Happy New Year from Vanderhacks!

Take stock of the year and imagine the possibilities

Welcome to 2024! A new year is always a cause for excitement. Yes, this is a Monday like any other, but many people feel a fresh energy, and a sense that there is a clean slate. The past year is now in the past. It’s time to start again.

As you look forward to the new year, here’s a helpful number to keep in mind: 8784. There are normally 8760 hours in a year, but since this is a leap year, there will be an extra 24 hours.

While 8784 hours is not an infinite amount of time, from the practical perspective of how we live life it is pretty vast. If you work 2000 hours, you’ve got 6784 for other things. If you sleep 2928 hours (that’s 8 hours a night every night for 366 days) you’ve still got 3856 waking, non-working hours for your various adventures and endeavors.

To put this in perspective, when people write 50,000 word novels as part of National Novel Writing Month, they generally devote 3 hours per day for 30 days to this project. That’s 90 hours. Someone training for a marathon might run 10 hours per week for 20 weeks. That’s 200 hours. Both of these are massive undertakings…and they are close to rounding errors when looking at a number like 3856.

In other words, when you look forward to the new year, you are looking at a vast blank slate. Eventually we will be on the other side of the next 8784 hours. The time will be filled with something. But what it is filled with is at least partially up to us.

I know I like to imagine the possibilities of what 2024 will contain! I hope you are excited about the next 8784 hours as well. Thank you for reading these newsletters. Together we’re going to make this an incredibly productive, meaningful, and enjoyable year.