“At some point, everything’s gonna go south on you.
Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That’s all it is.
You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem… and you solve the next one… and then the next.
And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” | Mark Watney, The Martian
While the consequences are generally not as existential as they are in the story, the arc is relevant in every attempt to solve a hard problem.
As a friend and I were reflecting about the end of a wonderful experience recently, this friend posed a two-part question – “What are you going to take with you, and what are you going to leave behind?”
I loved the premise of the question. Our approach to any experience is going to have aspects we should take with us to the next one. And, on the flip side, there are aspects we should consider leaving behind.
It is a question I’ve been thinking about in the context of the year that’s coming to an end (and it is, thus, the latest addition to the annual reflection list).
There’s a lot to unpack here and I’m looking forward to it.
The 10 question annual reflection is a longstanding ALearningaDay tradition. I recommend doing it in 3 steps:
i) Carve out an hour in the next week to “look back and look forward.” It helps to do this in a quiet place with no distractions or interruptions.
ii) Work with a list of 10 questions that make you think. For a starter list, I’ve shared the 10 questions I ask myself below (here’s the Google doc – you can just make a copy onto your Google Drive. Here’s a PDF if you prefer to print). I prioritize keeping my list simple – some years, I get done in an hour and in other years, I spend a few hours diving deep into a question or two. The important thing is not the length/depth, it is simply carving out the time to zoom out.
iii) Archive your questions and notes for next year. Check in with them over the course of the year and read them before you start next year’s reflection. Looking at what was top-of-mind a few years later is also guaranteed to make you smile. :-)
10 Questions – Annual Reflection 2025
“Sometimes, we need to just take a step back and look back at how the pieces fell. When we do that, we see what was important and what never was.”
i) Action + reflection:
ii) People:
iii) Books/synthesized info:
“Show me your schedule and I’ll show you your priorities.”
“How we hope it works: Commit → Take action
How it actually works: Commit → Fail → Recommit x 20 → Fail x 20 → Recommit → Take action”
Health:
Close relationships:
Money:
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
I look forward to doing mine in the next days. I hope you find this useful as well.
Be in the now.
It’s all we really have.
It’s always worth reminding ourselves that while we are the central character in our own story, we are, at best, peripheral characters in the stories of most people we interact with.
No point over-interpreting or overthinking reactions, silence, delays, or passing comments.
Most people aren’t paying as much attention to us as we are to ourselves.
Dr Eric Topol had a fascinating post on his blog about a potential massive change in the treatment of Autoimmune diseases. I can’t claim to have understood all the biology nuances but I did love the following –
(1) 10% of the world’s population suffers from autoimmune diseases and these have, so far, had no cure.
(2) He goes on to explain an approach that uses inverse vaccines. So, instead of vaccines boosting the immune system, these inverse vaccines do the opposite.
(3) But, most interesting, is the fact that these diseases are the mirror image of cancer. So, while cancer causes us to lose all immunity, these result in hyperactive immune responses. So, all the progress in treating cancer with the breakthroughs in the past two decades – including mRNA vaccines and CRISPR – results in progress in treating autoimmune diseases by doing the opposite.
He closes with these concluding remarks
I hope I am able to adequately convey the excitement in this field. This represents one of the biggest shifts in a domain of medicine that we’ve seen in decades. It has been stunning to see for the first time one-shot cures in patients who were refractory to all approved treatments. There’s a paucity of true cures in medicine. Considering that 1 in 10 people have an autoimmune disease, and these conditions have never garnered the level of attention as cancer, cardiovascular, or neurodegenerative diseases, these big steps of progress are especially welcome. Mirror biology and goals of all the clinical work in cancer directly benefits autoimmune diseases, turbocharging this movement.
