Better every year. That is my goal. I believe that through focused effort I can keep improving and ensure my best years are still in front of me.

With that in mind, at the start of a new year, I take the time to set my focus for the coming year. By being selective about where I direct my energy, I can achieve results that are exponentially greater than if I split my attention.

I detailed my 2022 focus here (read that first if you want more context). I’ve posted a few updates throughout the year (quarter year, half year update, and three quarter year update) and now is time for a final review.

2022 Theme: Forecasting

Self Grade: 8/10

I read four books on the topic and detailed my learnings in this recap of what I learned about forecasting.

This was a strong year and helped establish a pattern for how I want to handle themes in future years. Read a few books about the topic, practice it and summarize some of my key learnings in a blog post. If I can do this for one topic every year, I’ll make a lot of progress at learning about new topics and practicing new skills.

I’m going with 8 of 10 as I only read four books of the 11 I had identified, I should be able to read a few more than that per year related to the theme.

2022 Challenge: Become a Superforecaster

Self Grade: 2/10

I did not perform well enough to become a super forecaster, but I did have a strong year. I was able to improve my all time Brier score to 0.337 from 0.357 (lower is better). As of now my all time record is just a smidge below average, but I don’t know how different my score was from average at the beginning of the year, so it is hard to know how much I improved on those terms. I believe I went from a few notches below average to just below average for my overall score, which means that this year I performed above average for forecasters on gjopen.com. That isn’t bad considering the sample set is a group of people that enjoy forecasting as a hobby and are probably pretty decent at it compared to the normal population.

Looking at this year alone, here are the scores I had on the 69 questions that resolved (lower is better). Generally I’m pretty close to the mean, but with a few strong performances (and a few weak ones).

Grouping those by score bins you can see I tend to be closer to the middle with my most frequent bin being within 0.01 of zero, which represents the crowd average. The way Relative Brier Score works, you can only get a negative score if you are more accurate than the crowd expects. I had one questions where I scored a perfect zero points, but so did everyone else, so my Relative Brier score was zero. For 23 of 69 questions I did better than the crowd, for 28 I did worse and for 18 I was essentially right with the crowd.

The one score I’d really like to see, but don’t know how to calculate is my calibration. I want to know if when I predicted a 90% chance of something, it actually tended to happen 90% of the time. I don’t have access to all of the individual predictions in an easy to use format though, so at this point I’m not able to do this. I suspect my chart looks more or less like the average forecaster, which means I am overconfident at the low and and under-confident at the high end.

Of note, a lot of my forecasting hasn’t scored yet. Of the 120 questions I made forecasts on, 69 resolved, 43 haven’t yet ended and 8 have ended but are waiting for the resolution to be announced (sometimes it takes things a few weeks for the data to roll in, like car sales reports). So there is a chance I move up or down a bit in my score as those roll in, maybe I’ll check back once I know more.

2022 Habit: Spend an Hour A Week Managing Forecasts

Self Grade: 8/10

I completed forecasts in 38.5 of 52 weeks (74%) including all 13 weeks of the final quarter, so I’m going to round up to an 8 out of 10. In total this year I made 666 forecasts on 120 different questions.

2022 Exemplar: Steve Jobs

Self Grade: 9/10

I recently recapped some of the things I learned about Jobs in this review. To learn about him I read his official biography, one graphic novel written about his interactions with a monk he was close to, watched one movie, two documentaries and multiple of his keynote speeches.

I also went to and Apple Store and spent thousands of hours using Apple devices, including the laptop I’m typing this on now.

2022 Bucket List Item: Finish the Cascade Crest 100

Self Grade: 10/10

I finished the 100 mile race in ~31 hours, in a middle of the pack 72nd out of 126 finishers. Here is my race report of the Cascade Crest 100.