See my review of 2023 here.
If you asked me what I did this year, I wouldn’t be able to tell you without having to step through month by month and tug on whatever wisps of memories might still be around. “OK January… where was I in January? OK now February…” Maybe this is just what it’s like to get older. Memories are less sticky and more ethereal. Blink, and a year has gone by. And the years are getting faster too, the slippery little bastards.
I used to think I could live life without taking notes. That I was better for it by being more ‘in the moment’, somehow. But I’ve realized that that’s actually not the case, and that my life is made better by the additional presence of mind to accumulate notes, photos, artefacts, talismans; snapshots of specific swirls of thoughts at specific moments in time. Without my notes I wouldn’t be able to do these reviews, which have become a ritual I thoroughly enjoy. This year in particular demanded that notes be taken and reviewed. A lot happened.
There’s this analogy about digging holes in the ground, that describes one type of person that just likes to dig one hole and dig it deep. Then there’s another type of person that likes to dig one hole for a bit, then go and dig a new hole over there for a bit, and then dig another hole over there. So instead of one really deep hole, you end up with a bunch of holes that are not as deep. I’m like the second guy, now taking stock of where the hell he’s been digging.1
I truly forgot how much I did in H1. I continued and strengthened existing practices (gym, drawing, drums), made a bunch of changes, and also planted seeds that would sprout later in the year.
This was also just months 7-12 of my sabbatical, which looking back now feels so early on in my emotional journey. This was like an Act II, whereas now at the end of 2024 I feel like I’ve already finished Act III and I’m starting on Act IV. See “More on notable developments” below for more.
Trip 1
Trip 2
I was traveling for almost the entirety of this quarter, across two big trips that were more like 3-mini-trips-in-a-trenchcoat plus 4-mini-trips-in-a-trenchcoat. It was a like flood of new places and experiences displacing the preceding ones, but x7. Might’ve been a bit too much travel for my liking, if I’m honest.2
The Act III, to my Act II in Q1-Q2:
Coming in a separate post…
Coming in a separate post…
Coming in a separate post…
I finished 60 portrait studies (#407-466) over 200/365 days (~= 145h) in 2024. This is up a lot from 2023, where I did 145/365 days ~= 73h.
This year was intense and incredible. I improved more than I could imagine, and I made a lot of pieces that I love. I started time-tracking my sessions (with toggl). I also 100%’d my very first sketchbook, the one I started with in 2020.
But I was also hard on myself, and struggled with a lot of doubt when I felt stuck or when I plateaued. The more you learn, the more you understand how little you know. So my year of drawing also involved a lot of introspection and managing my psychology.
(There’s a lot more I want to write about here, but I also don’t want to blow up this annual review with too much text. Maybe that’s one added benefit of doing these reviews: it gives me a bunch of sandboxes to play in and see if there’s anything interesting below the surface that I want to explore deeper.)
More to come, on the subjects of:
I recorded two drum covers this year, both in H1: Still Into You and Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version).
And then I fell off! I played a bit in Q4, but songs are harder now. I’ve encountered the newest miniboss that I can’t get past yet with my current level of coordination and strength. The 16th notes require speeds I can’t yet produce (but I can get to 75% speed). Breaking through these limits will require more practice, and ideally deliberate practice (e.g. this video on paradiddles and more), but that’s less fun. But then staying stuck at my current skill level is also not very fun. Let’s see what I choose to do about this in 2025.
Including this review, I published 16 blog posts this year.
Part of me wanted to write more. Part of me still wants to write more. I have docs from the year filled with sketches of essays. I had even more ideas floating around that I wanted to get out of my head and onto the page, but didn’t make it for one reason or another.
But also with everything else going on in my days, writing ended up being bumped down on my priority list, with my focus on:
Writing for me is a high bandwidth activity. It’s effortful. Maybe if I could finish pieces in ~3-4 days I might be able to sustain the practice, because in that time I hit this sweet spot of attention span, effort, tiredness, and satisfaction. It’s like that nice buzz, that good level of fatigue, where you worked hard and you’re beat but you’re not absolutely destroyed. But pieces usually take me 5-7+ days to finish, with the final days feeling grind-y, tiring, and frustrating, to the point where I take a few days off of writing afterward.3 BUT then also, there’s no other feeling like hitting publish on a blog post, or rereading an old post and going “damn I was cooking”.
So my goal is to continue keeping things light. Continue writing, here and there. Push when I want to, and don’t push when I don’t want to. And most importantly: don’t burn out. I think I under-pushed a bit this year, so that’s something to try to adjust for 2025.
I played a lot of beach volleyball again–18 Sunday clinics, and 3 tournaments where I made it out of pools once, and made it to round 2 in the consolation bracket once. I’m still having a blast, and I’m still getting better (I’m like 7/10 confident in my hard swings now, and rising).
Next year I want to play in even more tournaments and get more real game experience.
