ps: Late reflection post from an essay that has been on my personal website.
This is my second year review, check the 2021 version here.
Summary
2022 was the year of compounding bold decisions.
I challenged my manager and ended up crossing the continent to cover an event with him. I visited a stunning startup and ended up with an internship. I serendipitously met a smart girl and ended up wondering about a.. relationship! This posture of bold decisions stands in contrast to the first few years of my career, which were defined by novelty and experimentation. In those early years, I was fueled by Lithuania's/São Paulo's hustle and bustle energy and the lust for achievement that hangs in the air.
Nowadays, I value much more the cities I inhabit. In the words of Paul Graham, "ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to whisper one type of ambition". The reason San Francisco is an impact-led capital is not just that there's a concentration of people wanting to change the world there, but that there's nothing else people there care about more, and I feel a huge contrast of that from São Paulo - where social classes are annoyingly apparent and, although surrounded by a handful of talented friends, my perspective gets diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in suits.
I recently reminded myself of a quote from Steve Jobs: "In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” As a 22 years old guy, I didn't know how challenging myself ferociously would impact my habits in 2022, but I’m happy to say that many of the habits I valued didn’t go away - writing, exercising, reading consistently. There were a number of adjustments I had to make along the way, but overall, I’m incredibly grateful for how smoothly things have gone.
I’ll start this Annual Review by reflecting on 2022. I’ll share highlights and reflect on the goals I set at the beginning of the year. Later, I’ll outline how I plan to improve my life and set a new vision for 2023.
Highlights
Joining Wildlife Studios first web3 initiative This year, I started seeing the prizes of consistent hard work, joining a team of 3 senior executives to help building the very first Wildlife Studios web3 game. I not just learned career-wise, but got multiple life-advices from the manager's I had. Even though it was a remarkable experience, I regret not speaking up when my intuition pointed to different decisions - regardless, I'm grateful for having internalized that specific lesson already.
Travelling to Berlin I lived in Berlin for three months alongside six other students from my university, met amazing people and deepened my relationship with close friends. Berlin played an important role on my identity - as I reflect on my career, it's hard to imagine where I'd be if people didn't take bets on me early on. There, I cold approached a startup owner, visited it out of curiosity and got an internship proposal, which I'm extremely grateful to continue remotely now that I'm back in Brazil.
Being mindful of my time Time is scarce, life is short, and as the grains of sand slip through the hourglass, so does the precious gift of time. Once gone, it disappears forever. We all know these things. And yet, at work and at home, we’re so lost in a trance of distraction that killing time has become a chronic disease. In my desire to avoid time-wasting, I confused what was good with what was difficult, and what was inhibiting with what was productive. I always felt spending too much time on work rather than enjoying meaningful moments that didn't show clear value - In the end, life is about intending to give more than you receive. I tried changing this in 2022 and convincing me more that going out occasionally without a given purpose is important, especially by the reflections it brings later down the road. As we move through life, we should swing between the discipline of work and the fullness of leisure. But in both cases, we should remember the scarcity of time and never kill it.
Values
I reflected on and updated my values over the last few days for 2023. I’ll use these values to evaluate the choices I make and benchmark how far off I am from what I’ve decided is a set of choices to strive towards.
For 2022, I had the following values...
Do the hardest things right
Find the office hours
Expect no second chance
Emotionally invested
For 2023, I've refined these values to...
Do a couple of hard things right
Find the office hours
Expect no second chance
Be present above all else
Keep my identity small
Do a couple of hard things right In 2021, I looked myself in the mirror and said, “You should try harder next year.” But after some reflection, I no longer think that’s the solution. Although I keep my opinion towards my last year's goal, "the hardest path is not uniformly the best choice, but it often is.", I've changed something important here. Since attention is finite, adding something new means you have to stop doing the hard things you’re already doing. Plus, it’s easy to add goals but hard to take an honest look at all the ways you can use your time better. I’ve always struggled to motivate myself on hard things that doesn't make much sense to me. One example was at school, as I knew that our education system rewards memorization, answer-seeking, and the pursuit of brand names to signal we are valuable - e.g. You should study hard math as an exploration of your curiosity, not purely as an obligation set upon you. In 2023, I want to spend more time doing the right hard things right, moving away from hard things that doesn't matter faster, improving the scaffold of my choices, and then setting an unnaturally high standard for the work I decide to do.
Find the office hours Almost everyone who became great had people with more experience than them who showed them the way, shared their knowledge, and brought them up. I won't go very far if I go it alone in any aspect of my life. So, where are the office hours? How can I ask incisive questions to those further along than me to learn and progress faster? It's not enough to leave my door open when others aren't trying to enter my office yet. So, find or force the office hours from the greats that you identify, and learn from them. I do this with my friends and those in my circle, because often a peer has just as much to teach as a great. Be generous about hosting your own office hours when others ask for them. I should rarely be "doing it alone", and seeking to actively collaborate with the best for each project that I work on. I keep in essence this value from 2022, but reinforcing that "a peer has just as much to teach as a great" - I want to look more into people who're slightly ahead of me.
