lot of this becomes a reality. - Yeah, absolutely. Let's try. Let's work on it. And the exercise with the guiding goals and the vision board brings us to the word of the year. - Every year we choose one word to guide us through the whole year. It is supposed to act as a compass. - Yeah, there is a saying that goes something like, don't let yourself be guided by a map, let yourself be guided by a compass. - And we think it's a very beautiful way of looking at life in a way. So if you put really concrete plans and goals and resolutions, you might find that it's impossible to carry them out because life changes and you might even change. You might find difficulties along the way that make it impossible. Or you might see new opportunities that you'd like to take instead. For us, it's very important to not put all our attention into a very concrete goal, but allow ourselves to build a life that we believe in and that we want to create. - And having a guiding word, a compass to take you through life, make sure that you have a direction, you know what you want out of life, you know what you're striving for, but allows for the flexibility to shift the concrete tasks and goals along the way to better suit the reality of what you are encountering. - Yeah, so for the last year, the word was invest, and I think we did pretty well in that sense. - Yeah, we focused a lot on investing everything we had. Our resources, but also ourselves into building a different life, an alternative way of living. And now we need to go beyond that. - So the word for 2024 is gonna be a bit different. We have come up with the word... - Freedom. When you choose one word for the year, you have to see it within lots of different contexts. For us, the most important freedom we're seeking is the freedom to choose to live our own life, the life how we want it, not how convention dictates it. We also want financial freedom, of course, so that we can make this life a sustainable reality. And also we want freedom from our own limitations. We've talked already how sometimes we struggle with getting away from the to-dos and having a more broad perspective. So we want this year to always allow ourselves the freedom to just live, to enjoy ourselves, to pivot, to change directions, as long as we're happy and we're proud of what we're doing, we should allow ourselves the freedom to change. Do you feel like you need an additional word for yourself? - I was thinking of the word build for a while, and that was related to the real construction, but also like just building up this life because we have done the investment and now we're gonna grow. But I think with freedom that already encompasses that, so I'll hold on to freedom. But I think you have an individual word for yourself. - Another word I've chosen to compliment it is health, healthy. And that's because I want to have a healthy mindset. I mean, I want physical and mental health this year to be a priority for me, I really need it. I also want to have a healthy relationship with you. I want to focus on having healthy relationships in general. I want to have a healthy home environment, a healthy base, a healthy balance with Wale&me and our work. I want it to continue being a source of inspiration and joy in our life. - And creativity. So the word health very closely relates to the freedom we're seeking. And I feel that with those two guiding words, I have the tools necessary to go forward this coming months and year. - So that was our exercise for 2024. - Yeah, it's a fun reflecting. It's always a good moment. - We hope you found this video useful. - Or interesting in some way. - You absolutely don't have to do it in the same way as we do, but we do think it's a very good way of reflecting on your previous year and looking forward to the year to come. - It works for us at least. If you have a different way to set goals and reflect upon what you have lived and what you want to live, let us know in the comments. We're very curious about how different people do this. And maybe we learn something new to do next year. - This is gonna be the last video of this year for us. We hope you have a great holidays if you celebrate it and we hope to see you in the next year. - Thank you so much for supporting us this year for joining this little corner of the internet that we're trying to create. We're so grateful to have you with us. - And hope to see you very soon. - Ciao. - Ciao.
