Most people finish a year with activity. Very few finish with clarity.

In this episode, Ray walks through the simple framework he uses to audit his year in three categories:

Learned. What new lessons emerged through experience?

Relearned. What did he already know — but drifted away from when circumstances changed?

Unlearned. What did he change his mind about as the business evolved?

This isn’t about creating a long list to feel productive. It’s about extracting the few durable lessons that actually matter — the ones worth carrying into 2027.

Ray explains how he builds the list (calendar review, content review, AI conversation prompts) and why he’s sharing the lessons one at a time in upcoming episodes instead of delivering an information dump.

The goal isn’t volume. It’s leverage.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. Why relearning is often more important than learning something new
2. How to identify patterns you’ve quietly stopped applying
3. What it looks like to intentionally unlearn a belief
4. How to systematically extract lessons from a full year of work
5. Why curated reflection compounds more than reactive goal-setting

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This podcast is where Ray thinks through hard decisions — especially when the usual playbooks stop working.

If that approach resonates, that’s what you’ll find more of here.

New to the show? The “Start Here” playlist outlines what the podcast is about and how to approach it: https://player.captivate.fm/collection/a7577a6f-15da-4521-b214-35e4e47f320b

What are the lessons I've relearned? And these are really important because I want to make sure they stick. There are certain things that we learn, and then circumstances change, and for whatever reason, we stop doing the thing that we had learned previously worked or didn't work. And so understanding what those are so that I don't continue to repeat mistakes is really important.

And then the third thing is what are the things that I unlearned? What are the things that I've changed my mind on as the business has gone through? And there's a few of those as well.

So what I've done is on this reflection created this long list. And I've got a bunch of them. And the way that I do that is I look at my calendar, I look at content that I've created throughout the year, I look at the conversations that I have in AI—and I've actually this year I've prompted Claude, GPT, Gemini, others—and said, "Hey, what are some potential lessons that I've learned?" and just kind of asked it based on our conversations and the memory that you have.

And it's hit and miss with that, but there's a number of ways you can go back and pull those lessons forward. And I've got this long list. And what I'm going to do for the next number of episodes is I'm going to share a curated list of those with you one by one. Rather than just have this big long information dump that has filler and other things like "Hey, I'm at 18, I gotta make it 26, how do I split these up? How do I make it sound like more?"

And that's going to be the next number of episodes. So this is just kind of teeing up what that's going to look like. And each day I'll drop in a new one. And again, my goal is make it as actionable as possible. So I'm not trying to give you fillers, I'm not trying to make the longest list possible, I'm not trying to make the shortest list possible. I'm giving you what I genuinely believe are the most important pieces that if I look at this going into 2027, I could come back and know these are the rock solid things. These are the ones that had the biggest impact and biggest output and most leverage for me.

So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and start jamming on these and feel free to leave me some feedback if you have any questions or comments below. Adios.