Hey! If you don’t know me, I’m Ben aka @typeoneerror. This is my year in review for 2023.
2023 was a challenging year in many respects, and I encountered a number of new obstacles that I had never faced before. There was so much enjoyment and growth though, I feel as if I’m leaving this year in one of the best places I’ve been in a long while.
The hardest thing that happened to me this year was the death of my dog, Mochi. She had an eye surgery earlier in the year and didn’t do well with the anesthesia. Following this, she started having major seizures regularly, and one day was having a seizure every few hours and was not recovering, so we made the tough call to say goodbye on September 7th.
(Which coincidentally was the launch date for Notion Formulas 2.0, so I basically powered through loads of new content creation to avoid feeling anything until it caught up with me a few weeks later.)
We’ve been together for 14 years over two wives and two countries, so to say she was a pillar of my life would be an understatement.
8 weeks
14 years
Her death and the grief that followed absolutely rocked my world. To the extent that at times I thought something along the lines of “this is an entirely new emotion I have never felt”. But in time I came to understand that grief is around the “backside” of love. Experiencing this loss (and the work I did to explore it which I’ll mention in this review) gave me such a profound feeling of calm and appreciation for my life, it’s hard to actually put it in writing. But I have little “pots” of Mochi ashes everywhere throughout the house now to remind me of the impact.
So I say “lowlight”, because—man, did that hurt—but it was truly an eye-opening experience I am very grateful to have experienced.
One thing that helped a lot was experiencing this grief with my partner Marie Poulin who had known Mochi most of Mochi’s life too. We experienced the grief as an shared emotion. I never felt like it was solely mine in this respect, which changed the nature of the way I view love and (admittedly still “small g”) god. Truly awakening.
This was a challenging but fruitful year in business at Oki Doki and our flagship product Notion Mastery. Like many course-based businesses, we saw a dip in revenue in 2022 and it didn’t really shoot back up noticeably in 2023. Our product offering had become somewhat diluted over the years, with work like (some of the items from our Goals database):