 Well, folks, this is about the time of year. You know, sometimes it's actually a day sooner, but we were covering some news and some fun topics about me just talking about my goals for myself and this channel in 2024 because I think it's always important to look back on what you wanted your goals to be and where you ended up. And we had a number of goals over this last year. We wanted to hit, right? We wanted to get our viewership to average right around 8,000 views per video and, hey, we actually exceeded that in large part of things. There's a crazy amount of views we got on Tears of the Kingdom videos, but still we did end up exceeding that goal from last year. We also wanted to cross 80,000 subscribers in 2023 and, well, I mean, 132,000, I would say we kind of destroyed that goal. But there are some other stuff I didn't necessarily do. I will say there's one thing I did achieve. I did mention last year in a similarity like this that I wanted to weigh less on January 1st, 2024, then I did on January 1st, 2023, and I am happy to say we achieved it. Now, we're not significantly less. While we are less, we're about 12 pounds down from where we were on January 1st last year. So we are ahead of, well, beating that goal. Actually, we just did it. We achieved the goal, we beat it. But now we gotta talk about what our goals are for this year because there's a lot of stuff going on. Last year was my first year being a full-time YouTuber. And so in year two of being a full-time YouTuber, hopefully we continue to be, there's just some things I wanna focus on. Number one is obviously continuing to get healthier and healthier and healthier. I've already feel a lot more energetic today than I felt months ago. And a lot of this is because whether or not you could tell, I have been losing weight. I'm not to the point where I think it's extremely noticeable and a lot of my clothes that fit me years ago still don't fit me yet. But there are certain clothes, certain pants, certain things that are starting to fit. And I do wear sometimes now that I wasn't before. So we just wanna continue to be healthier, get back into my cardio workouts, which is something I haven't been doing for a bit. That's really gonna help quicken up my metabolism a bit, maybe go back on my walks again. And then on top of that, it's a little bit of lightweight training and stuff. We have some workout stuff coming your way, potentially before live streams, starting at some point here. So that's gonna be pretty exciting. Shout out to Paul Gale Network, who's gonna be helping me out with that stuff. And then on top of all of that, I'm also, in terms of getting healthier, we have this issue when I had a surgery a while back to fix a hernia. And I had some fat that protects my organs come out and they didn't do anything about it. They left that fat in there. So it looks like I have this giant melon sticking out from, it's like an alien. It's really weird. And I don't show it on camera hardly ever. It's literally below the line down here. So that is something I'm also looking to get taken care of this year. We're gonna try some cold therapy treatments on it, see if we can get it to break up a bit. Cause right now that hasn't shrunk at all with me losing weight. So I feel like we need to maybe try to break it down. So again, we're gonna try some cold therapy and we'll see how that goes. I think my first treatment for that's in February. Now that being said, that's just me just talking about myself and I hope all of you guys are looking to get healthier as well. Again, we have this one life to live. And yes, I let myself go for a long time but it's time to get back on track here. Never gonna be what I used to be. I'm not trying to be like a triathlete or anything but I would like to get myself down to a much more healthier and sustainable life and weight. All right, beyond all of that, there are things that I wanna improve in my videos. I got a list here. So if you see me glancing down a lot I'm just kind of referencing this. I wanna always find something new at least every month to improve my videos. Now I put some ideas down and these are just sort of ideas in my head at the moment. One such idea is new equipment. I can give you an example right now. I would love the Elgato Promptor because instead of me looking at my notes down here I could have them directly here because it's a teleprompter. So I don't have to look away from the camera when I need to reference my notes. That would be very, very useful and that would really help with ad reads. That would really help with my videos. If I do have a small scripted part or if there's just like a small plate where I'm making a reference or a quote being able to look directly at the camera I think just adds to the quality of my videos. But again, that's a piece of equipment that we're just thinking about getting not yet new editing techniques. So just getting better at editing and doing fancier edits and maybe adding more sound effects in and other things to keep you guys engaged. New formats of videos. You guys know we have this format. We also have my standing set over there. So just different ideas and different formats for that stuff. New backgrounds. I don't know if we're gonna build a new set this year that might be something that happens in the summer. We'll see. But we could do things like maybe, try different backgrounds on the TV back here. Mess with things like that thumbs up thing that just popped up. Like there's a lot of things we can look at too for the new backgrounds. And obviously just new ideas, new different types of videos, new different formats. Example, this month we're actually doing a Zelda show on January 18th at 8 p.m. central time. And it's kind of a, it's sort of a mini podcast. It's replacing one of my regular streams and being read by our moderators. And it's gonna be really awesome where our paid members can come on and directly talk to us in like a phone call type situation and ask us questions live on the show. And it's gonna be a lot of fun. We hope it really goes off well. And it's just a brand new idea. And it's one that we're already in talks that if this goes really, really well, trying to make this more of a regular thing, maybe with other topics, it would literally be a