//Frost will thaw (and likely turn into mud that dirties your discs)
Theme of the Month - Planning an Awesome 2025
The questions/thoughts that led me to the posts for Jan 2025 were:
What are the AI and Crypto narratives coming up?
What don’t you care about?
How was Nepal/Pokhara back in 2014?
What should my parents (and most people) do to help secure their digital life?
How do you improve your morning routine?
What are some mechanism design examples in platforms and how does the web3 economy apply to it?
I love new years and new beginnings. It’s a chance to embrace the awesomeness of a blank slate with all this potential for creativity and productivity. The reason my end of year reflections are filled with triumphant activities is because I actively plan to make them that way. Just pick one awesome thing a month and you’ll be filled with joyful life milestones and memories.
What about the money? How do I pay for this? It does help working in tech remotely, but more importantly, it’s about framing your youth and savings to the memory dividends you might accrue from these awesome adventures. Of course, I also do them in a thrifty way - there’s the pure Asian joy in saving money. It’s also true that you need to spend money to save money. Here’s to a new year of 2025 investing in memory dividends.
The “damp January” approach was much appreciated. I only drank one or two beers when I hung out for a party on a weekend. It was mindful sobriety and I feel like I might extend it to a year of this mindfulness. My sleep has been improved and I did wind up losing almost 10 lbs (5 were from getting the flu for a week, but it’s still a noticeable lean). I’ll try it out for another month in February (except for the planned Disneyland trip) and see where we go from there.
Hearts and prayers go out to those in Los Angeles dealing with the wildfires. I hope the fires are contained and there’s rebuilding with proper recovery with better designed houses. I can only expect there will be more crazy natural disasters and stress going forward. Let’s hope AI doesn’t implode our economy and instead cuts through the red tape to solve the important problems.
The blogposts I’ve published this month were:
I capitulated and wrote about AI and crypto. It’s mostly just bots running wallets and DAOs, but it’s definitely leading to higher TVL and robo-advisory set-it-and-forget-it schemes.
I’m very good at certain things because I absolutely don’t care about many other things that take up people’s interest. A big one is sports. Even within the fantasy league, I don’t have the brain capacity to add more stats and names.
Nepal was an incredibly fun trip with some parahawking, a beautiful sunrise, and incredible hikes down the side of a mountain. Commutes are a bit tougher through the mountains driving in some crazy uncle’s car with no roads or room, but we lived to tell the story.
Operational security is extremely important to me. It’s not even that I don’t want to get scammed (which I don’t), but it’s more about having backup plans and protection across surface areas of attack.
My morning routines craft my whole day. Wake up early to be productive and work out leads to a guilt free day to unwind and hopefully sleep early.
I’m a mechanism designer at heart. I just want to figure out how things work and how game theory impacts the economics of a particular industry. It’s all incentives at play.
Some ideas for Feb 2025?
30 More AI Buzzwords - Latest buzzwords from reading some different research papers and looking at headlines.
30 Life Decisions and Systems - Biggest decisions of your life time.
Daddy-Daughter Cooking challenge - Putting together some recurring cooking habits with Evie with a list of 30 dishes to make together.
30 New AI Careers - Rethinking our post-labor economic jobs. Let’s all switch to the gig economy.
Reflecting on 10 years of writing lists of 30 - I still love writing lists of 30! It’ll define my whole life.
30 Future Decade Goals - We split the next 30 years into goals per decade as mapped out by Evie’s age. This was a great activity in long term planning for her ages 6-16, 16-26, and 26-36.
30 Ways to Stretch Time - Wealth doesn’t mean money, but time. It’s our only limited resource.
30 Things I do for Self Care - We all need to figure out what restores our energy and keeps us sane.
Kicking off “Her Life in Lists of 30” - I think I have enough material from my monthly lists of 30s to cover this and launch it in 2024. Maybe I’ll find a publisher for this book? I think I’ll be happy with more substack subscribers than a single book defining a decade. If it’s popular, maybe I’ll do a book tour!
Thank you for reading and I hope everyone stays safe! See y’all in the new year!
Please suggest a list of 30 and I’ll write it! I’ve written 300+ lists of 30 and only publish ones that I think other people would enjoy. It’s my fun brainstorming routine.
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