📚 Book Notes: Your Best Year 🎉 + Updates I'd Make Now

Notes, study guide and the updates I'd make today from Lisa Jacobs, the author of Your Best Year

Your Best Year Final Draft: Productivity Workbook and Business Planner is a book written by me, Lisa Jacobs, that has evolved over many iterations. The system was born out of necessity, and it’s one I still follow every year. I created it because I was stuck in cycles of panic, overwork, and uneven results — and I needed a way to think clearly about an entire year of effort instead of reacting day-by-day.

I’d been in business for a few years when I wrote the first edition (2014), and I needed structure. I needed to understand why some seasons felt impossible, why other seasons took off, and how to perform at the same intensity year-round.

Your Best Year is for entrepreneurs who are ready to stretch their comfort zones and make things happen. It helps you review what is and isn't working, challenge your limitations, shatter glass ceilings, and figure out how to focus your time for maximum results. It includes systems, exercises, worksheets, strategies, and perpetual calendars — all designed to reduce time-wasting errors, habits, and busywork.

You can shop the entire library of my planning tools and workbooks on Etsy

Top 3 Key Takeaways:

1. Your business has natural seasons, both high and low.
   Not acknowledging the cycle creates panic. Rather than suffer through slow seasons, you can use them to prepare, refine, and build momentum for what’s coming next.

2. Business involves some risk.
   Being in business means coping with varying levels of uncertainty and unknowns. Your Best Year includes healthy techniques for handling discomfort and resistance.

3. You already know what you need to do next.
   Most entrepreneurs know exactly what their business needs in order to achieve the next level, they just haven’t taken the leap.

Favorite Quote:

“Nothing happens until something moves.”

Favorite Study:

The endurance entrepreneur: The book draws heavily from endurance athletics — specifically the idea that success depends on coping methods and perception of effort. The more discomfort you expect, the more you can tolerate. The more you can tolerate, the better you perform.

Favorite Needle Mover:

Trust the business to provide. One of the most powerful shifts in the book is the idea that indecision and hesitation drain more energy than action ever will. When you make a decision and commit to it, momentum follows.

For Implementation:

• Identify your strongest season and plan the year around it.

• Assess what is actually working before setting new goals.

• Eliminate “doing for doing’s sake.” Every action should lead to growth or profit.

• Create a schedule that defines when you work and what you focus on.

• Make decisions quickly and with finality. If more information is needed, assign a “decision deadline.”

• Refine your pace. If you’re feeling perpetually behind, add margin to the schedule.

• Focus on completion. What can you cross off the list today, to be done once and for all?

What I’d Update Now:

Permission to Skip Sections

I sometimes hear from readers how much they struggled to complete one section or another, and I can relate! That happens to me as well, depending on how much I’m already managing. Now, I often reference a quote from Zora Neale Hurston:

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

Both types of years are good and necessary. Ask years stir movement, and movement is interesting. It leads to growth. Answer years invite settlement, and settlement is comforting. It leads to being.

Ask years make life bigger. Answer years make life slower and more inhabitable. In the grand scheme of things, this is how growth and change (the asks) become lasting and sustainable (the answers).

Some years, speed and coping are not virtuous strategies at all. Other years, I’ve loved and needed the advice to “barrel-roll through the goal.” Just be careful not to always be barrel-rolling and bulldozing through life. You’ll miss all the important stuff.

Your Best Year is best utilized in ask years. It can feel a little hardcore for answer years — and that’s okay. Take what you need and leave the rest.

People have varying levels of risk tolerance

I’ve loved observing risk tolerance over the years. When I took my first corporate job, I heard the owner tell the story of his early days in business. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. He said,

“When I was getting started in business (out of my dining room), I knew how much risk was involved. I was very comfortable with it, but [my wife] wasn’t. She’d get so nervous about money, so I asked her, ‘What amount of money do you need every month, in order to feel comfortable?’ She gave me a figure, and I made sure it was in the account every month. I was willing to go $1M in debt if I had to, but she was going to see that money.”

That story threw me for a loop, because I’d never been that comfortable with risk. I’d never carried business debt! I was too afraid of it.

I’ve come to realize that people have 3 levels of risk tolerance:

1. Risk-avoidant — this person is likely not an entrepreneur at all

2. Risk-averse — this person will try things, but only when there’s little to no risk, lots of potential upside, or it feels like a “sure thing” or at least worth a try

3. Risk-tolerant — the man I quoted above! Willing to go all in and tolerate as much risk as necessary in pursuit of the goal

When approaching risk, be sure to choose your adventure based on your tolerance! If you exceed your natural limits, your business starts to feel like a dangerous runaway train — with you hanging on for dear life!

Name your boundaries

I do mention in the book that you want to set no more than two or three needle movers for the year. Today, I’d expand on that concept.

In business, constraints are more valuable than unlimited potential. “What we won’t do” is more important than “all that we could do.” There is a natural limit to how much can be effectively and realistically produced in a year.

This year, I set one business goal. I just want to get one thing fully accomplished. And it feels so good to have such a singular focus! The next thing I want to do (that I originally tried to also schedule into this year), has become my one goal for next year.

That may be extreme, but the point is: It’s always a better idea to do one thing really well than to try to do #allthethings, and ultimately do them poorly.

Define what you’re asking MORE of

In this final edition of the book, I was greatly influenced by the book, How Bad Do You Want It? by Matt Fitzgerald. It’s written to endurance athletes, but I could’ve exchanged the word “athlete” with “entrepreneur” throughout the book—I found it that relevant to what we do.

According to Fitzgerald, in order to make it as an endurance athlete, the answer to the question: “How bad do you want it?” always had to be, “MORE.” And in translating that for entrepreneurs, I agreed! We always have to want it MORE.

However, what I failed to do was identify what exactly I was asking for more of. I’ve come to re-evaluate what I was asking for more of from my business in years past. I don’t just want more money, and I certainly don’t want more responsibilities!

Along my journey, and in my undisciplined pursuit of growth (no direction, no definition, just MORE!), I lost my way in business. I no longer felt on purpose. The work I was producing wasn’t born of true inspiration or meaningful desire, it was created because I had to produce.

One of my new favorite questions to ask is: What, specifically, do you want more of?

I want more reliable business systems. I want more meaningful connections. I want more adventure + new experiences with my family and friends.

For every new project or endeavor I consider, I filter it against my personal “more list”:

• Is it (or can it become) a reliable and/or automated business system?

• Will it provide more meaningful connections?

• Will it become a resource for adventures and new experiences?

If a product, project, or endeavor cannot pass this litmus test, I won’t pursue it. How about you — what’s your list of more?

Here’s to Your Best Year yet xx