A sentence which describes my 2023

Hello omniscient readers.

Happy new year. :)

Why is this event celebrated so much? I think because it creates a benchmark of time.

Well that’s exactly what a year is. 1st January just happened to be the position of Earth relative to Sun that is celebrated.

Enough with my wandering mind. I am just making my compression perform worse.

A sentence which describes my 2023.

The sentence is… A low radius spiral.

Before you begin thinking what it means let me tell you.

• A low radius means short length. What’s a radius? The point at center of circle to its outer circumference. Spiral basis structure is a circle.
• The radius signifies time. A low radius means short time.
• The spiral is the struggle. Our lives are struggle. If struggle seems too pessimistic for your taste you can just replace it with “adventure” or “journey” or simply “life”.
• Imagine the spiral to be circles stacked on each other. Each “flat” circle is one unit of struggle. Your life is a sum of multiple struggles.
• This struggle duration is dependent on time. Since ultimately your life is confined to limited time.
• The low radius spiral in 2023 means I had shorter “time” of struggles in a year.
• Which also means my total units of struggles were comparatively more(wrt my past experiences).

This doesn’t mean I “struggled” more. Its simply different distribution. Like you have ingredients to make 1 kg of cake. You can make one big cake. Or 5 smaller cakes.

Similarly my 2023 was like 5 different cakes instead of 1 big cake.

I dived into many areas of study/skills for few months before moving on to next. Started with reading Carl Jung’s work in Psychology. Moved to designing web sites. Then the art of writing ad copies/marketing messages.

What did I learn?

Insights

Regret Minimization

Well now that I am writing this I remember Charlie Munger (RIP) and Warren Buffet’s idea

What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word ‘selected’: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence.

What I did is a destructive force in business. It erodes money.

But I don’t think its a destructive force in the concept of regret minimization framework. Developed by Jeff Bezos:

“I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have,’” explains Bezos. “I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this.

If I never got my hands dirty on skills not related to my specialty I would have always thought “maybe I could have tried been a marketer and enjoyed that”.

More than that I was curious on how it looks from the inside. How long can I go without quenching my thirst? Not much.

Following the path of least regrets will make you look deep inside you. All answers you seek lies there.

Iterate to find your unique world view

If the last century was about “specializing” in one field I think this century is about combining ideas into new branches.

Why?

When you study a new subject like marketing (for me) you look at the world in new light. Of course, it doesn’t come immediately. Even after weeks of intense devotion to the subject you will not feel any change.

But its there. Its remarkably subtle. The thoughts you conjure from nothing changes its direction slightly.

You begin to see “why” in things you observe daily.

“Why is this reel using this word so frequently?”

“The button on the web page, why is it so weird?”

“Why is my friend denying the obvious so much?”

You most likely instinctively know answers to lot of questions. But its similar to how you make your heart beat. It beats for sure, but you don’t understand it. You don’t control it. Yet you do it. You know it.

To consciously apply such ideas your only choice is deliberate practice.

With practice and iterative questioning, you see things differently. And it opens up new paths.

Path unique to you. Which means there is no competition here. Other than you, you have no other obstacle.

And of course no AI can ever achieve it.

Question everything. Iterate and form new ideas. This will unlock a part of you which is closer to your true self.

Plans of 2024?

To make more money without regrets.

Here is my list of failures which I plan to change

As an investor

As an investor I tend to be more on the defensive side. I didn’t loose much money when market was bad. But I also didn’t make much money when market was rising.

Thats bad. I am better off investing in index fund. To fix this I need to find bargains better. Go after companies whose price is significantly lower than its intrinsic value.

Putting breaks on freelancing

Around mid last year my freelancing business went bad. But I also didn’t put effort to make it better. Didn’t invest time or money into finding new clients. Why?

Because I suck at building things for money.

I enjoy building things. But I only enjoy it when I have control on the thing I want to build. By building I make an idea of mine come into life.

Building stuff for money takes the soul away from it. And I stop enjoying building things.

If I keep doing this then I will lose the element of “play” from the stuff I like doing.

Building something that I enjoy

And it brings me money. Which as per my experience has been extremely hard.

On the start of this year I had less idea on things I can build and enjoy that I have now. Thats a good thing.

The bad thing is that out of many things I have built I have had only few sales. And I failed to find more customers.

I suck at it. But I have no choice than to find a way to make it possible if I want to keep doing things I enjoy.

Ending

From the start to the last word of the last section there were total 1000 words approx.

So one year of my experience in ~1200 words (till you read the last word) is not a bad compression method. That is only if it was impactful enough. Otherwise, I can just write one word and say, “best compression”.

I think failures are inevitable and its failures which makes you. Not the winners. Failures are impactful and evidence of your struggle.

Winner is the last brick you put when you finish the building. Then move to building next one.

So its inevitable to have failures if you are struggling. Lack of failures just means there isn’t enough struggle. Which is bad.

So don’t be afraid of it. Face your failures. Think of 2023 and stuff you failed at. And then fail more. The act of failing is itself a win (because you gained meaningful experience). So don’t let failure or anyone else discourage you.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.