It’s still early, but most major autoimmune diseases are getting approached by both the engineered cell and inverse, tolerogenic vaccines. The off-the-shelf, universal engineered cell approach is ahead of the inverse vaccines so far, and the refinements in the work are extensive. Eventually, both major routes of cell therapy and tolerogenicity are very likely to pan out and we should see a big dent in autoimmune diseases in the future. Of course, for any scaling, this will require availability at low cost, limiting side effects, making in practical and accessibility to all, avoiding inequities. But given all the rapid progress I’m confident we’ll get there in the years ahead. We’re seeing the initial stages of a renaissance vs autoimmunity. Curing instead of just treating autoimmune diseases.
Fascinating.
“One of the most realistic parts of Lord of the Rings is that almost no one wanted to get involved, until it was very nearly too late.”| Ricki Tarr
I saw this in a quote collection from Kevin Kelly and thought this was both funny and insightful.
Derek Thompson shared an insightful post titled “The Monks in the Casino.”
He brings together some powerful data about how young men are spending more of their time alone.
And then goes to share stories of two men – who are part of this large group – who are spending significant time during this loneliness either on porn or gambling. There’s even a term for those focused on porn – gooners.
As the journalist Kolitz wrote in his chilling and spectacular essay in Harper’s Magazine, gooning is a ”new kind of masturbation” that has gained popularity among young men around the world. Its practitioners spend hours or days at a time “repeatedly bringing [themselves] to the point of climax … to reach the goonstate’: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation.”
He goes on to frame this as an “absence-of-loneliness” crisis.
While I know that some men are lonely, I do not think that what afflicts America’s young today can be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-consantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them.
After examining the rise of gambling (hence the casino), his conclusion is poignant.
This inversion of risk doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the predictable result of how public policy and technological change have allocated risk and reward. Since the 1970s, America has over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital space. To open a daycare, build an apartment, or start a factory requires lawyers, permits, and years of compliance. To open a casino app or launch a speculative token requires a credit card and a few clicks. We made it hard to build physical-world communities and easy to build online casinos. The state that once poured concrete for public parks now licenses gambling platforms. The country that regulates a lemonade stand will let an 18-year-old day-trade options on his phone.
In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.
This shift has moral as well as economic consequences. When a society pushes its citizens to take only financial risks, it hollows out the virtues that once made collective life possible: trust, curiosity, generosity, forgiveness. If you want two people who disagree to actually talk to each other, you build them a space to talk. If you want them to hate each other, you give them a phone.
It is a rotten game that we’ve signed up to play together, and somewhere deep down, beneath the whirl of dopamine that traps us in dark places, I think we know that a better game exists. Porn may be compulsive, and gambling may be a blast, but I refuse to believe that blasting ourselves with compulsion is the end state of human progress. The alternative is staring us in the face, and like most true things, it is obvious but not simple. The game is being alive. It comes with tears and boredom and disappointments and deep, deep joy. It is meant to be played in the sun and in the shadows cast by other people.
As a follow up to my recent note on reference checks, I was asked if there was a question I’d found most useful.
My favorite question is – “For their tenure and role, would this person be in the top 10% of people you’ve ever worked with? Why or why not?”
I’ve found it useful because it forces clarity. And because you combine the objectivity (yes/no) with the subjectivity (the “why or why not”).
This question doesn’t eliminate the risk that goes with a hire. I don’t think avoiding risk is the point – it’s just helps us better understand it.
I book a lot of travel through Chase Travel, and many of those flights end up being on United. Every once in a while, I get an an email titled –
“Urgent – Your itinerary has been updated.”
Except the message never actually tells me what changed.
So I end up comparing the old itinerary with the new one – flight numbers, timings, connections – trying to spot a difference that isn’t always obvious. In some cases, I never figure it out. Maybe it was a terms-and-conditions tweak. Maybe a backend update. Who knows.
As someone who receives a lot of harsh criticism about the products I’ve built over the years, I always remind myself it’s far easier to criticize than it is to build. I’m sure there’s some operational or technical reason things work this way.
But it’s still a good reminder for anyone building products – and especially for myself: If you notify a user that something changed, make it dead easy to find the change.
A simple visual cue or one clear line of copy can transform an experience.
Clarity is a feature.
A Learning a Day 