By Staff Reporters
Two months after the death of his mother, J.D., the creator and voice behind the prominent personal finance platform Get Rich Slowly, has announced a major shift in both his personal life and his approach to content creation. Following a period of profound grief and subsequent introspection, J.D. has officially declared 2023 to be "The Year of Me," signaling a deliberate pivot toward prioritizing his own physical and mental health above all else.
In a candid update shared with his readership, J.D. explained that the heavy emotional fog that followed his mother’s passing has finally begun to lift. With this newfound clarity has come a resurgence of motivation to pursue productive endeavors. However, rather than immediately diving back into the relentless pace of digital publishing and editorial management that defined much of his career, he has chosen to redirect that energy inward.
The decision was born from a period of serious soul-searching conducted alongside his partner, Kim. According to J.D., it became glaringly obvious that he had spent far too many years placing himself at the very bottom of his own priority list—often ranking second, third, or even ninth behind external demands, projects, and the expectations of others. Starting immediately, his aim is to invert that hierarchy and put his own well-being first for the foreseeable future.
2023 — The Year of Me
For longtime followers of Get Rich Slowly, the concept of intentional framing is a familiar one. More than a decade ago, J.D. popularized the habit of assigning overarching themes to specific months and years. Whether he was channeling his focus into fitness, writing, or dating, these structured periods of concentration consistently yielded fruitful results. Eventually, however, this habit fell by the wayside as other responsibilities crowded his schedule.
Reviving the practice for 2023 carries a distinct emotional weight. J.D. admits that the conscious shift toward self-preservation initially felt uncomfortable, even running contrary to his natural instincts.
"This is tough for me. It seems selfish. It seems wrong," J.D. wrote. "But the truth is I’ve been allowing other things to interfere with my pursuit of physical and mental health for too long. I’ve been making excuses. No more! For the foreseeable future, J.D. is job one. Let the age of selfishness commence!"
Despite characterizing the shift as an era of selfishness, J.D. maintains that prioritizing his own needs will ultimately make him a better person and a more effective resource for others, including his readers. It is an axiom he has frequently preached to friends and followers over the years, though he acknowledges he struggled to apply it to his own life.
For the audience of Get Rich Slowly, the day-to-day experience of engaging with the platform is expected to remain largely unchanged. The transformation is primarily internal, granting J.D. the explicit psychological permission to place his own desires ahead of external obligations. In practical terms, this new chapter is anticipated to generate fresh editorial fodder for the site, while finally clearing the path for the long-delayed completion of the platform’s ongoing redesign.
However, the pursuit of this personal renaissance comes with one significant caveat for readers: J.D. is deliberately abandoning any rigid publishing or production schedules. Moving forward, content will be driven entirely by organic inspiration rather than arbitrary deadlines. If he has something meaningful to share, he will publish it; if not, he will remain silent, refusing to force material simply to fill a content quota.
This spontaneous approach was reflected in the creation of his latest update, which was drafted following a personal exercise from the book Designing Your Life during a brief window of free time before a scheduled phone call with a friend. While long-form, focused articles will not disappear entirely from the site, J.D. notes that shorter, more conversational dispatches will likely become the norm throughout his Year of Me.
The Courage to Be Disliked
The intellectual foundation for J.D.’s current phase of self-reflection was reinforced during a Thanksgiving road trip to California with Kim and her family. To pass the miles, the couple listened to the audiobook The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The book explores the psychological framework of Alfred Adler, translating complex Adlerian concepts into an accessible philosophical dialogue.
Although the book’s title initially suggests a manual on social defiance, J.D. suggests it might be more accurately understood as The Courage to Be Happy. The text resonated deeply with him, prompting plans to revisit the material in a digital Kindle format to extract and review specific passages. Because the book is structured as a Socratic dialogue, J.D. noted that skimming for highlights will allow him to bypass the conversational scaffolding and focus purely on the core philosophical takeaways. He has also floated the possibility of publishing a comprehensive review and summary of the book on Get Rich Slowly at a later date.
A Values-Driven Life
The synthesis of J.D.’s recent personal breakthroughs and his reading material ultimately ties back to foundational principles of personal accountability and proactive living. Highlighting a passage he recently encountered through his Readwise account, J.D. pointed to a quote from Stephen R. Covey’s seminal work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:
"The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of a proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values—carefully thought about, selected, and internalized values."
Reflecting on Covey’s words, J.D. realized that a core factor leading to his current burnout and need for a reset was a gradual erosion of his ability to control fleeting impulses, compounded by a departure from his core values. Recognizing the problem has prompted immediate corrective action. Beyond philosophical musings, J.D. has already begun taking concrete steps to curb impulsive digital behaviors—such as removing distracting applications like Reddit and Hearthstone from his iPad—to clear mental space for his core values.
As J.D. navigates this transitional period, readers should expect a more fluid, conversational, and unpredictable cadence from Get Rich Slowly. Rather than forcing monolithic essays into a strict editorial calendar, J.D. is leaning into a model where individual thoughts are shared as they arise, capturing the essence of a writer actively realigning his life with his deepest principles.
