The year 2023

Hello everyone!

Happy new year! How was your past year? Did you do a review of it? Did you make plans for 2024? Or did you just let it go, and float in the present moment, new year or old, it is always a new day?

As I look back at 2023, I know that it has been a year of immense growth, making many new friends, and learning a bunch from so many incredible people around me. So here are some of the things I have learnt, in no particular order, and giving credit where I remember the source of the wisdom.

1. Sometimes any decision is better than no decision - Palkush
   This one actually made me evaluate my decisions across the dimensions of impact and cost of redoing. High impact/high cost of redoing, think a lot about it, but for decisions that are cheap to redo, I am trying to be more experimental, which has also lead to the learning that most things aren’t as high impact or as expensive to redo as I would have initially imagined.

2. If something feels hard to do, evaluate what is making it high stakes for you and then reduce the stakes. - Saraswati
   This simple seeming insight is applicable in an infinite number of places. When I am finding myself procrastinating on anything, I just ask myself what is making this high stakes, and can I lower the stakes in anyway?

3. Ask for help, the whole point of having so many sharp people around you is that you can bask in the glory of their brilliance. -Aditi
   Okay, I admit she didn’t say it quite like that, but honestly asking for help from people who are close to me, being transparent to them and realizing how little people judge me and how much more they are invested in being kind and helpful has been an eye opener.

4. Aim for a fast no - Deb
   Definitely this is still much more congnitivly understood than emotional ly, but it really changed my perspective on how I look at “no”. Its information about the system that helps you make better decisions. So gathering fast no is good.

5. When you fail at doing something, don’t sneak out of it by saying “I didn’t even really try”. Whatever you tried, didn’t work. Accept that. - Pradeep
   This was a very sharp insight, possibly very specifically applicable to me, but since this was pointed out, I’ve found improvements in my own ability to see my mistakes and flaws as “my current system didn’t work” rather than “i didn’t try”. It was a good way to get out of a sneak out of responsibility mode.

6. I am not my past self anymore. I wont be subject to the same constraints even if I am in the same situation again - Charu
   Past often has a way of scarring us, and it has been good to remind myself again and again, that I am no longer the person who was 20 y/o with far lesser understanding of the world. This helps me give credit to my present self and reevaluate my scars.

7. There will be no perfect sign that will convince me that “this is it”. My mind will find the signs it is looking for - Devanshu
   This one was such an interesting articulation of confirmation bias, that my mind is not looking for signs, it is looking for the signs that confirm what I am already biased towards.

8. The value that I bring to things is my ability to think about the unknown unknowns and translate them into known unknowns.
   This sort of came out from a lot of therapy work. I am not the most creative artist/designer you will meet. I can’t dazzle people with my storytelling ability and I definitely don’t have the best ever analytical problem solving abilities. I am quite good at most of these things, but definitely not the best. But what I am really good at, is navigating uncertainty when it comes to problem solving. And that is as unique a skill as any ; being able to turn uncertainty to calculated uncertainty

9. Ultimately everything is figureoutable.
   Yeah, trying many things will actually make you realise that if you put your mind to it, you can sort of figure out most things.

I feel blessed that there are so many folks around me who have contributed so much to how my mind evolves. I’ve always loved the image of myself being as a clay pot, still wet and everyone who I come across leaves a their fingerprints on me. I don’t know how I’d ever manage to grow if it wasn’t for all the incredible people that life has blessed me with. So as the year closes, I want to share my top learnings from last year, that I have put into practice and that have helped me change how I navigate challenges. There are many more things that I have learnt but some of the folks that I talk too regularly to, it is hard to pin point one singular thing from them.