There’s this great clip from Paul Millerd and Cissy Hu where Paul describes self-employed work across the dimensions of Money and Energy, essentially plotting instances of work on a 2x2 of {alive, dead} x {money, energy}. E.g. X work may be money-alive but energy-dead. Ideally I want to find work that is both money-alive and energy-alive for me.
Lately I’ve also found myself considering a third dimension of Social: how important is it to me to have a social aspect to my work?
How do I feel about work that is more socially isolated and solo? e.g. stock trading
Vs working as an IC but on a team? e.g. software engineering
Vs working directly with a client? e.g. coaching, therapy
Vs getting my social fix largely from outside of the workplace?
One of my favourite ice-breaker questions goes like, “Let’s say you just won the lottery and now have $100M in the bank. Now that money is no issue, what would you want to do for work?”4
(Take a second to think about your answer, if you wish. Inhale. Exhale.)
A cool extension on this lottery question is: “What % of the lottery have you already won?”5 I take this to mean something like: what %-free are you, how close are you to doing the things you answered?
(Take another second to think about your answer, if you wish. Inhale. Exhale.)
The timeline:
This year I was repeatedly reminded that the thing I enjoy doing here is: being helpful to people via 1-1 conversations. There are actions I can take to generate more opportunities to do this. But if I focus too much on the generating AND the generating is not fun, then this becomes unsustainable. Which is what happened (again, lol).
TBD on if I get back to doing any form of coaching stuff in the near future. But if I do I’ll probably to keep it more casual. This also got bumped down in priority by a newfound interest in stock trading, so we’ll see. Idk, my priorities continue to shift quarter to quarter.
One of my friends and I started getting really into stock trading stuff in ~May of this year. And surprisingly it’s been very fun and engaging.
The public markets are like a global PVE game, where anyone can create a character and immediately join in. There are some out-of-the-box builds that you can just copy and not have to think about ever again and they’ll do well (e.g. broad market index funds). And then there’s trying to create your own custom build to beat the game, which is how I’m playing.
I’ll be honest, at first it really like guessing/gambling–you try to evaluate companies or short-term trade ideas based on some quantitative measure but early on your measures are so pedestrian and underdeveloped that you’re pretty much just trading on vibes… But because there’s an objective and unforgiving bar for performance (are you beating the S&P 500?), the feedback loop is tight. Iterate, fix your sh*t, and stop doing stupid stuff. Adjust, or die.
As for my daily efforts, my current “build” consists of: reading up on a bunch of information from various sources, and coming up with/refreshing my action plan of what trades to target and when. Then evaluating my performance.
This has been surprisingly fun, and energy-alive. And I’m hoping this can become sufficiently money-alive. But this is also the venture that got me thinking about the social side of work, along with other questions.
If I could make a living doing this every day, would I be excited to do so?
Or are there other opportunities that I would be more interested in pursuing, or regret not pursuing? (And is it really a binary either/or? Could I do both?)
What are the emotional and psychologial needs that are being met by this activity in particular? (In particular around my relationship to money.)
If I won the lottery and no longer had to worry about money at all, would I still do this? What would I want to do?
Concerts
Movies & Shows
I’ve been on sabbatical now for 1.5 years. Since the start of my sabbatical in 2023 I’ve pretty much been living life one quarter at a time, and I think that’s still going to be the case in 2025. Who knows what will happen with grad school applications, along with whatever else comes out of growing, and continuing to stir the pot that is my life.
I’m proud of how I’ve spent my days so far, and I’ll keep going as long as that feeling continues.
If you have a guy who likes to jump around from project to project, how do you make the best use of him? For me, I try to project-manage this by keeping a specific and limited set of projects that I’m prioritizing at any given time, usually ~3. And I work through 1->2->3 in one day, and start the cycle over with 1 the next day. And it’s a very pleasant and natural cycle – there always comes a point in working on a project after a couple of focus blocks where I feel like “yeah that feels good for the day, I want to work on something else now”. And that’s when I switch projects. ↩︎
Dare I say, this was too much travel. Or maybe it was just mistimed. When I’ve been busy grinding at work and am starting to calcify, that’s when I like to travel, break myself out of old routines, and refresh my mind with some novel and fun experiences. But this quarter was kind of the opposite – I had some new ideas that I was excited to get started on (e.g. trying to spin up a coaching business), but that I had to put on hold due to my travel plans, which was annoying because I wanted to ride that wave of excitement as hard as I could. Oh well, at least I got these two blog posts out of the experience 😅 ↩︎
This review took me ~13 hours over 8 days to put together. I wasn’t as warn out after as I thought I’d be at the end, but it sure was a substantial and sustained effort. ↩︎
Cheers to the footnotes readers, you get to see my answer. I would want to do something around: having conversations, helping people do things they want to do, learning about and understanding different perspectives, sharing knowledge, and leading by example. If I can construct such a job, I will. So far, coaching/therapy seems to be the nearest thing I can see. ↩︎
I got the follow-up question “What % of the lottery have you already won?” from this clip from Ali Abdaal. ↩︎