Expect no second chance Life may be a marathon, but I view my life as a series of sprints. And I'm sprinting now, because I believe that there's no second chance to attain a goal, relationship, friendship or experience. I may get fortunate in the future and be gifted with a second opportunity, but I should never expect to get one. This is antithetical to advice that cautions young people to grow gradually over time, or to build experience before seeking to accomplish a dream. Rather, I should fight to take what I set out for in the present. Nothing changes here, value kept from 2022.
Be present above all else. Romanticizing life, creating moments, being present. These are all different flavors of the same idea: ground yourself where you are - I want to keep relishing in the present moment and optimizing for fully being where I am! That doesn't mean I should stop evaluating the different moments I can be at the same time, but rather that I should be unreasonably invested in them once they're decided. I love writing to revisit the moments I was at, writing grounds you where you are, forcing you to think clearly. You cannot be anywhere but the present to write, otherwise nothing will come out, which means that even for writing, I should reinstate my presence.
Keep my identity small Conversations that involve people's identity - politics, religion.. - are often frustrating. The less concerned I am with my identity, the more I can think from first principles. Also, perhaps paradoxically, the less I judge myself, the less I judge other people, because when I judge other people I'm always comparing them with what I fear the most in me. I should strive to keep my identity small - because I can't preach what I don't practice - and always be making observations instead of judgements.
Goals for 2023
As I reflect on 2022, I’m surprised to see how many goals I achieved. My idea to make goals challenging but attainable, specific, and time-bound worked well. I acutely feel 2023 will be the year of commitment for me. As I said, it's easy to add goals but hard to take an honest look at all the ways you can use your time better. The following goals are related to what I've been committing recently and what my intuition whispers to me.
Sustain Writing Momentum
The thing I like about writing is that it’s quite literally thinking - a way for me access my own interiority and construct something from it. What I write is all mine. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect. In contrast to 2022, I’m not going to set any explicit writing goals this year. Here’s my rationale: The longer you do something consistently, the more gracious you can be with yourself. It helps to be disciplined when you pick up a new habit. Commit to following through on the schedule of your choosing, and don’t let yourself skip days. Only once the habit becomes second nature should you allow yourself to follow a more intuitive flow. Chances are, there’s an equivalent focal point for your life. No matter what you do for work, so much of your success will come from a simple mantra: Master the basics and show up consistently — even when it feels mundane. And while my goals are less strict, that’s what I need to do for writing - mastering it first until it becomes my second nature.
Keep surrounding myself with the right people
I love to work hard, and to surround myself with people who work hard. We live in a culture where that's sometimes looked down upon. You've to accept: If someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try, how much effort they put in order to develop it - and I'm much more aware of this now. Lately, I've been also rarely partying or drinking - I’m much more interested in deep conversations instead. Socialization doesn’t need to be 'productive,' but it should be fun and interesting. In the end, you're a product of your inputs: I want to organize more dinners with friends each week. I want to reach out and meet more inspiring people online. I want to be more vulnerable and talk often to my close friends.
Committing to less doors
Last year I wrote about keeping the doors open, this year I'm writing about committing to fewer doors. That's scary, because it requires you to close opportunities, surrendering your potential, which's the ultimate struggle of maturity: trading potential (possibility) for something tangible. Everyone says: keep doors open so you can pick the best one. What we miss with this mindset, though, is that eventually you do have to pick one. And no one tells you what to pick, or when to shift from option ‘generation mode’ to ‘selection mode.’ So, this loop just keeps running indefinitely until you realize: wait, wasn’t the whole point of this to end up somewhere specific, somewhere great?. Sure, you can get jacked, get educated, get a great job, increase your potential mating pool, but eventually, you have to pick, and this is my commitment year.
What to address next?
There’s a set of outstanding questions that I’ll be spending the first chunk of the year determining
What are the fewer doors I should be committing next?
Who are the next people I should strive to learn from?
Where's my curiosity at? What should I be writing about?
What does authenticity looks like, sounds like, feels like? How do I align my decisions with this?
Thank You
As always, thank you to my parents for the unwavering support. And thank you to my circle of friends for supporting and encouraging each others growth over the last year. Cheers to 2023, per aspera ad astra ;)
And a Final Quote...
I think about who I’m most drawn to, and it’s always been those that exude intensity. People with a unique ability to get consumed by something. Maybe that’s some flaw in my system—to be drawn to intense, obsessive people—or maybe I am predisposed to noticing outliers. Because pretty much every outlier is obsessive, whether we’d like to admit it or not. The obsessed do more, work harder and fall deeper into their zones of focus. Is it always healthy? Definitely not. It’s probably rarely healthy. But obsession is intoxicating. And anyone who has been obsessed knows that. Obsession pulls you in like quick sand. It immerses you. And the most startling part is that you go willingly. If you wanted to resist it, you could. But there’s that moment, that line, where you let yourself fall into it. It’s a kind of beautiful surrender—letting it take you. Scary, but seductive, and most of all: intense.
— Isabel