2024 in Reflection
Published on: Dec 30, 2024Filed under: Scratch
I don’t put much emphasis on dates. Reflecting at the end of a year simply because it’s the end of the year seems to make as much sense as waiting until Monday to start something - that is, none.
This isn’t to say that I don’t value starts or reflections. It’s the fixing those actions to a date, and thus hoping to impart some sort of extra meaning, that I take issue with.
If you want to start something, start now.
Likewise, if you need to reflect, reflect now.
Or as I have said countless times this past year, ‘The time between making a decision and measuring results is best described as risk.’
Risk that you miscalculated. Risk that you made the wrong decision. Or worse, you made the right one and wasted time realizing it.
But, tis the season.
The most apt reflection I have on the past year is that of change. But that one has applied to the last three years, so much so that change is appearing as a constant. So, instead, of a simple theme, here’s three lessons I learned over the last year.
I Learned My Own Limits
I changed jobs in early spring last year, leaving a comfortable role and landing in a challenging one. My new position is a much better fit - in terms of matching my passions[+]applied AI and aligning with a meaningful opportunity[+]modernizing education - but adapting to the challenge took a lot.
It’s a bit like rowing a race of unknown length. The initial rush, the allure of novelty, wears off after the first few hundred meters. With that gone, you have to dig into yourself and find the endurance to keep going.
Energy is fungible, and adapting to the challenges in life meant moving energy from other areas and into work.
A full life requires fueling four burners[1]. Family, friends, fitness, work.
One by one I turned those burners off, diverting energy to overcome the initial challenges of setting up my organization and creating the scaffold on which I could build future plans.
It took a lot, and was verging on crashing when I made it into the holidays. But I’m going into 2025 much more prepared, arguably even excited, about the challenges I get to tackle in the near future. And I’ve started turning the burners[+]well, some of them back on.
But I know what the sacrifice feels like. And I know when my personal cracks start to appear.
What I Don’t Know
Over the last year, I’ve grown much more uncomfortable with the unknown. Not just at work - where risk balancing is a major part of my job. And not just with technology, which is changing at a pace that keeps me in a never ending pile of white papers [+]In case you want to follow along, I have these ones currently open on my iPad 1, 2, 3.
Box’s aphorism, “All models are wrong, but some are some are useful,” applies not only to statistics, but life in general. This past year surprised me in both good and bad ways, and I’m certain that the future will too. Yes, I operate with an internal model of reality, but that model is wrong even if it can be useful.
The things I know are a rounding error when compared with the things that I don’t know. Which I take as an opportunity to keep learning, a belief that I’ll never reach the end.
Confidence
The biggest take away I’ve gotten from the year is a return to quiet confidence. In 2023, I reflected my way to my core values - Read. Write. Sweat. - and while this year made me cut back on those, I feel more confident my writing than I have in a very long time. So much so that over the course of the year, I started working with longer writing projects again. None that I’m comfortable sharing publicly, yet, but knowing my limits, embracing not knowing, and a returned sense of confidence has me creating again for probably the first time in nearly a decade.
The Year in Reading
Not counting technical books or white papers, I ended 2024 with 26 completed books. Incidentally, the same number I completed the year prior - which works out to one book ever two weeks.
This year saw an increase in nonfiction[+]11 books, up from 7 in 2023 as well as an increase in audiobooks [+]15, up from 10 in 2023, a trend I ascribe to the job change.
My favorite nonfiction book of the past year was the expanded version of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years [2]. [+]Technically, a re-read. I initially read this sometime around 2014, but it's my list so I get to make the rules.
My favorite fiction book of the past year was The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey [3].
The books I regret reading were Anathem by Neal Stephenson (which was overly long and kept me bogged down trying to finish it) and Lives of the Stoics by Ryan Holiday (which was too shallow).
I’ve got a nice pile of books to get to in 2025.
Photos from the Year
