Bye 2020. Hello the rest of the future.
By: Matt Cyrankiewicz
Tags: Journey, Blue Wave, 2020, Year In Review, Entrepreneur

Bye 2020. Hello the rest of the future.

On jail, deportation, family & cancer, near bankruptcy, COVID and how it all worked out. Thank you 2020. Matt Cyrankiewicz Jan 7·14 min read

Three months ago, freshly out of a US detention center and deported back to the Caribbean, I was staying at a certain inspiring billionaire’s beach front villa for a few days.

At the dinner table we were playing a sort of QA game and my friend Xander asked what is the most valuable thing I learned this year? I responded that this is the first year when I feel I haven’t really learned anything new, rather finally got to apply what I learned before to get myself out of trouble — over and over.

Perhaps I just wrote the most gangster intro paragraph this blog will ever carry! But such was that week, one day I was sleeping on the floor, handcuffed and questioned for many hours, another I was staying in a beautiful billionaire villa, trying to marry the two in my head. Let’s frame it for you my dear reader: I do not get to hang around billionaire places often and it was my first time ever in real handcuffs. But such was the week and I think it was very resembling of my 2020 overall.

2020 ended. “2020” is far from ending, for better or worse.

In my ‘19 summary post I shared my own 20 lessons for 2020. In quite a timely manner these, together with the 30 lessons I collected before, became incredibly handy this past year. Therefore after 2020, my biggest insight was, that spending some time to understand your mistakes really really helps.

Lessons work! Who knew.

So this post will be about my mishaps and mistakes, but also recoveries, growth and the future.

Back to 2020. My dad suddenly got a rapidly growing cancer, my company almost went bankrupt, I got banned from the US, to name a few. It was quite a brutal mess to navigate.

COVID with all its lockdowns, social rewiring, economy crash, riots, undoing of trust, exposed global social injustices, death, tiger business, tectonic shakes at the brink of 4th industrial revolution, zoom overload and the threat of the virus itself, was for me really minuscule in comparison. And I know even by itself it would have given me quite a crappy year, like for pretty much all of us.

Not to one-up your shitty year, but for me it was sort of worse even. And yet the year ends on a massively positive note. And hopefully this can inspire a positive outlook for you too, my dear reader.

My posts typically intertwine my work and personal life, they always have, as the two tend to be quite in bed with each other anyway. But I just shared recent events of HOO KOO E KOO here with some learnings — give it a read!

So here, this time, I’ll keep it fully personal and just give an overview of what 1 year can hold and why do I feel positive about the future — and it all has barely anything to do with COVID.

Before I get to it, I want to thank all the incredible friends, team mates, my new business partner, Chris for being there, pushing ahead and working asses off to turn things around 💛 And my dad for never losing optimism and inspiring me every day. I want to thank Rocio who put up with a lot and yet we somehow found a way to be together again.

I was about to scrap this entire post as an over-share and simply focus just on the thank you note, but following a conversation with my friend James (now Global Creative Director of Pinterest and soon HKEK’s advisor! 🙌) yesterday, I feel like it deserves to be shared.

2021 is already shaping up to be an incredible follow up to what happened, but I’ll get to this.

For now, here it is, my 2020 in review, for everyone to see. Let’s use a form of a diary this time, but trust me there will be some interesting nuggets in there.

The speakeasy nights ensued in my empty penthouse some time in April.

January

On 1st or 2nd I woke up newly single, almost broke, hangover and not too satisfied with the night and day of celebrations I just had. There was plenty to be anxious about, my dear friend and key team member Yukiko had just passed away, HKEK was running out of cash, the dream of our new life we constructed in Dominican Republic was collapsing. Now it was just me, alone, in a sort of ridiculous penthouse by the beach, with so many issues to solve.

I decided 2020 will be for me a year when I break through my inhibitions. Go explore new connections, make new friends, learn to DJ finally, not fall newly in love with a girl (for a change) and perhaps finally get back to skydiving. I bought myself some DJ gear when in NYC to start.

A week later I had the opportunity to speak about our efforts to Sir Richard Branson and all guests of the Ultramarine Ocean Summit, while Sir Richard was wearing our Future Horizon necklace and sitting right in front of me. Surreal. Thank you Susi Mai!