new type of live show on my channel this year. But we're doing an experimental show on January 18th. And I guess we'll see how that one goes. Another goal this year is just sustainability, right? We had a really, really, really big year in 2023. The biggest year in channel history, over 12 million, well almost 12 million views, 11.7 million views, insane. We had an insane year, almost 50,000 subscribers, all that stuff. I just wanna be sustainable, right? I'm a person with a family, sustainability. Like we all want that sustainability, that consistency in our lives, especially when it comes from our careers. And so I'm just looking to sustain at least what we did last year. I'd like to go above and beyond. But if we can just sustain it, we'll be, I'll be a happy camper. Now take time to sit back and examine others in my space and learn from them. It has been a long time since I've spent a significant portion of time examining what other content creators in my space are doing and what's working and not working. I used to have this giant checklist of do's and don'ts that I based off of thousands of videos from other content creators on trying to find a way to do what I do, but do it better and take advantage of the things I think other content creators are doing well and other content creators are not doing so well. And I haven't done that in years. So I think we're reaching this point where to help me take my videos to that next step, I got to start examining other content creators, even maybe having conversations with them and just trying to see what are the do's and don'ts for 2024 to just help make my content. Take that next step. Another thing is I want to listen to community feedback more. I'm pretty stubborn, but I should be listening to the community feedback more. There's some community feedback I'll probably never listen to. If you want to run out there and scream clickbait or scream some other stuff, I'm probably not going to say it. And you want to be just be overly negative towards me. You want to make fun of my weight. You want to say a whole bunch of mean stuff. I'm probably not going to respond. And even if you're saying it in a way that you think is constructive, probably not going to take it that serious. I am not looking for that sort of feedback. I'm also want to know like, how can I handle the pacing of my videos? How can we handle the editing of my videos? And if there's any topics you think would be good to hit on, obviously my topics are always based on what I want to talk about. But maybe there are certain things you wish I did more of. And that is something I'm always willing to listen to. And the other thing is like, not letting negative comments get to me so much. Like we're all human. We can't pretend negative comments don't bother us. But frankly, I do let them get to me quite a bit. And I need to stop letting that happen. It's just not good for your mental health. My mental health, it's not good for anyone. And most of the comments on my channel are positive. Like 99% of the comments on my channel are very, very positive. We have a very positive community. But the bigger you get, and especially when you're in this rumor leak space where we're covering lots of rumors and leaks, people get really angry. There are just certain people, a minority that are very vocal and very angry. And yeah, just have to accept that that sort of comes with the territory. I gotta let that stuff not really get to me. Now I have a few other goals as well. For those of you who have ever won a prime gaming fest prize, hello. Yes, we have a goal to get all of that stuff shipped here in the first three months of this year. So that is a huge goal that we're targeting at the moment. And then beyond all of that, I just want to just get back to doing what we do best around here. Look, you might have suspected me to be like, oh, do you have like a viewership goal? Do you have a subscriber goal you wanna get to? Do you have a this? And honestly, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I don't think about it. Like it would be cool to hit 200,000 subscribers. It would be cool to, you know, go from 11 million views to 20 million views. Like that's all fun to think about. But honestly, I think the rest takes care of itself if we achieve all of our other goals. Like if all of our other goals along the way are taken care of, then I think everything else will just take care of itself. So yeah, those are sort of my goals this year. I also sort of have this other goal to somehow do all of this while working a little bit less. Right now, I'm putting in about 70 hour work weeks. It's a lot. I would like to get that reduced down to more like 50. So that's not gonna happen right away based on my current work schedule and based on how things are currently set up. But I'm hoping by the time we get to summer, I have found a new setup that allows me to still do everything I do. And you guys don't notice any drop in quality, any drop in the content, any drop in the streams. However, I am doing it quicker and more efficient, right? There has to be ways that what I'm doing can be done better and faster without dropping quality. And that is something as well that I am looking into investing. So I can get some of that free time back, not just so I can play more video games, but obviously do more things with my children and stuff. As an example, this past year, my first full-time year doing YouTube, we did not go on a family vacation. We didn't go camping. It's not even an expensive vacation. I think 50 bucks go rent a cap site for a weekend. We didn't do that. We didn't do any family vacations this year because I was too busy. I don't want that to be a normal thing. I wanna make sure that we're able to still do stuff like that. And that's gonna require me somehow being able to maintain what I'm doing while working less, which means I have to work smarter and harder in less time. We'll see how that works out. Again, the goal is by summer. I've figured out a good pattern for that. Anyways, you guys are amazing. And what are some of your guys' goal for this year? Whether it's personal, professional, whatever, whatever you're willing to share, let me know your goals for 2024, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.