annual review 2023
In pursuit of my inner self
2023 was the year of pure commitment.
At the beginning of the year, I dropped out of university to surrender to my curiosities. I stopped hugging the x-axis and went all in on the center of my obsessions. I lived in Italy with my mom, got full-time hired at Soba, created a group of startup nerds, and got into a wonderful relationship.
Never in my life have I experienced such tight alignment between my values, my work, and my interests. I felt like writing my last year's reflection illuminated the hidden pathways that guided me in 2023. Going through them changed the way I view life though. Over a long time horizon, “always keep learning” was my single life one-liner. No doubt I kept that, but now I'm much more discerning about the inputs I consume and the taste I use to find them. Making this move was absolutely intimidating to my mind.
At times, it’s been tormenting. My focus has taken a hit in particular. With the ever-increasing information overload, I succumb to the same impulse of scattering the surface of knowledge, instead of pushing the frontiers of it. I knew I had to default to timelessness instead of novelty. Most people never get such clarity, and become stunted for life.
I’ve had to confront the era of abundance by looking back at taste, and most importantly, finding taste makers. I questioned myself if that wasn't bad. If I'm going after authentic taste, why would I hear others? Doesn’t everyone sense what they like?
Truth is, they do not, and there's more alpha than expected in understanding human behavior. So I racked my brain and saw how wildly contagious opinions are, and how most people are catching someone else’s. To escape, I guided myself back to the people that are closest to my nature and crossed narratives on it. This applies to taste in people, products, businesses, writing, speaking, storytelling, design. Everything. Refining my nose for quality was a daily discipline for me.
This Annual Review is about what I achieved in 2023. I’ll begin with my highlights, then reflect on the values I set last year, celebrate milestones and set goals for 2024, outline what I’d like to improve, and end with a list of open questions.
If you’d like to go back and read previous reviews, here’s what I wrote about 2021 and 2022.
Highlights
Living in Italy with my mother: Last year I set a scaffold for my choices, mainly around committing to less doors: setting up a few clear upshots, and stop doing anything that would distract me from getting to these goals faster. This year, I assembled the puzzle pieces in place and had tectonic shifts in my life — I decided to drop out of university and move to Berlin to work full-time at Soba, a startup centered around my obsessions.
As a Brazilian with no bachelor, I had a single option to live in Europe — moving to a tiny village in Italy and getting my Italian citizenship. I had not whatsoever lived alone, my mom joined me as she craved time off from the Brazilian work life.
The more time I can spend with friends and family, the better. I knew that by 22, the most time I could ever have with my mother had already passed. I was in the tail end. I also knew that If I was going to stay stuck in Italy for four months, I'd better take advantage of it by creating solitude — especially boredom — for my thoughts and explorations, which yielded an article about my obsession with UGC gaming.
Founding Genmafia: In 2023 I felt a strong desire to cultivate a cult of startup nerds. People who are interested in a problem for its own sake, and not because it's cool to be interested in it or what they can get from it. Genuinely inquisitive people.
In college, I felt insane for being driven and obsessive, and how on earth it’s so hard to find people like me. Why I have to do all my inquisitive explorations alone? That's all terrifying because… it's isolating. The more deep work you do, the deeper you go. It demands you in whole — in and of itself. But it's the only good fight there is.
For what it’s worth, moving in search of inquisitive peers isn’t a new idea. It’s why Ramanujan, one of history’s greatest mathematicians, went to Cambridge. At home in India, even though he showed a divine aptitude for math, he flunked out of school and hid under a cot because his parents disapproved of his obsession with math. Though he taught himself number theory by working through problems in a borrowed textbook on his own, he knew that his genius was ultimately constrained by a lack of ambitious peers. And so, he sent letters to a large number of English mathematicians, until one of them, G.H. Hardy, realized that this strange kid writing letters from India was not actually a crank but a raw genius and brought him over to Cambridge. Once they met, everything changed for Ramanujan.
We are now 22 people. Talking to these peers has been very pleasant to my intellectual health. Though maybe I should add some more abyss to the mix.
Finding the balance: This sounds like a controversial statement. How could one find balance while falling off into the obsession void? I thought both things were excluded, that you couldn't pursue greatness while balancing yourself with secondary metaphysical desires, such as love — the pure force that has freed us from cruel rituals. This year though, I got to realize that they're more connected than we imagine.
Peter Thiel advocates that geniuses live in a paradox, being both insiders and outsiders of the crowd figures. Insiders by agreeing partially with the consensus, so that the scapegoating doesn't obey them. Outsiders as seeing the world differently, going against set beliefs, and creating things that wouldn't get done otherwise. It's like living between a dichotomy, perhaps with enough esoteric camouflage so that they disguise themselves from the perpetrators that inhabit the new world.
The disturbing message that I have is that balance is key in this sense (thanks to a special person who taught me the shape of that). I got my expectations shaken multiple times over 2023, mostly because I didn't fully understand that real work has some kind of painful solidity, and that I should always aim to do it in an attempt to fulfill a single person, myself.
