Today is my birthday. In keeping with a tradition I’ve now done for half of my life, this post reflects on my life over the last year and my thoughts on the year ahead.
The last year was a big one. I celebrated the birth of my second child, Julia [1]. I finished the manuscript for my second book, Get Better at Anything, which will be published in the spring of 2024. We also spent our first year in our new house, having moved in shortly before my last birthday.
Finishing a book while having a new baby kept me busy. The first few months were a kind of synchronized chaos. I got used to the rhythm of waking up, getting my toddler to daycare, going to the office to write all day, coming home, cooking, cleaning, and getting my son to bed before passing out myself for a handful of hours of intermittent sleep.1 [2]
In spite of all that, I found myself less stressed this year than I was the previous year. Reality rarely reflects our anticipations of it. Doing the work was less stressful than imagining it—especially as I wrote more chapters and felt increasingly confident about how it was shaping up.
By May, I had handed in my manuscript and Julia hit her three-month milestone, leading to a relatively relaxed summer. I’ve been taking Fridays off to spend more time at home with my kids. I even managed to do some painting and sketching—something that had been on hiatus for a few years.
Plans for Next Year
Aside from publishing the book, I have a few things I want to work on next year.
One is to do more of my weekly writing ahead of schedule. While I find essay writing enjoyable, the task has grown since my more informal days years ago. Now, each piece goes through multiple edits, I often do illustrations, and we record podcast [3] and YouTube versions [4].
The weekly essay writing of the blog isn’t a full-time job, but it’s not trivial either. It tends to absorb a lot of time. This effect is compounded by having kids—even weekends at home can feel incredibly busy. Thus, one experiment I have for the next year is to batch more of my writing so I can deliberately cultivate some longer stretches to work on new projects.
Another goal is to travel more. Between the pandemic and having two small kids, I haven’t traveled as much as I’d like. But I agree with Tyler Cowen, who sees travel as an essential part of his work, not just leisure. Writing for a worldwide audience is hard if you’re always stuck at home.
Finally, I’d like to rebuild some exercise habits that atrophied in the last year. Firmly in my thirties now, I feel there are greater costs to my health and energy levels from having bad habits compared to when I was younger. Since busyness is ever present, just going to the gym “when I have time” is chronically insufficient.
The Path Ahead
Figuring out what I want to do with my life has never been a single decision. Instead, it’s always been a constant back-and-forth of pursuing new directions and recommitting to old ones.
One struggle I’ve had professionally has been navigating to a more mature phase of my work. When writing Ultralearning [5], I knew I was documenting a phase of my life that was nearing a close. I will never stop learning new things, but my life was already shifting away from that style of big, bold, public-facing projects. While I have zero regrets about those earlier efforts, I don’t really have the desire to try to repeatedly one-up myself or iterate endless variations of the same challenge.
After Ultralearning, I considered the path of being a serial author. The success of my first book gave me the opportunity to write another. While I’m pleased with how the book ended up, the difficulty of the writing process makes me hesitant of planning to churn out a new book ever year or two.
Going back to do a Ph.D. has also been an option I’ve toyed around with for years. Given that much of my writing has come to rely on academic research, my own lack of credentials may put a limit on my reach at some point. But I’ve also found the bureaucracy and specialization of academia somewhat alienating, so at this point, I’m happy being a dilettante.
Ultimately, the path I end up taking will probably not be entirely premeditated. Instead, it will be a by-product of smaller experiments—writing things I like to read and working on projects I think are interesting. I’m forever grateful for the luxury of being able to take risks like this—something I owe to the readers who have continued to follow my work!