all these things that I've done
things I learned in 2023
Life at home is simple, sweet. I eat fish with vinegar rice and oshinko, I see my friends, I lift weights at the gym, I go on long walks in the forest. This year has been hard for a variety of reasons, but moving through the hard things has been a strange sort of beautiful.
When I reflect on the past, I think about how I lost love and found it again in multiple different avenues. How lucky I was to really feel it, a wave washing over me. How our lives intersected at this pivotal point in time. I’ll only know the significance of it years down the road. I also overanalyze how I was wrong about a lot of things. I notice the gaps in my thinking more, my blind spots.
When you learn something new for the first time you flail miserably at it, but eventually you identify your weaknesses and over time the process toward solution becomes almost instinctual. Things get better and easier, and somehow you’ve developed into this whole new person who could do the hard things you once dreaded, now effortlessly. I find this deeply resonant across work, love, life.
Life gets bigger, more inclusive, richer, the more you keep your mind open. Your decisions get better too, or maybe just your comfort with making decisions: a confidence in knowing that you can handle the consequence of your choices. You are dealt the hand but you are also playing the game.
Some notes I took away from 2023:
Every choice holds ripple effects: meeting one person in a particular time and particular place can change your entire life trajectory, and you only need to meet one or two right people or do one or two right things. Take the pressure off of doing everything perfectly and instead focus on the areas with most surface area/leverage
Our character is the moving average of our actions (a la Ted Chiang), we must consistently focus on the betterment of forward actions, and the metric is always moving
Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk. (via Sam Altman)
Entering and absorbing the ecosystem: if you want to be surrounded by a particular social or intellectual milieu you need to engage or enter the ecosystem in which said groups operate. Even being on the periphery is highly valuable. e.g., if you want to learn from great leaders you don’t currently have access to, you could volunteer to usher for conventions/talks they would attend, or if you want to discover how someone thinks, listen to their podcasts/read their work often
Growth lies past natural set points. I was challenged a lot by work this year and I learned the most when I operated on the edge or cliff of my own limited understanding. Our set points/tolerance to pain can and do change
Writing is a natural output of operating. If I orient myself toward the long term, I still think writing is relatively underrated and honing it/shaping it slowly over years has long term payoffs that aren’t obvious when you’re initially writing and no one is reading
Great love exists in letting go. Most beautiful things end but that doesn’t stop them from being beautiful
I used to fear losing people so much. Now I realize we’re always losing each other regardless — the old versions of us never last.
Doesn’t the fear of losing something waste the loveliness of it?
Perhaps we can simply let it be lovely. Knowing that everything can change at any moment. Appreciating it while it lasts. (people come and go)
Keep the channel open:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open (Martha Graham)
Adult relationships require accountability and forgiveness: accountability for the things I did that hurt the people I love/forgiveness toward myself for making mistakes
At some point getting what you want is within reach with enough resources and will. The harder thing is to know what is worth wanting
Relationships are generative, as in: people will unearth certain traits or ideas that you might not even consciously know that you contain. Some minds are extremely generative when they come into contact with yours. Spending time with them unlocks emergent properties. E.g., In a good conversation, upon being asked good questions, you can go farther/deeper into an idea than simply ruminating alone. Same thing applies with a good partner or good friends, your journeys are enriched by each other’s directional force.
Henrik wrote about a related concept of mutual unfolding in his piece ‘relationships are co-evolutionary loops’ that I think about all the time:
Some relationships are hard, or even impossible, to change. As an individual, you grow—but your father won’t acknowledge that change or adapt to it, and the relationship gets stuck.
Other relationships are fluid and open-ended, they grow to fit you better and better the more time you invest in them, like an old house where you rearrange the walls, doors, and furniture until the light falls just right.
The important part is knowing what someone brings out in you and whether you can mutually unfold in a healthy way — this requires patience, devotion to conversation, and speed of iterating toward one another.
Sometimes we part ways with people because our lives travel on in different directions, sometimes we grow together in happy symbiosis. Almost always, even through mere contact or presence, you change another person and they change you irrevocably. I still have the books, the ideas, the mindsets, I adopted from people in my life across time and space even if our time together is sealed into the past. We are all just collections of everyone we’ve ever loved.
A sincere note of appreciation for reading my blog this year. It’s been almost 2 years of writing in public! I hosted my first meetup this year! Thank you for being here.
PS: Happy Holidays! If you feel inclined; please share and subscribe. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers :)
My favorite books this year (Have you read any of them? Which did you like?)
Picasso's War on Art, How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Psychopolitics by Byung Chul Han
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert Caro
M Train by Patti Smith
The Making of Prince of Persia (journals) by Jordan Mechner (also most books published by Stripe Press!)
What made him the greatest was not perfection, but a willingness to put himself on the line as a way of life.
The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin (via are.na)
Reading this and through Henrik’s post on co-evolutionary loops made me think you might like a fine article on the “throughput of learning”[1] where Tiago Forte writes about “listening for assumptions”:
“[The] deepest assumptions can only be revealed through experience and stories, not by reading books or having intellectual arguments. We do these things through the same old lens, and thus cannot examine the lens. It takes another free mind, reaching up and taking off our spectacles, to show us the cracks and the foggy areas.”
[1] Forte, Tiago. “The Throughput of Learning,” January 31, 2017. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/01/31/the-throughput-of-learning/.
Thank you for writing, Nix.