Values
I reflected on and updated my values for 2024. 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 2023, I had the following values...
Do a couple of hard things right
Find the office hours
Expect no second chance
Be present above all else
Keep my identity small
For 2024, I've refined these values to...
Aim at the center
Find the office hours (kept)
Expect no second chance (kept)
Be present above all else (kept)
Keep my identity small (kept)
Faith over logic
Aim at the center: I was a prolific consumer when navigating my curiosities, but I've since become much more discerning about my inputs, which is at odds with consuming the easier knowledge at the edges. Sensing this, I do want to segway and refine my last year's value, "do a couple of hard things right". Doing things right means aiming towards the center to the best extent I can, toward the most ambitious problems. Also, I should be appreciating the virtues of simplicity more — knowing where I'll be tied down. There's such an art of placing as few stakes in the ground as possible, pulling an orbit of unknown discoveries closer to you. In 2024, I want to venture much deeper into my curiosities. Reading more specifics. Less sheer amount of information but rather deliberately repeat the same content. To hear the voice in my head saying all the things I've been conditioned to do, and then ignore it and keep pushing the cutting edges anyway.
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 with a desire to take part in more cults. Not for the sake of being part of closed groups, but for the sake of doing positive things that people wouldn't do otherwise.
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. Rather, I should fight to take what I set out for in the present. Nothing changes here, value kept from 2021.
Be present above all else: Romanticizing life, creating moments, being present. These are all different flavors of the same idea: grounding 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. This is especially helpful to illuminate the integrity of my beliefs, so that I follow more my convictions and master the things I genuinely fell in love with. Value kept from 2023.
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 judgments. Value kept from 2023.
Faith over logic: At first, I thought about combining this with “expect no second chance", but they're fundamentally different. You don’t want faith to be unreasonable, and you don’t want it to be reasonable because then you could just use reason, so it’s a complicated question of how you get faith and reason to work together. On one side, if you view life totally rationally, you start to see life as an optimization problem; And if you see life as an optimization problem, by the time you're done solving the optimization problem, you will find that what you've optimized for is a completely meaningless life. A faith, on the other hand, can’t be rationalized away. Even when times get tough, you stick to your faith no matter what. So, am I faithful to what I commit to in life? Faith in the sense of believing something when it appears to be temporarily untrue, making no sense a priori? For example, even great marriages have bad spells, moments where people considered ending it, but their faith and commitment is what keep them together, and it’s often the moments where it almost ended that brought them stronger and provided more meaning. A real lifelong marriage is the deepest relationship you’ll ever have because you’ve committed to a lifetime of faithfulness. So now, more than ever, what am I going to make true about the future, no matter what happens to the rest of the world?
Goals for 2024
The following goals are what my intuition whispers to me.
Sustain Writing Momentum
I wrote more in 2023, but nowhere close to the abyss I want to immerse myself in. I feel more compelled to densely write about ideas that take me time to explore. For 2024 I want to aim my discoveries at the center of knowledge, and use writing as leverage for puzzles to connect in my mind. Sensing that I'll be ferocious in exploration, my writing has to follow through, which means that for 2024 I want to publish my articles at least two times more than I did in 2023.
Keep surrounding myself with the right people
There's some kind of art in finding your peers early on. Great friend groups are like renegade scientists; competitive enough to motivate each other but cooperative enough to find joy in their success. Those scientists meet often enough to share ideas but work independently enough to develop their own voices. Though they are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, they root themselves in a core set of principles. Too open, and their strong culture disappears. Too closed, and they lack the dynamism that generates progress. I've created that partially with Genmafia, but I still lack social interactions close to my core obsessions. I want to do this further in 2024, to fight to find my kindred spirits, even if it means moving across the world like Ramanujan or staying in on Saturdays to write on the Internet. I feel mentors would be helpful here, so I'll strive to reach out to more people I admire.
Committing to less doors
I want to go further with committing to less doors. Doing so in 2023 has put me in such a wonderful wavelength, closer to my nature and farther away from the abundance of noise. I wonder for how long the twilight of the modern age will endure, or more precisely, what's the moment I've to get back at preserving optionality. Until there, I want to tune out the world around me and focus on the tasks at hand, so at least I have more clarity of what true meaning is to me.
What to address next?
Those are the questions I'll deliberately reaccess over the year.
Am I aiming at the center by consuming or doing this? (exploiting vs exploring)
What few truths of the world I agree with? What I disagree? (insider/outsider)
What work that compounds am I seeking?
What am I afraid of? (everything I want is on the other side of fear)
Where should I bet with more size?
Thank You
Thanks so much for reading this piece. I appreciate your time a great deal, and I hope in return it brought you some new reflections. Cheers to 2024!
And a Final Quote...
In matters of the heart, commitment brings meaning. In matters of the mind, commitment brings knowledge. And in matters of the material world, running towards the responsibility that comes with commitment takes courage — and with courage comes achievement. People can only become world-class at things they commit to. Ultimately, the more hesitant people are about making commitments, the higher the rewards are for people who do. The alternative is empty hedonism and hard work without the rewards to show for it.