Early 2024 Recap
Travel updates, moving to Portsmouth, and other updates from the first few months of the new year
We started off 2024 with a road trip. First stopping in Savannah, Georgia for a week, enjoying one of the most walkable and unique cities in the US.
We then continued on to St. Petersburg, Florida, renting an airbnb for a few weeks right by a big park, and close to downtown. We hosted friends and explored many of the restaurants and coffee shops in the area. I also got to play some incredible golf courses, like the new Cabot Citrus Farms, with my dad (shown below).
After our stay in Florida, we headed back north and visited my Mom in North Carolina. What was supposed to be a few days turned into a few weeks of us staying in Southport, NC, a small coastal town about 45 minutes south of Wilmington.
We got back to New Hampshire in early March. It was unseasonably warm for a few weeks before we got a huge storm and descended back into winter.
I spent a week outside of Richmond, Virginia on a retreat with the Trinsic team, and we took a weekend trip to Alexandra, Virginia for a friend’s 30th birthday murder mystery party. I never thought I’d enjoy something like a murder mystery, but we had a total blast. It was definitely a highlight of the last month.
Moving to Portsmouth, NH!
We decided that we want to move to the seacoast of New Hampshire. We’ve loved Portsmouth for years and always dreamed of living there. We finally found an apartment that made sense, and a timeline that could work for us to make the transition. We listed our house a few weeks ago, and signed a lease in Portsmouth. As long as everything stays on track, we’ll be moving in mid May.
Not only is Portsmouth an incredible town, with a great culinary scene, countless shops and close proximity to the beach, but my family is all concentrated within a 20 minute radius of Portsmouth. Most weekends in the summer we found ourselves driving an hour from Concord to the seacoast to get together with my siblings or parents.
Summer time in coastal New England is special, and we can’t wait for warm days and long nights at the beach, sitting outside and spending time with loved ones.
Reflecting on what I’ve learned
I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, preparing for a revamp of my personal website, or perhaps the launch of something bigger than myself. After spending five years at Dual School, and now two years at Trinsic on the growth team, I’ve been trying to accumulate all of my learnings about how to bring new ideas into the world.
It’s odd to go back to some of my writing from college and realize how so many of the ideas I had then still hold up today.
What’s different now is that I’ve had seven years of real-world practice. Most ideas that are good in theory are actually quite hard in practice. The day-to-day logistics of working in a business make it hard to take a birds-eye perspective on improving the business itself. This is the whole idea of the E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber.
And even when you can take a step back to examine the state of a company, there is often so much organizational inertia that it’s difficult to make any change happen.
At its core, business is very simple:
Your product (or service) needs to solve a problem
You need people willing to pay to have their problem solved
You need to be able to acquire customers
The hard part is the putting it all into action.
Reading
I’ve enjoyed reading a few books in the murder mystery / thriller genre recently. Notably The Guest List, The Hunting Party and None of This is True. All these books are captivating and hard to put down. I also read Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh which was a good reminder about the power of mindfulness, and how we can find stillness in our everyday life.
What’s next
Over the next few weeks we’ll be packing up the house, completing our move and settling in Portsmouth in time for the summer. We don’t have many travel plans coming up because of how busy the past couple of months have been. If you’ll be around the seacoast this summer, let’s get together for coffee or a drink. Thanks for reading!
Would love to visit you around the seacoast!