Every year, I like reflecting and writing out a few things I learned that year. I missed last year but am back to rekindle that tradition.
One of my biggest lived lessons since I wrote my last reflection two years ago is the power of focusing on one thing and planning for a long time. It’s a painfully obvious lesson and one I was previously aware of but didn’t fully appreciate or respect until recently. I’ve seen a number of friends’ entrepreneurial ventures start to compound in ways that look like “overnight success” or where success seems inevitable, but I know and appreciate how long, hard, and uncertain the journey was to get there. In the past year, a few stock picks I made early in the year like KVYO, MSTR, ARM, CORZ I sold too early and left 100-300% additional profit on the table. As a rule of thumb, 80% of the gains come in the last 20% of time, which makes it hard to know during the first 80% of time when you’re only seeing 20% of the gains whether you’re on the right path.
As an aside, the only domain in my life personally where this is flipped is in weightlifting, where 80% of the gains happen in the first 20% of one’s weightlifting journey. (A bit of an exaggeration but directionally correct.) Reflecting on my own fitness journey, I realize I could have made more progress by focusing on just one modality of training vs. trying to juggle both weightlifting and running or that long term outcomes require checking the ego and avoid working out with max effort during every workout. Periods of low intensity training and rest are equally important in making progress.
The second biggest lived lesson has been accepting that both anything is possible and only one thing is possible at the same time. There’s a visualization popularized by Wait But Why that makes the point that while many life paths have closed for us in the past, there’s still an endless number of paths ahead of us.
What I mean by my point above is that even though our lives are filled with limitless possibilities at any point in time, only one thing is possible in the life we choose to live. We’ll take one of those many green paths ahead of us, and if we don’t pick a path deliberately, instead trying to keep our options open, we may end up on a middling sort of path with less purpose.
This complements the first observation that you can’t truly focus and become great at something or achieve outsized results without accepting that while you probably could accomplish whatever you want, you can’t accomplish everything you want, at least not all at once together.
Making tradeoffs and making the right ones is what allows for outsized results. Taking an example from my day-to-day, product management is all about this. As a company, you can only do so much and the job of product is to set the right focus and make the right trade offs in service of that to drive positive outcomes for the business.
My last learning to share: I spend a lot of time keeping up with newsletters, reading X to glean insights and keep a pulse on what’s happening in tech, and scanning every little message that comes through on Slack. I feel FOMO when there’s a piece of information in front of me or that I am curious about, and I don’t consume it because there’s the possibility that some nugget of insight will unlock an opportunity. But in reality, this kind of reading leads to very shallow knowledge that’s not actionable nor easy to recall. Opportunities tend not to be found in information that is presentable and easy to glean. By the time something hits X, you’re probably already behind the curve. It feels good in the moment to learn some interesting tidbit of information, but rarely does that help in my day-to-day or even help me sharpen my thinking. It’s the long-form content, lived experience, and thinking about something from many different angles and with time that cement information into deep foundational knowledge that impacts how you think and behave.
This was a pretty poor year of reading for me even by my standards—need to do better in 2025:
The Power Law was interesting in that it captures what venture capital was like when it first got started around the time of Intel and Apple. VCs were much more hands-on back then (in how they managed and helped shaped the outcomes of their companies) and that the risk-reward was much more favorable to investors in the early days given that there were basically no other options for tech entrepreneurs back then besides corporate investors—and even then, those tended not to bet on really big swings. Also interesting to learn that the concept of the time-limited equity fund with GP skin-in-the-game was itself an iterative innovation from government subsidized SBIC funds that were meant to fund moonshot tech bets but failed to do so because of various limits like fund size and debt + short-term orientation. The book also makes a strong case around some of Stanford's actions in the 1950s and 60s including its Research Park (basically working spaces for companies) and loose policies around commercializing.
Elon Musk, the book, basically summarizes how intense and unique Musk is. He's obviously quite polarizing, but the book paints a very nuanced and empathetic picture of who he really is. It makes you believe he actually doesn't care about money. He just wants to progress the human race—through space colonization, more effective use of energy, and, as become more the focus recently, safe superintelligence. I don't know if it's clear why he cares about what he cares about though beyond "just because" or "why not". The one point the book makes very clear though is how intense and drawn to chaos the man is. It's impressive how much he is able to push others to accomplish insane feats.
The Midnight Library was the one fiction book I read and describes someone who experiences a near death experience and basically "lives" many other lives they could have led. Somewhat of an obvious conclusion, but it makes the case that there's no strictly superior life than the one you're living. Even the one where you're a superstar is fraught with problems. The book makes you believe that both anything is possible and only one thing is possible in the one life you choose to live.