Three Things That 2024 Has Taught Me
For me, it is not enough to just "know" them; I must also "feel" them.
I’ve been writting personal “year-in-review”s for a while now. Until now, I had only shared them with a handful of people. This year, I decide to take out the “key learnings” section from my 2024 review and share it publicly.
I’m grateful for these three things that 2024 has taught me, and I hope they might touch someone else, even just a tiny bit.
One: There’s a huge delta between anyone’s best version of themselves and their worst.
Never judge a person (ourselves included) based on anything less than the best version.
Bringing out the best takes faith (in human goodness), wisdom, and compassion (knowing in guts that all of us are deeply flawed in some way and that’s ok).
Whether in parenting, leading, relationships, or self-growth, bringing out someone’s best is a beautiful art worth pursuing.
Two: Value-centric living grounds us and fills us with meaning.
It can be either a religion, or a secular belief system that’s non-selfish. It can be big as building something that’s a net positive for the world, or small as genuinely complimenting a stranger. “Non-selfish” is the key.
Three: Be obsessively action-biased, but act concsiously, and reflect / iterate often.
For every discussion of a problem, end it with “So what now?”.
Any cool concept is worth null until you do something about it, however tiny the first step might be.
Smart idea? Dumb idea? You can sit there and debate it all day. But more likely than not, you’ll never find out until you try it out.
Give equal attention to on-the-ground execution as well as 30,000-feet strategy. Do not mistake working hard on the wrong things for making real progress.
So these are my three things. What would your three things be? Or one?
Let me know in a comment - I would love to hear it.
Happy New Year, and let’s live the heck out of 2025!